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"Ancient Ancestors Come to Life," National Geographic, January 3, 2014

See our ancient ancestors come to life through paleoartist John Gurche's realistic human likenesses for the Smithsonian's Hall of Human Origins.
"The human story is really nothing short of the story of a little corner of the universe becoming aware of itself," says Gurche.>>>

Louise Iles, "Year in digs: How 2013 looked in archaeology," BBC, December 31, 2013

. . . . This year's research also gave us a glimpse into the private lives of our hominid cousins, reopening debates that might shed light on the evolution of our species.

The first complete Neanderthal genome was published, at the same time showing inbreeding within Neanderthal groups as well as reports of interbreeding between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans.>>>

Joe Holleman, "St. Louis University archeology team is unearthing Irish history," St Louis Post-Dispatch, January 2, 2014

Thomas J. Finan, a history professor at St. Louis University, has been taking students to Ireland for archaeological work since 2004. Last summer, Finan and his band of 12 students made an important discovery — the remains of what appears to have been a major Irish settlement dating to about 1200.>>>

Louis Charbonneau, "UNESCO sounds alarm about illicit Syria archeology digs," Reuters, December 16, 2013

The head of UNESCO sounded an alarm about widespread illegal archeological excavations across war-ravaged Syria on Friday, saying the U.N. cultural, education and science arm has warned auction houses, museums and collections about the problem.>>>

Lindsay Peyton, "Her group finds artifacts that reveal Texas history," Houston Chronicle, December 17, 2013

When the Texas Department of Transportation recently needed help sifting through a mountain of sand hiding hundreds of prehistoric human artifacts, staff archeologists knew exactly where to look.

The Houston Archeological Society jumped to their aid, offering to search through the sand at the Dimond Knoll site that TxDOT discovered while paving the way for the Grand Parkway. And society members offered to transport the dirt to an adjacent property, allowing more time and more people to join the effort.>>>

[We repost this piece by Eric Schultz, which originally appeared on November 19, 2013.]
Eric B. Schultz

Not long ago, a friend sent me a video which featured a new holiday character, “Pumpkin-Headed Turkey Claus,” with a note saying how appalled he was with the way retailers had hijacked
the holidays.

I’m pretty jaded myself by holiday retailers. But even I’ve winced a few times this fall.  There was the Christmas wrapping-paper sale I stumbled upon in mid-October, for example, and the recent news that many large retailers would be opening their doors at 8 or 9 p.m. on Thanksgiving evening.  (Who’s going to eat cold turkey sandwiches with me?)  Now, I’d been introduced to the Pumpkin-Headed Turkey Claus offering proof positive that Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas had finally been smashed together into the twisted wreckage of one long retail extravaganza.

Remember the time when Christmas was simple and less commercial, when you could step out of your door into a Currier and Ives print.  No?  How about a $29 Thomas Kinkade “Memories of Christmas” print?  Precisely.  One of the greatest of all holiday traditions is recalling a holiday season—historian Stephen Nissenbaum reminds us in his superb book, The Battle For Christmas—that never existed at all.

Commercial Christmas presents were already common in America by the 1820s, Nissenbaum writes, and in 1834 a letter to a Boston Unitarian magazine complained about aggressive advertising and the fact that “everybody gives away something to somebody,” turning the holiday into a source of bewilderment.  In 1850 when Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote her Christmas story, readers could identify with the character who groaned, “Christmas is coming in a fortnight, and I have got to think up presents for everybody!  Dear me, it’s so tedious!”*  Just a few years before, Philadelphia’s confectioners had begun displaying huge cakes in their shop windows a few days before Christmas, actively competing for customers.

Professor Nissenbaum also reminds us that the figure of Santa Claus, all but invented in the early nineteenth century, was first employed to sell Christmas goods in the 1820s.  By the 1840s the jolly old chief of elves had become a common commercial icon.  Christmas had turned into “the thin end of the wedge by which many Americans became enmeshed in the more self-indulgent aspects of consumer spending.”

Few technologies would have a greater impact on Christmas and consumerism than the railroad.  In The Search for Order, Robert Wiebe tells us that it was two great explosions of railroad construction following 1879 and 1885 that, combined, produced hundreds of miles of feeder line designed to connect countless American towns—once isolated communities—into a single, massive, national distribution system.  This was aided by agreement on coordinated time zones in 1883, and a standard railroad gauge largely adopted by 1890. 

Retailers heard the whistle and jumped on board.  In 1872, Aaron Montgomery Ward produced his first mail-order catalogue, in 1874 Macy’s presented its first Christmas display, and in 1888 the first Sears catalog was published.  By 1890 many Americans were trading Christmas cards (thanks to affordable imports), and Santa had gone from icon to messenger, his arrival defining the holiday for many children.   Mass distribution had become a reality, though Santa might have felt more at home in a boxcar than a sleigh.

In November 1924, editor and journalist Samuel Strauss (1870-1953) penned “Things Are in the Saddle” for the Atlantic Monthly, an essay that addressed head-on the issue of American consumerism (or what he termed “consumptionism”, i.e.—the science of compelling men to use more and more things). “Something new has come to confront American democracy,” Strauss sounded the alarm.  “The Fathers of the Nation did not foresee it.”  And then he asked the reader, “What is the first condition of our civilization?  In the final reason, is it not concerned with the production of things?  It is not that we must turn out large quantities of things; it is that we must turn out ever larger quantities of things, more this year than last year?” Writing in the month leading up to Christmas, Strauss concluded, “The problem before us today is not how to produce the goods, but how to produce the customers.”

What had happened, he concluded with some pain, was that the American citizen had become the American consumer.  Civic duty now meant buying goods as fast as the great machines of industry could produce them, and the great trains of industry could deliver. 

Strauss implicitly understood that the relationship between our year-end holidays and merchant needs has always been incestuous.  While the Pumpkin-Headed Turkey Claus didn’t exist in 1939, for example, President Franklin Roosevelt most certainly did.  When merchants complained that a late Thanksgiving (on November 30) would reduce the number of shopping days before Christmas, he gladly changed the date.   The Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1939 declared the date of the holiday to be not the last, but the second-to-last Thursday of the month.

That same year, Robert L. May created Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer for Montgomery Ward.   And, of course, it’s just a lucky coincidence that 1947’s Miracle on 34th Street wove Santa Claus, Christmas, Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and the company’s flagship store into one happy story.  In 1966, another of our beloved holiday classics, It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, frankensteined Christmas and Halloween when Linus sat in the most sincere of pumpkin patches, waiting for the Great Pumpkin to arise and deliver toys to all the boys and girls.  In fact, you might remember that it was in yet another Peanuts special, It's the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown, when the kids are disgusted to find Christmas store displays in the middle of April and a sign warning that there are only 246 days left until Christmas.

I don’t mean to sound like the Grinch, but hopefully your children have talked you into purchasing tickets (at $115 per seat) to his live holiday show by now.

In any event, Stephen Nissenbaum, Samuel Strauss, and Robert May all remind us that we come by the “Ho-gobble, gobble” of Pumpkin-Headed Turkey Claus honestly, one in a long line of characters that has contributed to what is now called “Christmas Creep.”  We’ve even developed an entire vocabulary around the launch of retail Christmas, including Grey Thursday, Black Friday and Cyber Monday.  It is the very reason you can hear David Bowie and Bing Crosby singing "The Little Drummer Boy" long before the jack-o-lantern on your front porch goes soft and mealy.

Columnist Yvonne Abraham wrote recently in the Boston Globe that she was shocked to find a house adorned in Christmas lights on the first week of November, and “the red snowman cups at Starbucks came out on Nov. 1. Ditto the elves on shelves at CVS. The wall-to-wall carols weren’t far behind.”  Indeed, global warming scientists warn us that our lawns are moving the equivalent of 6 feet south every year due to climate change.  It seems the Pumpkin-Headed Turkey Claus is here to warn us that Christmas is moving right before our eyes as well, a few hours earlier every year—a cultural movement that is nearly 200 years old and just as traditional as Old St. Nick himself. 

[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 they are historically or culturally worth remembering, whether, in short, these kinds of homes merit the obvious expense and effort that are required to keep them open and accessible to visitors. The tour presents arguments on both sides of the question, and leaves it up to the listener to decide as he or she continues with his or her visit.

Of course my first instinct, as an AmericanStudier, as a public scholar, as a person deeply interested in the past, was to respond that of course we should preserve such historic sites. But if we take a step back and consider what the question would mean in a contemporary context, things get a bit more complicated. Can we imagine a future organization spending millions of dollars to preserve Donald Trump’s many homes? Oprah Winfrey’s Lake Como getaway? Bill Gates’s estate? Certainly I can imagine tourists a hundred years hence being interested in visiting those places—well, hopefully not the Donald’s homes; but yeah, probably them too—but is that a sufficient argument for them to be preserved? Or does there indeed have to be something architecturally or artistically significant, or something historically or culturally resonant (beyond their owners’ obvious prominence), to merit the preservation of a private home? And do these “white elephants” (as Henry James famously called them) make the cut?

The question thus isn’t quite as simple as I had first imagined. But my own answer would, I believe, be to point precisely to the topics covered in this week’s blog posts. A site like The Breakers is the repository of so many compelling and vital American histories and stories, so many moments and identities that can help us understand and analyze who we’ve been and who we are. Of course there would be ways to remember and tell those stories without preserving the house, but I do believe that historic sites provide a particularly effective grounding for them, a starting point from which visitors (like this AmericanStudier) can continue their investigations into those themes. I know that my own ideas about America were expanded and amplified by my visit to Newport and The Breakers, as they have been by all my AmericanStudies trips. So while I know it’s not entirely practical, I vote for preserving anything and everything that can help with such ongoing and inspiring AmericanStudying.

Ben
P.S. What do you think?

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 pot had also long been central in funerary rites, and the fact that they were no longer being made must have caused heartache and anxiety for bereaved families preparing for the burial of a loved one in the brave new world of post-Roman Britain.

Baldock, the site of our find––which, in the 4th century had been a lively small town with a hardworking population of craftsmen and traders––ceased in the early 5th century to be a town, and in the decades after 400 it lost most of its population. Still, a few people continued to bury their dead in the former settlement’s old Roman cemetery.

During the Roman period, a number of typical Romano-British funerary rites had been practiced here, including postmortem decapitation (with the head of the dead person placed carefully between the feet of the corpse!) and hobnail-boot burial. Most of the dead during the Roman period were placed in the ground in nailed coffins, and a number were accompanied in their graves by domestic fowl and mass-produced, wheel-thrown pots, many of them color-coated beakers like our pot.

After 400, as pottery production faltered in the region, the community burying at Baldock carried on, as best it could, with time-honored Romano-British funerary traditions. Domestic fowl and coffins (although some now partially or wholly fastened with wooden dowels rather than now scarce iron nails) continued to play starring roles in funerals; and postmortem decapitations and hobnail-boot burial persisted, as did the placing of pots at the feet of the dead.

This is where our pot comes in. It is from one of Baldock’s 5th-century post-Roman graves. It is an extremely worn color-coated beaker, mass-produced in the years before the Roman economy’s collapse, and it had to have been at least a half-century old when buried. Much of its slip-coat had rubbed off from long years of use, and its rim and base were nicked and worn with age. Although this is exactly the same kind of little beaker favored by mourners burying at Baldock in the 4th century, the appearance of one in a 5th-century grave is startlingly different, because pots as hard-worn as this are never found in Roman-period graves. This pot is an extraordinary survival, an heirloom carefully husbanded by people determined to carry on funerary practices in which their families had participated for generations, rituals that, with the collapse of industrial-scale pottery production, must have required determination and the careful preservation of whatever pots were left. It gives eloquent testimony to the lived experience of people alive during Rome’s fall in Britain, people who were trying, as best they could, to maintain the rituals and lifeways of their ancestors.

Robin Fleming, professor of history at Boston College, is a 2013 MacArthur Fellow. Her most recent book is Britain after Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400 to 1070 (Penguin, 2010). 

Nicole White

“What is the most decadent thing anybody could ever do? Get all dressed up, do their make up, and stay at home.” -Marc Jacobs

Jazz music, speakeasies, flappers, and the mob were all part of Kansas City in the 1920s, but the Paris of the Plains was also swarming with creativity and innovation. In the early twenties, Walt Disney started an animation company called Laugh-O-gram Films on E. 31st Street in Kansas City where he created black and white animated short films based on classic fairytales. He befriended a small mouse in the building, which was said to have inspired his creation of Mickey Mouse. Later that decade, Ernest Hemingway, who had previously worked for the Kansas City Star, drove his wife back to the city for the birth of their second child while, at the same time, he was putting the finishing touches on one of his greatest masterpieces, A Farewell to Arms. And just around the corner, dressmaker Nell Donnelly Reed was making her mark in history.

Nell, born in 1889, grew up in the humble town of Parsons, Kansas and developed an interest in sewing at a young age. After moving to Kansas City and marrying Paul Donnelly, she quickly grew tired of cooking, cleaning, and handling other day-to-day domestic minutiae in the unflattering, drab clothing available to middle-class housewives. She asked herself, "Why not put a frill on it, the way I do on my holiday aprons?" As a result, Nell quickly reinvented the house dress in a way that would have made June Cleaver swoon. Her friends and family were so smitten by her dresses that they encouraged her to start a business. Nell told the New York Times, "I'll make women look pretty when they are washing dishes." And she did just that.

In 1916, Peck's Dry Goods in Kansas City ordered 18 dozen of Nell's dresses with the hopes of selling them for $1 (compared to the average price of 69 cents). Nell rushed out and purchased a few sewing machines and hired two girls to help her construct the 18 dozen dresses in her home. An article published in the New York Times about Nell's beginnings wrote, "Nell inquired at the store at noon of the day of delivery. Not one was left on the racks. From then on she contracted to deliver two dozen a day. It was not long before the other stores in the city became aware of the new style in house dresses. They sought out the young designer."

In a building not far from Walt Disney's studio in the early twenties, Nell employed 250 employees. Mirroring Henry Ford's approach, she brought the assembly line to garment production and came up with catchy tag lines for ads including "Nelly Don, Just Try One On" and "'Tis inward satisfaction to don a Nelly Don". Ironically, Nell's achievements proved that women could be successful outside the home, but she still embraced her initial passion of making quality and stylish dresses for housewives of all sizes at an affordable price. By the early 1930s, Donnelly Garment Company housed over 1,000 employees and was up to $3.5 million in sales.

Aside from her booming success, Nell made headlines across the country when she and her chauffeur were kidnapped in 1931. Their abductors forced Nell to write letters to her husband and a lawyer demanding $75,000 for her release. James Reed, a former U.S. Senator from Missouri, neighbor of the Donnellys, and father of Nell's newborn son (that's a whole other story) was contacted about the kidnapping and sprung into action. Reed went straight to Johnny Lazia, the reigning mob boss of Kansas City's organized crime scene, and threatened that if Lazia didn't find Nell within 24 hours, he would buy 30 minutes of radio time and reveal his shenanigans and shady connection to Tom Pendergast. Lazia acted quickly and sent 25 carloads of armed gangsters out into the city in search of Nell. Needless to say, members of Kansas City's mafia soon found Nell and her chauffeur unharmed in a four-room cottage in Bonner Springs, KS. Nell later said that the men who rescued her were scarier looking than her kidnappers.

Nell acquired a New York office in the Empire State Building as Nelly Don dresses were flying off the racks of high-end stores such as Bloomingdale's. Fortune Magazine described her as possibly the most successful businesswoman in the United States. She kept her self-made business thriving through the great depression and wartime (Donnelly Garment Company was the largest manufacturer of women's military and work clothing during World War II), while still managing to be among the first in Kansas City to offer paid group hospitalization for employees and tuition benefits. She also
strived to make her workers happy with perks such as a cafeteria, a cart that offered lemonade and snacks in the afternoon, company parties, and an in-house shop where employees could acquire unused fabric to make their own clothes at home. Nell designed and sold more dresses in the 20th century than any other single person in the United States.

Just like Nell Donnelly Reed, Marc Jacobs shares the concept of feeling "decadent" at home by wearing exquisite clothing. The drab, Mother Hubbard clothing worn by housewives in the early 1900s may be comparable to the styleless, matching sweat suits and yoga pants worn by modern day homemakers. Inspired by Nell, I recently designed and sewed my own house dress (highly unlikely I'll be doing housework while wearing it). I chose a unique black fabric with appliquéd flowers and added fullness to the skirt, which gives it a 1950s vibe. As Nell once said, "No housewife in America today need look dowdy and frumpy, unless she wants to be that way."

________

Crossposted from Iron as Needed.