Coming Fall 2014

Sarah Forbes Bonetta Davies, 19th century woman

Though I have not graded the first paper for this course, I am already prepping for next semester. In addition to teaching "U.S. to 1865" (HY 103), I will teach "The Nineteenth Century City" (HY 300) again. Students in this course will spend more time looking at urban life in America during the nineteenth century. The growth of cities begins in earnest in the early nineteenth century. By 1920, more Americans lived in cities than the countryside.

While making fliers for this course, I wanted to find one that has resonances with one of the course readings, a memoir by Eliza Potter, a hairdresser of mixed race. A native of New York, Potter traveled to Europe, working as a nursemaid and later as a hairdresser for wealthy people on both sides of the Atlantic. All this as she eventually  owned a home with her "own fig tree," as she put it, in Cincinnati. Potter's account is helpful to my effort to show students how race, gender and class can nuance what can be learned in any exploration of city life, something I hope students enrolled this spring in Black Urban Culture understand as they prepare for their final exam.

One of the fliers I made advertising "The Nineteenth Century City" features  Sarah Forbes Bonetta Davies, a woman of West African royal ancestry who was reportedly orphaned in 1848 when her parents were killed in a massacre. I was struck by Davies' elegant hairdo in this photograph. Two years later, the king of Dahomey presented her as a "gift" to Queen Victoria. After becoming the queen's goddaughter, Davies apparently spent the rest of her life between her home in England and Africa until her death in 1880.

Davies' life made me think of Potter even though Potter's memoir focuses primarily on her experiences of styling the hair of white Americans and Europeans. It made me wonder if she had in fact ever had the opportunity to style the hair of a person of African descent. Surely in her memoir, one case see the degree to which she emphasizes her desire to treat all people - black or white, rich or poor, enslaved or free - the same. 

"Love and Basketball" (2000)  has a funny reference to Spaudling's sporting goods empire.

Spaulding Collection, New York Public Library

In addition to learning about Potter, the students will also be introduced to various developments that help define city life including the arrival of department stores. They will learn as much via a text on nineteenth century urban culture in the United States. It was written by Gunther Barth. 

Baseball also helped define city life.  A.G. Spaulding, a native of Illinois, was one of the first Americans to make an enormous amount of money on sporting goods including equipment for baseball. 
By the 1880s, men who were confined to New York and Pittsburgh factories and offices, headed to ball parks. Whereas football was initially associated with the wealthy and educated, baseball early on made room for working class urban dwellers. But by the time it got professionalized in the late nineteenth century, the ball clubs - not the players - increasingly had the most power and this was true for decades.

This sport, like many, was segregated well into the twentieth century, oppressing certain players even more. As Barth tells us, not only needed something to divert their attention from their depressing environs, but something that mirrored their own struggle for success. Writes Barth, "the game almost reduced their daily tensions because its ups and downs seemed more momentous than their own lives."