Society Of Antiquaries Research Articles

Канадський архівіст Дуглас Брімнер та його «Шляхетна мрія»

The purpose of the article is to reconstruct the life path and activities of Douglas Brymner (1823–1902), journalist, politician, state server and the fi rst chairman of the Dominion Archives of Canada, a member of the Royal Society of Canada (since 1895) and the American Antiquarian Society (since 1898), based on archival and personal sources, to analyze the main issues of the implementation of the Canadian archive development project «The Noble Dream», which was the result of combining elements of the British and European archival systems into a single Canadian archival network. The methodology is based on the principles of historicism, objectivity, and general scientifi c (analysis and synthesis, methods of structural and functional analysis), as well as general historical methods – chronological, retrospective, and biographical, thanks to which it was possible to reconstruct the picture of a person’s life in a certain space. The use of source studies methods made it possible to analyze D. Brymner’s «Reports on Canadian Archives» and to explore the collection of Frederick Haldimand (1718–1791) in these reports. The scientifi c novelty of the study lies in the fact that for the fi rst time, on the basis of a comprehensive analysis and involvement in the scientifi c circulation of archival and personal sources, to explore the little-known pages from D. Brymner’s biography, including archival activity. Conclusions. In the formulated conclusions, the chronological sequence of D. Brymner’s activities as the head of the archive branch at the Department of Agriculture of Canada is documented, his personal contribution to the activities of the archive, his role in initiating the copying of archival documents, including outside Canada, and the development of the universal document collection system are presented.

Collecting the nation in the museum of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 1832–91

Abstract The sixty-year period from 1832 to 1891 was key to the development of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland and its museum, during which time its collection was transferred to national ownership and greater emphasis began to be placed on social and cultural history. This article analyses acquisition data to add substance to the knowledge of the meanings attached by the antiquarian society to the collection of Scottish materials from the period after ad 1100. Its purpose is, first, to ascertain the extent to which the society developed targeted collecting strategies and, second, to demonstrate the ways in which the museum’s collecting practices were influenced by the society’s priorities and broader antiquarian ideas on the value of material sources in the study of history. It is argued that by 1891 the museum’s collecting strategies had shifted from a unionist-nationalist framework towards an international comparative approach which elevated the ‘Scottishness’ of the museum’s collection by representing Scotland as a distinct nation of Europe with its own recognizable material history.

L’Art du Bonheur: Rituals of Domesticity in VideoSchetsboek, Pink 1983

This contribution analyses Pink’s artwork VideoSchetsboek (1983), a performance part of the project L’Art du Bonheur, which shows the same ‘De Koning family’ repeatedly in different interiors within the same street by means of a series of photographs and videos. The emphasis on ritual and domesticity in this series explains its recent inclusion in the collection of the Royal Antiquarian Society (KOG). The ideals of the KOG after its foundation in 1858 reflected, for example through the Atlas of Manners and Customs, those of a nineteenth-century society in which an orderly interior was seen as a core value: domestic happiness was deemed to be good for the development of the nation. Those values ​​changed after 1900 with discussions about individuality and a sense of taste. With the increasing prosperity in the second half of the twentieth century, it became possible for everyone to furnish a home interior as a reflection of their own identity. Pink’s work questions this individualization. Since 1980, the values attributed to marriage and family have declined sharply and all kinds of alternative types of households and discussions about them have arisen. In conjunction with the KOG’s older collections, Pink’s work makes it possible to gain insight into this ever changing culture of living and its domestic rituals and provides context to discussions on their meaning.

Western Lands, Western Voices: Essays on Public History in the American West ed. by Gregory E. Smoak

Reviewed by: Western Lands, Western Voices: Essays on Public History in the American West ed. by Gregory E. Smoak Emily Gowen Gregory E. Smoak, editor, Western Lands, Western Voices: Essays on Public History in the American West. Salt Lake City: U of Utah P, 2021. 232 pp. Hardcover, $70; paper, $35; e-book, $28. In the twelve essays that make up Gregory Smoak’s Western Lands, Western Voices: Essays on Public History in the American West, the University of Utah’s American West Center comes into view as the contested center of a fifty-year battle to define and expand the parameters of public history. In one sense the volume is a rich, polyvocal institutional history of the center, and a loving tribute to its founders’ vision. In another sense, though, the volume is an extended meditation on the most pressing questions that animate the field of public history. What sorts of tensions arise when historians, Richard White asks, enter the public sphere? How do we resist the popular urge to instrumentalize history, to make it speak the way we want it to? Or as Liesl Carr Childers puts it, what happens when history is “hostage” to politics? (27). And what would it look like to truly center Native voices in the way we tell stories about the American West? The volume offers several models of good public history: Michael Childers writes about Hal Rothman, the late historian and public intellectual who sought to “engage the public on its own terms” and “create the ears with which to hear us” (41). Leighton M. Quarles shares lessons from his own work as a historian for the National Park Service, a role in which nationalist mythmaking, tribal memory, environmental preservation, and the mandates of a tourism economy jostle for primacy. As many of the essays insist, a professional historian is uniquely positioned to understand and combat the settler colonial origins of land preservation projects that, in the popular imagination, are often billed as an unalloyed good. Yvette Towersap Tuell calls walking the line between serving Native history and public land management “working on the dark side” (101). But she insists that inhabiting such a vexed position is essential if we are to “better incorporate Native history and local knowledge into . . . policy decisions” (101). From the adjudication of tribal water rights to the interpretive decisions made on ghost tours, to the creation of new centers for [End Page 88] Native American and Indigenous studies programs, to the digitization of archives, the volume charts the American West Center’s sprawling and complex legacy, and showcases the hard, often frustrating, but richly rewarding work of “doing public history in the American West” (1; emphasis original). In its best moments the volume lives up to its own definitions of public history, offering a road map to young scholars interested in forging careers that span disciplines, audiences, and institutional constituencies. For those entering the profession today this volume may even feel like a life raft. Its vivid accounting of the wide range of purposes to which a historian’s credentials can be put offers a much more expansive vision of a fulfilling academic career than we often see in discussions of the academy today. To read Western Lands, Western Voices is to get an up-close look at what it’s like to wade into the messy, fascinating, unfinished work of public history in the American West, and perhaps even to be inspired to enter the public sphere oneself. [End Page 89] Emily Gowen The American Antiquarian Society Copyright © 2023 Western Literature Association

Martin Folkes (1690–1754): Newtonian, antiquary, connoisseur

This is a wide-ranging, informative, but ultimately slightly frustrating book. It represents the first book-length account of Martin Folkes, the only man to become president of both the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries, a distinction that, as the author tells us in her acknowledgements, was what drew her to her subject in the first place. Previous authors had been discouraged by the apparent lack of source material, since Folkes directed on his death that his papers should be destroyed. Anna Marie Roos, however, has been able to do much to rectify this state of affairs. Thus she uses materials auctioned at Sotheby’s in 1932, some of which subsequently turned up on book barrows in the Farringdon Road, whence they were retrieved by the late R.E.W. Maddison and subsequently presented to the Royal Society, while others were acquired directly by the Royal Society itself and by the Wellcome Library. She has also been able to trace letters in the collections of such of Folkes’s correspondents as Henry Baker and Charles Lennox, 2nd Duke of Richmond, and more scattered materials that survive in repositories like the Norfolk Record Office and the Bodleian Library – in the latter case, the travel journal that Folkes kept while he was on a tour on the continent in 1733–5, an episode on which Roos wrote an informative article in the British Journal for the History of Science in 2017 that forms a significant component of the current book.

A. W. Franks, William Ridgeway and collections of Irish antiquities

Abstract The visit by A. W. Franks of the British Museum to the Irish Industrial Exhibition in Dublin in 1853 gave him the opportunity to assess the holdings of Irish antiquarian material displayed there. This soon led to purchases for the museum. The collections that most interested him are discussed here, along with another, long known to William Ridgeway, who eventually bought it on behalf of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society.

Women's Studies Archive: Rare Titles from the American Antiquarian Society, 1820‐1922

Women's Studies Archive: Rare Titles from the American Antiquarian Society, 1820‐1922 provides literature by female authors on the American woman's experience in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is the third database in Gale's Women's Studies Archive, which is only one of a number of Gale Primary Sources collections. It contains more than one million pages of works from the American Antiquarian Society, all authored or edited by women. The works available here are drawn from the American Antiquarian Society's library collections and cover a wide variety of nonfiction subjects and fiction genres.This database is relatively easy to navigate, though the numerous available search and browse functions may prove confusing to some. Despite this relatively minor complication, this resource offers a broad and varied range of materials from female authors in the time period indicated above. This is not a subscription database; instead, it must be purchased. The price, based on full-time enrollment (FTE), can range from $22,080 to $27,600. The licensing agreement for this database is too long, overly detailed, and sometimes repetitive, but in most ways is average in its composition.

Exhibition Review of Althea McNish: Colour Is Mine, William Morris Gallery, London, 2 April–11 September 2022

This article is a review of the exhibition Althea McNish: Colour is Mine at The William Morris Gallery, Walthamstow, London – 2 April to 11 September 2022. Co-curated by Rose Sinclair of Goldsmiths and Senior Curator Rowan Bain of the William Morris Gallery, the exhibition is the first major retrospective of significance about the work of Trinidadian-born textile artist and designer Althea McNish. It features original textile design work, fabrics, artefacts, photographs and archival film footage that celebrates McNish’s prolific and vibrant cultural contribution to twentieth century textile design. Exhibits include items from McNish’s personal archive – early sketches and prints from the Trinidad Art Society, through to sample books, swathes of original fabrics from Heals, Hull Traders and Liberty, later paintings created by innovative CAD technology and an interpretation of the 1966 Ideal Home exhibit “A Bachelor Girl’s Room” recreated by Studio NYALI. It highlights the renown in which McNish was held in the 1960s-80s and in doing so, asks challenging questions about why this extraordinary black woman designer – the first designer of Caribbean descent to achieve international recognition – has been so overlooked in recent decades. The exhibition forms part of a three-year research project on McNish’s legacy led by Rose Sinclair and funded by the Society of Antiquaries through its Janet Arnold Textile Award.

The Earl of Buchan's Second Summer: Dryburgh (1785–1829)

After over a century of relative neglect, the activities of David Steuart Erskine, the eleventh Earl of Buchan, on his Dryburgh estate between 1785 and 1829 have come under increasing academic scrutiny. The Earl’s retirement to Dryburgh has been seen less as a retreat from his high public profile as the founder of the Society of Antiquaries and more as a continuation both of his antiquarian and political interests. Indeed, landscape features such as the Temple of the Muses to the poet James Thomson and especially the giant statue to William Wallace have been viewed recently as part of a highly political nationalist-historic romantic landscape. While confirming the essentially political nature of these monuments, this article will explore an alternative whig and unionist reading of them. At the same time, although highlighting the continuity of Buchan’s antiquarian agenda, it will attempt to show how this gradually merged with a wide range of the Earl’s more personal enthusiasms such as Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, classical antiquity and the beaux arts of London’s Royal Academy to form a distinctive second summer to his career.

Progress and Change in Psychiatry Coming Too Slowly

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article From the PresidentFull AccessProgress and Change in Psychiatry Coming Too SlowlyVivian B. Pender, M.D.Vivian B. PenderSearch for more papers by this author, M.D.Published Online:21 Apr 2022https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2022.05.5.8The book Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness by Andrew Scull, Ph.D., is being published this month. The book, based on a carefully researched history of psychiatry, provides a critical assessment of the psychiatric enterprise. In the rush to find cures for psychiatric illnesses, Scull believes that there has been a disappointing lack of focus on patients. Rather, the profession has been gnawed away from within by various self-interested factions and subjected to multipronged attacks from without.It is important to remember psychiatry’s beginnings. Even in 1886, Pliny Earle, M.D. (a superintendent of several asylums and a founder of APA and the AMA), lamented that “in the present state of our knowledge, no classification of insanity can be erected on a pathological basis, for the simple reason that, with but slight exceptions, the pathology of the disease is unknown. …” Furthermore, he noted that there was an overwhelming reliance on reporting of symptoms (Pliny Earle Papers, 1886, box 1, folder 3, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.).Nearly a century and a half later, nothing, it seems, has substantially changed. The connection between the general lack of progress in psychiatry may reflect that previous research may not have included “all of us.”Steven Hyman, M.D., a former director of the National Institute of Mental Health who did much to support shifting psychiatric research to focus on biology, neuroscience, and genetics, had by 2007 concluded that “it is probably premature to bring neurobiology into the formal classification of mental disorders” (Nature Reviews Neuroscience, September 2007).The Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Grand Rounds recently presented highlights from the 2021 American College of Neuropsychopharmacology meeting. Although many advances have been made in understanding complicated plastic brain functions, almost none were clinically applicable, and when they were, the therapeutic mechanism was poorly understood. The summary of the conference was a validation of Scull’s treatise and Earle’s lamentation that nothing has significantly changed; however, it was noted that the quest of big pharma over the last several decades to develop drugs and thereby earn huge profits is gradually being replaced by new, radiologically based interventions into the brain. As a result, prior optimism over the prospect of highly specific drug-based cures is changing to pessimism over the current state of affairs using nonspecific pharmacologic “blunt instruments” and a return to physical treatment instruments.Few patients and their families escape the ravaging effects of mental illness; however, nobody escapes its social burdens. Just as Black patients were once segregated in separate wards or in entirely separate institutions, marginalization, discrimination, and exclusion persist in psychiatry to this day. The form is different, but the premise is the same. Racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination continue to impact individuals in all sectors of society, including the economy, housing, education, and the criminal justice system. And with respect to physical and mental health, the cumulative disadvantages of poverty and prejudice are vividly demonstrated by high rates of maternal mortality and lower life expectancy. Unsurprisingly, during the COVID-19 pandemic, racial and ethnic communities had less access to medical and mental health care than Whites. The lack of correcting the effect of bias on contemporary research on racial disparities in psychiatric treatment is dismaying. Even organized psychiatry did not come forth with an apology for its support of structural racism until January 2021. We are now working on righting our wrongs by taking systematic steps to eliminate racism within our organization.If research in genetics, neuroscience, and microbiomics do not show signs of producing practical advances for all of humanity, supporting programs may tire of funding such endeavors.A renewed focus on the prevention of traumatic life experiences such as living in poverty and witnessing violence would provide a welcome shift in the psychiatric paradigm. Rather than exclusively seeking more biological cures for downstream psychiatric illness that are socially driven, patients and the public may benefit from less prescribing and more listening to the desperate voices that can be heard if one pays attention.Incidentally, this is my last column as your president, and you will be in good hands under the leadership of incoming President Rebecca Brendel, M.D., J.D. While my term may be ending, I will never stop fighting to ensure that all patients—regardless of background and ability to pay—have access to high-quality care and are treated with the dignity and respect they deserve. It is incumbent on all psychiatrists to do the same. ■“Can Neuroscience Be Integrated Into the DSM-V?” ISSUES NewArchived

The Century Yearbook 2021

It may seem odd to review a New York social club's yearbook, with its list of members’ addresses and series of committee reports. But such books sometimes contain material of more general interest. The latest one from the Century Association, for example, devotes 250 of its 685 pages to “Century Memorials”—that is, biographical sketches of recently deceased members, written by other members. Among the well-known figures taken up in these eighty-three sketches are the artists Richard Anuszkiewicz and Robert Motherwell; the architects Henry N. Cobb and Charles A. Platt; the newspaper editors Harold Evans and Whitelaw Reid; the historians Henry F. Graff and William McFeely; the translator and literary scholar Donald Keene; the collector of literary and musical manuscripts Frederick Koch; the popular writer on Russian history Robert K. Massie; the clergyman James Parks Morton; the financier Felix G. Rohatyn; the lawyers Whitney North Seymour Jr. and Isaac N. Phelps Stokes; the literary editor Elisabeth Sifton; the university president Michael Sovern; the museum director Evan H. Turner; and the broadcast journalist Sander Vanocur. The sketches are generally well written and often richly evocative: the writers include Louis Begley, Kenneth T. Jackson, D. T. Max, and Honor Moore.The long shelf of Century volumes like this one clearly constitutes a valuable contribution to prosopographical literature. And the Century is not the only institution with such a tradition (other examples are the British Academy and the American Philosophical Society); but their publications are a frequently overlooked source, one not always available in research libraries. Unfortunately, it is also a source that seems to be diminishing: the American Antiquarian Society and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation are examples of organizations, each with a history of providing biographical information, that are no longer doing so. Of course, the great previous runs of the former's Proceedings and the latter's Reports remain (one hopes) on the shelves for those who know to look for them. A step in the opposite direction has recently been taken by the Grolier Club, which has not had such a tradition (except for two biographical volumes in 1959 and 2000): its Gazette now includes a section of memorials in each issue. This is a welcome move, but one has to regret that so little scholarly use is made of this whole body of biographical detail and reminiscence.

Is Burnout the New Nostalgia?

Is Burnout the New Nostalgia? Kim Adams (bio) Thomas Dodman. What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. 304 pp. Paperback, $38.00. In January of 2020, I sent an email from the reading room of the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts. I had found an entry for "Nostalgia," between "Noli me tangere (see Lupus)" and "Obesity" in an 1834 Dictionary of Practical Medicine. Nostalgia, it appeared, was a dangerous disease in which "feelings, when inordinately exerted or long indulged" disordered the bodily functions "through the medium of the organic nervous system."1 While nostalgia might complicate existing conditions or produce dangerous sequalae like phthisis (tuberculosis) or marasmus (malnutrition), the acute form of the disease—"nostomania"—was deadly in its own right: a "more or less complete collapse of the functions of the brain and the powers of life may take place and the patient die in the course of a few weeks."2 My friend replied, "I'm in public stifling laughter at nostalgia being a fatal illness." Before the term became a ubiquitous signifier for wistful reminiscence, and the deadly force of such sentiments grew laughable, outbreaks of nostalgia decimated entire armies, according to Thomas Dodman. His recent book What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion is a careful, well-documented intervention in the history of medicine. Scholars of the long eighteenth century, particularly those with an interest in European medicine, will find a compelling case study of a forgotten disease. Dodman traces nostalgia's career from pathological affect to benign emotion through a history of the French armed forces, beginning under the absolutist Louis XIV and ending with the imperial Napoleon III. Nostalgia, it turns out, was a disease of national character. [End Page 167] Readers in the broader field of medical humanities will find a backstory for post-traumatic stress disorder and a historical counterpoint to our contemporary discourse of burnout. Dodman frames nostalgia as an earlier era's military mental health crisis: what PTSD was to American soldiers in the Vietnam War, nostalgia was to French soldiers in the Napoleonic era. Yet the etiology of the earlier disease preceded the psychology of trauma. Whereas modern military psychiatrists understood post-traumatic stress disorder to be caused by the shock of battle, eighteenth-century physicians defined nostalgia as a psychosomatic illness produced by the daily regimen of military life, in much the same way that burnout is a symptom of ordinary labor conditions under late capital. Dodman begins with the word itself—invented by a medical student at the University of Basel for his 1688 dissertatio medica—in the intellectual ferment of the European Enlightenment. Nostalgia, from the Greek words nostos for homecoming and algia for pain, was a scientific name for the vernacular Heimweh or maladie du pays: homesickness. It indexed a social and scientific problem. Nostalgia was a disease of mobility, of spatial displacement: "a motion sickness" in which the distance from home interfered with the ordinary circulation of bodily spirits, making them grow sluggish and potentially, perilously, cease (33). Dodman suggests a parallel between this new mechanistic "physiology of spirits" and the seasonal flows of migrant labor in "rural and protoindustrial" Europe (25, 34). The stagnant animal spirits of homesick peasant girls in Basel or Basque conscripts in Louis XIV's standing armies reflected how "increasingly far-flung and long-term migration flows were straining the networks of kinship and solidarity within which much of local and circular mobility had typically occurred up to that point" (34–35). Industrialization, militarization, and colonization changed the circulation of European bodies, which in turn changed the circulation within them. The new disease was less the malaise of wandering philosophers and more the effect of economic and political circumstances that uprooted artisans, peasants, and soldiers. Nostalgia was, from its inception, a soldier's disease. Strongly associated with Swiss militiamen, who succumbed when hired out to serve in royal armies across the continent, it became a major concern of the Service de santé des armées during the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. At a time when the government was engaging every means at...

"Textual Editing and the Future of Scholarly Editions: A Conference on the Bicentennial of James Fenimore Cooper's The Spy" by the American Antiquarian Society

"Textual Editing and the Future of Scholarly Editions: A Conference on the Bicentennial of James Fenimore Cooper's The Spy" by the American Antiquarian Society

Martha Ann Brown’s Books “Unbound”

Reflect, if you will, on two libraries forming at the same time in nineteenth-century Worcester, Massachusetts, separated by only a seven-minute walk. The American Antiquarian Society (AAS), a rese...

News, Events, Publications, and Awards

News, Events, Publications, and Awards

АНГЛІЙСЬКІ АНТИКВАРІЇ В ІСТОРІОГРАФІЧНІЙ ТРАДИЦІЇ

The history of English antiquarianism is particular importance in the study of the process of formation of national identity and the preservation of national heritage. The purpose of the article is to analyze and systematize the corpus of historiographical works on the problems of history and historiography of English antiques, to define the role of the Society of Antiquaries of London in the formation of British identity and patriotism. Scientific tasks of the article are to carry out a comprehensive analysis of the historiographic works on the problems of the origin and formation of the English tradition of antiquity and antiquities, to outline the main stages of the formation of the oldest society of antiques. The novelty and degree of development follows from the fact that today in Ukrainian historical science there are no generalizing works on the history and historiography of English antiquaries and the London Society of Antiquaries. However, there is a corpus of historiographical works on the individual components of this complex problem. The antiquarian classes of the eighteenth century cannot be dismissed as unconvincing dilettantism, detached from modern life, or confronting the spirit of the Enlightenment. Antiquarianism was of great importance, both in practical and cultural life in Britain. It embodied the nostalgia of years past for those who feared the coming changes, but equally it could serve as an illustration of the past, demonstrating the progress of the present and the unquestionable superiority of the modern century over the backwardness of past times. At the same time, antiquaries made a clear contribution to the formation of British identity and famous English patriotism. Their merits in the field of culture and the arts are also difficult to overestimate: they contributed to the development of the printing business, the art of book design, and infected their enthusiasm with artists, painters, engravers who, through them, became passionate fans of the medieval past of Britain.

Toying with Early Cinema: Media Studies in the Children’s Archive

Toying with Early Cinema: Media Studies in the Children’s Archive Meredith A. Bak (bio) Researchers whose work falls under the multidisciplinary umbrella of childhood studies are accustomed to thinking creatively. “The traces of childhood found in archives and special collections,” Karen Sánchez-Eppler notes, “may tend toward the ephemeral.”1 Sánchez-Eppler also acknowledges the difficulty of finding the child’s perspective in the archive, pointing out that “[r]ecords of childhood and records made by children have been housed in archives and library special collections all along, although they have usually been classified in a manner that tends to obscure rather than highlight their presence.”2 Childhood studies has much in common with certain areas of media history. For instance, many scholars of childhood and practitioners of media archaeology contest teleological models of history that conform to a kind of “developmental paradigm,” and researchers in both fields maintain similar orientations to the archive as a repository to be interrogated and reinterpreted for missed perspectives.3 During the research for my book on nineteenth-century optical toys, I became used to venturing into archival spaces that did not register immediate or obvious connections to cinema [End Page 168] and media history.4 I spent a month at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts—an institution that endeavors to collect “everything printed in what was once British North America before the year 1877.”5 Yet their outstanding children’s literature collection includes several intricate movable and novelty toy books, which adapted pre-cinematic visual effects and gestured to experiences of spectacle and spectatorship that cinema would further institutionalize. Optical toys appear in the collections of such institutions as the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum of Childhood in London, and the Cotsen Children’s Library at Princeton University, where they are not typically or primarily regarded as objects of media history but for their relevance to the history of childhood. These objects’ inclusion across such varied collections demonstrates Sánchez-Eppler’s assertion that classificatory systems can conceal some associations just as much as they can illuminate others. Excavating the significance of optical toys as toys required archival encounters that sought these artifacts embedded within the visual and material worlds of childhood rather than within networks of meaning that prioritize the optical effects they produced (which have served as the primary basis for their link to the invention of cinema).6 Resituating these toys in this way opens up opportunities to view their functions as instruments of perceptual pedagogy, not as oppositional to the pleasure they afforded in play but as closely linked. If evidence of film and media’s longer history is distributed in such diverse archival contexts, interwoven with other narratives, to what other unexpected sources might we turn to trace histories that have remained under-considered? Moreover, can familiar texts in cinema history be reread to point us to previously overlooked forms of evidence? A new research project on the history of toys that come “to life” brought me to accounts of the origins of stop-motion animation and to a passage in Albert E. Smith’s 1952 memoir, Two Reels and a Crank. Smith recalls making a film called The Humpty Dumpty Circus in 1897 or 1898—shortly after he and James Stuart Blackton founded Vitagraph studios: “Vitagraph made the first stop-motion picture in America, The Humpty Dumpty Circus. I used my little daughter’s set of toy wooden circus performers and animals, whose movable joints enabled us to place them in balanced positions. It was a tedious process inasmuch as movement could be achieved only by photographing separately each change of position.”7 The film is not extant and may never have been made at all. If the film had been made, Donald Crafton hypothesizes, it was [End Page 169] not until later, between 1902 and 1905.8 Smith’s claim to have made The Humpty Dumpty Circus in 1898 is not widely believed by animation historians (and indeed, it can be disproven). However, his statement also raises an intriguing link between early animation and children’s play culture. This unexplored connection suggests...

Guest Editor's and Editor's Notes

Guest Editor's and Editor's Notes Katherine Grandjean (bio) and Marion Rust I confess I have no idea how to write this note. It is January 2021. Two days ago, I learned of the death of Sarah Schuetze. She was a gifted scholar and teacher, much beloved by many people. But she was much more than that, to me. She was my friend, my guide, my sister. We met as fellows at American Antiquarian Society. I loved her immediately. She was funny and warm and snarky. She took notes by hand, in fat spiral notebooks. We sat across from each other in the reading room for months, interrupting each other, passing notes. "Finding a new friend is so funny," she said to me once. "It's kind of like falling in love." And it was. Her work was about disease, and she could tell you gnarly things about syphilis and typhoid and scurvy. She loved writing. She wrote expansively and fearlessly. She wrote long meditations on things, on texts, confident that she would find the way, and she usually did. She gave excellent advice. She listened endlessly to my research dilemmas, and she generally had very little patience for my insecurities, which helped me, always. This issue was her idea. When she told me she wanted to do this, and that she wanted me to coedit with her, I was reluctant. I knew it would be a lot of work. But Sarah's enthusiasm for things was irresistible. She liked to try new projects. Building things. Planting roses. Layer cakes from scratch. She took things on wholeheartedly, without betraying an ounce of reservation. She once threw herself a raccoon baby shower, to collect necessaries for the baby raccoons she was fostering. There was even a registry. So I said yes. And it was not easy. But this issue is a testament to her and to our friendship. It is surreal to think that she won't see it in print. The past year has been full of disruption and shock. But her death, to me, is the cruelest interruption of all. Words fail. [End Page 1] I am grateful to Sarah Schuetze, Katherine Grandjean, Linda Coombs, and the many anonymous readers who made this special issue possible. And with this first issue of the calendar year, thanks are due to several EAL editorial board members who conclude their five-year terms with volume 55: Matt Cohen (University of Nebraska–Lincoln), Paul Downes (University of Toronto), Gene Andrew Jarrett (New York University), Meredith Neuman (Clark University), and Christopher Phillips (Lafayette College). As a field, we owe you a debt of gratitude for your acumen and your generosity of spirit. I would also like to welcome our new board members: Wendy Bellion (University of Delaware), Lisa Brooks (Amherst College), Sarah Chinn (Hunter College, CUNY), Andrew Newman (Stony Brook University), and Derrick Spires (Cornell University). Thank you in advance for the unique contributions each of you are prepared to make. I look forward to working with you. [End Page 2] Katherine Grandjean katherine grandjean is an associate professor of history at Wellesley College. She is the author of American Passage: The Communications Frontier in Early New England (Harvard UP, 2015). Her essays have appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly, American Quarterly, and Early American Studies, and her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Antiquarian Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the American Philosophical Society, and others. She is currently working on a new book about the violent legacies of the American Revolution. Copyright © 2021 The University of North Carolina Press

Rescued from Oblivion: Historical Cultures in the Early United States by Alea Henle

Rescued from Oblivion: Historical Cultures in the Early United States by Alea Henle Christine DeLucia (bio) Keywords Historical societies, Historical culture, Heritage, Artifacts Rescued from Oblivion: Historical Cultures in the Early United States. By Alea Henle. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2020. Pp. 264. Cloth, $90.00; paper, $28.95.) Alea Henle surveys the tumultuous landscape of historical enterprises in the early U.S. republic in this carefully constructed study of “historical cultures.” Opening with the founding of the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1791 and the Boston-based organization’s goals for preserving original materials and supporting inquiry into historical topics, Rescued from Oblivion traces out the larger contexts and consequences of institution-building. In its six chapters the book adopts a comparative approach, examining scores of historical societies to discern larger patterns [End Page 488] in their origins, motivations, trajectories, and social effects. This is a welcome vantage that adds profitably to extant literature more focused on single-institution, municipal, or regional historical pursuits (for example, accounts of the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, or the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia). The comparative lens also foregrounds the many networks of historically engaged individuals and groups who consulted with one another, competed for acquisitions of notable materials, and attempted to differentiate their goals and remits. Henle’s work emphasizes the tenuous quality of these early historical enterprises, which took shape from Maine to Georgia to California. Nearly all of them confronted serious challenges while attempting to build and sustain their memberships. They struggled to obtain donations—both documentary and artifactual—to their nascent collections and labored to secure sufficient funding to purchase or rent appropriate meeting and storage spaces. When members did amass collections, fires, floods, mold, vermin, and neglect frequently compromised the holdings’ integrity. Many societies found it challenging to maintain their momentum beyond their founders’ initial enthusiasm. While the institutions that have endured into the twenty-first century may be best known today, Rescued from Oblivion points out the importance of recovering and critically scrutinizing those that failed or dwindled into obsolescence. (Appendix One neatly lays out a chronology of societies’ establishments.) These lesser-known histories underscore the relative weight or lack thereof accorded by local communities to formally institutionalized historical endeavors. Henle’s methodology draws on the ample though uneven documentary records that many of these institutions created about their own origins and evolution. It productively illuminates the complex crossovers between “private” and “public” domains, and how entrepreneurial historical society leaders sometimes scooped up colonial and state records, particularly in the relative absence of formal governmental structures for preserving and rendering accessible key archives. It also situates the collecting of physical objects—especially objects associated with locally and nationally prominent individuals—as a counterpart to early archival development that eventually spurred the divergence of natural and historical museums from historical societies. Rescued from Oblivion recognizes at the outset that most of these institutions were envisioned and operated by elite Protestant, Anglo American [End Page 489] men. It critically assesses how members’ identities and political commitments strongly shaped the types of histories that they valued and preserved—or de-legitimized and ignored. The societies’ work closely aligned with emerging commitments in the early republic such as local pride, civic duty, and nationalism, as well as anxieties about the salience of American histories as compared to European ones. The book does not simply critique these exclusionary ideologies and practices. It also productively examines how individuals and groups not represented in these spaces pushed back against their marginalization and advocated for other forms of knowledge-production and preservation. Chapter 6, “‘An Oblivious Society’: Inclusion, Exclusion, and Omission in Historical Collections,” takes up societies’ relative silences about histories of slavery and emancipation and about settler colonialism’s impacts on Native American people and tribal nations. Engaging recent scholarship such as Jean M. O’Brien’s Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis, 2010), the chapter critiques historical societies’ efforts to relegate Native people to a distant past (typically under a heading of “antiquities”) rather than recognizing their ongoing presence and sovereignty. While the book takes historical societies as its interpretive center, it certainly appreciates that...

Mapping Henry: Dendrochronological Analysis of a Sixteenth-Century Panel Painting Based Upon Synchrotron-Sourced X-ray Fluorescence Mapping

ABSTRACT The study of materials that comprise artworks significantly contributes to understanding of age and provenance. While dendrochronology is a particularly valuable and well-established technique for panel paintings comprising oak timber, conventional practices of resurfacing end-grains to reveal tree rings is becoming less acceptable because it removes material, modifying the painting. Recently, application of non-destructive X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectroscopy to a portrait of Henry VIII held by the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), Sydney, Australia revealed tree-ring boundaries in the resulting high-resolution elastic scatter XRF map. In this study, we examine the dendrochronological potential of that mapping with the aim of contributing to resolving the relationship of the AGNSW portrait to similar paintings elsewhere. Examination of the timber revealed affinities with Quercus petraea (Matt.). We measured tree-ring widths along multiple paths in the XRF scatter map and crossdated the resulting 81-year XRF ring-width (XRF portrait ) series against master chronologies of English, western European, and Baltic origin. Rather than an arbitrarily defined threshold, we used a Bonferroni correction to determine a minimum significance level for crossdating. While the XRF portrait series did not crossdate with the continental European chronologies, we identified a single significant (α = 3.4 × 10−6) dating position with the English chronology (1400–1480 CE). Cross-matching with site-level chronologies revealed a cluster of high t-values in central-southern England. The earliest date of felling precedes the documented date of completion for the AGNSW and two similar Tudor portraits of Henry VIII held by the National Portrait Gallery (NPG), London and one at the Society of Antiquaries, London. While the apparent British provenance of timber used in the AGNSW portrait contrasts to Baltic origin of timbers used for the two NPG portraits and the majority of English panel paintings, it is consistent with the provenance of the timber used for the Society of Antiquaries portrait.