Results for Travel

"What the devil are they doing"? English Authors Writing about America

September 24, 2013
Randall Stephens 

Oh, my autumn almanac
Yes, yes, yes, it's my autumn almanac.

I like my football on a Saturday,
Roast beef on Sundays, all right.
I go to Blackpool for my holidays,
Sit in the open sunlight.

- Ray Davies, The Kinks, "Autumn Almanac" (1967)

An American version, "Fall Almanac," just wouldn't have cut it.  Ray Davies has long been an observer of the differences--linguistic, cultural, and otherwise--of the American and English scenes.  Sure, The Kinks were as English as clotted cream, cricket, Yorkshire pudding, and bad weather.  But Ray and brother Dave spent quite a bit of time living or touring in both countries. 

I've spent my share of time in both countries, too. I live in Newcastle Upon Tyne. (Which, in itself, is almost like another country compared with the Kinks North London stomping ground.)  So I look forward to getting my hands on a copy of Ray Davies new book Americana: The Kinks, the Riff, the Road: The Story (October, 2013).  Here, so says the promo material, the famous mod rocker and 60s icon "tries to make sense of his long love-hate relationship with the country that both inspired and frustrated him." The book promises to take "us on a very personal road trip through his life and storied career as a rock star, and reveals what music, fame, and America really mean to him." 

These kinds of travelogues have long been bestsellers.  Authors of them have included helpings of criticism along with a dash of admiration.  Maybe the sheer number of these volumes has something to do with the cultural and political special relationship between the two nations, the shared language, or just a general curiosity.  Think of the Americans who write about Britain--humorist Bill Bryson or former ambassador Raymond Seitz.  Or the English who write about life in the U.S.--academic Terry Eagleton and, most obviously, Alistair Cooke.

This is a literary trail that winds all the way back to the 18th and 19th centuries, when many of those who lived in America were becoming more than just relocated English people. I'm most interested in the English who made their way to the colonies or the U.S., pen in hand,
The "British despot" beaten again, 1897.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
ready to comment on American bragging and tobacco chewing.  They asked: What accounted for the growing distance between the Mother Country and the New World? Was there such a thing as an American character?  Or, as G. K. Chesterton put it in his What I Saw in America (1922): "We say that the Americans are doing something heroic, or doing something insane, or doing it in an unworkable or unworthy fashion, instead of simply wondering what the devil they are doing" (7).  Many of us natives wonder the same thing. A great collection of these accounts--spanning the centuries--is Allan Nevins' America through British Eyes. (Published in 1948, it's now a difficult volume to come by).   

If you're endlessly fascinated by such romps through America's teeming cities, pig-choked streets, and highways and byways then check out these gems:

Douglas S. Robertson, ed., An Englishman in America in 1785 being the Diary of Joseph Hadfield (1933)

Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832)

Harriet Martineau, Society in America (1837)

Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation (1842) 
 
John Benwell, An Englishman's Travels in America: His Observations of Life and Manners in the Free and Slave States (1853) 

Anthony Trollope, North America (1862)

William Archer, Through Afro-America: An English Reading of the Race Problem (1910)
"What the devil are they doing"? English Authors Writing about America "What the devil are they doing"? English Authors Writing about America Reviewed by Joseph Landis on September 24, 2013 Rating: 5

Summertime Hiatus

June 23, 2013

During our short break, have a look at these summer-related posts.

Tuesday, September 18, 2012
The Battle of Antietam and War Photography
Heather Cox Richardson

One hundred and fifty years ago this weekend, 75,000 Union and about 38,000 Confederate troops massed near Sharpsburg, Maryland. One hundred and fifty years ago on Monday morning, a clear fall day, September 17, 1862, the two armies engaged. The ensuing battle of Antietam remains the bloodiest one-day battle in American history.>>>

Tuesday, August 16, 2011
School’s Back From Summer: Blogging about Teaching
Edward J. Blum

Well, it’s about that time, that delightful and dreadful moment when classes begin again. Unless you are privileged to have a sabbatical or be on fellowship (cough, cough, Matt Sutton you lucky duck, cough, cough), the end of August is when the kids come back and time flies away. Alas, school’s back from summer!>>>

Thursday, July 7, 2011
Summer Fiction Reading
Randall Stephens

Have you noticed all the newspaper and magazine articles on summer reading? Can you take your iPad, Kindle, or Nook to the beach? (Someone must have invented a waterproof case already.)>>>

Thursday, July 15, 2010
Dog History Days of Summer
Randall Stephens

Lately I've been on some history walking tours of Boston, accompanied by my dog, Beatrice. She's a border collie. Very smart.>>>
Summertime Hiatus Summertime Hiatus Reviewed by Joseph Landis on June 23, 2013 Rating: 5

The Greatest Migration of All

May 14, 2013
Eric B. Schultz

Ask an American historian to define the Great Migration and you’ll hear one of several answers.  Most will describe the movement of 6 million African Americans from the rural South who headed north and west, from
A Jack Delano photo of migrants
heading north from Florida, 1940.
World War I through 1970, seeking economic opportunity and relief from Jim Crow laws. This is the story so beautifully told in Isabel Wilkerson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Warmth of Other Suns.

There’s another group of historians who might describe the Great Migration as the 20,000 English men, women, and children who crossed the Atlantic between 1620 and 1640, seeking opportunity and relief in New England. These are the Mayflower names, the families that delight and provide such rich insights for genealogists.  Since 1988 the New England Historic Genealogical Society has sponsored the Great Migration Study Project, scheduled for completion in 2016.

In his monumental What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 Daniel Walker Howe describes “one of the greatest migrations in America,” when Andrew Jackson encouraged white squatters from the Carolinas, Georgia, and Tennessee to move onto 14 million acres expropriated from the Creeks. By 1819 this flood of humanity had established Mississippi and Alabama. “The Alabama fever rages here with great violence,” one North Carolina farmer moaned, “and has carried off vast numbers of our citizens.” Never, Howe remarks, had so large a territory been settled so rapidly—though the peopling of the Old Northwest Territory was not far behind.

Still, there has been another kind of Great Migration in America, less dramatic, but in some ways the steadiest and perhaps most influential. It also has great bearing upon one of today’s hottest political issues, immigration policy, and helps explain why Silicon Valley is so vested in the bill currently making its way through Congress.

"The Puritan Migration to America, 1620-1640."
From Bedford/St. Martin's MapCentral.
Brooke Hindle (1918-2001) was the historian emeritus at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History when he, along with (current) Brown University’s Steven Lubar, authored Engines of Change: The American Industrial Revolution 1790-1860. It’s a beautiful book that emphasizes the material aspects of innovation (later reinforced in Hindle’s excellent Emulation and Innovation). It also answers in a very simple way a very profound question: How did a nation of farmers stage their own Industrial Revolution and by 1851 stun the world with their technological prowess at London’s Crystal Palace Exhibition?

One answer, of course, is theft and industrial espionage. If good ideas can be stolen and copied, from Samuel Slater’s work in duplicating an Arkwright-type spinning factory at Pawtucket, to Francis Cabot Lowell’s study of English power looms, then revolution is possible. Indeed, even Eli Whitney—who all good Americans know invented the cotton gin—relied upon a millennium of global cotton gin technology (and not very well, Angela Lakwete’s Inventing the Cotton Gin tells us). One wonders if the talk in 19th-century Parliament about Americans wasn’t roughly akin to that of today’s U.S government and its recent indictment of China’s military for stealing industrial technology.

A second answer is that Jefferson’s virtuous farmer also just happened to be conversant with machines of all kinds; a healthy farm required that cams, ratchets, escapements, pistons, and even (or especially!) whiskey stills be in good working order. Lubar and Hindle quote one New Jersey farmer-tavern keeper, who told an astounded visitor not long after the Revolution, “I am a mover, a shoemaker, furrier, wheelwright, farmer, gardener, and when it can’t be helped, a soldier. I make my bread, brew my beer, kill my pigs; I grind my axes and knives; I built those stalls and that shed there; I am barber, leech, and doctor.” 

Finally—and here’s the Great Migration aspect—America (with a few notable decades excepted) has long been a welcome destination for skilled artisans. Dutch and Polish glassworkers, Italian silk reelers, and German sawyers arrived in Jamestown, the authors tell us, at the invitation of the Virginia Company. England, itself a destination for German miners, Flemish weavers, and French glassworkers and horologists, in turn transferred those technologies to America as skilled artisans crossed the Atlantic.

As early as 1754, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, had a pumped and piped water supply courtesy of Moravian Germans. The famous Pennsylvania rifle and Conestoga wagon evolved from German prototypes. The sawmill, so important to America’s growth, was brought by artisans from Hamburg. England passed along navigational and mathematical instruments, clockmaking, gunnery, and coal-fuel industries. In the 1830s and 1840s when the steam engine pushed the geographic center of industry from New England to Pennsylvania, it was English, Scottish, Welsh, and Cornish miners and ironworkers who brought their skills to bear. “The leading cities—Philadelphia, Boston, and New York—received a continuing stream of artisans,” Hindle and Lubar write, “most of them from London, quickly making available the skills and newer developments of the British metropolis.”
Occupational portrait of a skilled worker,
ca. 1850. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

There seems more than a casual relationship between the fact that, from 1824 to 1831, more than 1,000 Englishmen classifying themselves as “machinists” immigrated to the United States, and by 1860 American machinists were among the best in the world.

Like a modern CEO warning his engineers that they will surely fail if they adopt a “not invented here” mentality, George Washington told his countryman in his first address to Congress that “the introduction of new and useful inventions from abroad” could be as valuable as those created by the “skill and genius” of Americans. Those kinds of “foreign entanglements” were ones that the Commander in Chief appeared to welcome.

While Hindle and Lubar focus on cutting edge technology, we also know that sometimes the sort of “artisan talent” that migrated to America came in the form of incredible persistence and sheer ambition. In The Maritime History of Massachusetts, Samuel Eliot Morison tells us that conditions on whaling vessels became so abysmal that American citizens refused to serve; this left opportunity for “Kanakas, Tongatabooras, Filipinos, and even Fiji cannibals like Melville’s hero Queequeg” to make their way in America. By taking jobs that Americans would not, these hearty immigrants supported an enormously profitable global trade and enriched their adopted country.

It’s a powerful historical reminder that this Great Migration of skills that advanced America’s innovation economy over the last 300 years sprang from both the most advantaged and the least advantaged immigrant groups.

Once again we are embroiled in a great debate about immigration. (For two sides of the coin, see Howie Carr’s piece here and David Brooks’ here.) I don’t pretend to know the best policy, nor do I suggest that three centuries of this Great Migration of talent and technology should be the only thing considered in the debate. I just hope, given the impact of this extraordinary gift, that it is at least one of the factors considered by those who might otherwise close our borders.
The Greatest Migration of All The Greatest Migration of All Reviewed by Joseph Landis on May 14, 2013 Rating: 5
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