Social History Commons^™

Why It's Interpretive: Bid 'Em In, John M. Rudy

Interpreting the Civil War: Connecting the Civil War to the American Public

Browsing the provocative blog "Jubilo! The Emancipation Century" recently, I came upon a post featuring a curious YouTube video.

So why did Bid 'Em In speak so deeply to me? I think it's because it places you in the shoes of the 15 year old slave woman being auctioned. It's not an intellectual investigation of slavery. It's not an historical narrative written after the fact of a particular event. It's visceral. [excerpt]

Lee Chapel: Lost Cause Artifact And Culture Shock, John M. Rudy

Interpreting the Civil War: Connecting the Civil War to the American Public

I had the privilege to accompany a group of undergraduate students recently on a whirlwind tour of the Wilderness, Richmond and Appomattox. Our tour took us along the I-81 corridor on the way back to Gettysburg, so why not stop in Lexington for a Civil War two-fer. [excerpt]

"And You May Ask Yourself: Am I Right? Am I Wrong?", John M. Rudy

Interpreting the Civil War: Connecting the Civil War to the American Public

This blogging endeavour is dangerous. Blogging, I believe, should be a personal medium, where you wear your heart on your sleeve and let the real "you" hang out. That's scary. [excerpt]

The Quiet War: Nazi Agents In America, Robert Kellert

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

In the summer of 1942, the East Coast bore witness to an aberration when a German submarine appeared in the waters off Long Island, seemingly countless miles from the bitter fighting and utter carnage engulfing Europe.1 Only four days later, another submarine unexpectedly surfaced, this time near Ponte Vedra Beach off the coast of Florida.2 The United States, historically protected from its enemies abroad by the vast stretches of the mighty Atlantic, now found itself exposed to the Unterseeboote that had once provoked the superpower into world war.3 The submarines harbored agents of the notorious German spy organization known as …

'A Blood-Stained Corpse In The Butler's Pantry’: The Queensland Bush Book Club, Robin Wagner

All Musselman Library Staff Works

Lending libraries were not the norm in 1934 when the Carnegie Corporation of New York sent American librarian, Ralph Munn, to conduct a study of the condition of Australian libraries. In his initial survey Munn learned of the Queensland Bush Book Club, an organization of well-to-do, philanthropic women from Brisbane who had established a book lending service for settlers in the Outback. They hoped to ease the drudgery and lighten the burden faced by isolated women and their families in the rural areas. The antidote was a regular parcel of “proper” reading matter which included books, newspapers and magazines. They …

Colonel Utley's Emancipation - Or, How Lincoln Offered To Buy A Slave, Jerrica A. Giles, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

The reputation of Abraham Lincoln has see-sawed over the last half-century on the fulcrum of race, and the results have not been happy for that reputation. As Gerald Prokopowicz has written, "the big question" about Lincoln and slavery runs today like this: "Was Lincoln really the Great Emancipator that we have traditionally been brought up to admire, or was he just a clever, lying, racist, white male politician who had no interest in the well-being of black America other than when it served his political interests?" No longer is it necessary, as one historian has wryly remarked, for politicians to …

Triangulating A Modernization Experiment: The United States, France And The Making Of The Kossou Project In Central Ivory Coast, Abou B. Bamba

History Faculty Publications

Toward the end of the 1960s, authorities in the Ivory Coast decided to build the Kossou Dam, a hydro-electric dam on the Bandama River near the geographic center of the Francophone country. Initially conceived as a technopolitical measure to meet the growing energy demand of the most economically successful country of France's former colonies, the damming experiment soon emerged as a multipurpose regional development project aimed at correcting the regional disparities that tarnished the Ivory Coast's phenomenal economic growth.

This article focuses on the Kossou modernization experience and the sociopolitical transformations that it caused. I argue that the nationalist enthusiasm …

"The Last Full Measure Of Devotion": The Battle Of Gettysburg And The New Museum In Schmucker Hall, Bradley R. Hoch, Gerald Christianson

Adams County History

Schmucker Hall offers an unprecedented opportunity to interpret the role of religion in the Civil War and the American expenment in democracy. In particular it can give palpable expression to major themes in Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address concerning the battle itself, the conflict as a time of testing, the sacrifices of those who fought here, and the hope these sacrifices bring to the young nation for a new birth of freedom.

Built in 1832 and named for an abolitionist and founder of Gettysburg Seminary, Samuel Simon Schmucker, it is the original structure on the oldest continuously-operating Lutheran seminary in the …

March Into Oblivion: A Footnote, Larry C. Bolin

Adams County History

In the above-titled work in 2006, this writer briefly discussed the possibility that President George Washington traversed present Adams County in October 1794, during his return from Bedford to Philadelphia, a belief long and widely held locally. No credible assertion of the President's presence here in 1794 was possible at that time. Recently however, a forgotten narrative was "rediscovered"; its author, Jacob Eyster, gives some substance to the previous mere speculation. After extensive research, this writer was graciously requested to produce a sequel to his prior speculative writing. [excerpt]

Mapping Gettysburg: Baltimore Street In 1910, Danielle C. Hiss, Megan L. Gray

Adams County History

In 1910, the town of Gettysburg was a thriving, bustling place. The Civil War was long over, and the town had begun to profit from tourists who wished to see the site of the famous battle. Business boomed. Merchants moved in and out of buildings and young families set up housekeeping in their own homes, raising their children and getting off to a running start in their chosen professions. There were cars in the streets next to the old horse-drawn buggies and electricity had begun to replace the gas lamps and candles of the Victorian era. For all that the …

“There Was Nothing In Sight But Nature, Nothing...”: Nineteenth-Century Gendered Perceptions Of The Overland Trail, Andrea J. Savadelis

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

One hundred and seventeen years ago, between 1841 and 1867, the Overland Trail saw approximately 350,000 Oregon and California bound North Americans traverse its landscape. This westward migration painted the American frontier with a white sea of wagon covers, spotted the grassy plains with brown patches of oxen herds, and lighted the night sky with open cooking fires. Men and women Overlanders experienced this life-changing event in different ways, which are crucial to understanding the dynamics and interaction between these people and their frontier context. Gender-specific roles and social standards of masculinity and femininity carried from emigrants’ previous lives influenced …

Adams County History 2010

Adams County History

No abstract provided.

Farmville, 1963: The Long Hot Summer, Jill Ogline Titus

Civil War Institute Faculty Publications

On July 9, 1963, a reporter for the Richmond Times-Dispatch informed his readers that black protesters had attempted two sit-ins in the college town of Farmville, the hub of rural Prince Edward County. Obviously shocked by these developments, he termed the events at the College Shoppe restaurant and the State Theater "the first reported Negro movement in this Southside Virginia locality, which has gained prominence in recent years as the focal point of a struggle over the closings of Prince Edward County's schools." In this writer's mind, and perhaps many of his readers' as well, social movements were synonymous with …

'A Little Bit Of Love For Me And A Murder For My Old Man': The Queensland Bush Book Club, Robin Wagner

All Musselman Library Staff Works

This paper addresses rural book distribution in an era before free public libraries came to Australia. Well-to-do, city women established clubs, which solicited donations of “proper reading matter” and raised funds for the purchase of books for their “deprived sisters” in the Outback. They took advantage of a well-developed rail system to deliver book parcels to rural families. In New South Wales and Queensland they were known as Bush Book Clubs.

Testimonials found in the Clubs’ annual reports provide a snapshot of the hard scrabble frontier life and the gratitude with which these parcels were received. This paper looks at …

Into The Murky World Of Class Consciousness, Peter S. Carmichael

Civil War Institute Faculty Publications

In a 1975 article on the place of yeomen farmers in a slave society, Eugene D. Genovese identified a critical question concerning the nature of the Old South. The issue, he wrote, is to explain “the degree of class collaboration and social unity” that existed among all whites, which to Genovese appeared “all the more impressive in the face of so many internal strains.” Although some critics mistakenly charged that Genovese argued for non-slaveholder passivity in the face of planter hegemony, he was, in actuality, acknowledging that class relations were permeated with tension and discord, causing bitter resentments that occasionally …

"The Most Awful Problem That Any Nation Ever Undertook To Solve": Reconstruction As A Crisis In Citizenship, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

Reconstruction is the step-child of the Civil War, the black hole of American history. It lacks the conflict and the personalities that make the Civil War so colorful; it also lacks the climactic feuds and battles, and dissipates into a confusing and wearisome tale of lost opportunities, squalid victories, and embarrassing defeats whose ultimate endpoint is the great American disgrace - Jim Crow. It lives with the short end of the historical stick for accomplishing too much, then accomplishing too little, with the result that almost the worst thing that can be said about someone in American history is that …

Life On The South Side Of Chambersburg Street, 1910, Rachel A. Santose, Sierra Green

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

The people of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania heralded in the year of 1911 and reflected on their accomplishments throughout the past year. With "pealing bells, tooting whistles and noisy revolvers...in a more vigorous way than has been witnessed here for many years," this New Year’s Eve celebration recognized the past year as it welcomed the new year to come. The entire town took part and its faculties were utilized in the festivities of the night, including "the Court House bell and those of the St. James and College Lutheran churches...engines added their quota of noise and all over town men brought into …

Sweet Tooth For Empire: Sugar And The British Atlantic World, Colin Walfield

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

With increasing productivity and rising standards of living, a new spirit of consumerism reached Britain. After its entry into the Atlantic World economy, though Scotland never fully benefited until the 1707 Act of Union, all classes eventually gained access to a wide variety and exotic assortment of consumer products. Among them, sugar, valued for its sweetness since the Middle Ages, maintained a special position, dominating all exports from British America. Embraced by the British populace, sugar provided an impetus for colonization and required imported African labor. Sugar and a newfound consumerism at home drove the British Atlantic World.

Adams County History 2009

Adams County History

No abstract provided.

Book Review: Heart Language: Elsie Singmaster And Her Pennsylvania German Writings, Anna Jane Moyer

Adams County History

Heart Language: Elsie Singmaster and Her Pennsylvania German Writings

By Susan Colestock Hill. Foreword by Charles H. Glatfelter. Pennsylvania German History and Culture Series. The Pennsylvania German Society. The Pennsylvania State University Press. 2009.

A new century with all its energy and expectations had slipped into place and challenged Americans with fresh promises. The year was 1900. Elsie Singmaster had spent two years at Cornell University immersed in writing classes, and she would return home to Gettysburg eager to write. Her professors had been encouraging. She would always remember one of them who commented on her work for the day …

From "No Country" To "Our Country!" Living Out Manumission And The Boundaries Of Rights And Citizenship, 1773-1855, Scott Hancock

Africana Studies Faculty Publications

During the Revolutionary War and the first decades of the early U.S. Republic, as free people of color sought to define their place in the new nation, they expressed little connection to an American nationality. But antebellum black leaders later articulated a powerful vision of Africans and Americans. As slaves and free blacks had done during the Revolutionary era, they based this African American identity in part upon a biblical view of human rights and a natural rights philosophy, but they also buttressed black identity formation by making a rights discourse the fulcrum of their argument for full inclusion in …

Adams County Votes For President, 1804-2008, Charles H. Glatfelter

Adams County History

Adult male Europeans who were living in what is now Adams County, Pennsylvania, when York County was formed in 1749 could not vote to choose either their king or their governor. Thanks to the royal grant of 1682, their governor in 1749 took the form of two Penn proprietors, named Thomas and Richard. Thanks to the political principles of the first proprietor, William Penn, adult male Adams countians could participate in electing some of the officers responsible for the orderly operation of government in the province. They could vote for two representatives in the provincial legislative assembly, three York County …

Pushkin And Gannibal: Ethnic Identity In Imperial Russia, Miriam Grinberg

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

Since his untimely death in 1837, the nineteenth-century romantic writer Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin has been renowned the world over not only for his literary achievements, but also for being a paradigm of "Russianness." However, Pushkin himself was by no means a "pure" Russian. Like many of the inhabitants of the Russian empire during his time, he was borne of a veritable hodgepodge of ethnicities. The most surprising of these is his African ancestry; his great-grandfather, Abram Petrovich Gannibal, was an African slave brought to Russia in the early eighteenth century. Remarkably, this same slave became the godson and close confidante …

Adams County History 2008

Adams County History

No abstract provided.

Black Labor At Pine Grove & Caledonia Furnaces, 1789-1860, Troy D. Harman

Adams County History

Black labor operating under various degrees of freedom found a suitable working environment, if not a safe haven, in several iron forges of South Central Pennsylvania, from the late 1790s through the 1850s. Primary accounts indicate that two in particular, Pine Grove Furnace of Cumberland County, and Caledonia Furnace of Franklin County, harbored runaway slaves to augment their work force. Pine Grove records, dating from 1789 – 1801, specify names of “negro” employees, verifying that black labor coexisted with white, but day books, journals, and ledgers do not denote status.1 Whether they were free men, or slaves rented out by …

Register Of Births Of Dr. Isaac Pearson, Kevin L. Greenholt

Adams County History

Born June 6, 1824 in Huntington Township, Adams County, Pennsylvania, Isaac William Wierman Worley Pearson was the son of Isaac and Mary (Wierman) Pearson. By the time he was fourteen years old both of his parents had passed away. In 1848 he began the study of medicine under the tutelage of Dr. Hiram C. Metcalfe of York Springs, Adams County. He completed his medical education at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia during the winter of 1849 – 1850.

He returned to Adams County in 1850 and when the federal census was taken on September 25, 1850, the now Dr. Pearson …

Will The Real James Duncan Please Stand Up?, Charles H. Glatfelter, Wayne E. Motts

Adams County History

From 1956 through 1967 viewers enjoyed one of the most popular early television shows, To Tell the Truth. Host Bud Collyer would call on three contestants, standing side by side, to explain briefly who they were. Giving different stories, all claimed to be one and the same person. When they finished making their presentations, the host would turn to a panel of four, asking them to identify the only contestant who was in fact telling the truth about himself or herself. Then Collyer would ask that person to please stand up.

There were two contemporaries, both named James Duncan, who …

'A Beautiful Dream Realized': John S. Rice And The Seventy-Fifth Anniversary Of The Battle Of Gettysburg, Brian Matthew Jordan

Adams County History

"We have real cause for being proud of our past and the heritage it has given us ... We have a rich past ... along with this heritage we have had thrust upon us a deep responsibility," John S. Rice said in 1959. Indeed, it was the same sense of deep responsibility that had motivated him in anticipation of 1938. That year marked the seventy- fifth anniversary of the cataclysmic, three-day battle that was waged in the fields and farm lanes surrounding the seat of his native Adams County, Pennsylvania. Rice's cognizance of the importance not only of the Battle …

John Charles Wills: Reminiscences Of The Three Days Battle Of Gettysburg At The Globe Hotel, Benjamin K. Neely

Adams County History

John Charles Wills left the fullest account of what happened at and around the Globe Inn in the borough of Gettysburg during the Battle. In July of 1910, the Gettysburg Compiler interviewed Wills and printed a short story of his observations and experience during the Gettysburg Campaign entitled, "Battle Days at Globe Inn." In September of 1915, Wills once again shared his memories of the Battle of Gettysburg, this time in greater length. Fifty two years had passed since the battle occurred and Wills was approximately 77 years old. The 1910 and 191 5 reminiscences are remarkably similar indicating perhaps …

The Lincoln Highway: Coast To Coast From Times Square To The Golden Gate, Wayne E. Motts

Adams County History

The Lincoln Highway: Coast to Coast from Times Square to the Golden Gate

By Michael Wallis and Michael S. Williamson (WW Norton, New York and London, 2007 293 pages includes bibliography)

The book is divided into chapters by state following the highway from east to west. It is lavishly illustrated with color images of stops on the journey from the early days to the present. Of course, the roadway in Adams County is today US Route 30 and passes through the borough of Abbotstown to the western end of the county near the Michaux State Forest. Adams County highlights include …