Abstract
Ruby M. Hemenway (1884-1987), who was declared "the oldest newspaper columnist in the universe" in a 1984 article in Yankee Magazine, specialized in the restoration of long-forgotten facts about life in late-nineteenth-century rural New England. Such knowledge included how people outfitted their sleighs with buffalo robes and how women crimped the edges of their pies. Hemenway was a major source for the Dictionary of American Regional English, owing to her nearly encyclopedic command of an antiquated local nomenclature. In one of her columns published in the Greenfield, Massachusetts, Recorder, Hemenway once offered this suggestion with regard to wildflowers: "I hope you can call them, like your friends, by name; they mean so much more." Her attention to the names of the flowers, to the anchoring of specifics of daily existence generally, is not merely antiquarianism, but rather a deliberate challenge to history as it is practiced. I argue that her writing effectively trumps the predilection for abstraction and interpretation with a preference for practical and very local knowledge as history.1
Published Version
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