The drop and the metric system: how an unruly unit survived revolutions

IN MARCH 1875, A CHICAGO TRIBUNE CORRESPONDENT reported that a miners’ strike in Brazil, Indiana, continued with conditions worsening and the “breach between labor and capital widen[ing].” The year-long labor dispute found the striking miners “dogged and sullen” and was taking a dreadful toll on the men and their families. Many of the town's merchants initially supported the strike, but they increasingly feared violence would ensue as the striking miners became more vigilant and defiant. One merchant stated that he had witnessed other strikes, but none of them had “men so determined not to yield,” and he believed it would be necessary to bring in the military to prevent an outbreak of violence. The Tribune correspondent predicted that a “revolution in labor” was imminent because the desperate mine operators were willing to hire Black workers to take the place of the striking miners. The mine operators were “confident that, if negro labor [was] adopted unanimously, it [would] completely and effectively crush strikes, which [had] become so frequent and arrogant of late as to make any dependence on white labor impracticable.” African American workers, according to the correspondent, were more dependable than white laborers, and they would not become “turbulent at trifles, and for many other reasons that are apparent.” As a result, some midwestern mine operators had already arranged to fill their mines with Black workers, and “others will follow suit.”1The newspaper correspondent's prediction about a “revolution in labor” was accurate—during the height of labor unrest in the late 1870s, Northern industrialists sought measures to undercut the burgeoning labor movement by importing African American workers from the South into their predominantly European American worksites. Industrialists were encouraged by two overarching factors: first, Black workers from the South traditionally earned lower wages than their Northern counterparts and would therefore cost less; and more importantly, due to racist exclusionary measures, as well as the relatively small African American population in the North, semi-skilled and skilled worksites were dominated by European American workers. Industrialists correctly assumed that the racism of their workers would cause an exceedingly vitriolic reaction to the idea of Black workers replacing them. In addition to the typical labor conflict issues, racialized violence would invariably ensue. Industrialists then found justification to utilize draconian measures on the strikers—enforced by local militia or police—to ensure that the replacement workers would be allowed to work in relative safety, and to ensure that industrialists continued to make profits.2This racial dynamic became increasingly prevalent throughout the Midwest as rapid industrialization and massive population growth created whole new categories of workers. European American workers braced themselves for the possibility of a chaotic economic transformation by frantically jockeying for occupational viability within the racial hierarchy. In the environment of an increasingly racialized labor movement, Black and other non-white workers, with few exceptions, were forced to the bottom of the economic ladder.Among midwestern states, Illinois was particularly distinct due, in part, to the massive growth of Chicago as a central industrial hub for the region. In comparison to adjacent midwestern states, Illinois was also unique because of its relatively small African American population. By 1890, the African American population in Illinois was only 57,028 (1.5 percent of the state population); in 1900, 85,078 (1.8 percent of the state population). The dearth of a substantial Black population, coupled with a significant rise in anti-Black sentiment throughout the state, helped to create the perception that African American workers were unable to perform technologically advanced labor. Thus, Black Illinoisans of the late nineteenth century were often forced out or excluded from more desirable occupations and, subsequently, forced to the periphery of the labor movement.This article explores the labor activism of Black Illinoisans during the tumultuous late nineteenth century in the context of this relatively new phenomenon—that is, the racialization of labor. Of course, historians generally acknowledge this period as the Second Industrial Revolution in the United States. Yet for African Americans, the period also signified a time in which their racial “character” was under severe scrutiny—not only in labor, but also in virtually every aspect of Black American life. Notions of white racial superiority invariably circumscribed Black people as inferior outsiders—undeserving of a place within mainstream American life. Thus, to most European Americans, it made perfect sense within the twisted logical framework of white supremacy to categorize labor based upon race.In the context of heightened anti-Black sentiment, Black Illinoisans were faced with a difficult decision: should they remain with the larger labor movement that increasingly viewed them as “inferior” workers? While the European American working class famously fought for labor issues such as unionization, safer working conditions, and the eight-hour workday, Black Illinoisans during the nineteenth century also supported these issues. Yet Black workers were forced into a hybrid labor activism—an activism where they fought for their rights not only as workers but also as workers who were gradually excluded from higher-skilled occupations based upon their race. In addition to the racialized occupational environment, Black workers were also forced into a battle for their civil rights during the late nineteenth century as they fought against the inimical rise in white supremacy throughout the United States.The concept of racializing labor was not entirely novel to Northern industries. As historian Jacqueline Jones explained, white Northerners had always expressed their apprehension over emancipating Black people from slavery in moralistic terms. As early as the eighteenth century, they claimed that free Black laborers had shown a lack of restraint in public—displaying “racial” behavior that European American city dwellers found galling. Various groups of African American workers came under attack by the early nineteenth century for advertising for services in a supposedly unseemly fashion. For European American workers, their goal was to maintain their advantageous position in the workplace, and any other socio-political aspect in which there was the perception of losing ground within the racial hierarchy. Thus, European American workers developed new forms of self-definition that would establish a sharper distinction between “white” and “Black” labor.3One of the earliest and staunchest proponents for disrupting the burgeoning labor movement through racialization was co-owner of the Chicago, Wilmington, and Vermillion Coal Company (CW&V) Alanson Sweet. He quickly developed a reputation for slashing wages and firing workers when he forced workers at the Michigan Central Railroad Company to take a pay cut during a dispute in 1862. Workers that protested were fired and replaced with African American workers from the South.4 Sweet believed that the reaction of his predominantly white workforce would be intensified with the importation of an all-Black strikebreaking unit that would likely lead to violence. When violence inevitably ensued, Sweet and his co-owners were then able to utilize state-sponsored protection to ensure the protection of both his imported workers and his property.5As a co-owner of the CW&V in Braidwood, Illinois, during an economic depression, once again, Sweet reduced workers’ wages. Predictably, the unionized miners refused any pay cuts and went on strike. After some convincing, the CW&V co-owners acquiesced to Sweet's ideas on importing African American men to disrupt the conflict. “With the mines filled with colored men,” he assured his fellow owners and stockholders, “it is believed that the Company will not be burdened with the expense of another strike for many years.”6 The CW&V co-owners may have been willing to agree to Sweet's concept due to their past failures. In an 1874 labor dispute with their workers, both recently arriving European immigrants and white workers were recruited as strikebreakers. Instead of being a disruptive force, the replacement miners met with the striking Braidwood miners, became informed of the ongoing labor dispute, and were subsequently convinced to leave. Significantly, the workers left relatively peaceably within days of their arrival.7The nation was in the throes of a massive railroad strike starting in July 1877. Wage cuts, and generally poor conditions and treatment touched off a nationwide strike that shut down most of the nation's railroads. The Chicago Times observed that the arrival of African American workers, combined with the news of the national railroad strike created an “anxious mood” among the Braidwood miners, and “it would take but very little to cause an outbreak in this place.” When the African American workers arrived in Braidwood, there were no friendly meetings. Instead, the striking Braidwood miners gave them an ultimatum: leave town “peaceably or forcibly.” Fearing trouble, some of the miners left town.8 However, when Sweet and the CW&V ownership alerted Illinois governor Shelby Cullom of the intimidation tactics, the state militia was brought in to restore the Black miners to their jobs. The next day, 1,250 Illinois state militia were called into Braidwood to quell the conflict, and if the strikers resisted, “the troops [would] make short work of them.” The CW&V owners understood that an escalation in violence could possibly lead to such measures—and these measures would ensure that the African American workers would be protected and allowed to work in the mines.9Convinced that order could be maintained, and the African American miners would be allowed to remain in the mine shafts, the state militia left Braidwood several weeks later. Although relative peace did prevail after the departure of the state militia, the strike continued another four months. The Braidwood strike of 1877 was the longest strike in United States’ history (to that date) and took an enormous toll on the lives of the strikers and their families. With winter approaching in November 1877, the weary miners finally gave in and ended the strike. The owner's desire to destroy the miners’ union was successful, and the company refused to hire the union leaders as well. Feeling victimized by the CW&V owners, many miners complained bitterly about working alongside the African American strikebreakers who they believed had done “all they possibly could to assist capital to crush labor.”10 For the CW&V owners, the reaction of the Braidwood miners to the importation of African Americans into the mines was the crucial element in their victory. If white and immigrant miners did not react violently, the owners would not have brought in the state militia to see that their mines and their replacement workers were protected.Race relations remained strained in the Braidwood mines during the immediate years after the strike. Nevertheless, African American miners remained in Braidwood and continued to work in the mines. At least half of the seven hundred miners in Braidwood were African American; by 1880, there were 703 Black men and their families living in the surrounding area (compared to 242 in 1870). Institutions such as the Colored Odd Fellows lodge and the First Baptist Church were established in 1878 to support the town's African American community. Reverend T. C. Fleming, who was one of the strikebreakers during the 1877 strike, was the pastor of the church.11 Despite establishing themselves as viable workers in the mines, and decent citizens in Braidwood, the small African American population continued to experience difficulties in town and the workplace.While the African American miners at Braidwood established a reputation for being viable workers and willing union men, their white counterparts insisted on following national racist trends in the workplace. Moses Gordon, an African American miner among those imported from Virginia, observed: “[African Americans] could no more get work here until the year 1877 than they could fly. . . . [I]t was the miners themselves who would come out on strike before they would allow the negro to earn his daily bread.” White workers increasingly drew the color line in the workplace and the major labor unions in the late nineteenth century. Significantly, Gordon also noted that CW&V owners fired African American workers that joined unions. Thus, the racialization of labor worked as a two-pronged attack against Black workers during the industrial era: As discriminatory policies against non-white citizens in the United States became the norm, and therefore accepted by the dominant racial group, employers increasingly utilized African Americans as strikebreakers in order to disrupt unionization. African American workers were either shunned from major labor unions by white union members who refused to allow them to join, or, as in the case in Braidwood, African American workers were threatened with termination. On the other hand, white workers—embracing the full social Darwinism of the late nineteenth century—and thus, completely accepting their collective place at the top of the racial hierarchy in American society—readily rejected African American workers from the most desirable occupations. As white workers wielded more bargaining power in the last decade of the nineteenth century, they insisted on the racialization of both the workplace and their labor unions. Gordon remarked on how this racist process in Braidwood would affect the working class: “Every nationality on the face of the globe can come here and go to work wherever there is work to be had, except for the colored man, and in nine cases out of ten the miners are to blame for it. A house divided against itself cannot stand. If the laboring class fights capital for their rights, they have enough to do without fighting against six millions [sic] of people that have got to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow.”12Strikebreaking served as an occupational and economic weapon against the racialization of labor for men like Moses Gordon. As labor historian Eric Arnesen explained, strikebreaking was a viable form of working-class activism for African Americans as they sought to strengthen their economic position during the labor upheaval of post-Reconstruction America. The most important coal mining towns in Illinois followed the practice of racial exclusion. Strikebreaking not only allowed African American workers to gain entry into desirable industrial positions, but it also represented chances for low paid Southern African Americans to earn higher wages. Their decisions to become strikebreakers were often informed choices, rationalized by a complex and changing worldview that balanced their experiences as industrial workers, farmers, and African Americans. Indeed, these Black men were neither willing tools nor ignorant serfs—rather, they were poor and ambitious men who were often recruited by coal company agents, sometimes under false pretenses. During the nineteenth century, African Americans were never the only workers used as strikebreakers in Illinois or any other Northern state. Moreover, they were never the most used strikebreakers during the height of labor turbulence of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, African Americans were usually the most visible strikebreakers because of American racism, and therefore, they were almost always the easiest targets for white working-class rage during the tumultuous labor disputes of this era.13As the Chicago Tribune correspondent predicted, other industrialists throughout the region adopted racialization as a weapon to squelch unionization among the working class. For example, in 1880, approximately one hundred African Americans were hired to replace striking coal miners in Rapids City, near Rock Island, Illinois. Tragedy struck immediately—one of the African American strikebreakers was shot and killed by a striking miner. That same year in Springfield, Illinois, mine owners resisted demands made by union officials and proceeded to import African American miners from Richmond, Virginia. The predominantly European American workforce was ordered to remove their tools from the mines and evacuate company houses. If any violence ensued, the mine operators, their property, and the African American workers, were all protected by local police officials. These drastic actions led to the demise of the union.14 In the summer of 1886, a strike for higher wages occurred in Vermillion County at Grape Creek. In this case, there was a small African American presence in the mines—yet they refused to strike with their European American coworkers. The African American miners belonged to the biracial Knights of Labor (KOL) union and refused to participate because it was “a white man's fight.” The Grape Creek operators brought in African American men from Tennessee and Kentucky under police protection. The conflict dragged out and defeated the strikers, as the mine operators brought in five to fifteen new African American workers each day.15 This pattern of racialization continued throughout Illinois during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. According to data compiled by economic historian Warren Whatley, Illinois industrialists utilized Black strikebreakers more than any state during this period. However, while Black strikebreaking increased substantially during this period—especially in high-profile conflicts—they remained a relatively small percentage of the nation's strikebreaking force.16While Northern industrialists continued to recruit Black workers from the South during the late nineteenth century, they virtually ignored Northern Black workers. This omission was particularly glaring in Illinois and other midwestern states due to the dearth of African Americans living in the region. Approximately 90 percent of the African American population remained in the South, and it was simply easier to find and recruit Black labor in the South. Another more compelling reason had to do with the collective attitudes of African Americans living in the North. While Southern Black workers were cajoled relatively easily due to precarious economic condition or general lack of knowledge of a particular labor conflict in the North, Northern African Americans simply had more exposure to Northern labor strife. Although the Black population of Illinois was quite small, they gained a reputation as ferocious labor agitators during the late nineteenth century. Like their European American working-class counterparts, they also battled for workers’ rights. To be sure, African American workers in Illinois were occasionally used as strikebreakers during the late nineteenth century—there would be a collective shift in their attitude toward the labor movement by the turn of the twentieth century as white working-class racism became more pronounced. Yet prior to the full implementation of white supremacist ideas about allegedly inferior and superior workers based upon race, Black Illinoisans were not only a part of the labor movement, in some cases they were at the vanguard of the movement.During the summer of 1877, while the Braidwood mine operators were importing African American workers into their labor fracas, more than 150 Black longshoremen from Illinois disputed recent wage cuts against the Mississippi Valley Transportation Company (MVTC). Like their Braidwood counterparts, they too were inspired by the “Great Railroad Strike” and organized their own all-Black union. In solidarity with the national movement, the workers arranged a general strike against all Illinois, employers due to the recent wage When the owners were of the strike, they hired strikebreakers. The next the striking longshoremen on the and their and that they leave the When they refused to the longshoremen them by a of in their The longshoremen then after the to ensure that none of the strikebreakers would only a few but it created quite a throughout The observed that the longshoremen may well have been within their rights to strike for higher but they no to prevent from working who willing . . . to work for the The noted that by the strikebreakers off the the Black longshoremen were a for which they be a significant in how the African American workers were in When African American workers for their rights, they were often as or workers. In Black labor activism was often viewed as chaotic and While strikebreaking was generally in white working-class when Black workers fought to their economic the they should be a that [would] last them for all time to the Braidwood which and supported striking miners during their African American workers were viewed with throughout and as workers throughout Illinois sought the same measures in unionization as other workers prior to the full of racialization in labor. As early as 1877, the Knights of Labor (KOL) established as many as seven in Illinois that African American men and into their For many Black workers, the was more than a labor the of leaders and as a than any other union in their the were able to the for African American After the national railroad strike in 1877, labor leaders recruited Black workers to the to racist to workers. goal of the labor leaders was also to the of Black workers during an 1878 African Americans the supported the and the city and with the white Chicago continued to into one of the nation's industrial the of the city was for African Americans. The battle for skilled labor in a environment, was often a losing for African American for from the South. African American men often to racist racist white and workers with the of racist to Black men out of viable As a result, Black workers in Chicago were left with occupational and often found themselves to with national of the racialization of labor was in Chicago by the last of the nineteenth century. By 1890, African Americans were as the to be laborers, workers, or to the During that decade they represented only percent of the population percent of all in the occupational for Black of or no higher than railroad or were also tools for the of such as or who were who or the of and dwellers more and the to their To ideas of racial and economic the their to an One noted that African American men of slavery . . . and became a of to the of the African American men, as a Chicago were the they are by and to were not always to ideas of racial if it in wages. A could a sense of and the of the of the South, which could lead to a was a relatively novel idea in the nineteenth Yet any that these men would allow these to into their in labor issues of the would be an Black in were the of hybrid labor activism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Black over pay In 1875, they out of throughout the during and in some of At the out because their new to He informed the all-Black that they would be to at the an before their and they would no be allowed to left over by practice that allowed workers to their out in during the and workers of all and were toward labor unionization in the Yet European American workers to follow nationwide discriminatory in labor unions by Black workers from union Black often with their own of labor activism that all-Black unions or biracial unions. For example, after the of the five Black from the in Chicago, were to their of the that were to citizens of every and and were informed that it was against the to of their in the The the men a in the where the and their while on The by the left for another where they were and served without in Chicago were to find a labor union that would their in fighting for their labor and civil rights. The them with the of unionization that they In 1886, created the Colored local and more than four hundred Black and during a The Chicago Times the the Knights had on the Black the union the colored and gave the with This represented the entry of African Americans into organized labor in Chicago and was followed within two years by a Black the which organized after from the of the Black in Chicago little time in their reputation as labor In two hundred African American joined nine hundred white in of the of and in wages. The biracial an of substantial for The owners to a through the workers by importing African American replacement workers to replace the white The between the workers was and the Black were enough to the strikebreakers to A year during another Black labor conditions, and they also the to become more about their rights and the labor was not one African American predicted, by would for their working-class men and in Illinois for more biracial union during the late nineteenth century. an African American of the that more Black workers to the union to themselves as a within the labor than a within the the for laboring men and was an of wages. have been

A History of Trigonometry Education in the United States: 1776-1900 Jenna Van Sickle This dissertation traces the history of the teaching of elementary trigonometry in United States colleges and universities from 1776 to 1900. This study analyzes textbooks from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, reviews in contemporary periodicals, course catalogs, and secondary sources. Elementary trigonometry was a topic of study in colleges throughout this time period, but the way in which trigonometry was taught and defined changed drastically, as did the scope and focus of the subject. Because of advances in analytic trigonometry by Leonhard Euler and others in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the trigonometric functions came to be defined as ratios, rather than as line segments. This change came to elementary trigonometry textbooks beginning in antebellum America and the ratios came to define trigonometric functions in elementary trigonometry textbooks by the end of the nineteenth century. During this time period, elementary trigonometry textbooks grew to have a much more comprehensive treatment of the subject and considered trigonometric functions in many different ways. In the late eighteenth century, trigonometry was taught as a topic in a larger mathematics course and was used only to solve triangles for applications in surveying and navigation. Textbooks contained few pedagogical tools and only the most basic of trigonometric formulas. By the end of the nineteenth century, trigonometry was taught as its own course that covered the topic extensively with many applications to real life. Textbooks were full of pedagogical tools. The path that the teaching of trigonometry took through the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not always move in a linear fashion. Sometimes trigonometry education stayed the same for a long time and then was suddenly changed, but other times changes happened more gradually. There were many international influences, and there were many influential Americans and influential American institutions that changed the course of trigonometry instruction in this country. This dissertation follows the path of those changes from 1776 to 1900. After 1900, trigonometry instruction became a topic of secondary education rather than higher education.

Our Fellow Creatures: Who Were They? Who Are They?

Wandering: An Essay on Histories, Genders, Mobilities, and Forms

From Old Regime to Industrial State: A History of German Industrialization from the Eighteenth Century to World War I

This is the first monograph devoted to Ducray-Duminil, one of the most popular novelists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His literary career spanned decades, from his first novel in 1787 to a volume of fairy tales in 1819, and he demonstrated considerable political flexibility, moving from writing republican short fiction during the Terror to praising the Restoration in 1815. The volume begins with a biographical sketch to give the reader a sense of the range of Ducray-Duminil’s activities — for in addition to being a novelist, he was also a journalist, playwright, musician, songwriter, and poet. Łukasz Szkopiński then takes a structural approach to the novels in order to move away from the prevailing view of nineteenth-century critics that Ducray-Duminil’s work was homogenous, although he nevertheless admits that there is a ‘caractère réitératif’ (p. 58) to Ducray-Duminil’s plot construction: many of his protagonists are young people faced with family secrets, persecution, and increasingly dramatic obstacles to being reunited with loved ones, but they are always rewarded in the end when good triumphs and vice is punished. The analysis considers the various narrative strategies that the author uses to involve readers, an important element of the novels, and explores characterization, with a particular focus on Roger (from Victor, ou, L’enfant de la forêt) and Jules (from Jules, ou, Le toit paternel) as some of his more complex or unusual characters. Questions of morality and didacticism in the novels are considered, alongside the theme of education. Szkopiński rightly highlights the fact that, despite the didactic content and the young age of many of the protagonists, these novels were not written as littérature de jeunesse but were intended for all readers. There is also a detailed exploration of the use of the merveilleux. For the main part, Ducray-Duminil follows the French tradition of explained supernatural, despite his inclusion of dreams of a prophetic nature that fall outside of this. The mutual affinities between Ducray-Duminil and Ann Radcliffe are highlighted, although Daniel Hall’s work on French and German Gothic Fiction in the Late Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005) is surprisingly absent from the bibliography. In many ways the novels of Ducray-Duminil are ‘l’expression de son temps’ (p. 275). His recurring themes of social identity, bigamy, secret marriages, and disguised identities are to be found in numerous other novels of the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary era, even if no other writer had quite the success that Ducray-Duminil had. Victor, ou, L’enfant de la forêt, to give but one example, went through thirty-seven editions in the course of the nineteenth century (the last in 1893). The study concludes by sketching out Ducray-Duminil’s literary legacy, most visible on the stage with Pixerécourt’s adaptations, but Szkopiński also explores writers such as Balzac, Sue, and Hugo, for whom Ducray-Duminil was an influence. Overall this is a useful volume for those interested in fiction of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: it puts Ducray-Duminil in a broad context and helps us to understand better how he marked a whole generation of readers.

Visitors who dcribed the Lake District in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw its society as distinctively different from the rest of England and were struck by the survival of a numerous group of small, independent owner-occupiers. These farmers were often called ‘statesmen’, a term applied by outsiders rather than locals and not of great antiquity. Lakeland owner-occupiers preferred to use ‘yeomcn’. A good deal has been written about this social group. However, much of this relates to the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries or has focused on problems of nomenclature. Research on parliamentary enclosure in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has established some general trends regarding changing numbers of small proprietors, while census enumerators' books have provided the basis for work on Cumbrian owner-occupiers in the second half of the nineteenth century. Less attention has been paid to, how this society changed in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the Lake District was drawn into the mainstream of English society and economic life. The use of the term ‘peasant’ in the title of this article is deliberately contentious as there has been considerable debate on whether the term can be justified for English society after medieval times. Marshall has suggested that one has to go back to the early eighteenth century to find a real peasant society in the Lake District. but Searle has claimed that a peasantry with a near subsistence economy, little penetration of market forces, much mutual assistance and collective regulation of assets survived until the end of the eighteenth century.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Antipodean Myths Transformed: The Evolution of Australian Identity

Throughout the twentieth century, anthropologists and historians have regarded the Houma Indians of southern Louisiana as the descendants of the Houma Indians encountered along the Mississippi River by French explorers and settlers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Oral history of the contemporary Houma traces the group's origin to Native Americans of the Houma and other tribes who moved into the bayou country of southeastern Louisiana during the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries. However,anthropologists and historians from the Bureau of Indian Affairs have concluded that there is no documentary evidence of any cultural or genealogical link between the modern Houma and the Houma of the French colonial period. Available documentary sources indicate that the modern Houma originated in the nineteenth century as a multiethnic group that included Europeans, African Americans, and some Native Americans, none of whom are known to have been Houmas. The genesis of the modern group's identity as Houma Indians can be understood as a response to legally sanctioned racial classifications and race discrimination in Louisiana from the late nineteenth century on.

The establishment of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal in the late eighteenth century, whose chief goal was to introduce the civilizations of Eastern societies to the West, encouraged a series of enquiries by British writers and travelers on the history, culture, art, antiquities, and literature of Eastern countries, including Afghanistan. This chapter analyzes the writings of three enterprising British explorers who traveled to Afghanistan in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It focuses on the travel accounts of George Forster, Mountstuart Elphinstone, and Charles Masson, men separated in time, interests and ambitions, but whose work, when examined collectively, delivers from personal observation an expansive picture of Afghanistan in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Such detail has not been found anywhere else, even within indigenous sources, which makes their writings essential and indispensable resources for studying the history, culture and society of Afghanistan in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Together, their enquiries concerning ethnographic, cultural, and social life in Afghanistan have formed a topographical and cultural template for future researchers.

The jury is still out on Eureka. Although still a seemingly anomalous outlier in Poe's oeuvre, Eureka has been given high marks for its remarkable anticipation of many features of twentieth- and twenty-first-century physics, astronomy, and cosmology even as it still challenges modern nonscientific readers with its conceptual rigors. And while recent scholars such as René van Slooten and David N. Stamos have explored the myriad scientific and philosophical insights found in Poe's cosmological treatise, the average Poe aficionado often steers clear of the text after a first reading. Poe himself, of course, set great store by his last major creative effort, writing to Maria Clemm on July 7, 1849, “I have no desire to live since I have done ‘Eureka.’ I could accomplish nothing more.” First published in June 1848 and dedicated to the German scientist and polymath Alexander von Humboldt, author of the multivolume Kosmos, Eureka had been debuted as a lecture at the New York Society Library lecture on February 3 while Poe was trying to raise money for his projected magazine, The Stylus. Among Eureka skeptics, the New York editor and critic Evert Duyckinck, who launched Poe's first collection of Tales (1845), wrote his brother George after the lecture that it was “full of ludicrous display of scientific phrase—a mountainous piece of absurdity for a popular lecture.” But for more discerning and sympathetic readers, the world has been catching up with Poe's cosmological intuitions ever since.In his new study of Eureka, Robert J. Scholnick, a scholar specializing in the intersection of nineteenth-century American writers and science, presents a useful examination of the scientific and cultural milieus that produced Poe's work, highlighting the possible influence of the writings of Erasmus Darwin as well as the other scientific minds who likely helped shape Poe's thinking such as William Herschel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, John Pringle Nichol, Robert Chambers, and Alexander von Humboldt. Produced when the concepts of Deep Space and Deep Time were beginning to alert individuals to the staggering age and size of the universe, Eureka was in fact, in Scholnick's view, an integral part of an emerging scientific debate over cosmic and planetary evolution; indeed, it was “grounded in the radical, dangerous science of its own time” and “part of a vibrant and contentious transatlantic discourse that addressed fundamental questions of science, social structure, and religious belief” (iv). As Scholnick notes, Eureka has the distinction of anticipating a number of key concepts in modern astronomy, cosmology, and astrophysics including the theories of the Big Bang and the Big Crunch, the idea of a multiverse, the equivalency of matter and energy, the concept of a pulsating or oscillating universe, the existence of black holes, the butterfly effect as set forth by chaos theory, the space-time continuum, and more. Poe was well trained in mathematics at West Point and, as a book-reviewing polymath, well read in many of the contemporary sciences of his day, notably astronomy. But to what extent did Poe draw on contemporary science for his ideas, and to what extent were they original to his literary imagination?In his analysis of the influences on Eureka, Scholnick emphasizes those figures like Erasmus Darwin and William Herschel whose ideas and discoveries tended to undermine traditional religious beliefs and extend the subversive power of the European Enlightenment in order to conceptualize the idea of an evolving, dynamic materialist universe little resembling the biblical mythology of Genesis. Scholnick thus begins by providing an overview of some of the leading scientific ideas of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, focusing particularly on the work of Erasmus Darwin, a brilliant doctor, scientist, and progressive thinker of the later eighteenth century whose writings suggested the evolutionary basis of life on earth, as set forth in the two-volume medical treatise Zoonomia, and in the didactic poems The Botanic Garden and The Temple of Nature. Scholnick notes that Poe demonstrated his acquaintance with Erasmus Darwin's posthumous poem Temple of Nature (1803) by alluding to it in number 69 of his “Pinakidia,” published in 1837 in the Southern Literary Messenger. Scholnick argues that Darwin's popularity in the early nineteenth-century United States, both because of his scientific acumen and his championship of American democracy, made it likely that Poe read Darwin's didactic poetry and may have gleaned there his ideas of the explosive origin and future collapse of the universe.In Chapter 1 Scholnick provides an overview of how Poe went from his 1827 “Sonnet—to Science,” which depicted science as a vulture preying on the poet's heart, to his embrace two decades later of a subversive Romantic-era science in Eureka. Influential along this route was likely the publication of Robert Chamber's Vestiges of the Natural History of the Earth, a sensational publication in both England and the United States in 1844–45 for its depiction of an evolutionary history of the earth beginning with the formation of the planet according to Laplace's nebular hypothesis, which in turn drew on the astronomer Hershel's recent findings on the seeming evolutionary growth and development of celestial phenomena. Scholnick notes that Poe denied having read Vestiges, although the astonishing popularity of the work makes it seem likely that he was familiar with its basic ideas. Like the anonymous author of Vestiges in his history of the planet, Poe would be positing the materialist, evolutionary development of the cosmos, with the token figure of God providing only an initial impetus for creation. Poe's Eureka thus clearly took advantage of the intense contemporary interest in new scientific ideas in the 1840s. Eureka was also symptomatic of the work of other lesser-known scientific figures of the era whose work advanced the materialist focus of science away from the orthodox ideas of natural theology; these included the surgeon William Lawrence, whose daring writings on physiology were read by Percy and Mary Shelley and influenced the creation of Frankenstein.In Chapter 2, Scholnick points out the concept of the sublime that pervaded Poe's writings and appeared in Eureka, noting that “the sublime serves as a perceptual vehicle for a journey back to the origins of everything and forward to the cosmic collapse” (41). Poe, of course, was deeply read in Burke's influential treatise on the subject, but it is still a moot question whether he also knew of Kant's theories of the sublime, whether at first- or secondhand. The ineffable sublime scale of the cosmos depicted in Eureka, according to Scholnick, also traces its scientific lineage back to the atomism of Lucretius, whose unorthodox poem on the atomistic composition of the universe had been steadily gaining an audience, appearing in England in 1805 in a translation by John Mason Good, later the author of the popular Book of Nature (1826). In Chapters 3 and 4, Scholnick returns to the similarities between Eureka and the pioneering ideas of Erasmus Darwin in their shared depictions of an evolving universe: “Both in Darwin's poetry and in his prose, Poe could have found sublime depictions of the Big Bang and also of the Big Crunch, as well as a direct reference to the foundational discoveries of William Herschel” (67).Finally, in Chapter 5 Scholnick examines the relationship between Eureka and the work of Alexander von Humboldt, the first volume of whose five-volume Kosmos was published by Harper and Brothers in the United States in 1847. Scholnick notes that Poe reprinted an English translation of a German review of the first volume of Kosmos in the Broadway Journal on July 12, 1845, a review that noted von Humboldt's initial presentation of his ideas in a lecture series in 1827–28 in Berlin—a possible reason for Poe's initial presentation of the ideas in Eureka in his February 1848 lecture. The introduction to the first volume of von Humboldt's masterpiece included an overview of the latest discoveries in astronomy, also possibly providing an important impetus for Poe's composition of Eureka. Von Humboldt was notable for his embrace of a Romantic view of science that welcomed the coexistence of intellectual rigor and artistic imagination, an idea that Poe also palpably endorsed in his cosmological treatise. As the most celebrated scientist of the mid-nineteenth century, whose work had a profound impact on American science, environmentalism, literature, and art, von Humboldt was well suited to be the tutelary spirit to Poe's treatise.Overall, in his study Scholnick provides a suggestive overview of the scientific milieu in which Poe was writing Eureka and a stimulus for further the study of a number of scientific figures who might have influenced Poe's late work. Scholnick's discussion of the figure of Erasmus Darwin is especially intriguing, but it needs further exploration and development to attain more critical mass. The emphasis on Erasmus Darwin in the title of the book thus draws attention to this relatively unexplored connection, but Scholnick's study also provides an informative guide to several other figures within the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century radical scientific community who played a role in the larger scientific and cultural context of Eureka. In Poe's “Eureka,” Erasmus Darwin, and Discourses of Radical Science in Britain and America, 1770–1850, Scholnick thus has produced a very useful gloss on a Poe text that continues to both baffle and fascinate the common reader even as it offers a tantalizing skeleton key to the mysteries of the cosmos—the final testament to Poe's brilliant cryptographic imagination.

Reviewed by: The Portrait and the Book: Illustration and Literary Culture in Early America by Megan Walsh Carla J. Mulford (bio) The Portrait and the Book: Illustration and Literary Culture in Early America megan walsh Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017 259 pp. Walsh's The Portrait and the Book embraces new methods in studying the history of print media and argues that American reading and visual tastes were driven by the market in illustrated British and European books. This sounds straightforward enough, but it is actually breathtakingly important. Walsh helps us recognize how much our attention to the words of our beloved historical books has enabled us to write literary history in the absence of the more palpable cultural investments of early readers. They loved illustrations! By tracing illustrated imports and [End Page 611] American reprints of British and European books, Walsh demonstrates that readers sought to participate in a visual media culture that evolved, in the hands of American printers seeking to meet the needs of American readers, into a specific form of nationalist (and antinationalist) literature. Her important contribution to study of the early national era relates to her insistence that Americans' visual literacy has been occluded in discussions of the literature, discussions that tend to feature themes like sentimentalism and coquetry or critiques of enlightenment. Walsh argues that early readers would have sought not just the written words but accompanying images as marks of their culture. Walsh's notion of Americans' visual literacy includes not just actual illustrations in books but the writerly method of ekphrasis, graphic verbal descriptions of scenes and works of art. Speculating on readers' "imaginative experience of reading illustrated books," Walsh argues that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, "Americans made use of verbal descriptions of images in order to speak to one of the most pressing visual questions of their day: the profound trade gap in illustrated books" that existed between North America, on the one hand, and Britain and Europe, on the other (12). Her primary goal is to illustrate for her own readers the literary culture of North America as it formulated its own cultural goals from the middle eighteenth century onward. As Walsh tells the story, illustrations in books from Italy, France, and the Netherlands were common in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Britain lagged behind. By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, "British books were suddenly bursting with images" (2). The result was that "formal experimentation, especially the emergence of the novel, was inextricably tied to authors' and printers' use of visual paratexts" (2); "[f]rontis-pieces in particular influenced readers' conceptions of novels" (2). Even as frontispieces began to be used more regularly, other kinds of illustrations in novels tended to fall off during the second part of the eighteenth century. Yet changes in technology made many different kinds of illustrations possible, so that "by the first decades of the nineteenth century, the demand for engravings, both in books and as stand-alone prints, was booming" (3). In British North America during this same time, printers and booksellers tended to import books from abroad and sell them in their shops. Books that would sell well—Bibles and literary materials—were imported with greatest frequency. By the end of the eighteenth century, [End Page 612] printers often reprinted British books for American readers. This began, of course, with Benjamin Franklin's "reprinting" (really a much watered down version) of Samuel Richardson's Pamela, but the practice gained momentum and solidified in the very late eighteenth century, and American consumers grew fond of British books and British-authored books. "It was this investment with the culture of the mother country through the patterns of consumer culture that gave the United States its own distinctive culture," Walsh notes, "a culture built on appropriation, adaptation, and reinvention" (5–6). Walsh summarizes the printing techniques used by American printers, pointing to two kinds of printmaking methods, relief printing (in both wood and then in metal, by the mid-eighteenth century and later) and intaglio printing. Printers tended to prefer intaglio printing, which employed a "relatively durable and precise technology to produce the illustrations commonly found in expensive...

Research Findings: In this research we explore the relationship between young children’s number knowledge and their measurement of length. First, we examined 4- to 5-year-olds’ (kindergartners’) understanding of and preference for using standard or nonstandard units to measure length. Second, we investigated whether the following tasks were related to children’s understanding of using standard (i.e., rulers) and nonstandard (i.e., blocks) units to measure length: (a) counting and written number identification knowledge, (b) symbolic or nonsymbolic number magnitude comparison ability, and (c) approximate number line estimation ability. Third, we examined whether understanding these number tasks predicted understanding how to measure length for both standard and nonstandard units. Our results show that young children prefer to use standard units of measurement when given a choice, and some of these children use a ruler correctly. Our results also show an important relationship between children’s und...

Cunning Distortions: Folk Christianity and Witchcraft Allegations in Early Mormon History

Scholars, the general public, and special collections libraries are increasingly aware of the importance of visual images in examining the past. With the proliferation of sophisticated digitization technologies, researchers now have the opportunity to "see" images in new ways. No longer considered secondary to text and used merely to illustrate the written word, visual materials are taking their rightful place as primary evidence that document the past and influences our understanding of the present. The Library Company of Philadelphia supports this continuing focus on the historical importance of visual culture.