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Halloween postcard, ca. 1900-1910. Kevin Kenny Halloween is a Celtic festival, imported to America, and later re-exported to Europe, pumpkins and all. The word Halloween is a contraction of All Hallows Evening—the eve of All Hallows Day (or all Saints Day) Day. October 31 tends to be a boisterous occasion, whether in Boston (even without the World Series) or in the U.S. Southwest and Mexico, where it kicks off the festival of el dia de los muertos . In the Christian calendar, All Hallows Day, on November 1, was the day to remember saints and martyrs. All Souls Day, on November 2, was dedicated to all the departed faithful awaiting entry into heaven and hence in need of prayer. As with most Christian holidays, the Church carefully overlaid the “days of the dead” on top of an earlier pre-Christian festival. Just as Christmas marks the winter solstice and Easter the onset of spring, Halloween was timed to coincide with a Celtic festival celebrating the end of the harvest. The Protestant E...

Miniature of Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13th at Cockington Green. Steven Cromack Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980)—both more than thirty years old—are now America’s classic horror movies. Why do they enjoy such prominence in American culture? The answer rests in the content of their plots and the context in which they were produced.   John Carpenter’s Halloween catapulted the slasher film into American culture with its release in 1978. In 1974, before he made A Christmas Story , director Bob Clark made Black Christmas , a story of young adults alone in a secluded area, ready to be terrorized, an all but standard plot line in horror movies today. But Halloween ’s central character Michael Myers was something new. He was not just a serial killer, but one who stalked his victims with creepy music in the background. And he was seemingly indestructible. Never before had such a character existed in cinema. Not too long after Halloween came Friday the 13th , another m...

[Here is the fifth and final installment of a series of posts by Benjamin Railton that originally appeared on his blog AmericanStudies .] Like so many evocative American places, the Newport, Rhode Island mansion The Breakers contains and connects to numerous histories, stories, and themes worth sharing. So in this series, I’ll highlight and analyze five such topics. As always, your thoughts will be very welcome too! The Breakers. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality, depth, and breadth of the self-guided audio tour at The Breakers—that tour, to be clear, provided starting points for all five of this week’s blog topics—but was particularly taken aback, in a good way, by a provocative question raised right at the tour’s outset. The narrator asks directly whether preserving mansions like The Breakers is a worthwhile pursuit for an organization such as the Preservation Society of Newport County —whether such mansions are architecturally or artistically worth preserving, whether the...

[Here is the fourth installment of a series of posts by Benjamin Railton that originally appeared on his blog AmericanStudies .] Like so many evocative American places, the Newport, Rhode Island mansion The Breakers contains and connects to numerous histories, stories, and themes worth sharing. So in this series, I’ll highlight and analyze five such topics. As always, your thoughts will be very welcome too! Alva Vanderbilt, 1883. At the same time that Cornelius and Alice Vanderbilt were building The Breakers, Cornelius’s brother William and his wife Alva were completing their own Newport mansion, Marble House . Located just down the street from each other, these two Vanderbilt homes jointly exemplified and dominated late 19th-century Newport society, and it’s easy to see the two women as similarly parallel. Yet the two marriages ended in very different ways—Cornelius died suddenly in 1899, at the age of 56, and the widowed Alice lived 34 more years but never remarried; Alva controver...

[Here is the third installment of a series of posts by Benjamin Railton that originally appeared on his blog AmericanStudies .] Like so many evocative American places, the Newport, Rhode Island mansion The Breakers contains and connects to numerous histories, stories, and themes worth sharing. So in this series, I’ll highlight and analyze five such topics. As always, your thoughts will be very welcome too! Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney , 1916, by Robert Henri.  Just in case Gertrude Vanderbilt (1875-1942), eldest surviving daughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt II and his wife Alice Gwynne Vanderbilt, didn’t seem to have enough of an elite American legacy on which to live, she went ahead and married  Harry Payne Whitney  (1872-1930), son of a famous attorney, grandson of a Standard Oil executive, and heir to a sizeable fortune in his own right. Together the two expanded upon those impressive starting points, inhabiting a New York mansion of their own , becoming prominent raceho...

[Here is the second installment of a series of posts by Benjamin Railton that originally appeared on his blog AmericanStudies .] Like so many evocative American places, the Newport, Rhode Island mansion The Breakers contains and connects to numerous histories, stories, and themes worth sharing. So in this series, I’ll highlight and analyze five such topics. As always, your thoughts will be very welcome too! While I hope that yesterday’s post complicated some of the simplest narratives about a figure like Cornelius Vanderbilt II, it was nonetheless, I admit, still pretty crazy to use the phrase “rags to riches” to describe Commodore Vanderbilt’s grandson. But how about  Rudolph “Rudy” Stanish , who began life as the seventh of thirteen children born to an Eastern European (Croatian and Serbian) immigrant couple in Yukon, Pennsylvania, and ended his life as the world famous Omelet King , chef to some of America’s most prominent people and families? A young man who was brough...

[Here we present the first installment of a series of posts by Benjamin Railton that originally appeared on his blog AmericanStudies .] Like so many evocative American places, the Newport, Rhode Island mansion The Breakers contains and connects to numerous histories, stories, and themes worth sharing. So in this series, I’ll highlight and analyze five such topics. As always, your thoughts will be very welcome too! Cornelius Vanderbilt II (1843-1899), the man for whom The Breakers was built (as perhaps the most luxurious “summer cottage” in human history), was named after his grandfather, Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877), who at his death was the wealthiest man in the United States. Which is to say, young Cornelius wasn’t just born into privilege; he was perhaps the closest thing to the royal baby American society has produced. Moreover, over the thirty-four years between his birth and his grandfather’s death, a period that culminated quite tellingly with the start of the G...

Joe Amato, emeritus professor of history at Southwest Minnesota State University, is a prolific and creative scholar. He has published eye-opening books on unique topics (his most recent is Surfaces: A History ). He is also a veteran practitioner of the kinds of history most avidly pursued by non-academics: genealogy and local history. The January, April, and June issues of the 2013 volume of the Historical Society's bulletin  Historically Speaking   feature a   three-part essay series by Amato, "Place and American History," where he ruminates on these seemingly mundane--though in his hands anything but--historiographical genres. Recently Amato spoke to South Dakota Public Radio's Nathan Puhl about these essays. You can listen to their conversation here .

Chris Beneke On my office wall, I have a replica 1775 Boston map. It looks like this: Boston, 1775 As I stared idly at it last week, I was suddenly struck by how much the drawing resembled other maps that I'd seen recently, such as this one: Projected map of Boston after a 5 ft. seal level rise (coupled with another 2.5 ft. storm surge.) If you concentrate only on the grey areas above, you should discern (as I finally did) an eerie resemblance to the 1775 map at the top. I wasn't the first to notice the similarity. The Atlantic ran a piece  last February that I missed, and perhaps you did as well. There, Emily Badger noted the resemblance between Boston in the 1640s and the exceedingly damp, post-global warming projections of what it will look like in 2050, 2100, etc. By dint of massive and repeated landfills over the last two centuries, Bostonians have doggedly claimed areas that once belonged to the sea. Before this century is over, the sea may be taking many of them back.

Heather Cox Richardson For all their new applications, new technologies are also good for the old-fashioned craft of history. They are excellent for honing our writing skills. First of all, blogging and tweeting require very low investments of professional energy. There is something daunting about starting A Book. I often panic when I face a new project, because I simply can’t remember how to begin. What do you write first? How do you set everything up? Do you write an introduction? And on and on and on. For days. Everything seems Very Important. Andrew Sullivan, an early and influential blogger. Blogging, though, requires none of that. It is an exercise in brevity, centered on a single idea. It is not intended to Sit On A Shelf Forever. It doesn’t have to be Brilliant. It has to get done, and done quickly. So stepping over the threshold is easy. It’s fun. It’s a good way to rev up your engines to carry into the day’s more daunting projects. Blogging also forces your writing up several...

Heather Cox Richardson United States Department of Defense graphic in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston. The Cuban Missile Crisis lasted for thirteen tense days in October 1962. During those days, the USSR faced off against the U.S. over the placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba. President Kennedy vowed not to permit missiles so close to America; Premier Krushchev vowed to put them in Cuba anyway. The two week standoff was the closest the Cold War ever came to erupting into a hot war. And with nuclear weapons widespread, it would have been a hot war, indeed. The J.F.K. Library has put together a website that enables a viewer to experience each day of that crisis.

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe In my job as a fellowships advisor I stress to applicants that a strong application demonstrates three things: depth of expertise in a given field; breadth of interests and experiences; and the applicant’s change over time, i.e. history. The third pillar of the triad constitutes the all-important biographical element. Americans' hunger for personal history makes  Ancestry.com ’s stockholders rich and guarantees the flood of genealogists to the shores of Salt Lake. The Ball family of Lompoc, California, ca. 1894.  My sons started high school and middle school at the end of August. As I delivered my nearly­ men to the doors of their new institutions, my desire to make history from memory overwhelmed me. The hundreds of digital images stored on the family computer cried out for a chronology with which to capture the evolution of my chubby-­cheeked chappies into the skinny tweens who seek escape from their mother’s needy embrace. My compulsion has since...

Brian D. Bunk Chicago, 1905. SDN-004085, Chicago Daily News negatives collection, Chicago History Museum. One sure way to irritate historians of soccer in the United States (and yes, there are a few) is to call the sport foreign. In various forms the game has been played by Native Americans and Puritans; factory workers and college students; and professionals and preschoolers throughout American history. Why then does this idea persist? The reasons are complex, but one important factor is that the mainstream sporting press, especially in the second half of the 20th century, has continually depicted soccer as a foreign game. Anyone who watches ESPN, the nation’s dominant sports network, probably already realized what the website Deadspin.com [http://deadspin.com/what-i-learned-from-a-year-of-watching-sportscenter-5979510] quantified for 2012: the majority of airtime on the channel’s signature news program Sportscenter focused on just three leagues, the National Football League, Nationa...

Henry Voigt In the preface of his 1894 cookbook The Epicurean , Delmonico’s chef Charles Ranhofer cited seventeen grand banquets as being particularly memorable.1 One of these dinners had been held fourteen years earlier for Count Ferdinand de Lessep, the French entrepreneur who built the Suez Canal. Eager to replicate his engineering feat, De Lesseps came to New York in March 1880 to raise money for a sea-level canal that would cut across the Isthmus of Panama. As was customary, a banquet was held in his honor. However, as far as the French-born chef and his brigade were concerned, their famed countryman was more than just another special guest. To them, he was a hero of the age. Observing a palpable excitement in the air during dinner, the reporter from the New York Times wryly noted that “the nationality of the distinguished guest of the evening had had something to do with the zeal of the cooks, confectioners, and waiters.”2 On New Years Day of that year, De Lessep symbolically be...

Steven Cromack Contrary to popular belief, Jackie Robinson was not the first black man to play major league baseball. That title belongs to Moses Fleetwood Walker, who lived and played nearly eighty years before Robinson. Walker’s story is fascinating not only because of his baseball stardom, but also because an all white jury acquitted him of first-degree murder in 1891. Historians do not know much about his early years. Moses Fleetwood Walker was born in Ohio. A minister’s son, he entered Oberlin College and planned to become a lawyer. While at school, however, it became clear that his passion lay elsewhere. Instead of going to class, Walker played baseball, and in 1883 he landed a spot in the minor leagues as a catcher with newly formed Toledo Blue Stockings. As a player, he impressed the press and the fans. Sporting Life , the nation’s largest sport publication at the time, wrote on September 15, 1883: “Walker, the colored catcher of the Toledos, is a favorite wherever he goes. He ...

Arissa H. Oh   International adoption is in the news almost daily, but its numbers are in decline and the tone of the conversation around it has darkened. Celebrity adoptions and heartwarming stories of orphans finding "forever families" in the U.S. have given way to more  skeptical coverage that emphasizes the underside of international adoption : the profit motive that leads to illicit practices and the lack of regulation and oversight in a vast system that shuffles children around the world. The American evangelical crusade for international adoption has received particularly sustained attention . Since the middle of the last decade, evangelical churches and organizations have encouraged their members to adopt children from abroad, often providing funds to help with the high costs. They have promoted a culture of adoption by publicizing a “global orphan crisis,” a disputed concept in itself. Children—many not actually orphans—are adop...

Robin Fleming Sometimes the most unimpressive objects, like this little Romano-British ceramic pot, found in Baldock, in Hertfordshire (in the UK), can speak volumes about the lives of long forgotten individuals. To appreciate the value of this pot, which was manufactured in the 4th century but still in use in the 5th, we need a little context. Although Britain in 300 CE was as Roman as any province in the Empire, within a single generation of the year 400, urban life, industrial-scale manufacturing of basic goods, the money economy, and the state had collapsed. Because of these dislocations ubiquitous, inexpensive, utterly common everyday objects––including mass-produced, wheel-thrown pots like this one––began to disappear. The dislocations caused by the loss of such pottery were immense, and it is easy to imagine the ways the disappearance of cheap, readily available pots would have affected the running of kitchens, the rhythms of daily work and the eating of meals. But pots like our...

Mimi Cowan In yesterday’s post I gave you the basics of Chicago’s 1871 Great Conflagration, as they called it, and how Mrs. O’Leary became everyone’s favorite scapegoat. I also promised you a story about what French socialists, women with Molotov cocktails, Mrs. O’Leary, and the creation of modern Chicago all have in common. So here’s where the story starts: as I flipped through a series of old images of Mrs. O’Leary, I realized that she looked different in every picture. That’s because Mrs. O’Leary hid from the press; she didn’t want anyone to sketch her likeness in the papers. As a result, illustrators were free to depict her in anyway they chose. But if these aren’t accurate representations of Mrs. O’Leary , what were the models for these images ? Turns out that these depictions of Mrs. O’Leary bear a striking resemblance to images of the pétroleuses of the 1871 French Commune. In March 1871, the citizens' militia and city council of Paris ran the French national government and...

Mimi Cowan Yesterday I told my eighty-eight-year-old grandmother I was writing a blog post about the Great Chicago Fire. She replied, "the one the cow started?" Yup. The one the cow started. Well, actually, no. Everyone and their grandmother have blamed Chicago's biggest disaster on Mrs. O'Leary and her incendiary bovine for the past 142 years, but here's the thing: The cow didn't do it . But that got me thinking. Why, almost a century and a half later, is her name often the one thing people know about the fire? I've got some theories so grab a mug of milk, pull up a stool, and keep an eye on that lantern. First, a little background: Late on Sunday October 8, 1871, a fire broke out on the west side of Chicago. Legend tells us that Catherine O'Leary placed a lantern behind the hoof of the cow she was milking. The cow kicked and the lantern broke, catching the surrounding hay on fire. Within moments, the entire barn was engulfed in flames. Whether or not...

Aaron Astor In 1926 historian E. Merton Coulter described Kentucky during the Civil War as a “crouching lion, stretched east and west . . . the thoroughfare of the continent.” Kentucky served as more than the geographic fulcrum of the Union between slave and free states. It also represented the political heart of the Union, its politicians, most notably Henry Clay, having offered Union-saving compromise measures since 1820. It had long embraced conservative Unionism, a political tradition that understood “conservative” both as a social orientation (allowing for only gradual change to the institution of slavery) and a political relationship (with the Union buttressing the social order). Militarily, Kentucky was absolutely critical to the Federal war effort, as the Ohio River would have become an international boundary if Kentucky had joined the Confederacy. Further, tens of thousands of Indianans, Illinoisans, and Ohioans traced their roots to Kentucky, including President Lincoln himse...

Steven Cromack I just completed teaching a unit on the Gilded Age. Information wise, the Gilded Age can be soporific—railroads, oil, Stalwarts, Mugwumps, and Half-breeds. Who cares, especially if you are 16 and have just gotten your learner’s permit? Instead of teaching content, therefore, I decided to teach concepts. I took a risk, and, as a result, a classroom experiment that could have gone horribly awry not only intrigued students, but also forced them to reflect on their roles as citizens and to face their own sense of morality. At the heart of the Gilded Age was the question of wealth. What, if anything, do the rich owe society? I began one class by having students choose a card from a prearranged deck stacked with twos, threes, and fours and four kings. I then gave each student the number of Hershey kisses on their card. The kings, however, got “King Size” Kit Kats. There was outrage. I immediately had the students write and reflect. How did it feel to have the wealth of the cla...

Heather Cox Richardson Untenured scholars are in a funny place: that gap between the old world and the new. Ten years ago, yes, blogging would convince many senior scholars that a junior person was not a serious academic because s/he was catering to a popular audience. Since then, the old world of the academy is crumbling, and while many departments have not yet caught up, others are aware they must move into the twenty-first century. So will blog posts and tweets hurt your career? Maybe. But they can also help your career in very practical ways. The first has to do with publishing. The gold standard for employment and for tenure remains a published book. When most senior scholars finished their doctorates, it was almost guaranteed that their dissertations would find academic publishers. In those days, university presses had standing contracts with university libraries that guaranteed automatic sales of a few thousand copies of each monograph that came out from a reputable press. Budge...

Lisa Clark Diller I will admit to having been a re-enactment virgin until the weekend of September 21, 2013.  As readers of this blog are well aware, we are in the midst of all things Civil War in the United States. Chattanooga, Tennessee, is marking its own big battles all this fall.  Specifically, the engagements at Chickamauga occurred 150 years ago, September 19-20.    As someone whose research reflects a great deal on another civil war (one in England in the 1640s), I have tended to smile blithely through local history enthusiasts’ explanations of the Confederacy, the Union, and the role played by East Tennessee in that conflict. However, as a teacher of a first year seminar who is always looking for the required “bonding experience” for my students, this year it seemed appropriate to participate in some local history.  I don’t think this was one of the most effectively executed re-enactments (others with more experience have confirmed this opinion)....