Michael Loves History

I’ve been consumed by papers for other classes for the last few days, but prior to that was making good progress on the thesis. I received the FileMaker database software and have been able to continue compiling newspaper ads. This actually has been a frustrating process–I don’t think I’ve taken the opportunity to complain about it yet. As incredible as the Newsbank database of Americas Historical Newspapers is, there are some real technical flaws with the advanced search mechanism. Halfway through a large batch of returns, the database will lose my original search terms and I have to start over again. Slowgoing, but in the end it will yield good results, I think.

Other than that, I’ve been reading some new things:

• Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (1984). Less helpful than I would have hoped.
• Dell Upton, Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New American (2008).
• Edwin Burroughs, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (1999). This is an amalgamation of scholarship on New York City, which I’m reading for context and to spark new ideas.
• And a whole lot of literature on reform for my antebellum America paper, which I’ll discuss in a bit.

I found the outline assignment a worthwhile kick in the butt. If anybody has feedback on my first draft of a thesis and the preliminary chapter breakdown, I’d love to hear it:

• Introduction. THESIS: The hotel–not only a new architectural form, but also a business model distinct from the tavern–reflected the desires of social and cultural elites to cling to traditional social structures while simultaneously improving their new nation, thus embodying a central paradox of American ideology in the years of the early republic.
• Chapter 1: Taverns in New York City, 1783
• Chapter 2: New York’s First Hotels
• Chapter 3: The Republican Vision and Symbolism of New York’s Early Hotels
• Chapter 4: Hotels as a New Approach to Health and Morality
• Chapter 5: Hotels, Capitalism, and Industrialization
• Conclusion

The paper I’m writing right now for the class on antebellum America will factor heavily into Chapter 4, and much of what I’m reading will affect Chapter 3, as well. The paper centers on that 1810 pamphlet by the Humane Society of New York City condemning “petty taverns” as centers of vice and disease, and intersects with the antiliquor writings of Benjamin Rush (1780s-1810s).

I argue that the Humane Society’s early motion for temperance reform represents an attempt by patrician New Yorkers to preserve a republican vision that they, at the top of society, saw beginning to falter. By examining an earlier period, the paper strives to reassess scholarship on the later temperance movement (1820s and 1830s) that was associated with the height of the Second Great Awakening, concluding that the Second Great Awakening did not give rise to temperance, as has sometimes been argued, but rather transformed and augmented it.

That paper is due on Monday, and another (smaller) one is due for a different class on Tuesday. So I probably won’t get much thesis work done until next week. I do hope to finish reading Upton by the end of the weekend. After that, I’ll start writing Chapter 1 using the newspaper ads, travel accounts, a slew of anecdotal histories of New York, and three recent books on taverns in other early American cities.

Progress, yes. Both in the sense of working towards a thesis, and in the sense of the early-nineteenth century American ethos–a theme that’s coloring my sources and secondary readings on every page.

Finished the book review on Wilentz, Chants Democratic, and now have a much firmer grip on social relations and political ideology in early New York City. The biggest idea I’ve gleaned from that task is that, although the first hotels appeared within a(n essentially) pre-industrial context, they seem more representative of the culture and social structures that emerged from post-1825 industrialization in New York. Something to chew on and work with.

Am still compiling the database of newspaper ads–less progress there than I’d hoped. I need to make this a higher priority.

Have been working with a source on the early temperance movement–an 1810 condemnation of “petty taverns” as centers of vice, degradation, and even disease–for Carol Sheriff’s class on antebellum America. Something really cool is going to come of this, though I’m not sure what precisely. I’m analyzing the relationship and differences between this pamphlet and the later reform movements that marked the height of the Second Great Awakening (1830s), using W. J. Rorabaugh, Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (1981). At the moment (as in, this afternoon) I’m looking through the New York City directories for 1810 and 1814 to determine WHO, precisely, the authors of this pamphlet were. Early returns suggest, as predicted, that they were quite the group of civic-minded patricians.

And just received in the mail a brand-spankin’-new copy of Dell Upton’s new book, Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New American Republic (2008). I’ll really be able to engage with his work, which deals mostly with Philadelphia and New Orleans and focuses on many of building types and institutions that emerged in the early republic, but not really hotels (!). In fact, the index doesn’t even have an entry for “hotel.” What the heck, Dell? Thanks, I guess . . .

Plan to continue pushing ahead on all fronts, with a two-day sabbatical for Homecoming

I really have been terrible at keeping this blog updated the past few weeks. I think my aversion to posting indicates how uncomfortable I’ve been with a recently slow rate of progress. But now that midterms are over I can get back in business and hereby solemnly pledge to devote the following time blocks to my thesis (let’s see if this actually works):

• Today from 11:45 to 2:30, and again from 6:30 to 9:30
• Tomorrow from 9:30 to 4
• Monday from 11 to 2

Here’s what I’ve been up to recently:

• Decided that FileMaker Pro is the best way to organize these newspaper ads. Downloaded the free 30-day trial and applied to the department for funding to get the full version.
• Began compiling my database (which is actually progressing quite nicely), which I’ll use to begin discerning how, when, and why taverns gave way to hotels.
• Started working on a research paper for Professor Sheriff’s course on antebellum America which will examine that 1810 Humane Society pamphlet in light of the themes of that class (reform movements, the emergence of the middle class, etc.). A lot of what I’ll write for that paper will probably come to play in my work with the honors thesis next semester.
• Moving towards a book review of Wilentz, Chants Democratic.

The plan for now is just to keep pushing on those fronts for the weekend and then see where I’m at. I’m really going to be better from now on about updating this blog.

Here the link to that New York Times article I mentioned yesterday in class. PS, I’m really not left of Marx and Michael Moore, it might just seem like that sometimes.

Had a bit of a revelation in Professor Sheriff’s “Antebellum America” class today, thanks to her lecture on urban boom. YES. She synthesized a library worth of urban histories into the argument that cities in the early Republic embodied a kind of dissonance. That is, cities stood as the physical manifestations of elite and middle-class ideas about progress and republicanism (think churches, museums, government, arts; the pinnacle of human civilization; like Thomas Cole’s The Consummation of Empire, hardcore) while simultaneously functioning as centers of poverty, crime, working-class depravity, and moral decay.

I can work with this. Bushman fits in perfectly. The taverns–>hotels architectural transformation fits in perfectly. The 1810 Humane Society report on NYC taverns/jails fits in perfectly. AWESOME. I’m not yet sure of all the nuances of the argument, but I’ve just opened up about 800 new themes to work with as I forumulate a thesis. To start with, I think that the hotel form embodies those elite and middle-class perceptions of the city as American republican center, which helps to explain Andrew Sandoval-Strausz’s contention that the hotel emerged as a uniquely American building and institution.

The challenge now is to not formulate an argument before I have evidence that gives rise to it. So while I have a reading list that just became three miles longer, I’m only allowing myself to read a few introductions until I assemble this newspaper ad database. In case you’re curious, those intros are:

• Mary Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (1981);
• Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1798-1860 (1987); and
• Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900 (1989).

OK I’m psyched. More to come as an argument emerges.

This post is way, way late. Sorry!

This week I read Richard Bushman’s Refinement of America: Persons, Cities, Houses. This book is going to have a major impact on my thesis. Bushman separates trends in American culture into two broad developments: eighteenth-century refinement and nineteenth-century respectability. My initial reaction to this is that NYC taverns became refined during the eighteenth century–that is, they stratified according to certain social classes and network–and that hotels are the product of Bushman’s “respectability.”

I think Bushman gets a lot of things right: that gentility is a social performance; that genteel sensibilities infiltrated both middling- and upper- classes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and, most especially, that the subconscious drive for refinement based upon Old-World standards directly contradicts the popular early American ideology of republican egalitarianism. For, as Bushman notes, “Gentility was worldly not godly, it was hierarchical not egalitarian, and it favored leisure and consumption over work and thrift.”

I think I disagree, however, with Bushman’s contention that genteel buildings are “outward signs of what the inhabitants hoped would be an inward grace. They wished to transform themselves along with their environments.” On the contrary, I think that the elites who patronized hotels and the entrepeneurs who built them thought themselves to already be transformed. They wanted to reinforce that transformation–not to jumpstart it–by creating beautiful, refined structures which excluded those who might tarnish the enjoyment of genteel things, spaces, and people. We’ll see if that holds up to my primary research.

I also read Paul Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837, which describes a number of social forces related to industrialization and the stratification of social class. Though the Rochester experience undoubtedly differs from that of NYC, I think the book will still shed some light on my study. I don’t have it with me, so I’ll have to talk later.

Also started compiling newspaper ads using Zotero. (Thanks, Josh!) This will be a long and arduous process but will ultimately, I think, yield good results. I’m at a point where I have a lot of unfounded notions bouncing around my brain and need to ground them in some real, quantifiable/qualifiable primary evidence. So that’s where I turn next. I hope to get a solid database started this week.

That, and reading a few more things:

• The rest of Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic;
• A few chapters of A. K. Sandoval-Strausz, Hotel: An American History;
• and Alan Taylor, William Cooper’s Town.

PS: Seminar, I had a blast at our dinner on Monday! I think we should do it again.

Just posting quickly to note what I’ve been doing this week. I’ll ruminate some more this weekend once I come up to breathe.

I’ve been reading two secondary works that will have broad implications on my thesis. Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (1987), has been my starting point as the best social and cultural history of NYC during my period. Richard Bushman, Refinement of America, Persons, Houses, Cities (1992) is the seminal statement of the cultural currents which (I think) precipitated the shift from taverns to hotels. Still getting through them, so I’ll talk more about them later.

I’ve also been trying to sketch out a basic plan for my primary research. I think I will start with a survey of tavern and hotel advertisements in NY newspapers. I’ll attempt to see how businessowners attracted patrons to their public houses, which will (I hope) allow me to discuss what customers wanted from their hotels and taverns. Was refinement a selling point–the response to a kind of market demand? Swem microfilm room, here I come . . . . Any advice on how to analyze these advertisements would be particularly appreciated

OK, time to get started here. The above photo shows me in the lap of Alma Mater, the “nourishing mother” of scholarship, bearing an expression which adequately conveys my sense of frightened excitement as I stand upon the brink of a senior thesis. This new blog will chronicle my year-long journey through the personal nirvana/hell which I have laid before myself as an honors student in history.

Perhaps a quick introduction is in order? I’m Michael Blaakman, a senior history and religious studies major from Rochester, New York. I sing with the W&M Choir and with an a capella group called “DoubleTake.” I work at the Wren Building, participate in an international service trip through the Catholic Campus Ministries, and am a full-time resident of the Daily Grind (upon whose familiar high-top seats I am perched as I write this entry).

This post is intended as a kind of intellectual biography. I’m feeling a bit scatterbrained this afternoon (really, for the last week), so this will be a useful exercise in centering my zen or whatever and rationalizing my decision to pursue a thesis.

My thesis will examine the architectural and cultural transition from taverns to hotels in early New York City. I’ll use this entirely obscure topic as a lens to reflect on (do lenses reflect? I suppose not . . . ) the cultural history of New York City in the early national period.

How in the hell did I settle on this topic? I’ve spent most of my time as an undergraduate drifting between a few disciplines in American history. Through a handful of internships and independent studies I’ve explored my compatibility with careers as a preservationist, an architectural historian, and a material culture . . . person. I like these things (a lot), but am pretty settled on a future in regular academic history. I won’t discuss why right now, but I will say that this rough draft of a life plan has guided my selection of a thesis topic.

During a field school in architectural history last summer,  I visited Hanover Tavern near Richmond. In discussing the historical evolution of the building, Professor Lounsbury (an architectural historian at Colonial Williamsburg) noted that in the early nineteenth century the tavern had been renovated into a more modern hotel through the partitioning of smaller, private bedrooms and the addition of several larger and more refined spaces for dining and large gatherings. For some then-unknown reason, the idea of that transformation–and the institutions of taverns and hotels in general–really piqued my interest.

I decided to focus the thesis on NYC when I received funding to live and study in New York City for the summer but had no way to stay in Virginia. Not ideal, I suppose, but eventually I decided that the change was good. I had been interested for a while in branching out from the history of colonial Virginia to explore other regions, more urban settings, and other time periods. So I settled on an examination of the transformation of public accommodations in NYC from about 1780 to 1820. What constituted the transformation from taverns to hotels? That is, how did taverns change architecturally, socially, and operationally? Why did the change happen? And how did it affect the role of public houses in the lives of New Yorkers?

This cultural history will rely upon the methods of social history (some good quantitative stuff), architectural history (mostly in terms of squeezing architectural information out of surviving documents, for few early architectural sources remain standing in NYC), and material culture. It will largely reflect upon the themes discussed in a few good books, namely:

• Sean Wilentz,  Chants Democratic (1984);
• Richard Bushman, The Refinement of America (1992);
• Sharon Salinger, Taverns and Drinking in Early America (2002); and
• A.K. Sandoval-Strausz, Hotel: An American History (2007).

The study will work with several historical themes. I’ll try to explore the role of race in tavern interactions,  but I see class and gender playing a much larger role, especially when it comes to the linked historical developments of the middle class, privacy, and the “republican” family in early national America. Also, I think I will write a chapter on NY taverns and hotels as centers for interaction with the Atlantic World.

I’ve long been interested in the ways that buildings are used to manipulate and edify people. To be dead honest with myself,  that might be because I always had the smallest house of all my friends growing up. I feel stupid saying that because it is a beautiful and comfortable house, but for some reason its size really bothered eight-year-old me. Since then I’ve always been attuned to issues of class, and so the way that architecture and cultural institutions blur class boundaries (as I think many taverns did) or reinforce them (as I think many later taverns and hotels did) really fascinates me.

Signing out for now.

Time to figure out what this is all about . . .