Basic Facts
Teaching Position:
Assistant Professor, San Diego State University 2007-present
Area of Research:
19th Century United States History of race and religion
Education:
Ph.D., History, University of Kentucky, 2003
Major Publications:
Blum is the author of Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865-1898
(2005), W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet (2007),
and co-editor of Vale of Tears: New Essays on Religion and Reconstruction.
Blum was awarded the C. Vann Woodward Dissertation Prize from the Southern Historical Association for his
dissertation:"Gilded Crosses: Race, Religion, and the Reforging of American Nationalism, 1865-1898."
For Reforging the White Republic, Blum was awarded 2006 Peter Seaborg Award for Civil War Scholarship, given by the
George Tyler Moore Center for the Study of the Civil War, Shepherd University, and 2005 Gustavus Myers Book Award,
given by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights (Honorable Mention),
and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize
(nonfiction and biography), The Bancroft Prize (Columbia University), The Avery O. Craven Award
(Organization of American Historians),
The Frederick Jackson Turner Award (Organization of American Historians),
The Merle Curti Award (Organization of American Historians),
Frederick Douglass Book Prize (Gilder Lehrman Center),
Charles S. Sydnor Award (Southern Historical Association),
Albert J. Beveridge Award (American Historical Association),
Best First Book in the History of Religions (American Academy of Religion), among others.
Currently, Blum is co-editing (with Paul Harvey) the Columbia Guide to American Religious History and writing a
book on race and depictions of Jesus Christ in American culture, society, and politics, titled Jesus in Red,
White, and Black.
Awards:
Blum is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including among others:
National Endowment for the Humanities,"African American Civil Rights Struggles in the Twentieth Century,"
Summer Institute, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University (1 of 20 nationally), 2006;
2006 Peter Seaborg Award for Civil War Scholarship, given by the George Tyler Moore Center for the Study of
the Civil War, Shepherd University;
Grant, Students Partnering with Faculty Summer Research Program, Kean University,"'They Lynched Christ':
Race and Religion in the Early Black Freedom Struggle," 2006;
Gustavus Myers Book Award, given by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights
(Honorable Mention), 2005;
C. Vann Woodward Dissertation Prize, Southern Historical Association, 2004;
Fellow, W. E. B. Du Bois Center for the Advanced Study of Race and Religion, Notre Dame University;
Best Paper Prize for United States History, Southwestern Historical Association, 2004;
Nominee for"The Arnaldo Momigliano Best Article in History Prize," sponsored by The Historical Society;
University of Kentucky Association of Emeriti Faculty Endowed Fellowship, 2003;
Provost's Award for Teaching, University of Kentucky, 2002;
Pew Younger Scholars Fellowship (1 of 30 nationally), 2002;
Commonwealth Research Grant, University of Kentucky, 2002 and 2003;
Presidential Fellowship, University of Kentucky, 2001-2002 and 2002-2003;
George C. Herring Writing Award, presented by the Kentucky Association of Teachers of History (KATH), 2002.
Additional Info:
Blum has been a fellow with the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University and with the
National Endowment for the Humanities.
Blum formerly was and Assistant Professor at Kean University 2006-2007.
In the classroom, Blum is interested in helping students engage
the past in a variety of ways, whether through music and images or role-playing and historical simulations.
His courses include Jacksonian America, the Civil War and Reconstruction, religion in the United States, and
African American history.
Personal Anecdote
Email was one of my best friends throughout graduate school. With it, I could laugh with old high school friends, try to broker fantasy football trades, and network with new colleagues. But in the weeks following graduation, after I had defended my dissertation and was pining for a book contract, email almost sunk my ship. Most of us, I would imagine, have drafted quick email notes that make us thankful for the cancel button. You know what I mean, the angry rant at a newspaper article, the frustrated response to a department chair or a book reviewer, the dismissive response to a whinny student. Ninety-nine times out of one hundred, we cancel those messages and the next day breathe a sigh of relief. My email blunder was distinct, but probably not all that uncommon: it was a case of mistaken identity. Or rather, of email haste making a mess. Some email programs have"quick-fills," where you start to type in a name or address and the computer finishes it for you (like when you type"Jo" and the computer adds"John" and his email). For me, it was a case of two Michaels.
Michael #1 was an editor of a series that I was interested in for my dissertation. Michael #2 was a senior colleague who had guided me through many of graduate school's ups and downs and who himself had successfully negotiated some great book deals. By now, you can see where this is going. I wrote a long email to Michael #2, asking him for advice about how to negotiate a contract. I was torn between the series edited by Michael #1 and another press that had expressed interest. So I laid it all out for Michael #2. I signed my name (as always"Best, Ed"), and away went the email. That night, I realized, the email for #2 had been sent to #1. Now, I was frantic over what to do: should I contact #1 to explain the situation? Sure, I had been honest with the editors that I was shopping the manuscript, but this looked bad. I just emailed an editor that I wanted to maneuver either his press or the other into a bidding contest. This was bad negotiating, on the one hand, and bad form on the other. If this was Texas Hold 'Em, I had broken one of the cardinal rules: I had shown my cards with vigor. If this were a basketball game, I had just asked my opponent the best way to beat him. I tossed and turned all night with how to respond. I considered another email to Michael #1 with the subject heading:"DO NOT READ PREVIOUS EMAIL." But that wouldn't work. He would probably open it after he read the first message and I would look even worse. I decided, in the end, to explain that I had sent this note to the wrong email address, but that I was still very much interested in publishing my book with him. My guess is that if Michael #2 had received the message, his first piece of advice would have been to keep my plans close to myself. So much for that. Michael #1 understood completely (or at least had the wisdom to cancel any chastising email he had composed in response); and, for his good humor, I decided his was the press for me. So I shot him a quick email.
Quotes
By Edward J. Blum
existence. It is there in the prayers he wrote for his students, in his attacks on
church segregation, in his jeremiads against war and unbridled capitalism, and
in his literary creations of black Christs and dark princesses. It is there in his
friendships with white ministers, in his lectures in churches and synagogues,
and in his conception of Communism. Du Bois never hid his assessments and
feelings on religion behind codes or riddles or anagrams. They were too vital
then. And they are too vital now. Du Bois was, in his self characterizations and
in the hearts of thousands, a prophet with sacred insight. He could see past the
myths of the present age and reveal worlds beyond what lies on the surface.Du Bois was an American prophet; he was a moral historian, a visionary sociologist, a literary theologian, and a mythological hero with a black face. In a world marked by white supremacy, capitalistic exploitation, grotesque materialism, and wicked militancy, Du Bois became a rogue saint and a dark monk to preach the good news of racial brotherhood, economic cooperation, and peace on earth." -- Edward J. Blum in"W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet"
About Edward J. Blum
"I normally have no interest in history, but Professor Blum brought out all the juicy details and made this class extremely interesting. On top of the fact that he was super nice and engaging in his teaching methods. This semester has been one of the best that I've had. I really enjoyed having Professor Blum as a teacher and I hope to have him again."...
"Professor Blum's drive for teaching history is comparable to the religious fervor of the Prophet Matthias. Rather than teaching about a broad historical concept alone, he used the reading material and lectures to bring us closer to the lives of individuals of the time periods."...
"The arrival of Dr. Blum to San Diego State University's history department marked one of the luckiest days in my life. Dr. Blum's work ethic, his constant availability, and his concern for others have left an immediate impact on our graduate community."...
"Professor Blum's Civil War and Reconstruction class is easily one of the best I've taken yet. I knew the time period itself would be interesting, but Prof. Blum's knowledge and ability to teach the materials went way beyond my expectations. He has a gift of being able to connect a single event in history with everything else going on at that time, as well as put it in the larger context of history. Too many times in history classes, students learn about events as if they were completely separated and had no relationship with one another, which can be detrimental to a student's understanding of how history works. But Prof. Blum took extra time in class to explain the other things going on in the late 19th century and how they both contributed to, and were affected by, the Civil War and Reconstruction. He was also able to connect the events of this class to issues that plague today's society, and even show parallels between other points in history. Plus, he's just a great teacher that takes time to get to know the class and will always make time to meet and communicate with students" -- Anonymous Students
Basic Facts
Teaching Position:
Assistant Professor, Department of History and Associate Director, Centre for American Studies,
University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario.
Area of Research:
Post-Civil War United States, with a special interest in the histories of American technology
and business in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Education:
PhD in History, Harvard University, June 2004.
Major Publications:
MacDougall is currently working on the book manuscript The People's Telephone: Networks, Corporations, and
Two Nations, 1876-1926, based on his PhD dissertation. His book manuscript is a comparative history of the
telephone industry in the United States and Canada from the 1870s through the 1920s, and the way the dueling
networks of that era's information revolution embodied competing arguments about the ideal organization of the
economy and society.
He is also the author of numerous scholarly articles including:"The Wire Devils: Pulp Thrillers, The Telephone, and Action at
a Distance in the Wiring of a Nation," American Quarterly 57:3 (September 2006);"Long Lines: AT&T's
Long-Distance Network as an Organizational and Political Strategy," Business History Review 80:2 (Summer 2006);"The
All-Red Dream: Technological Nationalism and the Trans-Canada Telephone System," chapter in Unfinished Business:
The Making and Unmaking of Canadian Nationalism in the Twentieth Century, Adam Chapnick and Norman Hillmer, eds.,
Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007;"The People's Telephone: The Politics of Telephony in the
United States and Canada," Enterprise and Society 6:4 (December 2005), among others.
He is also interested in the phenomena of"pseudoscience" and"antiscience" in America,
and the changing place of technological expertise in a democratic nation, and has written the journal article"Strange Enthusiasms: A History of American Pseudoscience," 21stC 3:4 (Winter 1999) on the topic.
Awards:
MacDougall is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including among others:
Krooss Dissertation Prize Nominee (Business History Conference) 2005;
Cliopatria Award for Best Weblog Post (Historical News Network) 2005;
Cabot Fellowship for Innovation in Teaching (Harvard University) (Declined) 2004-2005;
John E. Rovensky Fellowship in Business and Economic History (University of Illinois) 2003-2004;
David Packard Fellowship (Harvard University) 2002-2003;
H.B. Earhart Fellowship (H.B. Earhart Foundation, Ann Arbor, Michigan) 2001-2002;
Indiana Historical Society Doctoral Fellowship 2001-2002;
Charles Warren Center Research Grants (Harvard University) 2000-2001;
Center for Middletown Studies Research Grant (Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana) 1999-2000;
Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship 1998-2000;
Commendations for Excellence in Teaching (Harvard University) 1997-2003;
Henry Adams Fellowship (Harvard University) 1995-1997;
Queen's Medal for Highest Grades in History (Queen’s University) 1995.
Additional Info:
MacDougall was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Visiting Scholars Program at American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
Cambridge, Massachusetts 2004-2005.
MacDougall writes for the blogs"Cliopatria," and
"Old is the New New"
Personal Anecdote
I'm afraid I haven't won a Pulitzer, met Henry Kissinger, or been asked to write for The West Wing. One thing I have done, for whatever it's worth, is visit almost every drive-through tree, roadside mystery spot, and death car museum in the United States. In the summer after college, I and two friends drove across the continent and back, covering 10,000 miles and visiting 25 states in search of strange museums, forgotten tourist traps, and other bits of offbeat Americana.
"It must be nice to have a job that lets you drive around the country for a month," said the border guard when we crossed over from Canada."What do you boys do for a living?""I'm a musician," said my buddy Derek."I plant trees," said Pete. I had the best answer:"I'm a historian."
It was a historical research trip, of sorts. I hadn't heard the phrase then, but we three Canadians were looking for what author Greil Marcus dubbed"the old, weird America," that unruly country of cranks and confidence men, mystics and medicine shows that lies under the surface of America's more familiar past. In the decade since, I've filled in many of the gaps—48 states down, Alaska and Mississippi to go—and I find that without making a conscious choice to do so, I have continued exploring the old, weird America in my work. I am drawn to the back roads of American history, to its oddities and strange enthusiasms, to the pasts Americans do not immediately recognize as their own.
"The taste for strangeness does not suit the favorite flavors of history in the United States," writes Robert Darnton. We tend to like more familiar history, well-worn tales in which we see flattering outlines of our present selves."The familiar past," writes Sam Wineburg,"entices us with the promise that we can locate our own place in the stream of time and solidify our identity in the present." Weird history, on the other hand, requires confronting our own subjectivity: was the past strange in itself or is it simply strange to us?
My affection for the old, weird America is probably most obvious in my history blogging and in my nascent research on American cranks and pseudoscientists, but my work on the history of technology and business is also about recognizing the unfamiliarity of the past. Telephones and corporations, the chief subjects of my current book, are not strange to us now. I am interested in the historical moment when they were.
The technological systems that structure our lives were not pre-ordained by the logic of technology or the market. They are the product at every step of human choice. Without recognizing that telephones and corporations have human histories—and that they once seemed quite strange, in ways both exciting and alarming to ordinary Americans—we cannot see the ways in which these systems could have been different or think about how we might make them different now.
The weird past need not be an unusable past, and its study can be more than a new kind of geeky antiquarianism. Strange history helps us to see the ways the present is strange: the things we take for granted, the choices others have made for us, the injustices we don't protest. The old, weird America is an alternate history, not one that takes off from a historical turning point into an imaginary future, but one that snakes back from our present into a hidden past that also was. It offers an inoculation against the shrunken horizons of the present. It reminds us that America is older, bigger, and stranger than we know.
Quotes
By Robert MacDougall
Spiritualism--communication with the dead through a psychic medium--also captured the imagination of the educated and the unwashed alike. William Lloyd Garrison, Horace Greeley, and James Fenimore Cooper were among thousands of antebellum Americans who frequented seances to witness table rapping and oozing ectoplasm.1 Mesmerism, electric medicine, creationism, and the water cure all joined them in the stew of popular beliefs.
Why was nineteenth-century America so welcoming to these beliefs? A combination of historical circumstances provided both motivation and opportunity for pseudoscience to flourish."In the eighteenth century, people were convinced that if you examined the book of nature it would lead you to God," says Philip Kitcher, professor of philosophy at Columbia, and author of Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982). Most believed science and the scriptures to be harmonious. The scientific developments that destroyed that harmony--the explosion of geological time, Darwin's Origin of Species--came as a terrible blow. The universe"no longer looked at all Providential," Kitcher says."By the middle of the nineteenth century, you could only hold onto the literal truth of Genesis if you were prepared to engage in pseudoscientific maneuvering." -- Robert MacDougall in"Strange Enthusiasms: A History of American Pseudoscience," 21stC 3:4 (Winter 1999)
But if I had to make a choice, I'd plant my flag a hundred and fifty miles south of Jamestown, on the real first English settlement in the New World: the lost colony of Roanoke. (Let's not talk about Frobisher's ill-advised attempt on Baffin Island in 1578.) In 1584, more than twenty years before Jamestown, Sir Walter Raleigh planted a hundred or so men on Roanoke Island, off the North Carolina coast. Raleigh's men toughed it out for a year before all but fifteen of them caught a ride back to England with Sir Francis Drake. A return expedition in 1587 brought more colonists, this time with women and children, led by the artist John White. (Soon after arrival, White's daughter delivered the first English child born in the Americas.) White himself returned to England for still more settlers and supplies, but a certain Spanish Armada interfered with his return trip, and when English ships finally returned to Roanoke in 1590, the colony's ninety men, seventeen women, and eleven children had vanished without a trace. Or almost without a trace: the word"CROATOAN" was famously carved into the bark of a tree near the lost colony's gate.
Like many I expect, I first learned of Roanoke as a kind of ghost story. I don't know which lurid kiddie book I read it in, but I do remember having the distinct impression that"Croatoan" was the name of some slavering forest monstrosity, and not, as it turned out, a nearby Cherokee tribe. The fate of the lost colony remains unknown, but the best guesses say they either got killed by the Powhatans, set out on foot for the Chesapeake
and died en route, or went native, interbreeding with the Indians. Whatever became of them, there's a nice
lesson there for American history about hubris, failure, and the great unlikeliness of the American experiment.In Edmund Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom, Roanoke is not a creepy campfire tale but a tragic road not taken. While Raleigh's ships were settling Roanoke, his friend Drake was buckling swash up and down the Spanish Mainósimple piracy, Morgan admits,"but on the scale that transforms crime into politics." Morgan makes much of Drake's alliance with the Cimarrons, black and Indian slaves escaped from the Spanish. Drake was not above slaving himself, but he made common cause with the"Maroons" and threatened New Spain with a general uprising of its Indian and African labor. As Drake sacked Santo Domingo, Cartagena, and San Augustin, he liberated, or collected, some three hundred Indians and two hundred"Negroes, Turks, and Moors," whom he planned to deposit at Roanoke to enjoy English-style liberty and serve as a rallying point for New Spain's oppressed natives and slaves."Perhaps it could never have come to pass," Morgan writes,"and perhaps no one really intended that it should." Nevertheless, for him, Roanoke represented"a dream in which slavery and freedom were not yet married, a dream in which Protestant Britons liberated the oppressed people of the New World."
Less reputable historians have pushed the Roanoke story further. For my man Kenneth Hite (writing in jest) and Peter Lamborn Wilson (writing in earnest), Roanoke was a magickal working by the occult imperialists of the School of Nght, an alleged circle of Elizabethan atheists and adepts said to include Raleigh, poet Christopher Marlowe, magus John Dee, andóhow great is thisóone Lord Fernando Strange. Shakespeare's The Tempest, Wilson says, was propaganda for their imperial aims. The lost colony, Hite proposes, represented an"alchemical marriage" between the"Red King" Powhatan and the"White Queen" Elizabeth to establish a Golden Empire."The Old World can keep its maternally-inclined wolves and its giant-killing Trojan refugees," Hite writes."Occult conspirators built the United States on a foundation of High Weirdness indeed."
Of course, sometimes the magic works, sometimes it doesn't. What matters most for Wilson (aka the neopagan Sufi anarchist Hakim Bey) is that Raleigh's plans didn't succeed."The very first colony in the New World chose to renounce its contract with Prospero (Dee/Raleigh/Empire) and go over to the Wild Men with Caliban," he writes. This makes Roanoke the first of Wilson / Bey's anarchist ideal of"temporary autonomous zones":
They dropped out. They became"Indians,""went native," opted for chaos over the appalling miseries of serfing for the plutocrats and intellectuals of London. As America came into being Ö Croatan remained embedded in its collective psyche. Out beyond the frontier, the state of Nature (i.e. no State) still prevailedóand within the consciousness of the settlers the option of wildness always lurked, the temptation to give up on Church, farmwork, literacy, taxesóall the burdens of civilizationóand"go to Croatan" in some way or another.
Ron Sakolsky's Gone to Croatan: Origins of American Dropout Culture similarly celebrates Roanoke as the taproot of an American dropout counterculture including pirate utopias, glister societies, Great Dismal Maroons, rogue Quakers, Antinomians, Levellers, Diggers,"tri-racial isolates," black Islamic movements, and hippie communes.
It's all more than a bit dodgy, historically speaking, and certainly nothing I'd stake my tenure decision on. But then I wouldn't stake my hopes of tenure on the legend of the first Thanksgiving either, or the tender tale of John Smith and Pocahantas. We're talking about founding myths here, usable pasts. And the lost colony is a myth to conjure with, pun intended. It's a scare story to help cure historical hubris. It's Morgan's dream of American freedom without American slavery. It's the original old, weird America: a founding myth of sufficient strangeness to suggest that America once was and ought to be more than just a corporation or a pious city on a hill. -- Robert MacDougall in"Cliopatria Symposium ... Jamestown 2007"
About Robert MacDougall
"Robert MacDougall is a dedicated teacher. He goes out of his way to be available to his students ... and to instruct and encourage in any way he can. Bravo!"...
"One of the best teachers I've had. He's knowledgable, nice, helpful, approachable. His comments are insightful and his explanations clear."
"Overall Great Prof! If you have a chance to take a course with him do it. He's young... but he is extremely helpful and gives great feedback on essays!"...
"Awesome prof. So knowledgeable!"...
"Rob is a great guy. This class was awesome and really interesting to take. If you can take one of his classes I would definitely recommend it!"...
"Professor MacDougall did an excellent job leading the class on a thorough, interesting and exciting exploration of America from the Puritans to the present. He left no stone unturned it seemed."...
"Professor MacDougall has done an excellent job this year. ... One of his greatest strengths lies within his talented ability to respond to student writing. In this sphere, Prof. MacDougall has been vastly superior to any other professor here." -- Anonymous Students
Basic Facts
Teaching Position:
Associate Professor, Department of History, Brown University
Area of Research:
Modern British History, Comparative British and German History
Education:
University of California, Berkeley, Ph.D., 1996
Major Publications:
Cohen is the author of Household Gods: The British and their Possessions, 1830-1945,
(Yale University Press, 2006), which was short-listed for PEN's Hessell-Tiltman prize, and
The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914-1939
(University of California Press, 2001, which was awarded the Allan Sharlin Memorial Award
by the Social Science History Association.
She is the co-editor, with Maura O'Connor of Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-
National Perspective (Routledge, 2004). This book surveys
comparative and cross-national approaches to the study of Europe. The
volume reflects upon the gains - as well as the obstacles and costs - of such research.
Awards:
Cohen is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including among others:
Howard Fellowship in Social Sciences, 2005;
Salomon Research Award, Brown University, 2003;
Allan Sharlin prize, Social Science History Association, 2002;
Summer Fellowship, National Endowment for the Humanities, 2001;
National Humanities Center Fellowship, 2001;
Senate Research Award, American University, 2000;
Conference Grant, German Historical Institute, 1999;
Mellon Research Award, American University, 1998-1999;
Senate Research Award, American University, 1997-1998;
German American Research Network Grant, 1997-1998;
Conant Post-Doctoral Fellowship, Harvard University, 1996-1997;
Mellon Fellowship, 1991-1995;
German Academic Exchange Service Fellowship, 1994-1995;
Council for European Studies (Columbia) Fellowship, 1993;
Berkeley Fellowship for Graduate Study, 1991-1994.
Additional Info:
Formerly Assistant Professor, Department of History, American University (1997-2002).
Personal Anecdote
I don't have stacks of crumbling newspapers in my dining room, though my favorite uncle does. In a way, I envy him; he also has shelves of the Louisville telephone directory dating back to 1912; cupboards full of ephemera from the Southern Exposition of 1883; shoebox upon shoebox of cartes-de-visite, ambrotypes, and albumen prints; and life-size cardboard cut-outs of Elvira, Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis. (That is of course a small, if representative, sample of the objects in his dining room.) I'm quite certain that were I not a historian by trade, I, too, might by now be well on my way to amassing piles of things. But all of the rigors of disciplining knowledge and inquiring after significance have practically snuffed out my collecting ambitions. I still spend hours at flea markets and yard sales. Whenever I think of starting a little collection - of glass eyeballs, turn-of-the-century desk sets, chased silver umbrella handles - I ask myself the"so-what" question, and put the eyeball down.
At the same time, I've never been able to summon up the disdain we historians are supposed to feel for antiquarians. Perhaps it is because I know from my uncle's example how much learning is involved when someone sets out to master the seemingly arcane details of postal history. Perhaps it is that I sometimes wish that a little mustiness, whether from the attic or the basement, would seep into our more arid scholarly exchanges. Perhaps it is, too, that there seems at times an uncanny connection between the habits of collectors and the methods of the most inspired historical scholarship. The wild and brilliant juxtapositions of apparently unrelated entities, cartes-de-visite to Elvira - how different is that really from seeing a relationship between leviathans and air pumps? The omnivorous taste for the material world's full bounty - isn't that the promise of Braudel's total history? A seemingly inexhaustible appetite for knowledge, married with unrepentant boundary-breaching: we historians could do with more of both.
My uncle is now seventy-five, blinded in one eye by an angiogram gone awry, and most importantly, possessed of a new girlfriend who has exiled Elvira, Marilyn and Elvis to the basement, and threatened to do the same to the boxes of cigar labels and World War II postcards that prevent the dining room table from serving its intended function. He has begun to de-accession. His two children naturally want nothing to do with his treasures; my cousin, the owner of an emphatically minimalist New York apartment, refers to his father's activities as"spelunking." And so the boxes have begun to arrive here in Providence. This is an old house with no storage space. Nothing can be hidden away. Everything must be confronted. Having long avoided collections of my own, I have now inherited bits of a lifetime of hunting and gathering. Last week I spent an evening riffling through the pages of a high school valedictorian's keepsake book, circa 1912; a late nineteenth-century German immigrant's outgoing copy letter-book; a rubber-band bound set of albumen prints of babies. Putting out of mind the doubts that have always frustrated my own nascent collections - what in God's name am I going to do with all of this stuff - I am trying, for the time being, to relish a life amidst history.
Quotes
By Deborah A. Cohen
How to be good and well-to-do: this was the question that confronted
the British middle classes from the
mid-nineteenth century onwards. At the dawn of the age of mass consumerism, worldly pleasures had first
to be cleared of the charge of self-indulgence. The idea that possessions could be evaluated along a moral
yardstick - a notion endorsed by design reform and underwritten by incarnationalist theology-found wide
reception among Victorians, both agnostic and religious. By redefining consumption as a moral act, and
the home as a foretaste of the heaven to come, the British middle classes sought to square material
abundance with spiritual good.
-- Deborah A. Cohen in"Household Gods The British and their Possessions"About Deborah A. Cohen
