Michael Loves History

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.