MARCH/APRIL 199; VOLUME 13/NUMBER 2

Walt Whitman 1819-1892 EDITOR'S NOTE

The Walt Whitman Centennial He was a printer's devil, a country schoolmaster, a newspaperman, a builder of houses, a wartime nurse, a government clerk, a poet. Walt Whitman, who died one hundred years ago this March, brought a new voice, a new vernacular to American poetry. Like Hawthorne and Emerson and Melville, Whitman felt that he had dwelt long enough within the cultural traditions of Europe. He saw in America—and analogously in himself—an emergent greatness and celebrated it in a small volume of untitled poems printed in 1855, Leaves of Grass. "I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world," he crowed in one of them. He was exuberant, egotistical, and shocking. Walt Whitman in an 1872 photograph by G. Critic Mark Van Doren later wrote that Whitman owed a clear debt Frank E. Pearsall. National Portrait Gallery, to Emerson, citing the book's epigrammatic style, the nature of things Smithsonian Institution. said, and "the quality of the egoism." Van Doren added: "From Emerson he learned his fundamental lesson, that a man could accept Humanities A bimonthly review published by the and celebrate himself in cosmic language. He could transfer his vision National Endowment for the Humanities from the eccentric, the unique self to the general, the impersonal one. He could move at once from doubt of Walt Whitman, to faith in Man, Chairman: Lynne V. Cheney of whom he might take what he called 'Myself as representative. Director of Communications Policy: Bound as he was to brood upon his own nature, he found in Emerson a Claire del Real way to do so which would legitimatize his emotions, liberate himself, and fascinate the world." The untitled poem was to become "Song of Myself," and Whitman Editor: Mary Lou Beatty was to continue the exploration of self and nationhood for the rest of Assistant Editors: James S. Turner his life. The twelve poems and ninety-five pages of the original Leaves Ellen Marsh of Grass grew to 293 poems and 382 pages by the sixth edition in 1881. Editorial Assistant: Amy Lifson The poems were in their final form, although Whitman kept tinkering with what he call the "annexes" at the end. In later life, most of it spent Editorial Board: Marjorie Berlincourt, Harold Cannon, George F. Farr, Jr., in Camden, New Jersey, Whitman received the occasional visitor and Donald Gibson, Guinevere Griest, James wrote some more. He began building a mausoleum to bring together Herbert, Thomas Kingston, Jerry Martin, his scattered family. And he began a final edition of Leaves of Grass. Malcolm Richardson, Carole Watson In January of 1892, two months before he died, Whitman prepared an advertisement for the New York Tribune:

Marketing Director: Joy Evans Walt Whitman wishes respectfully to notify the public that the book Leaves of Grass, which he has been working on at Design: Hausmann Graphic Design, Inc. great intervals and partially issued for the past thirty-five or forty years, is now completed, so to call it, and he would like this new 1892 edition to absolutely supersede all previ­ ous ones. Faulty as it is, he decides it is by far his special and entire self-chosen poetic utterance. In this issue of Humanities, we look not just at Whitman but at two The opinions and conclusions expressed in others who flourished in the late nineteenth century. Although some, Humanities are those of the authors and do not like Mark Twain, slighted Whitman's work, others found in the search necessarily reflect Endowment policy. Material appearing in this publication, except for that for a distinctive American vision an inspiration for their own endeav­ already copyrighted, may be freely reproduced. ors. In art, a fledgling Winslow Homer was drawing for the illustrated Please notify the editor in advance so that periodicals of the day, developing a fluidity of form that would be appropriate credit can be given. Humanities (ISSN 0018-7526) is published bimonthly for carried into his more serious painting. And in architecture, H. H. $11 per year by the National Endowment for Richardson, newly returned from study in Paris, was addressing the the Humanities, 1100 Pennsylvania Avenue, question of designing for the new materials and techniques of the N.W., Washington, D.C. 20506. Second-class postage paid at Washington, D.C., and addi­ industrial age. tional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address They were to foreshadow the new American century. changes to Humanities, NEH, 1100 Pennsylvania —Mary Lou Beatty Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20506. Annual subscription rate: $11.00 domestic, $13.75 foreign. Two years: $22.00, $27.50.

Telephone: 202/786-0435. Fax: 202/786-0240.

MARCH/APRIL 1992 HUMANITIES THE MAGAZINE OF THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES

Page 17 Page 10 Education The Whitman Centennial Other Features

4 A Conversation with. . . 10 The American Renaissance: 26 Buildings of NEH Chairman Lynne V. Cheney Literature at Midcentury the United States discusses educational reform By Ellen Marsh in central Europe with two 12 Whitman's Wanderings A new guidebook series offers educators in Budapest and one By Francis Murphy comprehensive treatment of the in Prague. Through phases as a news­ nation's architectural heritage. paperman, builder, and nurse, Whitman wrote poetry that 30 Sephardic Jewry and 1492 37 The Numbers Game gave him fame without fortune. By Jane S. Gerber By Jeffrey Thomas Scholars debate the circum­ Despite momentous recent 14 Whitman and the Bohemians stances and impact of the Jewish events in central Europe and expulsion from Spain in the Age Russia, the teaching of world By Jan Seidler Ramirez of Discovery. history in American high Whitman, not a proper bohemian schools focuses on ages past. himself, ran with the Pfaff s crowd and left a Greenwich 34 The World of Issei Village legacy. By Steven Wolf Los Angeles' new Japanese 17 H. H. Richardson: American museum looks at the The Humanities Guide An American Idiom in first generation. Architecture 42 Reference Materials By James F. O'Gorman 39 Noteworthy By Helen C. Agtiera To promote a national cultural identity a la Whitman, Richardson 40 In Focus: Alfonso Ortiz 43 Recent NEH Grants forged a new architectural style. Views of a native American by Discipline anthropologist. 22 Winslow Homer: 46 Deadlines The Years as Illustrator 41 Calendar By David Tatham Intrigued like Whitman by American common culture, the painter learned his craft working on popular illustrated magazines.

HUMANITIES 3 A Conversation with ... ATTILA POK & PETER HANAK

h e changing fa c e of Lynne V. Cheney: First you might work in the research institutes. What­ explain to me what the Hungarian ever they could publish was under EDUCATION IN CENTRAL Academy of Sciences does. control, but anyway they could sur­ vive as scholars. T Attila Pok: When it was originally From the late sixties and early founded it was a body of distinguished seventies on, the intellectual climate E uro pe was t h e topic scholars. It didn't have the function became more liberal and our institute of day-to-day managing and organiz­ especially gained in prestige. Our w h en N E H C hairman L ynne ing the activity of scholars because budget came from the state, and if the scholarship was organized through senior leader of the research institute V . C h e n e y m e t r e c e n t l y university chairs. could convince the responsible poli­ After the Second World War, fol­ ticians that this or that project was WITH EDUCATORS IN BUDAPEST lowing the Soviet pattern, the acad­ very important, that it might enhance emy was reorganized as something the prestige of the academy, and thus and Prague. In this passage like a ministry of scholarship. It was enhance also the prestige of socialist believed that scholarship, just as Hungary, then money was no problem. she talks with Attila Pok, other things of life, can be adminis­ Now the aim of the academy is to tered and planned and managed. secretary of the National get a really autonomous position so So the academy and the research that it isn't dependent in its scholarly institutes of the academy were used Committee of Hungarian activity on the government or any­ for research and the university chairs body else. But at the same time, the did the work of teaching; and in an Historians and deputy direc­ parliament has to put a certain amount artificial way, teaching and research of money in the budget at the dis­ t o r OF THE EUROPA INSTITUTE, were divided. posal of the academy. This system had disadvantages, but At the present moment, however, and Peter Hanak, head of also some advantages, because in the when the whole country is in a very fifties, especially in the late fifties, difficult economic situation, all THE DEPA RTMENT OF MODERN early sixties, there was a great num­ expenses that have no direct social ber of very prestigious scholars who use, that do not produce immediate H is t o r y in t h e I n s t it u t e were not allowed to returns or profit are difficult to get. teach at the univer­ This is now the great problem of the f o r H is t o r y o f t h e H u n ­ sities, but still they academy, that the were allowed to do parliament Service Information U.S. ofCourtesy garian A cademy some research wants to

Peter Hanak, Attila Pok, and Lynne V. Cheney

MARCH/APRIL 1992 subsidize only those things of research ideological criteria, as well, for get­ number of universities the content which are directly productive even ting this or that degree. fundamentally changed. those only to a limited extent; and we Cheney: What kind of ideological For example, at the faculty of law, thus have a very great problem in criteria? at Budapest University, a very good getting enough money for our work. chair for real political science devel­ This is, of course, a disadvantage, Hanak: You have now a wonderful oped. It was also quite remarkable but there are also very positive mathematician in the United States, that some of these chairs also became changes. First of all, the whole intel­ Jean Kollar, a Hungarian and a genius the centers of what is generally des­ lectual climate is now much more in mathematics at twenty. But he was, cribed as reformed communism. liberal than it used to be. Secondly, first, religious and, second, didn't fol­ Relatively young intellectuals within completely new forms of subsidizing low the Marxist line so he couldn't the party were trying to achieve cer­ scholarly research have turned up, get the support he needed. Therefore, tain changes by maintaining the foundations and so on, so that an insti­ he could not go to the Soviet Union. framework but slowly transforming tution like the academy as a whole Consequently, Kollar went to the it. But there were other universities and the research institute within it United States, got a job in Princeton, where the material used for teaching doesn't expect all its expenses to be got married, and now you have an was exactly the same as in 1962. expert, an excellent Hungarian. covered by the state budget. Cheney: One professor I talked to It is difficult to explain the new Pok: In order to get a degree, you said that many Hungarians learned situation to scholars who were used had to pass a number of examina­ two languages, so to speak, two intel­ to just applying for something and tions, not only a special examination lectual languages. One was the lan­ they either got it or they didn't get it, in your own field, but also exams in guage of Marxist-Leninism, and the and the reason was not financial but the ideological philosophy in Marx­ other was a more private language. political. They have to be persuaded ism and Leninism. Does this fit with your experience? to consider foundations and various Cheney: On these ideological exams, Hanak: other forms of indirect financing of This is ideological bilingual­ what kind of questions would you ism. Yes, because, for example, a research when they are developing have to answer? family has a family language for the their projects. For a very long time, scholars, especially in the field of humanities, had no idea about the financial side “To a Hungarian student the professor of research, and I think that in the very long run, this new awareness might be an advantage. More realis­ IS AN AUTHORITY. THE AMERICAN STUDENT tic projects might be worked out, but this period of transition we are in is CONSIDERS THE PROFESSOR A PARTNER.” very, very difficult.

Cheney: One of the questions to be —P o k decided, I understand, is who will grant Ph.D.'s, whether this will con­ Pok: Maybe you were asked about children, and then at school there is tinue to be a function of the academies what Lenin said about the role of the another language, so we were accus­ or whether this will be returned to state. These exams were taken very tomed to have two faces and split con­ the universities. seriously. At every university when sciousness, if you want, something you started your curriculum, you also for the public life and something for Peter Hanak: This is the task of the had to choose some sort of ideologi­ family and society life. universities. cal subject, such as political economy My society, for example, was most­ Cheney: Why was it assigned to the or scientific socialism. There were ly composed of oppositional scholars, academies in the past? Was it an special chairs for all this, and you can but in public life, including here or attempt to weaken the universities? imagine how many people had this the institute, one had to take Marxist- as a background and who were teach­ Leninist ideology into account. Now Pok: It was an attempt at centraliz­ ing this and lived on teaching it. The we don't have to. And we don't. ing and controlling academicians and quality, of course, varied. their universities. You couldn't, for Cheney: When I talk to scholars in example, be appointed to a certain Cheney: You couldn't teach capital­ the former Soviet Union, they talk position at the university without ism or free market economies in a about not being able ever to get the having an academic degree, so while positive way, could you? books that they wanted. Was that a in principle the university had the Pok: No. But it kept changing, so problem in Hungary, too? right to appoint, it was in fact not the the history of the seventies and eight­ Pok: It was not easy to buy some­ right of the university because if that ies in Hungary is extremely interest­ times the very expensive source pub­ person didn't have that degree they ing. The old framework survived. lications, for example, but if some­ couldn't be appointed. So it was It remained the same, so that the stu­ body had a peculiar research interest another way of trying to keep every­ dents at university kept learning all and was in need of a specific book, thing under control; and there were these ideological subjects, but at a one could either within the frame­

HUMANITIES work of a trip or with the help of a pares you to pass this examination, if you have a Xerox machine in the library exchange generally get it. that's his business. corner then you can copy a lot of things. And you can distribute them. Cheney: We have been talking about Cheney: Is the examination you It was the same with personal com­ the difficulties that the old regime mention a good one? puters. Now we have got a whole caused at the college and university Hanak: This is a very controversial desktop publishing system, and some level. Do you pay attention to the problem. Some want to abolish this of the publications that we have pre­ schools? so-called German and Hungarian pared were also made with the help "maturity" examination. And some Pok: You mean primary and secondary? of this system. are for such an examination. It would Cheney: Yes. be very hard for us to have a number Cheney: How did you get that? Were Pok: We are sometimes asked to give of different examinations because we you able to get state money for it? lectures for primary and secondary are a small country. We can have a Pok: It was step by step. One, the very first one, we got with the help of the Soros Foundation. Whenever we “T h e GREATEST SHOCK FOR ME WHEN I had, for example, the task of publish­ ing something very important, then we could ask for further support and STARTED TEACHING AMERICAN STUDENTS WAS sometimes it arrived in the form of another computer. THAT THEIR BACKGROUND KNOWLEDGE WAS Cheney: When you look at how education used to be under the old GENERALLY MORE LIMITED ___ ” system and you compare it with now or where you want to be, what was —P o k the greatest weakness? Pok: Of the former system? school teachers. We are sometimes variety of schools—private ones, asked to revise history textbooks for religious only—but not a variety of Cheney: Yes. primary or secondary schools. Right examinations. Hanak: If you want a very quick and now there is a very, very great dif­ Cheney: The private schools are sup­ simple answer, it was the lack of plural­ ficulty in that primary and secondary ported by the state? ism, the thinking in pluralistic forms, schools are in great need of a text­ where there are alternatives. Up to book for the post-World War II period. Hanak: Yes, and the foundations. the mid-eighties that was the biggest Cheney: Are American foundations Cheney: I am sure. problem, I would say. From the mid­ important here? I hear about the eighties, we had some pluralistic Pok: It's not that all the former his­ Soros Foundation? thinking, but only at the higher level. tory books cannot be used because Pok: Yes, Soros is a very great help. some of them are good for earlier per­ He was the very first American to Pok: I remember lecturing at a great iods. But for the post-World War II establish a foundation in Hungary number of secondary schools in the period, they are not only permeated and it does many things: scholarships countryside in the mid-1980s, and I by ideology, but they deal with prob­ for students and teachers of English, must say that if I compared the intel­ lems that are unimportant from the enrichment of libraries. If anywhere lectual atmosphere of those second­ present point of view. They devote at a cultural institution you see a ary schools to some prestigious second­ much attention to the congresses of good-quality copy machine, there is ary schools in Budapest, they were the Communist party or the various some possibility that this was bought completely different worlds, as if factions, let's say, within the Commu­ with the help of the Soros Foundation. they were not in the same country. nist party. The rural students were really unable A lot of things have been omitted Cheney: When I was in Russia, in to think in a pluralistic way. that are important. In this work our the former Soviet Union, I remember I could make the same comparison institute and historians again have an talking to historians who said that between American and Hungarian important role. they did get a copy every month of students. The greatest shock for me One thing that has changed now is Foreign Affairs, but there were fifty when I started teaching American historians and only one copy. I said, that some schools—religious ones, for students was that their background very foolishly, why don't you Xerox example—don't have to use the offi­ knowledge was generally more limited it? They had no Xerox machine and cial textbook published by the Minis­ than that of an average Hungarian no prospect of getting a Xerox machine. try of Education. The ministry works student, but they were much more We sometimes forget how important off the national curriculum, which is willing to think and ask questions. these things are. compulsory for every school. The Much more. final examination that students take Pok: I must say that the lack of Xerox The Hungarian student knew more, at age eighteen is based on this curri­ machines was due not only to eco­ but was unwilling really to think. culum, but how the teacher prepares nomic problems but to political and It was not just the amount of infor­ you with the help of what books, pre­ ideological problems as well, because mation but their whole approach also

6 MARCH/APRIL 1992 to the professor. To a Hungarian stu­ Cheney: Awkward. Pok: There might be different reasons dent the professor is an authority. Hanak: Awkward, that's a good word. for it. First of all, I think there is a The American student considers the It was almost prohibited to speak of long-standing tradition that certain professor a partner. They are build­ the Hungarians in the Second World things that couldn't be expressed poli­ ing up something together. War because we fought against the tically were expressed in the form of If a Hungarian student asks a ques­ Soviet Union; no memorial statues for historical analogies. tion and the professor says, well, I'll the victims of the Second World War. So problems of the day were meant, come back to that next time, every­ Pok: The Hungarian victims. but the person was actually writing body forgets it by next time. But gene­ about some historical subject. That Hanak: The Hungarian victims. We rally, in the case of American stu­ was also the role of literature and art. had to teach that we fought an unjust dents, they will ask "Did you prepare There were a number of things that war against the Soviet Union, which your answer for me and have you intellectuals and artists could say that is true because it was not a very pro­ read what I submitted?" politicians could not. gressive thing, but that had nothing There is certainly nothing like an Another reason might be that so evaluation sheet at Hungarian uni­ to do with the individual soldier. His family had to be silent about him. many traditional politicians from the versities. socialist regime have been completely Pok: One problem we have now, that discredited. Therefore, we need new Cheney: Student evaluations? it might be strange to hear about from people who haven't been discredited Pok: Student evaluations which the a historian, is that one often has the politically, and this vacuum has been student has to complete. When I feeling that too much attention is filled by a number of intellectuals, teach my American students, at the being paid to the past. Politicians in free intellectuals. end of every term they have to com­ parliament deal more with the past plete an evaluation form. It couldn't than with the present, which is their Cheney: If I come back and visit you be imagined in Hungary. proper task. in five years, how will your lives be Of course this is understandable Cheney: Is it a good idea? different? because if there are unclear things in Pok: Yes. It is. It all came to my mind history or uncertainty about facts, Hanak: (laughter) Come back in two when you asked about the weaknesses then that's a problem people want to years. of the old system. The greatest weak­ ness of the system was that it didn't develop a person able to participate in a pluralistic society where he has “W ho knows what w ill happen in the to make decisions every day, so the end results or the end product of this educational system was a more or ex-Soviet Union, in Yugoslavia, in less well-trained subordinated person or subject. Romania, in Czechoslovakia? W e a r e Cheney: Still, your students know a lot, you said. DEPENDENT ON FOREIGN FACTORS.” Hanak: The interest is very great for history in central Europe, which makes —H a n a k it all the worse that history was sim­ plified to schemes and dogmas. The personal experiences of the come to terms with. But there is an I am uncertain how to answer the fathers and grandfathers of the stu­ overemphasis on clarifying historical question because we are greatly depen­ dents did not fit with the history stu­ problems, and if you made a content dent on our neighbors. Who knows dents were being taught. Instead of analysis of the speeches given in par­ what will happen in the ex-Soviet learning about the Russian siege of liament, of how much was dedicated Union, in Yugoslavia, in Romania, in Budapest, for example, they learned to various periods of Hungarian his­ Czechoslovakia? We are dependent about the Russian "liberation." tory and how much to real, burning, on foreign factors. The personal experiences I could present problems, it would be sur­ Our party system is not in good give to my children became very prising to see how much attention is shape, or final shape; therefore we important for us. Our children did not given to the past. don't know what trend will be victor­ ious. Still I think that until 1995 or learn in school, for example, about the Hanak: Our president used to be a 1996, our greatest problems will be extermination of Jews, and there was historian, and so, too, the minister of economic. So if you go to our minis­ no word of this problem for forty years. war or defense, and the minister of try, I hope you will say that humani­ Cheney: In the textbooks? foreign affairs. ties are one of the most important Hanak: In textbooks, in the media, Cheney: It is unusual. In the United things for the coming twenty years, because it was—how you say— for each States, intellectuals very seldom as important as technologies, and party it was something inconvenient, become political leaders, but we see as important as any technological something . .. this in central Europe. Why is that? knowledge. □

HUMANITIES A Conversation with...RADIM PALOUSA Conversation with...RADIM The conversation continued in Prague with Palous: We had "flat seminars," held in private flats or apartments. I was teaching the non-Marxist view in Radim Palous, the new rector of Charles secret. And I think I shall never in my life have such audiences as I had in U niversity. D r . Palous ts the U niversity’s the flats. The students weren't there to get degrees or qualify for profes­ FIRST FREELY CHOSEN RECTOR, ELECTED sions. They were there because they wanted to learn.

b y t h e S e n a t e f a c u l t y . Cheney: And they took a risk in order to learn. Palous: The police would come and Radim Palous: Perhaps I should des­ For philosophers and historians, it arrest me, arrest them. cribe the university for you. Charles was different. In philosophy, it was University was founded by the Czech not possible to teach any philosophi­ Cheney: That kind of experience is king Charles in 1348—there's none cal trends that turned from Marxism. so hard for people who live in a free older in central Europe. In all of One couldn't interpret, or if it was society really to understand. It seems Europe, only the Sorbonne is older, done, it had to be done carefully. a nightmare. and Oxford, Cambridge, some of the Historical research was always risky. Palous: You can also think that we Mediterranean universities. In 1998, Our twentieth century is very differ­ have had important moral experi­ we'll celebrate our 650th year. ent from the American century. Our ences that other societies have not. There are sixteen faculties and republic lived only twenty years after We have something spiritually valu­ 30,000 students, and that's enough. 1918. It was lead by an intellectual, able to offer the Western world. We We don't wish to be bigger. We have Masaryk, who was a friend of Woodrow lived under a watchdog regime with more than 3,000 teachers from Wilson and a professor of philosophy Western understanding: We know Marienbad to Dubrushka. at this university. Then came World totalitarianism, and we know democ­ Lynne V. Cheney: I've heard about War II and then the Soviets. Now, racy. We mix these experiences and your new social science department. after 1989 we are free. And again we offer much to the humanities, that is, Tell me how it came to be. are led by an intellectual. a history, a philosophy, that has been deepened by what we have been Palous: In the old university, there Cheney: You spent many years as through. So despite these sufferings, had been a faculty of journalism, which a dissident before you were elected we still have much to be thankful for. was nothing more than a school for rector of the university. teaching Marxist-Leninist propaganda. Cheney: I am amazed that after all Palous: Thirteen. I had three times to After I was elected rector of the uni­ you've been through, you talk about leave my job. I have two Ph.D.'s, one versity in 1990,1 established instead being grateful. Do you think your in philosophy. For a time, as a non- the faculty of social sciences, in which democracy is secure here now? Marxist philosopher I couldn't con­ also the former institutes of econom­ Palous: No, it's not secure. It has had tinue. So I studied chemistry. ics and politology were included. deep problems since the first hour of In the 1960s I went back to philo­ I appreciate very much the help of existence. Right now we are very sophy; 1967 was my rehabilitation. I the Mellon Foundation and other U.S. worried about our borders, particu­ went up against one of my opponents insitutions' helping us in postgraduate larly the Ukraine. And there are other in argumentation to qualify for an education, particularly in economics. difficulties. Democracy is in each epoch assistant professorship. I made it and a task, not a given reality. Cheney: What was the climate for became leader of the department. teaching under the old regime? There was the "Prague spring," and Cheney: What is the role of a univer­ Palous: There were three political hopes were high. But then came the sity in a democracy? parties, so-called, but it was really a Russian occupation, and I had to leave Palous: To educate, in the sense that Communist party and two fictional the leadership of the department. I Plato talked about; to draw students offshoots. They were all dependent could stay at the university, but I was out from the dark to the light; to move on the Communist leadership. Each never sure of my fate. Then I got from closure to openness, to an under­ teacher, even in subjects like medi­ involved in Charter '77. That was a standing of the truth—which is some­ cine, had to have special permission group petitioning the government to thing that cannot be changed. from the Communist party to teach. abide by the constitutional charter. Cheney: There are many on univer­ Cheney: It must have been particu­ We were saying, "Please follow your sity campuses in the United States larly difficult in the humanities. constitution." It became the rallying who hold a different view. They point for dissidents. I signed the docu­ Palous: In the sciences, there were would argue that truth doesn't exist, ment, and within fourteen days of its that only perspectives do, and that no problems. Sulfuric acid is always publication I had to leave the univer­ sulfuric acid. There is no Marxist- the job of scholars is to explore differ­ sity. I was fifty-two years old. I became Leninist view of sulfuric acid. There ent perspectives. a coal stoker. But I didn't stop with was no one philosophy of sulfuric Palous: To be educated we must my philosophy or my teaching. acid; there was no Marxist-Leninist understand the truth. And that means philosophy of it. There was just sul­ Cheney: How could you possibly literally to stand under it. It is above furic acid. keep up your teaching? us, not we above it. □

HUMANITIES 9 Walt Wltitman, ca. 1854-55. This portrait was the frontispiece to the first edition (1855) of Leaves of Grass. Stipple engraving by Samuel Hollyer after a daguerreotype by Gabriel Harrison. he h a lf decade of i85o- When Ralph Waldo Emerson pro­ talist ideas into the national con­ 1855 saw the appearance of an nounced America's declaration of cul­ sciousness and to awaken Americans unusually rich cluster of liter­ tural independence from Europe in to a sense of the sublime social per­ ary works in America: his "American Scholar" address of fection that lay within their grasp. THawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850) 1837, he was actually articulating The other writers of the American and The House of the Seven Gables the transcendental assumptions of Renaissance were less sanguine about (1851), Melville's Moby-Dick (1851) Jefferson's earlier declaration of poli­ the fulfillment of the democratic ideal. and Pierre (1852), Thoreau's Walden tical independence. In the ideal new Hawthorne, even while portraying (1854), and Whitman's Leaves of Grass world envisioned by Emerson and his Hester Prynne's assertion of transcen­ (1855). Representing the first flower­ transcendentalist associates, America dental freedom as heroic, concluded ing of a national literature with was to become a perfect democracy that such antinomianism leads to characteristically American settings of free and self-reliant individuals. moral anarchy. And Melville, who and themes, the period is known as Because the transcendentalists con­ saw in the story of the Pequod a meta­ the American Renaissance. sidered the potentialities of the indi­ phor for the misguided assumptions Not a rebirth in the sense of a vidual to be infinite, the possibility of democratic idealism, declared the recovery of the lost arts of the past, of achieving the democratic ideal transcendentalist dream unrealizable. it was rather a confluence of two seemed, for them, within reach. Bring­ Ironically, the literary vigor with streams of thought that emerged in ing Emerson's metaphysics down to which both Hawthorne and Melville early nineteenth-century America: earth, Thoreau asserted that in Amer­ explored the ideal showed their deep a determination to cut loose from ica one can live entirely without sympathy with it even as they drama­ imitation of European literary forms, encumbrances and thus can realize tized its delusions. and a desire to explore the millennial the transcendental doctrine of self- Thus the writers of the American belief that an ideal new world was reliance. Emerson wanted to visual­ Renaissance waged a kind of imagi­ forming in America. ize Thoreau as the ideal scholar in nary debate over the American demo­ The dream of realizing a heavenly action that he had called for in the cratic ideal, with Emerson, Thoreau, commonwealth on earth was early pro­ "American Scholar," but in the end and Whitman affirming it as vibrant­ jected upon America, but Puritanism, Emerson regretted Thoreau's too- ly emergent, and Hawthorne and which began as a quest for freedom private individualism, which failed Melville warning that it was sadly from the English church, became an to signal the vibrant revolution in specious. Although the Civil War orthodoxy in its own right based large­ national consciousness that Emerson seemed to corroborate the ideals of ly on Old World habits of thought, and had prophesied. "Instead of engi­ freedom and democracy, the rise of the dream faded. The American Revo­ neering for all America," Emerson realism in literature and of pragma­ lution broke with the past, however, wrote of Thoreau, "he was the cap­ tism in philosophy during the latter reviving a belief in America's special tain of a huckleberry-party." half of the century revealed that the mission. The quasi-religious assump­ For Emerson, what Thoreau lacked, debate was not over. That the debate tions of the Declaration of Indepen­ Whitman embodied in full. On read­ continues heatedly to this day, in dence—freedom, equality, and the ing his complimentary copy of Leaves issues ranging from civil rights to inalienable rights of the individual— of Grass, Emerson saw in Whitman multiculturalism, only reinforces transformed the original dream of a the "prophet of democracy" whom the epic significance of the American sanctified commonwealth into a secu­ he had sought—the poet-seer with Renaissance and the revolutionary lar one of exemplary democracy. the charisma to propel transcenden­ legacy of which it, too, was a part. □ —James S. Turner the American Renaissance

HUMANITIES 11 Whitman's Wanderings

BY FRANCIS MURPHY

N JULY 21,1855, America's ing his mother and his retarded most distinguished literary brother, with whom he shared a O figure, Ralph Waldo room. His father had questioned Emerson, sent a letter to a resident of his son's "bohemian" ways, but Brooklyn, a poet completely unknown in spite of his seeming lack of direc­ to him, acknowledging the "wonder­ tion and indolence, Whitman was ful" gift of Leaves of Grass. In reading the soul of responsibility and had it, Emerson said, he felt "happy"— been working since he left school at the volume had given him "great the age of eleven or twelve. joy." It was, he added, "the most extra­ What attracted him more than any­ ordinary piece of wit and wisdom" thing else was the world of news­ contributed to the world of letters by papers. In 1846 he served as editor an American. He wasn't sure until of the Brooklyn Eagle, and in 1848 he cylinder and wet paper between us," he saw an advertisement for the book went with his brother Jeff to New he was impatient to leap from the in a newspaper whether the speaker Orleans to work on the Crescent. He book's pages and insinuate himself named in it, "Walt Whitman," was returned to Brooklyn to work on into their lives: a real or fictive person, but when he the Freeman, a daily newspaper sup­ learned he "could trust the name as ported by Free Soil Democrats. But If yon are a workman or a workwoman, I real and available for a post-office," in 1855 he was self-employed as a stand as nigh he felt like putting his own writing builder and thinking of himself with as the nighest that works in the same aside and striking out to meet him. increasing confidence as a writer. He shop. . . Had Emerson actually done so, he was the author of a temperance novel If you meet some stranger in the street would have found a remarkable man and, in addition to editorials, had writ­ and love him living in less than remarkable circum­ ten poems and essays. He kept his or her, do I not often meet strangers in stances, a far different writer from hand in as a compositor by setting the street and love them ? those college-educated men he knew the type for the 1855 Leaves himself. If you see a good deal remarkable in me I in Concord, Massachusetts. He needed neither Harvard nor Yale see just In July 1855, Whitman, thirty-six College; instead, the city became his as much remarkable in you. years old, was living on Ryerson Street university. As a newspaperman he in a house purchased by his mother. got to know its preachers and politi­ It was too close for comfort for some By the time he received Emerson's cians, its artists and writers, its librar­ readers, but in publishing his Leaves letter, his father, a farmer turned car­ ies, theaters, opera houses, and Whitman had found his true voice penter, had been dead two weeks, museums, and, above all, its ordinary and vocation; henceforth being the and Whitman must have been think­ men and women—carpenters and author of Leaves of Grass would be a ing about his responsibilities regard- craftsmen like himself, firemen and full-time job. He was already think­ cabdrivers, mechanics, sailors, and ing of a revised and expanded edition Francis Murphy is a professor of English ferrymen. In the volume he sent for 1856. at Smith College in Northampton, Emerson, he told his readers that, Emerson was not alone in admiring Massachusetts. "chilled with the cold types and Whitman's book, but Whitman was

12 MARCH/APRIL 1992 never a part of any literary establish­ Drum-Taps and "When Lilacs Last (treating the Civil War as if democracy ment, especially after the poems of in the Dooryard Bloom'd" are the had its origins there and not in the the "Children of Adam" and "Cala­ two great products of Whitman's Revolution). He was always cagey, mus" sections appeared in 1860 and wartime years. but he became more and more eva­ made it difficult for the reader not to After the Civil War it was not only sive about his personal history and confront his homosexuality. He found New York that seemed shallower to sometimes traded his integrity for his readers both here and in England him. America itself had failed in her popularity. He wanted nothing more among men and women of all social promises. Part of Whitman's dis- than to have a large audience and to classes, the self-educated as well as gruntlement may have been caused be a kind of prophet of American the highly taught. He was shunned by physical exhaustion. He often democracy. He prolonged his visit in Boston by Longfellow and Lowell told friends that the war years took a to his brother's house in Camden, and patronized in New York by terrible toll on his health, and in 1873 New Jersey, after the death of his William Dean Howells, who should he suffered a stroke that left him par­ mother, and in 1884 he bought a small have known better and who seconded tially paralyzed. He looked, and cul­ house on Mickle Street where he the remark of an anonymous critic tivated the look, of a much older man. spent his remaining years. Although who said that in reading Leaves of But not everything he wrote can be not very much read, he was famous Grass it was necessary to "hold your explained by mere bad temper. The and sought out by the great as well as nose." He suffered more than a mere republic of American artisan-crafts- the humble. Earlier, when he was at literary snub, however, when in June men he once envisioned had, in this his brother's house on Stevens Street, 1865 he lost his much-needed job in gilded age, been replaced by an he was visited by Oscar Wilde, who the Department of the Interior in Washington, D.C. The secretary, James Harlan, a preacher now turned The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains politician, announced that he would examine every employee for his of my gab and my loitering. "fidelity" and "moral character." When Harlan discovered a corrected I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, copy of the 1860 edition of the Leaves I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the zvorld. in Whitman's desk, he dismissed him. Whitman's firing was widely publi­ The last scud of day holds back for me, cized. Fortunately, he found employ­ ment almost immediately in the attor­ It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the ney general's office where, as the shadow'd wilds, Brooklyn Eagle smirked, they were "not so particular about morals." It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk. It was the Civil War that took Whitman south. In December 1862, I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun, he saw his brother George's name on I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags. a list of wounded and left Brooklyn for Virginia and the war front. Whit­ I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, man's efforts on behalf of the soldiers he found there and in the hospitals If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles. of Washington made him beloved by many, and a visit planned for weeks — "Song of Myself," from Leaves of Grass was extended for several years. For one moment Whitman must have debated whether nursing was his true oppressed crowd of industrial laborers said "I come as a poet to call upon a calling, but the impulse to write poems in a country driven by impersonal poet." Wilde's mother had read really never left him. Home for a visit greed. Whitman's best work after the selections from Leaves of Grass to him in November 1863, he wrote: war can be found in his prose collec­ when he was young, and Wilde often tions Specimen Days and Democratic quoted the poems when he was a I feel to devote myself more and more Vistas, where he scorned an America student at Oxford. Whitman offered to the work of my life, which is making "canker'd, crude, superstitious and his guest some homemade elderberry poems. I must bring out Drum Taps. rotten"— a nation that had failed all wine in a not-too-clean glass. When I must be continually bringing out but the rich. asked later if, given his epicurean­ poems... . The life here in the cities, and In these years Whitman began to ism, he had any hesitation about the objects, etc. of most, seem to me very rewrite not only his own history drinking it, Wilde responded that flippant and shallow somehow since I (offering his Leaves as a "veteran's he would have swallowed it had it returned this time. . .. testimony") but his country's as well been vinegar. □

HUMANITIES Whitman and the Bohem ians

WO DECADES AFTER the who congregated there consisted of death of Walt Whitman, his BY JAN SEIDLER RAMIREZ a somewhat fluid circle of aspiring T legacy lived on in the cultural journalists, thespians, writers, and revolution that erupted in Greenwich wits whose mentor-in-residence was Village on the eve of the First World Henry Clapp, drama critic, feminist, War. To those in the crusade to reform Fourierist, and sporadically employed the inequities and pretense of Ameri­ adopted for her stationery Whitman's editor. Some of the group, including can society and its stale art forms, dictum, "Do I contradict myself? Clapp, had visited Paris and actually Whitman was a prophet whose liber­ Very well then, I contradict myself." observed at firsthand the Latin Quar­ ating vision touched the core of their Isadora Duncan, idolized by count­ ter underworld immortalized in the radical creed. less village writers and artists for recently published tales of Henry While associated with the preced­ pagan sensuality, freely attributed Murger. Pfaff's became the testing ing century, Whitman's life and words her uninhibited dance technique to ground for their attempts to transplant embodied a bohemian defiance that Whitman's inspiration. Max Eastman, "la vie de Boheme" to New York. spoke directly to this modern gen­ Floyd Dell, Emma Goldman, Harry Whitman first entered the orbit eration of freethinkers. The Masses, Kemp, and James Oppenheim were of self-described "Pfaffians" in 1858 The Little Review, Seven Arts, and other other members of the village avant- after terminating his editorial tenure progressive "little magazines" born garde who acknowledged the potent at the Brooklyn Daily Times. His in the village between 1912 and 1919 impact of Whitman's democratic patronage of this Manhattan salon, paid repeated homage to Whitman gospel, confident individualism, and which entailed a lengthy trip from his in their pages. The Liberal Club on unapologetic sexuality on their radi­ Brooklyn home to the Fulton Ferry, MacDougal Street, founded in 1913 as cal psyche. a river crossing, and a ride on the up­ a "Meeting Place for Those Interested A spiritual participant in New town Broadway stage, certainly con­ in New Ideas," extended frequent York's counterculture of the early sumed a significant share of Whitman's lecture invitations to Horace Traubel, twentieth century, Whitman in his new-found leisure time. Distance was the poet's former assistant, confidant, own day had consorted with a clique incidental, however, when the await­ and literary executor. The Brevoort of clever literati and libertarians who ing rewards were contemplated: Hotel on Fifth Avenue at Eighth Street, conferred on Greenwich Village its ori­ a feast of stimulating conversations an oasis for local intellectuals with a ginal notoriety as a bohemian bridge­ and access to Pfaff's celebrated wine temporary cash surplus to expend, head shortly before the Civil War. cellar, heady cheeses, and savory welcomed members of the Interna­ This drama had unfolded in a dim German pancakes. tional Whitman Fellowship in its and smoky rathskeller at 653 Broad­ Whitman's renown as author of basement cafe. way, just north of Bleecker Street, Leaves of Grass preceded his admit­ Mabel Dodge, the moneyed host­ run by a genial Swiss-born German tance into Pfaff's inner sanctum. A ess whose Greenwich Village salon named Charlie Pfaff. The stage was a number of his barroom companions ignited the fuse of a chain of left-wing vaulted dining alcove in the tavern's are known to have read the volume, protests and daring creative ventures, cave-like basement that Pfaff reserved including Henry Clapp, who warmly for the use of his literary regulars, the praised it. The frontispiece engraving Jan Seidler Ramirez is assistant director subterranean setting seeming to auth­ that accompanied the first edition in for collections and curator for paintings enticate its occupants' divorce from 1855, depicting a coatless, bare-necked and sculpture at the Museum of the City Manhattan's main-street manners. Whitman in a pose of unflinching of New York. The cast of unorthodox characters nonchalance, also would have pro­

14 MARCH/APRIL 1992 jected the image of a man custom- The New-York Illustrated News (6 February Waldo Emerson shared Howells's ordered for the bohemian court tak­ 1864) depicts the bohemian patrons of Pfaff's impressions when he dropped by rathskeller (left) as they described themselves, ing shape at 653 Broadway: a willful Pfaff's for a look, describing its deni­ and (right) as they were characterized by deserter from the world of buttoned members of a rival club. zens as "noisy and rowdy firemen." collars and genteel deportment. In addition to Henry Clapp, crowned Whitman's embrace by the Pfaffians head of the Bierstube, who provoked was both immediate and advanta­ the disapproval of these upright men- geously timed. In 1858, the Saturday of-letters? Ironically, many were indi­ Press made its debut with Clapp as in this Broadway lair to lament their viduals who would graduate to the its founder and presiding editorial unrecognized genius, castigate bour­ ranks of mainstream authorship fol­ voice. Ambitious and underfinanced, geois society, and impress one another lowing a short-lived but exhilarating the publication was conceived as a with the audacity of their opinions. adolescence as cultural renegades. forum for fresh, often irreverent per­ Reports of their insurgent table talk Drama critic William Winter, editor spectives on contemporary literature, soon leaked to the press, luring curi­ and novelist Thomas Bailey Aldrich, drama, art, and politics. The contro­ osity seekers to inspect this bohemian anthologist and stockbroker E. C. versial weekly, denounced by some as nest for themselves. Stedman, and travel writer, poet, and a beer-hall house organ, also devoted Sightseers were rarely disappointed future diplomat Baynard Taylor were space to showcasing the newest Amer­ by the posturings of Pfaff's nonconfor­ among these brief-blooming bohemi­ ican writing, stepping on many tradi­ mist clientele. Whitman, who would ans. Other camp followers clung more tional toes in the process. The promo­ often recite poems-in-progress to his tenaciously to their radical convic­ tion of Whitman quickly emerged as tavern companions, proved a special tions, however. Several courted scan­ one of its special causes. In Decem­ house attraction. When the young dal by frequenting the nearby League ber of 1859, the Press published his Ohio journalist William Dean Howells for Free Love at 555 Broadway and poem "A Child's Reminiscence," encountered him at this village resort by penning accounts of their halluci­ retitled "Out of the Cradle Endlessly in 1860, he was intrigued by Whitman's natory experiments with hashish. Rocking," and over the next twelve rough dress, casual manner, and More than a handful would die young months featured twenty-five addi­ striking appearance, with "branching as victims of alcoholism, poverty, sui­ tional items by or about Whitman, beard" and "Jovian" cloud of hair. cide, and a "restless craving for mental including letters, reviews, and paro­ Admiringly, he recalled the poet as excitement," so Whitman concluded. dies. This attention served to fuel an "imperial anarch" in literature. Two women also risked the notori­ interest in Whitman's poetry while Although proud to have been pub­ ety of fraternizing with the Pfaff's set. inflating his public perception as a lished in the Saturday Press, Howells Propriety mattered little to actress fixture at Pfaff's. was less than awed by Whitman's Ada Clare, who had defied her gen­ In talk, conduct, and outlook, Pfaff's bohemian colleagues, whose "whirl­ teel southern upbringing by moving cadre of rebels resembled the Left ing words" sounded less original than to New York, entering the moral limbo Bank characters depicted in Murger's he had anticipated. Fresh from a call of the theater, and bearing a son out stories. They kept late hours, drank on New England's literary lions, of wedlock—the putative child of liberally, worked irregularly, and Howells was offended also by the composer-pianist Louis Gottschalk. championed free expression as an Pfaffians' contempt for these esteemed A contributing columnist to the inalienable right. Creatively inclined, authors. Their immoderate drinking Saturday Press and ardent supporter short of money, and professing to and incessant smoking also disturbed of Whitman's controversial poetry, loathe respectability, they gathered his self-restraint. Evidently Ralph Clare ruled New York as the "Queen

HUMANITIES 15 of Bohemia" during the height of her celebrity. When slanderers began to assail Clare after her grisly death from A WHITMAN SAMPLER rabies in 1874, Whitman defended the actress, insisting that she had he Museum of the City of On March 26, the day Whitman led "a gay, easy, free, loose, but not New York has organized a died in 1892, a program of music ungood life." ten-week program of activi­ and poetry readings at the Poet's Thespian and poetess Adah Isaacs T Corner of the Cathedral of St. John Menken shared Clare's enthusiasm ties collectively titled Democracy's Poet: A Walt Whitman Celebration, the Divine will kick off the activities. for Whitman, composing passionate which will take place at several Participants in subsequent free verse—punctuated with allusions cultural institutions in New York events include nationally known to her own affairs—that exhibited City and on Long Island from late poets speaking about the influence his influence. Shocking polite ideals March through May. of Whitman's poetry on theirs, and of femininity came easily to Menken, Marking the centennial of the major Whitman scholars speaking who made a practice of consuming poet's death, the project will look about his life, times, and poetry. brandy and smoking cigars with her at both the historical and the myth­ There will also be walking tours to male compeers at Pfaff's. Her appear­ ical Whitman through lectures, explore Whitman-related sites on ance in the melodrama Mazzeppa, Long Island, notably his birthplace wearing flesh-colored tights and symposia, readings, panel discus­ sions, tours, workshops for teachers, at Huntington Station, as well as strapped to the back of a horse, was and living history performances. the lower Manhattan haunts of one a much-publicized succes de scandale The two essays on Whitman of New York's first bohemians. of the New York stage. printed in this issue were written For a detailed program brochure, Although he relished the impas­ for the project. call 212/534-1672, ext. 226. sioned atmosphere of Pfaff's and for three years descended regularly into its basement club room, Whitman Other NEH- Supported Whitman Projects never himself acquired a proper bohe­ mian temper. He preferred to observe Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry Walt Whitman and Emily rather than partake in his friends' and Collected Prose was the first Dickinson took place at Columbia debates, sipping the house libations volume published in the Library University in New York City. while others guzzled. As the Civil War of America, a series of author­ A fellowship was awarded to began to scatter the Pfaffian corps, itative editions of classic Ameri­ David S. Reynolds of Rutgers Whitman became more aware of the can writers. University, Camden, New Jersey, unreal air that separated his tavern An hourlong Walt Whitman to do research on "Walt Whitman merrymaking from the somber mood documentary was filmed as part and His Times: Leaves of Grass and now gripping the city. In "The Two of the acclaimed PBS series American Culture," and Susan Vaults," an unfinished poem dating Voices and Visions: The Work and D. Dean of Bryn Mawr College, from this period, he contrasted Pfaff's World of the American Poet. Pennsylvania, received a sum­ convivial hideaway with an image of At the University of Iowa in Iowa mer stipend to study "Whitman's the "myriad feet" passing overhead City, Ed Folsom is conducting a Liminality: The Quaker Ground on Broadway, musing, "As the dead study of the aesthetic, political, of Leaves of Grass." in their graves, are underfoot hid­ philosophical, religious, and Younger Scholar awards have den/ and the living pass over them, social responses that Whitman's gone to Richard A. Majerus of recking not of them...." poetry and prose has inspired Central University, Pella, Iowa, Whitman's subsequent departure among peoples and cultures to study "The Influence of from New York and dedication to around the world. Shakespeare on Whitman's nursing the war-injured did not erase A descriptive bibliography of Leaves of Grass" and to Melissa B. his fond memories of Pfaff's. He dis­ Whitman's works is being com­ Hall of Emmanuel College, patched occasional letters to those piled by Joel A. Myerson at the Cambridge, Massachusetts, still in residence, assuring them of University of South Carolina in to examine "James Fenimore their eternal enshrinement "in the Columbia. Cooper and Walt Whitman: portrait-gallery of my mind & heart." A summer seminar for secondary Responses to Two Periods in Less and less a maverick as time went school teachers on the poetry of American Urbanization." on, Whitman continued to value his early associations with this perch of the culturally adventurous. In 1881 anew something of the bonhomie of noted wistfully, over "big, brimming, he hunted up Charley Pfaff in New the past. The two proceeded to share fill'd-up champagne glasses drain'd York at his relocated place of busi­ a bottle of vintage wine and reminisce in abstracted silence, very leisurely, ness on 24th Street, hoping to taste about the veterans of Pfaff's, Whitman to the last drop." □

16 MARCH/APRIL 1992 FTER THE DEVASTATING FIRE OF nearly two decades earlier, completion of the new Auditorium Building was a sym­ bol of resurgence for the city of Chicago. On dedication day in December of 1889, Presi­ dent Benjamin Harrison and the diva Adelina H.H. RICHARDSON Patti were on hand to add luster to the occa­ sion. The new building, with its blunted tower, would house a hotel, offices, and an Chicago of Institute Art opera house for the rebuilding city. On the sixteenth floor of the tower, an event of equal importance, though less her­ An American alded, had taken place. The architects of the new building, an engineering specialist named Dankmar Adler and his partner, a Idiom in young designer named Louis H. Sullivan, had just moved their offices there, and in the Architecture next six years would make their mark as a major presence in the architectural history of BY JAMES F. O'GORMAN the United States. With them came a protege of Sullivan, the young Frank Lloyd Wright, who referred to himself as the "pencil" in the liebermeister's hand. Adler and Sullivan's move from the old Borden Block, an of­ fice building of 1880 that was one of the earli­ est results of their collaboration, H. H. Richardson: Marshall marked the Field Wholesale Store, Chicago, Illinois, y; partner­ 1885-87 ship's arrival among the foremost programs and historical architectural firms in the city, forms. This set him apart and it heralded the beginning from his peers. of a number of urban commer­ At the end of his all-too- cial works upon which the cor­ brief career, in the mid-1880s porate fame of the firm and the Richardson designed for individual fame of Louis Chicago two works of semi­ Sullivan would principally rest: nal importance in the develop­ the Wainwright Building in St. ment of Sullivan and Wright: Louis, the Union Trust Building the Field Wholesale Store and in St. Louis, the Chicago Stock the John J. Glessner house on Exchange Building, and the Prairie Avenue south of the Guaranty (later Prudential) Loop. These works certainly Building in Buffalo. Corporate provided immediate inspira­ tranquility and accomplishment tion in the evolving careers were short-lived, however, for of Sullivan and his assistant. Wright left in 1893, and in 1895 We have only Wright's the partnership itself dissolved, belated and highly colored with each of the principals pur­ notes about the interaction suing an independent career. between Sullivan and him in The generational influence their Auditorium loft high in architecture stretched in an­ above the metropolis by the other direction as well. The other lake. Wright suggests that the was toward the work of H. H. master held him a captive Richardson, who died just before audience for his thoughts the Auditorium materialized until he had to make a dash but whose recently finished for the last commuter train to Marshall Field Wholesale Store his suburban home. The exact in Chicago had a major impact content of those soliloquies is upon it. The confluence of these lost, but the scenario of teacher three creative personalities— Henry Hobson Richardson (1838-86) in 1879. and student is one Sullivan Richardson, Sullivan, and himself recreated for his Wright— represented in 1890 "Kindergarten Chats," a series the past, present, and future of a para­ credit Richardson with any impact of papers originally published in mount interlude in late nineteenth- on his master's or his own work. Interstate Architect and Builder between century American architecture. The period in which Wright joined February 1901 and February 1902. Writing about this period a half- Sullivan, the late 1880s, marked the Just as Wright noted in his Auto­ century later, Wright fleetingly men­ apogee in American architecture of biography that Sullivan needed to think tions late-night sessions with Louis "picturesque eclecticism," a term out loud even to the point of forget­ Sullivan, with the master doing all used to denote both the dependence ting Wright's presence, so the narra­ the talking, not, as one might suppose, of most architects on the variety of tor of the "Chats" at one point remarks, about the state of their profession or forms available from the history of "I thought aloud. You happened to the work of their contemporaries, but building both classical and nonclas- be present." about the greats of literature, philo­ sical, and their characteristic design As Wright observed, Sullivan had sophy, and music. He "venerated" of buildings of dramatic, asymmetri­ only contempt for the works of his Whitman, Spencer, and Wagner, in cal silhouette and sophisticated, accre­ contemporaries, and the "Chats" begin particular. Wright adds: "But later I tive detail. The result was the riot of by bashing a number of recent pictur­ discovered his secret respect, leaning creations once popularly labeled esque or eclectic Chicago buildings. a little towards envy (I was ashamed "Victorian horrors." Richardson's Number VI, however, containing the to suspect), for H. H. Richardson. Just work was a revival of French and quote about the narrator's oblivious­ the same and nevertheless he liked Spanish Romanesque architectural ness to the presence of his pupil, is and trusted me" (Wright's emphasis). forms. Like his contemporaries, he devoted to the Marshall Field Whole­ Wright's jealousy, still strongly was an eclectic architect, but his work sale Store. expressed after so many years, was stood apart from theirs: Richardson "Let us pause, my son, at this oasis reflected in his lifetime reluctance to disciplined the picturesque aspects of in our desert," begins Sullivan, and in contemporary design in favor of a an interruption in his stream of vitriol, James F. O'Gorman is Grace Slack return to architectural fundamentals: he conveys some of the most moving McNeil Professor of the History of Amer­ solid wall, arched void, roof, mass, praises ever directed by one Ameri­ ican Art at Wellesley College in Massa­ light and shadow, and natural mater­ can architect toward the commercial chusetts. This article is adapted, with per­ ials, usually ashlar stone. Unlike the masterpiece of another. Among the mission, from his book Three American sophisticated pastiches of his contem­ paeans, one in particular bears repe­ Architects: Richardson, Sullivan, and poraries, his works were "primitive" tition: "Buildings such as this, and Wright, 1865-1915 (Chicago: University in the sense that they were elemental, there are not many of them, stand as of Chicago Press, 1991). forceful interpretations of building landmarks, as promontories, to the

18 MARCH/APRIL 1992 navigator. They show when and where The architectural situation in this the two sources as his early commis­ architecture has taken on its outburst country when Richardson returned sions warranted. of form as a grand passion— amid a just after the Civil War revolved Richardson, to be sure, did not host of stage-struck-wobbling mock­ around a series of questions posed by change direction overnight. It becomes eries." So Sullivan saw Richardson's practitioners and theorists alike: How noticeable in two Boston ecclesiastical Marshall Field store when he wrote are we to incorporate the new materi­ works of the early 1870s. The Brattle the "Chats," and so he must have als and techniques of the industrial Square and Trinity churches display valued it when he was designing the age such as plate glass and structural one of the sources with which he had Auditorium itself a few years earlier. metal? What in the modern world is begun to experiment: the Rundbogenstil- Sullivan penetrated the Renaissance- the role of the professional architect, related Boston granite style and the Romanesque references of the Field and what, for that matter, is a "pro­ Romanesque of the south of France store to grasp its essential character fessional architect"? How are we to and of Spain. This shift from current as a quiet and massive foil to the shrill plan and articulate the varieties of English and French quotations set histrionics of contemporary work. new buildings made necessary by a Richardson apart from his contem­ pluralistic society? How, in a progres­ poraries and sent him in a direction hen H. H. Richardson sive, sophisticated era, are the findings toward his mature and disciplined stepped off the transatlantic of historical scholarship to be incor­ works of the decade's end. liner at New York in Octo­ porated into the process of design? Trinity Church is a triumph of ber 1865, he had just turned twenty-In what style are we to build? For design— eclectic design— a building ■seven years old, had just ended an Richardson personally, however, the that since its completion has ranked educational exile in Paris begun before chief question seems to have been, among the top works of architectural the outbreak of the Civil War, and How might I establish an individual genius in this country. As he had on had decided to begin his career in and a national identity within the a project for the Connecticut State architecture, not in his native New world of architectural design? It was Capitol, Richardson here drew upon Orleans nor in his adopted Boston the kind of question that, in broader Ecole methodology, but here he also but in New York City, the metropolis cultural terms, also preoccupied deployed historical forms out of the fast becoming the financial and cul­ Emerson and Whitman. distant past that would enrich the tural capital of the United States. With American designers and builders local lithic tradition. Early thumbnail his disembarkation he joined the few had always followed the lead of Euro­ sketches for the church echo that of academically trained architects in the pean fashion, first as shapers of the an 1863 Ecole project for a casino. On country, and he could expect to assume colonial outposts of England, Holland, the back of the letter inviting him to an important place in his chosen pro­ France, Spain, and other Old World compete for the commission and on fession. Although he was "prepared countries, and after independence, as various other fugitive scraps, the for a hard time for some months," as provincial exponents of the successive architect developed his central-plan, he wrote his brother in an unpub­ classical- and medieval-inspired pyramidal-mass church by summa­ lished letter now at Harvard Univer­ international styles. By the Civil War, rizing the elements of the design into sity, he had "confidence in ultimate American architects were profitably a simple geometric synthesis, then ela­ success." Richardson carried with aware of developments in three Euro­ borating it. Around the central point him off the ocean liner a vague desire pean national centers in particular: radiate the squat chancel, transepts, to create a "bold, rich, living architec­ England, where the polychromatic and nave, in the pattern of a modified ture" that was to have, as it came picturesque Gothic-derived architec­ Greek cross; above the central point near realization during the next two ture popularly associated with the in the finished building rises the decades, a varied and profound impact name John Ruskin was the dominant Romanesque granite masses and on the course of American building. mode from the late 1840s; France, details. The organization and stone Born in Louisiana in 1838 and edu­ where the academic classicism of the patterning of the east end, for instance, cated at Harvard College during the neo-Greco era and the Second Empire were derived from the twelfth-century second half of the 1850s, Richardson vied with Viollet-le-Duc's theories of churches of the Auvergne. The cen­ had trained for his career at the Ecole metallic building based upon a rational tral tower was inspired by that of des Beaux-Arts in Paris, in the atelier analysis of Gothic structure; and the cathedral of Salamanca. And as of Jules Andre, and in the office of Germany, where Renaissance- and a Romanesque pyramid, Trinity as a Theodore Labrouste. From his youth Romanesque-inspired arcuated blocks whole owed something to Ecole proj­ in the South he brought a knowledge carried the name Rundbogenstil. Immi­ ects such as Guadet's 1864 Prix-de- of the compact, hip-roofed classical grant architects as well as publications Rome-winning Hospice in the Alps. architecture of the ante-bellum era; out of each of these countries pro­ The result was an eclectic pile unlike and in Cambridge and Boston he vided American designers with knowl­ any other church then standing in must have noticed the austere granite edge of the latest in European theory this country. To this day it contrasts architecture of midcentury. In Paris and design. sharply with Cummings and Sears's he followed Richard Morris Hunt, The proliferation of available pro­ contemporary New Old South Church who had studied and worked there in totypes led to visual profusion and across Copley Square, an asymmetri­ the 1840s and 1850s, as an eleve of confusion. Richardson's first works cal, polychromatic, Victorian Gothic French theory and practice in archi­ reflected this situation. Possessed of pile of accumulated and nervous tecture, an experience matched by no a library of architectural reference detail. Romanesque Trinity, coherent, other American-born architect at the works both English and French, he balanced, and serene, was Richard­ time of his return from abroad. was well prepared to oscillate between son's first exercise in disciplining the

HUMANITIES picturesque. It immediately distin­ formal solutions to a variety of build­ courtyard. Details are derived primar­ guished the architect in his own time, ing problems. ily from either Early Christian or and it generated an important new The mighty Allegheny County Romanesque lithic forms. Low-sprung phase in the evolution of late nine­ Courthouse in Pittsburgh (1883-88) Syrian arches built of exaggerated teenth-century American architecture with its attending jail ranks as one of voussoirs of a type Richardson had known as the Richardson Roman­ his major achievements and is with­ seen on a brief trip to Spain in 1882 esque. Richardson had begun to create out doubt his most impressive surviv­ surround the entrances; Romanesque an architecture of his own. ing monument. The courthouse is arcades mark salient features such as As practiced intermittently by its lucidly organized and richly formed in the courtroom level. The main stair- originator, the Richardson Roman­ keeping with its function as a public hall is formed by an array of semicir­ esque was in fact an eclectic mode building both serviceable and ceremo­ cular stone arches smaller in size but combining elements of three general nial. It rests upon a 200-by-300-foot nearly as grand as the Roman fanta­ styles, the bold, primitive characteris­ rectangular plan in which served and sies of Piranesi, whom Richardson tics of which were particularly attrac­ "servant" spaces are clearly defined. had studied as a student in Paris. tive to him: the Syrian Early Christian, Wings contain primary spaces, such Its central tower, which with its the Byzantine, and the French and as the two-story, cross-ventilated ancillary towers served a state-of-the- Spanish Romanesque. Richardson courtrooms, that are separated by art ventilating system based upon was to find strength in these sources, one-story secondary spaces containing that of the Houses of Parliament in using them from Trinity onward judges' chambers, jury rooms, and London, formed a visual exclamation either in combinations or by absorb­ consultation rooms directly accessible point marking the civic center in the ing their lessons into even more basic from a corridor surrounding a central urban landscape. In the brief decade between the dedication of Trinity in 1877 and Richardson's death in 1886, the identifiable "Richardson Romanesque" image was established. Some of his colleagues and successors quickly began to incorporate his characteristically heavy forms into their already rich vocabulary. Richard­ son Romanesque was applied to a series of design problems, includ­ ing the commuter railroad station, the small-town library, the monumental public building, the urban commercial block, and the city residence. If European-trained, cosmopolite Richardson harbored thoughts of creating an architecture distinct from its Euro­ pean sources, an archi­ tecture corresponding to his reading of the Amer­ ican society of his time, those thoughts in likeli­ hood had come to him through the circle of New England intellectuals, some of whom were his friends, clients, and col­ leagues. Emerson had long ago issued a call for a national culture gene­ rated by an individual self-reliance. "Insist on yourself; never imitate," he had written in 1841. Important to American society that occurred with what he then called a dead language Richardson among these intellectuals quickening pace in the years follow­ of Italian and French classicism he was his neighbor and sometime col­ ing the Civil War. encountered at MIT in the early 1870s. laborator, Frederick Law Olmsted, These types can be plotted on the Although in 1903 he wrote that he the landscape architect and environ­ radiating pattern of American urban doubted that Richardson had much mental theorist. Olmsted was spread­ development during these years: The influence upon his "mental growth," ing the awareness of the transforma­ commercial block is a central urban the older architect did have demon­ tions in American society that were form; the library and depot belong to strable impact upon his maturation creating the concentric urban pattern the suburban towns ringing the com­ as a designer. The unveiling posthu­ of the 1880s: the urban commercial mercial center; and the home might mously of his last commercial master­ core and suburban domestic rings all be located anywhere along the radius piece, the Marshall Field store, and connected by the radiating commuter from inner city through suburbia to the publication of Van Rensselaers's railroad system. The new or evolving exurbia. Like massiveness and qui­ handsome and unprecedented Henry building types born of the new or etude, function and location were for­ Hobson Richardson and His Works in evolving social patterns, especially mative factors in Richardson's solu­ May 1888 (one of three publications the urban commercial block and the tions to these building problems. in Sullivan's library devoted specifi­ detached, single family house, as well Drawing upon the environmental cally to Richardson and his work), as the commuter depot and the small­ vision of Olmsted, Richardson seems all served to focus attention on the town public library, required more to have attempted to generate archi­ man and his achievement at the very imaginative responses. As Emerson tectural forms appropriate to their moment Sullivan was engaged with had concluded in his essay "Art" content and their context, that is, their Adler in creating the cornerstone of (1841), "it is in vain that we look for position within contemporary society. his fame, the Auditorium Building. It genius to reiterate its miracles in the In so doing he was to create proto­ was Sullivan's adaptation of Richard­ old arts; it is its instinct to find beauty types for urban commercial and subur­ sonian quietude and massiveness in the field and roadside, in the shop ban or rural domestic buildings that that established that work as his first and mill." That Olmsted and others were to inspire, among other subse­ major accomplishment. thought this applied to Richardson's quent works, the office buildings of The clearest statement of the impact ultimate achievement is suggested by Louis Sullivan. the Field store had on Sullivan, as we the fact that the 1888 Van Rensselaer have seen, is found in the "Oasis" monograph on the architect, spon­ ntil the mid-1880s, Sullivan chapter of the "Kindergarten Chats." sored in part by Olmsted, bears as the more or less ran with the Of the Field store Sullivan said in effect epigraph on its title page the lines U crowd. During the second what Whitman had said of his own immediately preceding these from half of the decade, however, he had work: "who touches this touches a Emerson's essay. perhaps read enough of Emerson, man." Here, Sullivan wrote, is "a male, That Richardson did indeed find and certainly enough of Whitman, to for it sings the songs of procreant- inspiration not only in the stone agree with the sentiment expressed in power, as the others have squealed of architectures of Europe but also in "Self-Reliance" that "whoso would be miscegenation." Here, he wrote, "stone the American mill and in the Ameri­ a man, must be a non-conformist," and and mortar . . . spring into life"; here can field was soon to become appar­ in Leaves of Grass that "works made was a "rich somber cloud of manli­ ent. In seeking appropriate forms for here in the spirit of other lands, are so ness"; here he "would place a modest city and suburb, for market and much poison in the United States." In wreath upon the monument of him domicile, he was able to add to his 1887, having discovered Whitman's who stood alone, an august figure in beloved round-arched lithic sources celebration of "self and nation" (to his art"; here was a structure "simple, those which he could identify as borrow Justin Kaplan's apt character­ dignified and massive." These and indigenous to or developed within ization), he wrote to the poet that he, other phrases from the "Oasis" sug­ the American context. too, was "reaching for the basis of a gest that Sullivan read Richardson Richardson built for nearly all virile and indigenous art." And as it the man as he read Richardson's aspects of contemporary American happened, it was to the virile mature building. As Philip Brooks had said society, providing solutions to reli­ works of Emerson's Massachusetts in his eulogy to the older architect, gious, educational, commercial, civic, neighbor, H. H. Richardson, works "the man and his work are absolutely transportation, domestic, recreational, that seemed to respond with vitality one," and both were exceptional within commemorative, medical, and govern­ to the call for a cultural nationalism, the context of the architectural pro­ mental programs. Among his mature that Sullivan turned for guidance. Here fession of the day. Richardson was an works, there are four building types was the precedent that was living Emersonian individualist, a Whitman- that carry the weight of his achieve­ rather than dead. When he needed esque force, the example of whose ment: the suburban library, the com­ vivid forms to fulfill his clients' needs, inchoate works suggested a direction muter depot, the commercial block, he found those of Richardson useful for Sullivan to follow, creatively, and the detached single-family house. models, and he thus assumed a his­ without mimicry. □ Richardson gave these four building torical relationship with his recently types his indelible stamp in the brief deceased precursor. To study "Three American Architects," decade between the dedication of Near the end of his life, Sullivan in 1988 James F. O'Gorman received a Trinity Church and his death, and recalled the "fairy tale" tower of $27,500 College Teachers and Indepen­ they were building types associated Richardson's Brattle Square church dent Scholars grant from the Division of with the historical transformations in as a "special delight" in contrast to Fellowships and Seminars.

HUMANITIES "Ashby's Feat of Horsemanship," an illustration by Winslow Homer for John Esten Cooke's Civil War novel, Surry of Eagle's Nest (1866). Winslow Homer: The Years as Illustrator

BY DAVID TATHAM

ORE THAN ANY other major Amer­ In these things Homer differed from the most impor­ ican artist of his generation, Winslow tant of his near-exact contemporaries in American art: Homer (1836-1910) was a product John La Farge, Homer Dodge Martin, Thomas Moran, of the Industrial Age. This at first Elihu Vedder, and James Abbott McNeil Whistler, seems paradoxical in the instance all of whom committed themselves to careers as fine of an artist whose great subject was artists at relatively early ages and scarcely looked back. the natural world and whose paint­ Homer was still a journeyman draughtsman for book ings show little of the urban and indus­ publishers and pictorial weekly magazines during trial life that surrounded him. Yet, as the years in which the others established themselves we will see, a major influence in Homer's as painters. He was twenty-six before he seriously career was the mechanization of pictorial took up painting in 1862, and he was nearly forty printing in the 1850s. It determined his way of before he ceased contributing drawings to mass- seeing and his way of recording, an essential element circulation weeklies. of his genius as a painter. The others, each in a distinctive way, set out on one or another of the paths leading to European high cul­ David Tatham is professor of fine arts at Syracuse Univer­ ture. Moran looked to Turner and English painting, sity in New York and the author of Winslow Homer and Vedder to Italy and a host of sources from the High the Illustrated Book (© 1992, Syracuse University Press), Renaissance to the Macchiaioli, La Farge and Martin from which this article is adapted. to France and the Barbizon School, Whistler to the

MARCH/APRIL 1992 Parisian avant-garde. Each transcended or transformed tory, geography, and novelties of many kinds, all rein­ these and other early influences, but remained in self- forcing the values and anxieties of a middle-class society concept and public image a fine artist with distinct rapidly and optimistically settling into the Industrial Age. European ties. By contrast, Homer spent the first twenty The machines, processes, attitudes, and tastes that years of his career oriented almost wholly to American brought about the success of these magazines left their society and popular culture. His paintings emerged mark on the arts of the book. For more than a genera­ not from the study of European and American fine art tion the book trade took its lead in many matters of (with which he was well acquainted), or even from any illustration from the new journals. Some publishers, significant formal art education, but from his work as such as Harper and Brothers, brought forth both illus­ an illustrator for a new wave of magazines and books trated books and magazines. Some artists, such as directed to the general public. It is to these publica­ Homer, contributed to both kinds of publications. tions, their makers, and their audiences that we must Homer observed the early years of Gleason's Pictorial look to find the first clues to his development. from relatively close quarters and with family encour­ agement. He had been born in Boston in 1836 to parents of old Yankee stock and had begun to draw regularly he decade of the 1850s—Homer was fourteen at when still a boy. His education in Cambridge public its start—saw the beginnings and early flourish­ schools apparently included little formal art training, Ting of the illustrated weekly magazine in Ameri­ but his mother, who was an able amateur artist, taught ca. This new species of popular journal typically con­ him what she knew of drawing and watercolor. She sisted of sixteen large pages, eight in letterpress and approached the making of art essentially as a copyist, eight devoted to uncolored, wood-engraved pictorial using both printed pictures and nature as sources. At matter. Some pictures illustrated the fiction and the eighteen, he was apprenticed to the Boston lithographer, features on current events and foreign cultures that made John Henry Bufford, whose copy-work assignments up the contents of most issues, but others were original instilled the idea that the making of art was essentially compositions, often views and genre subjects without a matter of transcribing the appearances of things. This significant accompanying texts. With the rise of the idea, reinforced by the reportorial spirit of the weeklies illustrated weeklies, pictorial matter began to approach and the long-standing realist tradition in American parity with the printed word as a means of communi­ painting, remained the foundation of Homer's art cation in popular magazines. throughout his career, even though he later transcended The voracious need of the new journals for drawings it in original ways. assured able draughtsmen in the 1850s a reasonably good income. Those who drew regularly for the maga­ zines in that decade—Homer and Thomas Nast are its most cele-brated (and dissimilar) products—seem to have gained a positive sense of association with a succ­ essful enterprise, even if in its factory production and all-inclusive audience the enterprise was at odds with many of the precepts of fine art. The first successful illustrated weekly magazine in America, Gleason's Pictorial Drawing Room Companion, came into being in Boston in 1850-51. In 1857, renamed Ballou's Pictorial, it published Homer's first original work. By the close of that year, two other major week­ lies with national circulation flourished in New York, offering the Boston journal formidable competition. These were Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, founded in 1854, and Harper's Weekly, founded in 1857. Homer contributed to Harper's beginning in its first year and to Leslie's in the mid-1860s. Part of the appeal of all three magazines was timeli­ ness. As early as the 1850s, illustrated weeklies pub­ lished accurate renderings of such topical subjects as the inauguration of a President or the ruins of a disas­ trous fire within two weeks of the event, and for the period this was remarkably quick printmaking. Another part of their appeal was inexpensiveness, a product of the high-speed, high-volume presses that made timeli­ ness possible. By the end of the 1850s, when the national population had grown to about 31 million, the com­ bined weekly circulation of Ballou's, Harper's, and Leslie's exceeded a quarter of a million. As copies passed from hand to hand, the number of readers for each issue was much greater than that figure. They found in pictures as well as words a steady stream of news, fiction, his­ "The Autumn Woods"

HUMANITIES 23 Homer's professional reputation grew steadily. From omer's battlefield excursions for Harper's were his early twenties he was a respected, nationally known ultimately to push him into a new genre. In graphic artist and, beginning at age thirty, a leading H February of 1866, he was signed on to provide American painter. It is too simple to say that he merely four drawings for a Civil War novel being published in drew what he saw, since he typically selected, edited, New York by Bunce and Huntington. The book was simplified, recomposed, and otherwise rearranged the John Esten Cooke's Surry of Eagle's Nest. Cooke, a Vir­ visual facts of his experience into the drawings he made ginian, had been a popular writer of southern historical for Ballou's Pictorial and Harper's Weekly. He included in fiction in the 1850s, and during much of the Civil War these depictions of everyday life subtle and usually had served the Confederacy as an officer on Jeb Stuart's benign pictorial commentaries on his own middle-class staff. His description of himself fit the heroes of his values, essentially urban, mercantile, genteel, and old novels: "I am a Virginian, a monarchist, what is called Yankee, softened by life in Cambridge. He was not a sati­ a Cavalier by blood, and strain and feeling." The war rist. He had none of the instinct for combat that propelled gave him the subject for his most popular novel, Surry Nast's partisan critiques of American culture, or the of Eagle's Nest. He wrote it in about two months in the inventive imagination that undergirded Nast's success. fall of 1865. When it appeared less than a year after the end of the conflict, the novel's sympathetic view of the Confederacy at first occasioned resistance among book omer moved to New York City in the fall of dealers in the North. The book quickly became a 1859. Ballou's Pictorial was on shaky ground national best-seller, however, exhausting two printings and about to go out of business; the move put and going into a third within three months. In many him in closer reach of the Harper publishing firm, which essentials, the fictional Surry is autobiographical. Like became his mainstay for several years. It also placed Cooke, he is a Confederate cavalry officer whose adven­ him in the center of the American art world. Though he tures associate him closely with most of the illustrious had not yet begun painting in oils, his intent to work in figures of the war in Virginia, among them Stuart, that medium was already clear. He told Joseph Baker, Jackson, Johnston, Beauregard, and Lee. Unlike Cooke, his fellow apprentice at Bufford's, that he meant to be a Surry also manages to spend time with Union general painter, and a good one. In 1859 his brother Charles George McClellan. The plot follows the course of the gave him a copy of an English translation of Chevreul war from 1861 to early 1863 and incorporates Cooke's on color, a book of no particular value to an artist who firsthand knowledge of several battles. Weaving drew only for wood engravers but of great interest to through this quasi-documentary account of the early Homer's generation of painters. In later life he referred years of the war is a fictitious subplot of exceedingly to it as "his Bible." Why he waited until 1862 to begin improbable people and events. to work in oils is an intriguing question. If he had Bunce and Huntington chose well in asking Homer begun earlier his first subjects would probably have to illustrate the book. He had observed and recorded been lively street, farm, and home scenes of the sort that the war in Virginia for Harper's Weekly and had already he had been supplying to Ballou's Pictorial and Harper's exhibited some of his first paintings of Civil War sub­ Weekly, instead of the altogether more serious Civil jects. He was now seriously involved in painting but War subjects that established his reputation as a painter. far from making a living from it. The publishers prob­ ably knew nothing of his Prisoners from the Front, however, since it was still in progress and yet unshown when he was invited to illustrate Surry. But one passage in the book, probably by coincidence, presents an image remarkably similar to Homer's painting. In describing the varied types that constituted the Confederate army, Cooke wrote:

All classes were mingled fraternally in its ranks.... Here was the high spirited boy, raised in his elegant home on the banks of the Shenandoah, and the hardy and athletic mountaineer from beyond the Alleghanies (sic). The pale and slender student lay down side by side with the ruddy son of the poor farmer, who had dropped the handles of the plough to take up the musket.

The three prisoners in Homer's paint­ ing serve well enough as examples of Cooke's high-spirited boy, hardy "General Jackson's Escape" mountaineer, and poor farmer's son.

24 MARCH/APRIL 1992 For all its melodramatic cliches, Surry was the most substantial text Homer had yet treated. Three of his illustrations are scenes of high drama, but one, The Autumn Woods, which serves as the frontispiece, represents a quiet moment. The figures are Surry and May Beverly, whom he loves, though she is affianced to another man. The figure of Surry and the Cavalier-like high-spirited boy in Prisoners have a common source, almost certainly one of Homer's wartime sketches. At the edge of the woods near the Beverly ancestral mansion, and within earshot of the guns of battle, May sits "upon a mossy rock, beneath a little pine, and looking down." Cooke soon has them em­ brace, but Homer best served the curiosity- arousing purposes of a frontispiece by keep­ ing them apart, contemplative rather than active, introducing them as two distinct charac­ ters of unspecified relationship. The image of May Beverly is one of several variants of a young woman whom Homer painted and drew in 1864 and 1865. She can be seen wearing a similar pillbox hat in his paintings The Initials (1864), The Red Feather (1864), and The Croquet Player (1865). She has been identified as Mary Fiske of Massachusetts, a friend of Homer's in those years. The quietude depicted in Autumn Woods was already typical of Homer's paintings of young men and women. It remained so for the next few years in his depictions of croquet games, mountain excursions, and seaside promenades. The large forms of the illustration, the broad surfaces of reflected light, the contrasts of line, the carefully worked-out composition in which, among other felicities, he repeats the shape of 'Combat betiueen Mordaunt and Fenwick" May's mushroomed skirt in the large rock behind her, are all controlled by a naturalistic vision, but one that reverberates quietly with a Japanese "feel" in its simplicity of forms and even in Mordaunt drove him, step by step... toward a gigantic oak, Surry's figure. which stretched its gnarled branches above, in the moon­ In contrast to this contemplative scene, the other three light—and then, Fenwick could retreat no further.... illustrations are of vigorous action. In Ashby's Feat of Rushing upon him, with his sabre at tierce point, Mordaunt Horsemanship, Surry's compatriot Turner Ashby attends drove the keen weapon through his breast, and the point was to a Union cavalryman who meant to intercept him. buried in the tree beyond. Ashby "seized...[him] by the throat" and then, "borne Earlier in the book, Mordaunt had put a bullet through on at a furious speed upon his powerful white horse, the same chest, but Fenwick survived and resumed his Ashby dragged his adversary clear out of the saddle, nefarious ways. Now, Cooke in text and Homer in pic­ never relaxed his clutch, and in a moment was beyond ture leave little doubt that Fenwick has at last reached pursuit, still dragging his prisoner by the side of his his deserved end, but few things are so simple in Surry's horse." In the nocturnal Gen. Jackson's Escape, Surry and plot. The traitor recovers from even this. Jackson press their horses to clear a stone wall as they Homer had spent some weeks in Virginia during the flee a pursuing Federal scouting party. "I cleared the war, and he returned in the 1870s, but no evidence has wall and the General followed," says Surry, but Homer come to light connecting him to Cooke on these visits. shows them jumping together rather than in sequence, It is one of the curiosities of the history of American unifying the action in time and space. illustration that directly after the Civil War a Confederate Combat between Mordaunt and Fenwick, another night officer and a Union artist-reporter, who may never scene, represents the culmination of violence in the have met, should jointly produce the most enduring recurrent struggle between the novel's fictional arch­ illustrated novel of the conflict. □ enemies, Confederate Colonel Mordaunt and the traitor Fenwick. With their horses shot from under Publication of Winslow Homer and the Illustrated Book them—Homer shows one felled steed in the distance— was supported by a $7,000 subvention grant from the the swordsmen closed in mortal combat. Division of Research Programs.

HUMANITIES 25 BUILDINGS o f t h e UNITED STATES

BY ELLEN MARSH

Perry and Anna Amelia Flint Hannah House, 1891JTraverse City, Michigan. © Photo by Balthazar Korab. N A QUIET COUNTRY road series under the editorial direction of days, especially after the completion in Monroe County in south­ the Society of Architectural Historians of the Erie Canal in 1825, settlers such Oeast Michigan one of the state's in Philadelphia. When completed, as the Osgoods left worn-out farms in Centennial farms can be found, desig­ this project, whose initial volumes western New York State and New nated as such because it has been have been supported by NEH, will England for fertile farmland in south­ owned by the same family for more be the first comprehensive, state by ern Michigan, building in the style than one hundred years. The stone state architectural survey and guide that they remembered from the East. farmhouse was built by Theophilus to the built environment of the United Nineteenth-century entrepreneurs and Roxanna Osgood, who left west­ States. In addition to the volume on were quick to discover the cornuco­ ern New York State in the mid-1830s Michigan, three other volumes in the pia of resources left by the Ice Age. to farm 160 acres in Michigan Territory. series will be published this fall by Besides the rich soil in the southern For ten years, they lived in a primi­ Oxford University Press: Buildings of part of the state, there were lakes tive wooden house until they could Iowa by David Gebhard and Gerald large and small, rivers, minerals, and afford to build a proper house in a Mansheim, Buildings of Alaska by countless acres of pine and hard­ provincial Greek Revival style, using orey f aod Osgood Harold of Courtesy the construction they remembered from back home, coursed cobblestone. The Osgoods painstakingly collected cobblestones, three to four inches in size, from nearby Stony Ridge and had a local mechanic lay them in regu­ lar horizontal courses in the walls of their new house. Forty known surviving farmhouses of coursed cobblestone construction, built between 1829 and the 1870s, embellish the landscape of southern Michigan. The cobblestones were a legacy of the Ice Age, polished, rounded, and deposited by glaciers, and were used in houses from upper New York State to Wisconsin, wher­ ever the stones were common. Some­ An 1890 photograph of the Osgood House, 1846; Bedford Township, Michigan. times the builders selected cobble­ stones of all one color; other times the Alison K. Hoagland, and Buildings of stones were set into herringbone pat­ wood forests. From around 1830 to the District of Columbia by Pam Scott terns or just in straight courses. These 1910, logging was a principal Michi­ and Antoinette J. Lee. houses, made of local materials by gan industry. "Michiganians love The story of Michigan architecture local people, eloquently evoke the his­ wood," Eckert says. "We have wood tories of their builders and occupants. begins with the arrival of nomadic houses of all kinds, from elaborate Paleo-Indians more than 12,000 years "Vernacular buildings like the cobble­ Queen Anne mansions of the lumber ago, to a half-frozen land still in the stone houses are important," says barons to the simple log houses of the grip of the Ice Age. The wigwams, Kathryn Bishop Eckert, acting state trappers and traders." longhouses, and lodges of the native historic preservation officer for Michi­ One of the mansions was built in peoples have disappeared. The gan. "They are close to the land, the Traverse City in 1891 for a prosper­ Norton burial mounds west of Grand place, and the people." ous lumberman, Perry Hannah (1824- Rapids survive as one of the few visi­ Eckert describes cobblestone houses 1892), and his wife. Noted Grand ble reminders of the times before the in Buildings of Michigan, the first com­ Rapids architect William G. Robinson Europeans arrived. French and English plete architectural history of the state. designed the Queen Anne house, traders, soldiers, and missionaries fol­ It is one of the first volumes in Build­ which has gables, turrets, a generous lowed the water route from Canada ings of the United States, a major wraparound porch, and more than in the seventeenth and eighteenth forty rooms. Queen Anne houses Ellen Marsh is assistant editor of centuries, and constructed forts, trad­ can be found throughout the United Humanities. ing posts, and houses. In territorial States, but the imaginative use of

HUMANITIES 27 wood in the Hannahs' house unmis­ arose in Detroit in the early twentieth Algers, Newberrys, and Blodgetts, takably connects it to the Michigan century. Eckert mentions the River all lumber barons; the Potter Palmers lumber industry. The house is orna­ Rouge plant, the executives' houses and Marshall Fields; and the meat mented with intricately carved and at Grosse Pointe, the workers' houses packers, the Armours and Swifts. decorated wood inside and out; every clustered around massive Saint Florian In the course of working on this room is paneled in a different hard­ church in Hamtramck. Saint Florian project, Eckert visited nearly every wood. "This lavish use of wood," parish was formed in 1907 to serve site mentioned in the book. Not only Eckert suggests, "identifies the house Detroit's burgeoning community of high-style, architect-designed build­ equally with the pine and hardwood Polish immigrants, who had come to ings are listed, but also vernacular forests of Michigan, and with Hannah, work in the automobile plants. houses of all periods and styles, parks, whose life was shaped and sustained Michigan's geography, another gift statues, cemeteries, factories, bridges, by that forest." of the Ice Age, offers miles of wild even utilitarian structures such as Stone, rather than wood, was the shoreline along the Great Lakes, many the nation's first automated carwash natural building material for the rocky rivers, and thousands of inland lakes. (1946) in Detroit. The volume includes buildings constructed as recently as 1990, such as furniture manufacturers' corporate headquarters and research centers in Holland, Grand Rapids, and Zeeland. Michigan has many special architec­ tural elements. For instance, because of its long shoreline Michigan has more lighthouses than any other state in the union. Bay City was the home of the Aladdin Company (1906 to 1981), one of the most prolific manu­ facturers of mail-order houses from the end of World War I through the 1920s. Homeowners across the coun­ try ordered bungalows, Queen Anne, American foursquare, and colonial revival houses from the firm, whose catalogue even offered plans for indus­ trial towns, complete with stores, Grand Hotel, 1887; Mackinac Island, Michigan. churches, schools, warehouses, hotels, and dwellings. Michigan also boasts the bottle house (1939-42) in Kaleva, terrain of the Upper Peninsula. Eckert From the late nineteenth century, mid- which has 60,000 glass bottles spar­ says, "Many buildings in this part of westerners have enjoyed their holi­ kling in its exterior walls. John J. the state are made of native red days at Michigan resorts. Mackinac Makinen designed and built the house sandstone or rocks from mine work­ Island, for instance, has splendid to use surplus and obsolete bottles ings." The mining industry—copper "cottages" built by the affluent, while from his bottling plant. In a flight of and iron—that dominated the Upper simple cabins for working-class vaca­ fancy, bottle bottoms across the front Peninsula created specialized build­ tioners can be found on the state's of the house spell out "Happy Home." ing types. For instance, in Calumet, a shoreline, rivers, and lakes. But of Eckert delights in the William W. roundhouse, warehouse, blacksmith all the resort buildings, Eckert says, Maier house (1940s) as the ultimate and machine shops, and other "the Grand Hotel exceeds all super­ expression of Michiganians' fascina­ buildings (ca. 1880-1910) are remind­ latives ever written to describe its tion with wood: Maier developed a ers of the once-prosperous and now stately majesty and festive quality." technique for siding the exterior walls defunct Calumet and Hecla Mining The Grand Hotel, prominently sited of buildings with concrete shaped in Company. The buildings were on a high bluff overlooking the Straits the form of logs. The chimneys of his designed by company engineers and of Mackinac, was a joint venture of house resemble tree trunks—all in were constructed of mine-waste rock, three railroad companies to promote concrete. "We even love imitation brick, and Lake Superior red sand­ the use of their transportation systems. logs," Eckert remarks. "You can find stone rubble. Many of these buildings George Mason, a Detroit architect, Perma-Log houses in the middle of are still used, although not for their designed the building, which was a forest, sometimes as a facing over a original purposes. constructed of local white pine by real log house." Some of Michigan's mining and Michigan architect-builder, Charles The Buildings of the United States lumbering fortunes were invested in W. Caskey. Among the guests at the series, begun in 1986, is modeled the new automobile industry that hotel's gala opening in 1887 were the after the Buildings of England, a forty-

MARCH/APRIL 1992 Saint Florian Church, 1925-28; Hamtramck, Michigan.

six volume series by the British art volume will discuss the development glove compartments of tourists' and architectural historian Nikolaus of the state and its architectural his­ automobiles as well as in university Pevsner. Pevsner noted that the U. S. tory, placing it in a national and inter­ libraries." □ was the only major Western nation national context. Descriptions of the that lacked a comprehensive study structures and sites are accompanied To support a series of guidebooks to of its national architectural heritage. by maps. buildings of the United States, since 1986 Osmund Overby, editor in chief of Overby is hopeful that the series the Society of Architectural Historians in the project, says that four or five vol­ will help prevent destruction of the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has received umes will be published each year nation's architectural treasures by $150,000 in outright funds and $152,906 until the series is complete. Most fostering a deeper appreciation of in matching funds from the Interpretive states will be represented by a single their beauty and historic importance: Research program of the Division of volume. Introductory material in each "We expect to find our books in Research Programs.

HUMANITIES SEPHARDIC JEWRY & 1492 BY JANE S. GERBER

N THE NIGHT of August 2, nant faiths of Christianity and Islam, gious poetry in Hebrew that has been 1492, the ports of Spain were Jews periodically suffered forced the hallmark of Sephardic civilization. Oclogged and frantic as the conversion, first at the hands of the Jews made contributions as well in last of Spain's 200,000 Jews attempted Visigothic Christians in the seventh medicine, cartography, astronomy, to flee before the deadline of their century, then under the Muslim and mathematics— areas of inquiry in expulsion had passed. Entrepreneur­ Almohades in the twelfth century, which questions of divergence of faith ial and frequently predatory sea cap­ and finally through the combined from the majority played no role. tains had flocked from Italy and North fury of Christian prelates and mobs As the Christian reconquest of Iberia Africa as news of the forced flight of in the late Middle Ages. progressed, beginning with the fall the Jews spread through the Mediter­ Sephardic Jewry, named after the of Toledo in 1085, Jews found them­ ranean. Because northern Europe Hebrew word for Spain, Sepharad, selves increasingly within the Chris­ was closed as a result of prior expul­ represented one of the two major cur­ tian orbit. By the thirteenth century, sions, the crowds of refugees pressed rents of Jewish life in the diaspora, the theological anti-Semitism of north­ into the southern ports. the other being Ashkenazic Jewry in ern Europe made itself felt on the That same night, Christopher Germany. Viewing themselves as peninsula. Special campaigns of the Columbus loaded his three vessels descendants of the ancient Judean newly formed Dominican order aimed in the port of Palos. In the opening aristocrats and priests exiled by King at undermining the Jewish faith. Even­ lines of the log of his first voyage, he Nebuchadnezzar in 586 B.C.E., Span­ tually, the pluralism that had assured noted the coincidence of the expul­ ish Jews derived textual proof of the Jews a niche in Spanish society sion of the Jews from Spain and the their ancient and noble origin from a gave way to an exclusivist national embarkation of his crew for their reading of the prophet Obadiah (I, principle as the Christian forces journey of discovery. 20): "the exiled of Jerusalem who are expelled first Jews and then Muslims. Five hundred years later, the quin­ in Sepharad shall inherit the cities of But before the breakdown of the centenary of these historic events the Negev." With a sense of the future convivencia, medieval Spanish plural­ invites reassessment; the two events based on the biblical promise that ism was particularly suited to Jewish are intertwined in more than simply they would ultimately return to the needs by affording an atmosphere coincidence of date. land of Israel ("the cities of Negev"), in which a distinctive Jewish culture The history of the Jews of Spain they developed a false sense of both could emerge and flourish. Jews is frequently described by the word their security in Spain and their derived security and a special position convivencia, or "living together," special destiny. as intermediary between two hostile which refers to a putative golden age The Muslims conquered the Iberian global forces, each of which found it of intercommunal and interethnic Peninsula in 711. Until 1150, a Judeo- convenient at times to use the Jews to cooperation among the Jews, Muslims, Arabic tradition flourished in Spain further its own cultural or political and Christians who lived in Iberia as Jews— exploring fields of special ends. Both the Muslims, after their from the eighth to the fifteenth cen­ interest to Muslims such as jurispru­ defeat of the Christian forces in Spain turies. Convivencia, however, did dence, philosophy, and theology— in the eighth century, and the Chris­ not mean religious toleration. In the combined rabbinical, exegetical, and tians, after their reconquest in the peninsular battles between the domi- philosophical traditions in a rare cul­ twelfth and thirteenth centuries, tural amalgam. By adapting forms recruited the Jews to repopulate and Jane S. Gerber is professor of Jewish and motifs from the courtly Arabic rebuild devastated provinces. More history and director of the Institute for poetic tradition at the cultural centers than once, rulers granted Jews eco­ Sephardic Studies at the City University of Cordoba, Granada, and Seville, nomic opportunities unavailable to of New York Graduate Center. Jews also fashioned secular and reli­ them elsewhere in Europe.

30 MARCH/APRIL 1992 In addition, Sephardic Jewry often 50,000 Jews had been murdered, Jews, ranging from fines to burning served as a bridge between Christian thousands had fled, and perhaps as at the stake, or against the entire and Muslim civilizations by translat­ many as 200,000 more had converted Jewish community in the form of ing the wisdom of one into the lan­ under duress when faced with the expulsion from its home city. guage of the other. When the Chris­ choice of conversion or death. Jewish-Christian relations leading tian king Alphonso X, also known as These converts, or conversos, also up to the expulsion in 1492 are the sub­ Alphonso the Wise, wanted to gain known as "new Christians," were to ject of continuing debate among his­ insights into the wisdom of the Arabs, become a chronic problem in Spanish torians. A major issue is that Spanish he surrounded himself with Jewish society. Conversos were not taught Christendom, which had sought con­ translators equally at home in Cata­ how to be Christians, and therefore version of the Jews for centuries, found lan, Hebrew, Arabic, and Castilian. even sincere converts often retained itself unprepared for the success of In the process, Jews absorbed many traces of Judaism in their daily and new converts. No longer restricted by of the modes of expression, artistic religious practices. Because they were anti-Jewish legislation, conversos, standards, and innovations of both not permitted to change their place of also known derisively as marranos, or civilizations. residence after conversion, the con­ swine, began to rise to unprecedented By the twelfth and thirteenth cen­ versos remained the neighbors, rela­ heights in Spanish municipalities, in turies, with the retreat of Muslim power tives, and business partners of Jews the court, and even in the church. and the advance of the reconquista, who had not converted. It was impos­ This success caused a great back­ religious polemic became a major sible to know who was a sincere con­ lash. Stinging satires were composed issue in Jewish life. Jews sought and vert, who was a backsliding Chris­ and attempts were made to separate received contractual promises of pro­ tian, and who was a "judaizer." Nor conversos from the rest of the popu­ tection from monarchs, a practical could anyone really determine who lation, throwing them back upon the necessity as Christian Europe became had converted out of loss of faith and mercies of the Jewish community. increasingly inhospitable to Jews. who out of fear. In 1449, anticonverso riots exploded Soon Jews were called upon to defend Many frightened Jews who had in Toledo, leading to the promulga­ their faith in public disputations, first become reluctant Christians struggled tion of laws requiring proof of "purity in Barcelona and later in Tortosa. valiantly to maintain ties with their of blood" to hold office in the univer­ These confrontations were actually families and with their former faith. sity, the army, the religious orders, trials of Judaism in which the judg­ Yet any assistance to a con verso by and the municipalities. What had ment of religious perfidy was fore­ the Jewish community was tanta­ begun as religious prejudice against ordained. Forced sermons were intro­ mount to abetting "heresy" and could the Jews had ended up as a lethal blend duced into the synagogues, with the result in reprisals against individual of racial and religious discrimination

king himself—as was the case with Elazar. Daniel by From

James I of Aragon— sometimes lead­ Today Sephardim The Jews: Other The ing the ideological attack. Not even the exhortations of skilled defenders of Judaism such as Moses Nahmanides © 99 ai Bos Ic B permission. By Inc. Books, Basic1989 could avert the violent anti-Semitic riots that the missionary friars' charges of deicide stimulated in cities through­ out Spain. By the fourteenth century, Jews were increasingly isolated and beleaguered as they confronted libel­ ous accusations of host desecrations, well poisonings, and blood libels— the scurrilous charge that Christian blood was used in Jewish rituals. Finally, on June 4,1391, anti-Jewish riots broke out in Seville and quickly spread through Spain and Mallorca. By the time public order was restored a year later, entire Jewish communi­ ties had disappeared. Approximately Sephardic emigration from the Iberian Peninsula after the expulsion of 1492.

HUMANITIES 31 against anyone of Jewish ancestry. ancient Jewish communities, begin­ demarcated Sephardic Jews within Ultimately, it was the converso ning a new chapter of Jewish renewal the communities among whom they problem that provided the pretext for in the Mediterranean. It took at least found a new home. Defying all laws the introduction of the Inquisition in one generation for the exiles to find of immigrant acculturation as well as 1481 and the decree of expulsion in their bearings. But find their bearings Jewish custom, the indigenous Jewish 1492. The rationale for expulsion set they did. They reconstituted hundreds communities sometimes felt com­ forth by Ferdinand and Isabella, with of communities, built new schools, pelled to emulate the Sephardim by the guidance of inquisitor Tomas de and wrote new commentaries on old virtue of their numbers, noticeable Torquemada, was that the presence works. They attempted to retain the pride, and tenacious loyalty to their of Jews on Iberian soil prevented the forms of social structure that they Sephardic legacy. Indigenous groups true conversion of the conversos. had known in Spain, calling their of Jews in Italy, Greece, Morocco, and Once Granada had fallen in January new congregations by the names of elsewhere practically lost their ances­ 1492, a nation united in territory and their old homes. A remarkable fidel­ tral cultures as they absorbed and were faith— the dream of the monarchs— ity not only to Spain but to its regions absorbed by the Sephardic refugees. could now be realized. Many streams and dialects continues to this day. The arrival of the Sephardim shook of social pressures converged to pro­ The most pronounced characteris­ up the sleepy Mediterranean Jewries vide the backdrop for the expulsion tic of the Sephardic refugees was as the newcomers, trying to under­ of the Jews, but the converso issue undoubtedly their faithful retention stand what had gone wrong with their dwarfed all other factors. of the Spanish language. Pre-expulsion history, struggled to readjust. Sephar­ The consequences of the expulsion Spanish was preserved in Ladino dic exiles were characterized by rest­ of the Jews from Spain in 1492 rever­ (Spanish written in Hebrew charac­ lessness and a deep sense of malaise, berated throughout the Jewish world, ters) and was spoken and written by and many sought an outlet for their affecting many European nations. Sephardim until the twentieth cen­ trauma in messianism. Others sought Some 150,000 refugees departed from tury. Whether they resided in Salonica comfort in writing history to record Spain in August 1492. Most of them or Sarajevo, Amsterdam or Aleppo, their national disaster for posterity. chose the nearest refuge, Portugal, Rhodes or Seattle, faithfulness to this Still others turned inward to explore only to be confronted with another pre-Columbian Spanish endured as the depths of their soul in kabbalism, expulsion that amounted to a virtual a hallmark of the Sephardic diaspora. especially among a select group of forced conversion in 1497. As a result, The seventeenth-century traveler Sephardic exiles in Safed in Palestine. the Iberian Peninsula remained the Domingo de Toral was astonished to Some converted Jews lost all faith. home of crypto-Judaism for centuries. find Jews in Aleppo, Syria, who not Neither fully Christian nor fully Converso influence continued for gen­ only recited thirteenth- and fourteenth- Jewish, they began to question all erations, with many of the great clas­ century Spanish ballads but were revealed religion and attempted to sics of sixteenth-century Spanish and also conversant with the works of work out their uncertainties in philo­ Portuguese literature being penned the Spanish cultural giants who were sophy and the picaresque novel— by Sephardic Jews, now newly con­ his contemporaries—Lope de Vega two cultural pursuits that were left verted Christians. As converts or and Gongora. open to them in postexpulsion Spain. offspring of converts, these Jews Ladino—the language of daily com­ Others could not rejoin a structured were compelled to conceal their inner munication as well as of nostalgic Jewish community after having lived identity through a variety of subtle longing—united the Sephardim as a a veiled existence as crypto-Jews. This artistic means. After the introduction minority within a minority in an inter­ was the case with the philosophers of the Inquisition in Portugal in 1536, national diaspora that spanned sev­ Baruch Spinoza and Uriel d'Acosta. periodic autos-da-fe sent waves of eral continents. Many of the oral The presence of such diversity in the Portuguese "new Christians" into traditions of fifteenth-century Spain European Jewish community—mystics exile. The "purity of blood" doctrine remained alive only through the care and believers in false messiahs, ratio­ as well as the Inquisition's relentless with which Sephardic exiles preserved nalists and devotees of the latest salon campaigns against "judaizers" and the romanceros and ballads their fore­ culture from Madrid, transplanted "heretics" sapped the vitality of Spain bears had carried as part of their spiri­ Portuguese merchants trading in all and Portugal at their moment of tual baggage in 1492. the emporia of Europe and the Near greatest expansion. The Sephardic identity was kept East—brought new dynamism to west­ The outcasts of 1492 who found alive long after the emigrant genera­ ern Europe and its greatest seven­ refuge in North Africa and the Otto­ tion by fidelity to the Spanish lan­ teenth-century city, Amsterdam. man Empire infused new vitality into guage and culture, which frequently Scholars today are divided on many

32 MARCH/APRIL 1992 central issues of Sephardic history, and others formed the majority of the Jewish past, thwarted the evolution such as the influence of the Jews on followers of Erasmus, the Christian of a more liberal Christianity in Spain Spanish culture. Some deny the Jews' humanist from Holland, in sixteenth- at that time. impact on Spanish life altogether, century Spain. They championed Other areas of debate are the reasons while others see the Jews' expulsion some of his ideas for church reform for the expulsion of the Jews from as the prime cause of Spain's decline. and worked openly for a more liberal Spain in 1492, the Jewishness of the Another area of debate is the impact Christianity in which they hoped to conversos, and even the possibility of the conversos on Spanish Christian­ find acceptance by "old Christians." that Christopher Columbus's ances­ ity. While many conversos sought Scholars debate the degree to which tors were conversos. Some scholars anonymity in the religious orders, the hostility of orthodox Christians speculate that Columbus's forebears they virtually controlled the order of toward these converso reformers, were victims of the pogroms of 1391 St. Jerome in the sixteenth century, because of their connection with a and that they arrived in Genoa, Italy, soon thereafter as Christian converts. Such conjecture might explain why Columbus always considered himself a foreigner and, although a Genoese, apparently used a somewhat archaic Spanish rather than Italian in speech and writing. Whatever the merits of theories about the converso background of Columbus's forebears, the story of the great Spanish explorations must include the converso factor, because it was conversos such as courtiers Gabriel Sanchez and Luis Santangel who financed the first voyage; con­ fiscated Jewish property paid for most of the second. The quincentenary of the Jewish expulsion offers an opportunity to examine some of the epochal events taking place inside Spain and Europe generally at a time when Europeans were casting their glances beyond the horizon, and perhaps to find deeper connections between events at home and Spanish encounters an ocean away. □

On April 5-8, a conference on “The Span­ ish jews and the Expulsion of 1492" will take place at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. USC received $32,061 from the Conferences category of the Division of Research Programs. On November 8-11, a conference on "Crisis and Creativity in the Sephardic World, 1391-1648" will take place in New York at Columbia University, the Jewish Catalan Atlas (detail), ca. 1375, attributed to Abraham Cresques (1325-87), a Majorcan Theological Seminary (JTS), and the cartographer who served the riders of Aragon. The Catalan Atlas is one of the outstanding Jewish Museum. JTS received $13,800 cartographical achievements of its period. from the Conferences category.

HUMANITIES 33 An Issei woman, wearing protective clothing, works in a Hawaiian sugar cane field, ca. 1912.

n$

I H E

BY STEVEN WOLF WORLD OF ISSEI

DECADE AGO, SOME busi­ national museum devoted to Japanese ostracized en masse out of suspicion ness people from Los Angeles' American history, but particularly of disloyalty. ALittle Tokyo, mostly Nisei to the memory of the thousands of The lasting legacy that they envi­ (second generation Japanese Ameri­ Japanese Americans who were evacu­ sioned has now materialized as the cans), and a group of Nisei veterans ated from the West Coast to reloca­ Japanese American National Museum who fought in the American army tion camps during the war. For both in Los Angeles, California. But when during World War II merged their groups—as for America— one of the the museum opens its doors this April, mutual interest in establishing a war's tragic ironies was that, even as its inaugural exhibition will not Nisei fought to preserve liberty and address the camp experience. Instead, Steven Wolf is a staff writer for the Los democracy against fascism, their museum staff chose to take a longer Angeles Downtown News. stateside parents and relatives were view with an exhibition on the cir-

MARCH/APRIL 1992 cumstances and experiences of the American recruiters who offered recent victors in the Russo-Japanese Issei, the first generation of Japanese three-year contracts at $15 a month— War of 1904-05, would soon be enlist­ immigrants who came to Hawaii and many times as much as they could get ing the aid of their Issei cohorts in an the American mainland between 1885 at home—to work on the Hawaiian invasion of the West Coast, resulted in and 1924, seeking to better their lot. sugar plantations. Thousands more the formation in California of the Japa­ The camps will be the subject of a followed over the next few years, con­ nese and Korean Exclusion League. future exhibition. stituting the first large-scale migration Partly because of this intensifica­ "We don't want to be known only from Japan and foreshadowing the tion of discrimination and partly as 'those people from the camps,"' migration of Japanese laborers to the because of the threat of economic says Akemi Kikumura, an actress continental United States. losses to the Hawaiian sugar industry turned anthropologist who is curator After their contracts were up, many due to the drain of Japanese laborers of the NEH-supported exhibition, workers returned to Japan as they had from Hawaii to the mainland, in 1907 titled "Issei Pioneers: Japanese Immi­ intended. But when Hawaii became the Gentleman's Agreement was grants to Hawaii and the Mainland, an American territory in 1900, workers formed between Japan and the United 1885-1924." "We want to show that whose contracts ended were free to States. By this pact, Japan agreed not to the history of Japanese Americans is go wherever they wanted, and many issue passports to laborers, effectively part of the larger picture of immigra­ chose to seek further fortune on the choking off Japanese emigration to tion to America." American mainland, where the rapid­ the U.S. and at the same time ensuring Starting such a museum in the forties ly expanding lumber, railroad, fish­ an adequate labor supply in Hawaii or fifties would have been unthinkable, ing, and agriculture industries called by preventing workers from leaving. Kikumura says. "That was a time when for a large supply of cheap labor. For its part, the U.S. agreed to let Japanese Americans were trying to From the time of their arrival in port Japan issue passports to the relatives heal the wounds, trying to forget about cities such as San Francisco and Seattle, of workers who were already Ameri­ the war, trying not to make them­ they stood out by their appearance as can residents. This provision allowed selves very conspicuous." The residue "aliens ineligible for citizenship." for the immigration of "picture brides," of anti-Japanese sentiment that lin­ In 1790, Congress had restricted the whose marriages were arranged by gered after the war, she says, discour­ right of naturalization to "free white custom. Their arrival hastened Issei aged any expression of ethnic pride. persons." In 1870, that right was settlement and adjustment to life in "From the sixties onward, however, extended to "aliens of African nativity America by enabling family and com­ there have been a lot of gains by and persons of African descent." The munity life to emerge and thrive. minority groups, and today more than Chinese and the Japanese, however, In 1924, with the Issei population ever we need dialogue to see how our were excluded. numbering around 180,000 on the experiences are similar and how we In 1905, the xenophobic reaction of mainland and 200,000 in Hawaii, Con­ can work together. We see the museum American labor unions to a competi­ gress passed the Immigration Act, as a means of educating other Ameri­ tive Asian work force, as well as which prohibited further immigration cans and peoples of the world about unsubstantiated fears that the Japanese, from the East and climaxed a thirty- who Japanese Americans are and how we fit into American society." The museum itself—the former Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple, originally constructed in 1925— is designated as a historic site by the City of Los Angeles. "Our largest artifact," Kikumura calls it, noting that it long served as a place of wor­ ship for the Issei and a center for many nonreligious community activities. Renovation of the triangular-shaped building was completed early this year. The Issei experience begins with the voyage in 1885 of nearly a thou­ sand Japanese men, women, and chil­ dren, all laborers, aboard the ship City of Tokyo, bound for the Polynesian kingdom of Hawaii. They left Japan in hopes of earning enough wealth in the American-run sugar industry there to return home and buy land that would secure a modest prosperity for their families. Hailing primarily from the Yama- guchi and Hiroshima prefectures, they were lured from meager, over­ The former Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist temple, Los Angeles, California, in the 1930s. taxed livelihoods as small farmers by The building has been renovated to become the Japanese American National Museum.

HUMANITIES 35 five-year attempt to limit and then monly appreciated, although they were Marveling at the terminate Japanese immigration. divided on how best to "get along," resourcefulness of the "This is a complex story that has as a comparison in the exhibition of Issei, Kikumura describes many parts/' says Kikumura, point­ the lives of two Hawaiians, Takie one outfit cobbled together ing out that the exhibition seeks to Okumura and Frederick Kinzaburo by Haruno Tazawa, an Issei woman dispel two common misconceptions. Makino, shows. Okumura, a Christian who worked on a Hawaiian sugar One is that the Issei were all alike, minister, advocated accommodation plantation and who, now in her nine­ a view which has led all too easily to with Western culture and counseled ties, lives in Hawaii. some malicious stereotyping. Illus­ against confrontation with white "The sugar cane is like knives, and trating this diversity, she explains: oppression. Makino, publisher of the women would dress like a samurai to "One man who boarded a ship at newspaper Hawaii Hochi, advocated protect themselves," says Kikumura. Yokahama for Hawaii thought that fighting American oppression in "The only thing showing was their everyone else on the ship already knew American courts, an option that many eyes. Mrs. Tazawa wore a Japanese English because he couldn't under­ Issei pursued, if only with little result. jacket with a mandarin collar, shoes stand them; in fact they were speak­ In the exhibition, which is designed that she made of denim and rubber ing other dialects of Japanese. Japan to tell the story from the Issei per­ from tires, pantaloons, a calico shirt did not have a uniform culture." spective, visitors will encounter the we think was from Spain, hand cover­ This diversity formed itself into dis­ painting Going to America, by Henry ings, and leggings." tinct Issei cultures, Kikumura says— Sugimoto, depicting a young man While there are more than 2,000 one in Hawaii, the other on the main­ leaving Japan. Another Sugimoto Issei still alive today, virtually all of land. Issei community in Hawaii was painting in the exhibition, To Find a whom are in their eighties and nine­ plantation based and self-contained, Job, depicts an itinerant laborer, or ties, sources of artifacts for the exhi­ as befitted a permanent settlement, "blanket carrier," as he moves with bition were limited, says Kikumura, with schools, stores, churches, temples, the seasonal work from California to because of the great quantity of and a male to female ratio of 3 to 1. Alaska. There will be a video station materials confiscated when the Issei and their children were shipped out to the camps following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Some Japanese Americans even destroyed their own property, as was the case with Teiko Tomita, who burned her Japanese- language tanka poems fearing that they would incriminate her as a traitor during the war. Her poems, rewrit­ ten from memory while she was in a relocation camp, will be on display. The material culture of the Issei will be presented in an archipelago of display stations covering the themes of family, community, work, and the creativity of the Issei. But the artifacts provide only hints of Issei vitality and steadfastness, Kikumura says. To broaden the educational impact of the exhibition, she and her associates have arranged a series of twelve lec­ tures by scholars, who will speak on Teiko Tomita's ink-stone box with ink and brush and her diary written in poetry (1939-47). topics such as immigration history, ethnic identity, and the American In contrast, Issei culture on the main­ at which to view rare home movies dream, to coincide with the exhibition. land was migratory and even more taken by the Issei of their work and The image of the cherry tree, sym­ predominantly male, with a male to community activities. bol of Japan, rooted in American soil female ratio of 24 to 1. In the first Among the exhibition's artifacts is a long-standing metaphor for the decades of the twentieth century, while will be photographs, identification transplanting of Japanese culture in only a tiny fraction of one percent of tags, original labor contracts, even the America, says Kikumura. One might the continental U.S. population was original brocade envelope that carried interpret the opening of the Japanese of Japanese descent, roughly 40 per­ the treaty governing immigration American National Museum this cent of the Hawaiian population was, from Japan to Hawaii, diaries, letters, spring as the fruit of that effort. □ and still is to this day. poetry, newspapers, movie posters The other misconception is that the of silent-film star Sessue Hayakawa, The Japanese American National Museum Issei were passive, self-effacing victims a charcoal iron, cooking utensils, sew­ received $220,000 in outright funds and of racial oppression. In fact, Kikumura ing baskets, and perhaps rarest of all, $50,000 in matching funds from the points out, they were scrappier in their work clothing, hard to find because it Museums program of the Division of struggle for civil rights than is com­ usually wore out or was discarded. Public Programs.

36 MARCH/APRIL 1992 THE NUMBERS GAME

Teachers of U.S. History Emphasize Twentieth Century Teachers of World History Focus on Earlier Eras

BY JEFFREY THOMAS

IGH SCHOOL TEACHERS and coverage of subject. The center of U.S. history are spending is now in the process of developing more classroom time teaching content and performance standards the twentieth century than the early in history for kindergarten through Table 1: The Top Ten Course history of the nation, running counter grade 12 under a joint $1.6 million Topics Given Most Extensive to the oft-stated complaint that teachers grant from NEH and the U.S. Depart­ Coverage by High School run out of teaching time at the end of ment of Education. The standards are History Teachers the school year without having arrived expected by 1994. (in descending order of coverage) at the end of the syllabus. Unlike their U.S. history counter­ A survey of general enrollment his­ parts, world history teachers— despite U.S. HISTORY tory teachers by the National Center the disintegration of the Soviet satel­

1. World War II for History in the Schools at UCLA lite structure in then-current events— 2. Great Depression & New Deal shows that teachers devote more class­ gave scant attention to twentieth- 3. World War I room sessions to the study of World century history, with the exception 4. The 1920s War II than to the founding and devel­ of World Wars I and II. Topics receiv­ 5. Current Issues opment of the English colonies. More ing the greatest attention were the 6. The 1960s & Civil Rights time is given to the Vietnam War than classical Mediterranean world, the 7. Cold War 8. Vietnam War to the American Revolution (Table 1). rise of the great monotheistic reli­ 9. The Recent Past Topics receiving only passing atten­ gions, and the Renaissance. Covered 10 Postwar Domestic America tion, according to the multiple choice in less depth were the Reformation, questionnaire, were antebellum the Enlightenment, and the Industrial WORLD HISTORY reform, the ratification of the Constitu­ Revolution. A number of historical

1. Rise & Spread of the Great tion, Puritanism, the Great Awakening, eras were treated in one or two class­ Monotheistic Religions and America before European contact. room sessions, the survey found, 2. Ancient Rome: Foundations, The survey was conducted among including the early histories of non- Republic, and Early Empire 481 schoolteachers during the 1989-90 Western civilizations, the Ottoman 3. Greek Civilization from Homer school year as part of an analysis Empire, the Chinese Revolution, and to the Peloponnesian Wars of teaching being carried on by the the Cold War. 4. World War II center, whose work is funded by a The main teaching tool for both 5. Renaissance 6. World War I $1.8 million grant from the National groups of high school teachers was 7. Ancient Rome: Later Empire, Endowment for the Humanities. survey textbooks (Table 2). More than Legacy, and Limitations Among the topics covered by the study 90 percent used a regular history text­ 8. Democratic Revolutions were teaching methods and materials, book at least once a week. About half 9. Totalitarianism: Nazi Germany used maps once a week. Few were & Stalinist Russia Jeffrey Thomas is assistant director for frequent users of such basic materials 10 Reformation & Its Effects humanities studies in the Office of as biographies, documents, and liter­ Planning and Budget. ature of the period.

HUMANITIES Table 2: High School History Teachers' Use of Selected Instructional Materials in the Classroom

FREQUENCY OF USE (%) Never or Seldom 1-3 Times a Month Once a Week or More Instructional Material U.S. World U.S. World U.S. World Textbook 2.6 4.7 2.7 4.2 94.6 91.1 History books other than textbooks 31.3 37.1 44.4 38.0 24.3 24.9 Literature of the historical period 57.5 56.7 34.7 32.9 7.7 10.4 Biographies and autobiographies 52.3 59.9 42.2 34.0 5.4 6.2 Literature about the historical period 56.4 51.9 35.4 38.2 8.2 9.9 Historical documents 29.7 42.3 54.8 46.2 15.5 11.5 Journals and newspapers of the period 58.8 67.6 31.5 22.4 9.7 10.0 Oral history/audio tapes 60.8 63.3 29.6 29.5 9.5 7.2 Films, film strips, video tapes 12.1 11.3 62.1 66.4 25.8 22.2 Computer software 88.4 91.0 9.7 8.6 2.0 0.5 Historical maps (beyond textbook) 12.7 14.9 33.5 36.0 53.8 49.1 Museum resources and artifacts 91.1 87.6 7.7 11.4 1.2 1.0 Art and architecture of the period 89.3 63.7 10.3 32.1 0.4 4.3 Music of the period 90.0 85.8 9.2 13.7 0.8 0.5

Table 3: High School History Teachers' Use of Selected Classroom Activities

FREQUENCY OF USE (%) Never or Seldom 1-3 Times a Month Once a Week or More Classroom Activities U.S. World U.S. World U.S. World Lecture 3.9 7.4 10.4 7.9 85.7 84.7 Discussion 1.1 2.3 8.4 7.4 90.4 90.3 Writing answers to questions 6.5 4.3 23.6 22.2 69.9 73.6 Writing essays and reports 23.2 21.3 57.6 59.9 19.1 18.9 Debates 72.8 69.1 25.7 26.3 1.5 4.7 Simulations and games 60.2 66.4 34.4 28.9 5.4 4.7 A cooperative learning game (e.g., jigsaw) 61.5 59.4 28.3 25.5 10.1 15.1 Creating a newspaper 95.4 94.3 4.6 5.2 0.0 0.5 Dramatization 85.8 88.1 13.0 10.9 1.1 0.9 Creating models 91.1 86.2 8.1 12.4 0.8 1.4

A combination of classroom lectures tional approaches such as simulations outside speakers, and field trips. and discussions was the preferred and games, cooperative learning, The bottom line, however, was not instructional method for about nine and dramatizations were used rela­ school-funded resources. When asked out of ten U.S. and world history tively infrequently. to identify the conditions that would teachers (Table 3). Nearly one in five Most seemed satisfied with depart­ have to change before teachers can reported assigning essays and reports mental support for items such as proj­ teach history more effectively, both at least once a week; slightly greater ectors and television monitors but U.S. and world history teachers put proportions said they seldom or never were less satisfied with support for "home support" first, followed close­ made such assignments. Nontradi- items such as supplementary books, ly by "student effort." □

38 MARCH/APRIL 1992 anthology, with much of the dialogue sung as ballads. Switten expects the videotape and accompanying teach­ ing materials to be available in December 1992.

Awards for NEH Books

Awards have been given to three NEH-supported books. The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Lower South, edited by a group of scholars at the University of Maryland, has won the 1991 Thomas Jefferson Prize from the Society for History in the Federal Government. It is volume 3 of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipa­ tion, 1861-1867. This is the edition's second Jefferson Prize, which recog­ nizes "outstanding contributions Improving History Education Crabtree, who led the successful toward the understanding of the his­ effort to implement a new multicul­ tory of the federal government in an The National Center for History in tural history framework for kinder­ edited collection of documents." the Schools is beginning a two-year garten through grade 12 in California, Richard D. Altick's The Presence of study to set standards in teaching says that the bottom line is "to bring the Present: Topics of the Day in the history aimed at matching higher students to a richer understanding of Victorian Novel is the winner of the achievement levels in other parts of what makes us a nation." the world. Established by NEH in 1988 to study Romance Renewed the teaching and learning of history in U.S. schools, the UCLA-based ...I wouldn't give a garlic center will now receive an additional for my life; but, my lady, you were $1.6 million from NEH and the My sustenance, my friend and rampart, Department of Education to create My tower and bulwark. and implement voluntary standards for kindergarten through grade 12. Pretty heady stuff for the twentieth Of history curricula in the U.S. century. To strengthen the teaching today, center director Charlotte of thirteenth-century French medieval Crabtree says, "It's a rush through romance in a contemporary setting, the centuries from the meeting of the the French department of Mount three worlds in the fifteenth century Holyoke College is videotaping a per­ up until yesterday. Teachers run out formance of Jean Renart's The Romance of steam by the time they reach of the Rose, with English narration World War II." and dialogue. What students need, Crabtree "More and more students and asserts, is specific guideposts. "These teachers perceive video not just as standards will include events, institu­ entertainment but also as a signifi­ tions, and people struggling to achieve cant pedagogical tool," says Margaret ideas and values. They will cover Switten, director of the NEH-supported both the achievements and failures project and professor of French at 1991 Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss of the U.S." Mount Holyoke. Switten is modeling Award for "outstanding works of A national coordinating council, the project after an earlier NEH-funded literary scholarship or criticism." comprised of fifteen members from undertaking at Mount Holyoke, which A House Divided won a citation historical organizations, will be estab­ she also directed, on the medieval lyric. from the Gustavus Myers Center for lished to oversee a larger task force In Renart's The Romance of the Rose, the Study of Human Rights in the of thirty-five teachers, school adminis­ the heart of a war-mongering emperor United States. The book, written by trators, university scholars, state leg­ is transformed by a beautiful young Eric Foner and Olivia Mahoney, was islators, and education association girl, and love, inevitably, conquers the companion to an NEH-supported members. The group aims to have all. The production was performed exhibition at the Chicago Historical standards in place for both U.S. and by the Folger Consort in Washington, Society on slavery and the Civil War. world history by the spring of 1994. D.C.; the play was written as a lyric —Robin L. Baur

HUMANITIES IN FOCUS Alfonso Ortiz Advocate of Native American Traditions

" T HERE WERE CULTURES urban man's alienation from nature, and civilizations here fully he maintains. Yet he does not posit Tas diverse, as complex, and the native American sensibility as as interesting as any in Europe for cen­ an absolute standard outside of the turies before Columbus was even a native American community. Much gleam in his father's eye," says Alfonso of his advocacy takes the form of Ortiz, a Pueblo Indian and an anthro­ combatting stereotypes, such as the pologist who teaches at the Univer­ pejorative application of the word sity of New Mexico in Albuquerque. "primitive" to Indian cultures. Author of The Tewa World (1969), "The indiscriminate use of this term about the world view of his native encourages a smug sense of superior­ tribe, and coeditor of American Indian ity," he says. "But who's to say that Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Myths and Legends (1984), Ortiz has one religion is more primitive than Anglo Americans, have to grapple increasingly found himself in the another, that alphabet-based writing with this idea. "They may feel pri­ spotlight as a spokesman on native is more sophisticated than petraglyphs, vately that their own culture or reli­ American issues during the Colum­ pictographs, bark writing, and calen­ gion is the best of all possible worlds. bian Quincentenary year. dar sticks? Until recent decades, we But they're at least willing to say that Native American cultures have sur­ haven't known how to interpret them. other ways are legitimate." vived despite the widespread belief But that's not because the record­ On the other hand, Ortiz still at the turn of the century that indige­ keeping systems are primitive; it's encounters students who ask him nous cultures were soon to disappear because our knowledge of them is pri­ questions such as, just when are native forever, he says. "Even on the East mitive. Our failure to understand does Americans going to stop living on Coast, where native Americans have not make other cultures 'simple'— reservations and become Americans? long since been dispossessed of their somewhere further down on the scale "I look at them and say, 'Let's get one ancestral lands, numerous tribes still of evolution; it's a reflection on us. thing straight. What you term reser­ maintain themselves by gathering, There really are no primitive cultures vations are the last tiny islands that telling the ancient stories, and reenact­ or primitive religions or primitive Indian people have left of a continent ing the tribal ceremonies." While arts in the pejorative sense in which that they once traveled freely over. many native American languages are the term is taken—as less reflective They walk on the dust of maybe a forgotten, he says, some 200 are still than modern ones." hundred generations of forebears.'" spoken in the United States today, The world— especially the United Traditional ceremonies on these lands mostly west of the Mississippi. States—is simply not a homogeneous are spiritually linked to the land's One of the main reasons for this cul­ place, Ortiz emphasizes: "Cultural specific geographical features in ways tural buoyancy, Ortiz explains, is the diversity is represented in the United that European Americans don't easily vitality of native American religions: States to a degree unparalleled in appreciate, he says. "Native American traditions through­ human history. We are the first truly He tells his students: "Since the out North America have in common global nation on earth. All the major 1960s, with the onset of a more per­ an ancient belief in the sacredness of cultural clusterings of the earth are missive cultural ethic, it's been okay the natural world. Plants, animals, represented here—African, a variety to have an identity in addition to the rivers, mountains, even the sun, the of Asian, even Pacific Islanders, Euro­ American one. It's not disloyal or moon, and the stars—all are enmeshed pean, Mexican, South American." subversive. It enhances your Amer- in a pulsating web of interdependent Anthropology, he says, begins with icanness to have a distinct language, relations in the natural world. The the observation that to be human is to especially if it predates Columbus." native American perspective offers a be diverse. "But it doesn't necessarily He adds: "American higher educa­ way of integrating the human imagi­ follow that to see diversity is to res­ tion still hasn't figured out how to nation into nature." pect it. That's one of my tasks—to integrate diversity into either the cur­ After the Industrial Revolution, teach respect for that diversity by riculum or the student body. To pre­ European Americans replaced this demonstrating that different cultures vent future generations of people reverential understanding of nature have their own internal coherence, from being unable to cope with cul­ with a utilitarian one, resulting in reasonableness, and they help people tural diversity, you need to stress it come to grips with the challenge of heavily at the elementary level. That's James S. Turner is assistant editor of living in their environment." going to be important in preparing Humanities. His students, who include native for the future." □

40 MARCH/APRIL 1992 CALENDAR March ♦ April an Lus r Museum Art Louis Saint

Latin American theater, from the early twentieth century to the present, will be the focus of an international conference April 28-May 2 at the University of Kansas at Lawrence.

"Seeds of Change," a traveling exhibition based on the Colum­ bian Quincentenary exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of Natural History, will be on view in March in Seattle, Washington; Salem, Oregon; Omaha, Nebraska; Montpelier, Vermont; and Birmingham, Alabama.

The historical and cultural background and spread of Caribbean Festival Arts is exa­ mined in an exhibition opening in April at the Seattle Art Museum in Washington.

James Earl Jones hosts two episodes of the PBS series Long Ago & Far Away: on March 7, "Frog and Toad are Friends," and on March 14, "Frog and Toad Together."

A conference will be held March 5-7 to examine the thirteenth- century Lancelot-Grail cycle of the Arthurian romances at the University of Texas at Austin.

HUMANITIES 41 HUMANITIES GUIDE FOR THOSE WHO ARE THINKING OF APPLYING FOR AN NEH GRANT

ODIFICATIONS OF informa­ sible new investigations or facilitate tion have been prepared for scholarly or general reference. If the centuries. As scholars unearth project will also be valuable for class­ new materials or rediscover territory room instruction, this potential should charted by their forebears, new com­ be described. Proposals for electronic pilations of information become nec­ Reference tools or guides should describe the essary to communicate newly discov­ contemplated reference work with ered facts or new estimates and new particular care because NEH evalua­ ideas about old evidence. tors may include scholars unfamiliar The Endowment's Reference Mater­ Materials with new technology as well as those ials program supports dictionaries, with advanced technical expertise. historical or linguistic atlases, ency­ Likewise, a full discussion of the clopedias, concordances, reference proposed methodology, such as edi­ grammars, data bases, text bases, and torial policies, and inclusion of sample other materials that codify information BY HELEN C. AGUERA entries are essential to the success of a essential to research in the human­ Reference Materials application. Many ities. Grants also support projects that orative, requiring a carefully con­ proposals for important reference will help scholars and researchers certed effort by experts from several works with excellent staff fail to locate information about humanities disciplines. During the planning phase, receive funding because the method­ documentation or determine the use­ project directors need substantial con­ ology is not clearly described or the fulness or relevance of specific mater­ sultation with others in the field to samples are inadequate. Samples ials for their research. Eligible projects determine the scope of the work and should reflect as closely as possible include bibliographies, bibliographic the most appropriate method of the format and content of the final data bases, catalogues raisonnes, and accomplishing it. In preparing a refer­ work because they will be carefully descriptive catalogues, indexes, union ence work, project staff must solicit scrutinized by scholars who know the lists, and other guides to materials in and edit contributions from dozens subject matter. Any limitations in the the humanities. Support is also avail­ and sometimes hundreds of collabo­ samples should be indicated and the able for projects that address issues rators while at the same time moni­ missing features discussed. Samples related to the design or accessibility toring the work of indexing, cross- of dictionary entries in particular of such reference works. Many of referencing, and fact checking. should reflect the applicant's knowl­ these projects make available unknown Before submitting a proposal, the edge of lexicographical procedures materials; others facilitate research by applicant should have completed and practices. Entries for bibliogra­ bringing together widely dispersed most of the preliminary planning, phies, similarly, should adhere to information that individual users such as meeting with consultants and accepted scholarly standards. would find difficult to obtain. potential participants. Unless the Applicants may request up to three The Dictionary of American Regional planning phase is well advanced, the years of support on a single applica­ English, for instance, identifies and applicant will not be able to provide tion; renewal applications are often explains American regional expres­ much of the information requested by filed by applicants whose work exceeds sions that are not included in standard the program guidelines. Proposals to three years. dictionaries.The Oxford Dictionary of compile encyclopedias, for instance, Since Reference Materials applica­ Byzantium compiles information on are expected to contain a preliminary tions generally require substantial all aspects of Byzantine civilization list of the entries to be covered and documentation and budget justifica­ drawn from multilingual sources a list of the prospective contributors. tion, applicants are encouraged to while also providing new interdisci­ Applications should also demonstrate consult with program staff and sub­ plinary perspectives and a reevalua­ that agreements have been made mit a draft proposal for advice at tion of previous scholars' findings. with institutions that hold materials least six weeks before the application Because reference works or schol­ essential to preparing the work or deadline. arly guides cover information on with those that will provide neces­ The next application deadline is many branches of knowledge or treat sary resources such as office space. September 1,1992. For applications a topic comprehensively, projects to Applicants should not assume that materials and further information, develop these works are often collab- the significance of the project will be write or call the Reference Materials self-evident. It is important to discuss program, Division of Research Pro­ Helen C. Agiiera is a program officer for the proposed work's scope and intel­ grams, National Endowment for the Reference Materials in the Division of lectual content, including specific Humanities, Washington, DC 20506; Research Programs. examples of how it will make pos­ 202/786-0358.

42 MARCH/APRIL 1992 RECENT NEHGRANTS BY DISCIPLINE

Oakland Museum, CA: L. Thomas Frye: $100,000. Interpretive programs with an Some of the items in this list are offers, not exhibition of American Indian artifacts from the final awards. Grant amounts in each listing Brooklyn Museum s Stewart Culin collection Archaeology & are designated as FM (Federal Match) and that will demonstrate his collecting strategies OR (Outright Funds). Division and program and the histories of individual objects. GM are designated by the two-letter code at the Anthropology end of each listing. Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; Joseph Rishel: $750,000. Construction and recon­ Archaeological Conservancy, Santa Fe, NM: figuration of spaces related to the reinstallation Mark P. Michel: $285,000. An increase in the Division of Education Programs of 53 galleries of European art. and the conser­ revolving preservation fund used to acquire EH Higher Education in the vation of objects for these galleries. CP and preserve endangered archaeological sites Humanities Queens County Art and Cultural Center, Inc., in the United States. CP ES Elementary and Secondary Flushing, NY; Marc H. Miller: $44,211. An exhi­ Museum of New Mexico Foundation, Santa Fe: Education in the Humanities bition on Louis Armstrong and African Ameri­ Bruce D. Bernstein: $350,000 OR; $100,000 can art and culture in the 20th century. GM FM. A permanent exhibition on the prehistory, Division of Public Programs Textile Museum, Washington, DC: Mattiebelle history, and contemporary period of the Indians GN Humanities Projects in Media of the Southwest. GM Gittinger: $100,000. An exhibition, catalogue, GM Humanities Projects in Museums and educational programs on the textile arts of U. of California, Berkeley: Cathleen A. Keller: and Historical Organizations the T ai people of Southeast Asia. GM $49,864. Documentation of the Egyptian GP Public Humanities Projects archaeology collection. PH GL Humanities Programs in Libraries U. of Kansas, Lawrence; Stephen H. Goddard: $150,000. A traveling exhibition and educa­ U. of California, Los Angeles; Christopher B. and Archives tional programs on the graphic art of the Donnan: $300,000 OR; $150,000 FM. A tem­ Belgian avant-garde, 1880-1900. GM porary, traveling exhibition on the art and cul­ Division of Research Programs ture of the Moche. a pre-Columbian culture that RO Interpretive Research Projects U. of Missouri, Columbia; Susan Langdon: flourished in ancient Peru. GM RX Conferences $49,528. Planning for an exhibition, catalogue, RH Humanities, Science and and educational activities on the art and culture U. of California, Los Angeles; Doran H. Ross: Technology of Greece in the Age of Homer. GM $50,000. Planning for a traveling exhibition, RP Publication Subvention catalogue, symposium, and educational pro­ U. of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, San Juan: RA Centers for Advanced Study grams on the art and material culture of the Enrique Vivoni-Farage: $49,925. Planning for Rl International Research Murik of Papua New Guinea. GM an exhibition on the historical and cultural RT Tools significance of Spanish Revival architecture in RE Editions Puerto Rico, 1900-50. GM RL Translations RC Access U. of Rochester, NY; David Peelle: $98,800. Preservation of sound recordings from the Division of Preservation and Access Eastman Audio Archive's Howard Hanson Col­ PS Preservation lection that contains performances of Hanson's Arts—History & Criticism PS U.S. Newspaper Program compositions and programs held at the PH National Heritage Preservation Eastman School of Music. PS Asia Society, NYC; Vishakha N. Desai: $50,000. Program Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. MN: Elizabeth Planning for an exhibition, catalogue, and pro­ N. Armstrong: $150,000. A traveling exhibition, gramming on 18th-century Korean art. GM Office of Challenge Grants catalogue, and public programs on Fluxus, an Brooklyn Historical Society, NY; Irene Tichenor: CE Education Programs international artistic movement most active $25,000 OR: $25,000 FM. Documentation of CP Public Programs between 1962 and 1978. GM Brooklyn graphics collections. PH CR Research Programs Yale U., New Haven, CT: Susan P. Casteras: Chicago Historical Society, IL: Robert I. Goler: $49,851. Planning for an exhibition, catalogue, $49,992. Documentation of the stained glass and programs on the Grosvenor Gallery, collection. PH Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Katherine London, in the context of late-Victorian art and S. Howe: $50,000. Planning for a traveling culture, 1877-90. GM High Museum of Art, Atlanta. GA; Ronni Baer: exhibition examining the work of Gustave and $50,000. Planning for an exhibition, catalogue, Christian Herter, German-born furniture makers, and public programs on the art of the Dutch and their contributions to the history of Ameri­ painter Gerrit Dou. 1613-75. and his contempo­ can decorative arts in the 19th century. GM raries. GM Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. MA; Peter C. Hood Museum of Art, Hanover. NH; Timothy Sutton: $200,000 OR; $200,000 FM. An exhi­ R. Rub: $153,755. A traveling exhibition, cata­ bition, catalogue, and public programming on History—Non-U.S. logue. and programs on the Panathenaic festi­ the art of the Flemish baroque period that val, the major civic and religious event that was highlights the work of Peter Paul Rubens, Arts Foundation of New Jersey, New held annually in ancient Athens. GM 1577-1640. GM Brunswick; Carol F. Dickert: $196,000 OR; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA: Earl Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, CA $14,000 FM. A four-week summer institute for A. Powell III: $42,045. Planning for a traveling Arthur L. Oilman: $20,000. Self-study to create 40 New Jersey teachers and administrators, exhibition on the contributions of American a long-range plan for interpretive humanities grades 5 through 12, on the life and times of Egyptologists and institutions to the under­ exhibitions and programs. GM Leonardo da Vinci. ES standing of ancient Egypt. GM Nelson Gallery Foundation, Kansas City, MO: B & O Railroad Museum, Baltimore. MD: John Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC; Mahrukh Wai-kam Ho: $250,000 OR; $100,000 FM. A H. Ott: $20,000. Self-study for long-range inter­ Tarapor: $250,000 OR; $100,000 FM. An temporary, traveling exhibition, publications, pretive programming and collection develop­ exhibition, catalogue, and public programs on and public programs on the work of the Ming ment plans. GM the art and culture of Islamic Spain from the Dynasty artist Tung Ch'i-ch'ang, 1555-1636, Brown County Historical Society Museum, 8th to the 15th century. GM and his contemporaries. GM New Ulm. MN; Charlene Akers: $20,000. Self­

HUMANIT1ES study to determine humanities themes to be paper series on suffrage requirements histori­ Chicago Botanic Garden, Glencoe, IL; Lisa C. explored in future public programs. GM cally and the Dorr Rebellion of 1842. GM Roberts: $12,707. Self-study of the garden’s Medieval Academy of America, Cambridge, Shaker Village, Inc., Canterbury, NH; Scott T. resources and interpretive programs. GM MA; Luke H. Wenger: $258,000. Endowment Swank: $304,000. Restoration of four historic Children’s Museum of Boston, MA; Kenneth S. of programs and publications, especially buildings and the creation of an endowment for Brecher: $750,000. Endowment for humanities Speculum. CR general operating costs, public programs, and programs, renovation of the entry and lobby U. of Illinois, Chicago; Gerald A. Danzer: annual maintenance of the historic site. CP space, and fund-raising expenses. CP $107,065. A five-week summer institute for 30 U. of Arkansas, Fayetteville; Lynne M. Hayman: Colorado State U., Fort Collins; J. Edward Chicago high school history teachers on maps $248,555. Cataloguing of newspapers in Schamberger: $190,000. A five-week institute and the relation between cartography and Arkansas repositories that will add 3,400 titles for thirty Colorado middle and high school history. ES to the national newspaper database, as part of teachers on the history, literature, and art of the U.S. Newspaper Program. PS 19th-century New England. ES U. of Florida, Gainesville; Augustus M. Burns: Concord Museum. MA; Robert A. Gross: $124,505. A collaborative project for 60 high $50,000. Planning of a permanent exhibition school social studies teachers and administra­ on the history of Concord from precontact to tors that will include two three-week summer the present. GM institutes on the Supreme Court’s role in defin­ Cornell U., Ithaca, NY; Anne R. Kenney: History—U.S. ing civil rights. ES $676,755. Microfilming of 10,000 brittle volumes U. of Texas, Austin; Harold W. Billings: from the Echols collection on the literature and Bay State Historical League, Waltham, MA; $372,009. Microfilming of 93 Texas newspa­ languages of the Southeast. PS Cynthia Robinson: $25,000. A seminar for the pers, comprising 427,000 pages, as part of the Council for Basic Education, Washington, DC; staffs of local historical societies on the history of U.S. Newspaper Program. PS A. Graham Down: $562,500. Endowment of the Massachusetts and the nation in the 1790s. GM Virginia State Library and Archives, Richmond; Independent Study in the Humanities Fellow­ Brooklyn Historical Society, NY; David M. William R. Chamberlain: $12,767. Planning for ship program, which provides summer fellow­ Kahn: $375,000. Endowment of three a survey of newspapers in state repositories ships to outstanding precollegiate educators humanities positions and the expenses needed and a strategy for cataloguing and preserving throughout the nation. CE to raise these funds. CP Virginia newspapers, as part of the U.S. DePaul U., Chicago, IL; Doris R. Brown: Chicago Historical Society, IL; Russell L. Newspaper Program. PS $500,000. Construction of a new library and Lewis: $300,000 OR; $50,000 FM. A tempo­ creation of an endowment to cover costs of rary exhibition, catalogue, and public programs acquisitions in the humanities. CE on Chicago during World War II. GM Denver Art Museum, CO; Gordon F. McEwan: Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford; $375,000. Endowment for staffing and programs Christopher P. Bickford: $20,000. Self-study. GM of the Center for Latin American Archaeology with the provision of interim funds until the Harvard U., Cambridge, MA; Martha S. Wiske: endowment is raised. CP $167,980. A collaborative project for 30 Boston- Interdisciplinary area high school history and social studies Emory U., Atlanta, GA; Joan I. Gotwals: teachers on the migration of African Americans American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, $750,000. Creation of an endowment fund for to the North. ES PA; Edward C. Carter II: $293,425. Renovation library acquisitions in the humanities. CR Hawaii Maritime Center, Honolulu; Evarts C. and equipping of the library component of Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, IL; Fox, Jr.: $285,000. Endowment for a new edu­ Benjamin Franklin Hall, and creation of an Deborah L. Mack: $400,000 OR; $200,000 FM. cation department in maritime history that will endowment fund to meet increased mainte­ A long-term exhibition on the natural history include salaries for an education specialist and nance costs. CR and cultures of Africa and the diaspora. GM an assistant and expansion of the education Amherst College, MA; Willis E. Bridegam: Frick Collection, NYC; Charles A. Ryskamp: program. CP $500,000. Expansion and renovation of the $750,000. Development of an endowment for the Historic Hudson Valley, Tarrytown, NY; Joseph college library, purchase of equipment, and art reference library enabling the library to main­ T. Butler: $50,000. Documentation and com­ endowment of two staff positions. CE tain services to its national constituency. CR puterization of the Historic Hudson Valley Arizona Historical Society, Tucson; Steven Fruitlands Museum, Harvard, MA; Robert D. collections. PH M. Harvath: $207,725 OR: $50,000 FM. Imple­ Farwell: $10,000. Self-study. GM Jewish Museum, NYC; Adina Back: $200,000. mentation of a traveling exhibition on the con­ Harvard U., Cambridge, MA; Richard C. To support an exhibition, catalogue, and public quest of New Spain. GM Schulhof: $49,507. Planning for a permanent programs on the relationships between African exhibition on the history and cultural signifi­ Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Jane Clarke: cance of the Arnold Arboretum. GM Americans and American Jews in the 20th $100,000. Publications and public programs century. GM on Asian art, history, and culture in conjunction Heard Museum, Phoenix, AZ; Martin E. Lehigh County Historical Society, Allentown, with the reinstallation of the museum’s collec­ Sullivan: $500,000. Construction of classrooms PA; Sarah E. Nelson: $20,000. A self-study to tions of East Asian art. GM and space for a new resident scholars program in the humanities and creation of an endowment create an intellectual framework for interpreting Association of Research Libraries, Washington, for residencies and the operating costs. CP the society’s historic sites. GM DC; Jutta Reed-Scott: $678,954. Retrospec­ NYC Department of Records and Information tive conversion of monographic records in the High Desert Museum, Bend, OR; Jonquil B. Services, NYC; Seth D. Janofsky: $138,259. National Register of Microform Masters, which LeMaster-Rock: $48,101. Planning for a per­ Preservation of 720,000 photographic nega­ will enable libraries and scholars to have access manent exhibition on the native Americans of tives that depict the built environment of New to some 474,000 records. PS the Great Basin and the Plateau. GM York City. They were produced from 1939 to Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rl; 1941 under the auspices of the Works Projects Leon Botstein: $500,000. Construction and Norman Fiering: $383,180. Endowment of two Administration. PS furnish-ing of a library addition and creation of staff positions and of the activities of a Center Newberry Library, Chicago, IL; James R. an endowment for library acquisitions in the for New World Comparative Studies. CR Grossman: $31,000. Planning for an exhibition humanities. CE Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, NE; Graham W. with interpretive catalogue, public programs, Bureau of Archaeological Research, Tallahas­ J. Beal: $500,000. Endowment of three existing and educational materials on historian Frederick see, FL; Bonnie G. McEwan: $49,916. Planning curatorial positions and the renovation and Jackson Turner's frontier thesis and its legacy. GL for an exhibition and related media that will expansion of the library and education areas. CP Ohio Historical Society, Columbus; Marjorie J. interpret the site of the San Luis mission, capital Kansas City Public Library, MO; Daniel J. Haberman: $446,326. Microfilming of 405 Ohio of Spanish West Florida from 1656 to 1704. GM Bradbury: $237,500. Creation of an endow­ newspaper titles, comprising 1.5 million pages, Carlyle House Historic Park, Alexandria, VA; ment fund for humanities acquisitions and as part of the U.S. Newspaper Program. PS Lesley B. Gilmore: $38,555. Planning for a public programs. CP Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence; series of exhibitions and programs on African Kansas Library Network Board, Topeka; Albert T. Klyberg: $177,871. A temporary exhi­ American history at 11 institutions in Alexandria, Mary D. Burchill: $35,785. Development of a bition, catalogue, public programs, and a news­ Virginia. GM statewide preservation plan for Kansas. PS

MARCH/APRIL 1992 Mississippi State Department of Education, U. of New Hampshire, Durham; Willem deVries: Eastern Kentucky U., Richmond: Harry Jackson; Sam L. Slick: $206,125. Two seven- $84,000. A four-week summer institute on the Brown: $18,416. A masterwork study project week summer institutes on the French and relationship between science and the humanities on poetry for 15 middle and high school Spanish heritage in Mississippi for 100 high for 40 Maine and New Hampshire high school English teachers. ES school teachers of French and Spanish. ES teachers of science and the humanities. ES Huntington Theatre Company, Boston, MA; New York Public Library, NYC; Irene M. U. of New Mexico, Albuquerque; Robert L. Pamela K. Hill: $28,579. A masterwork study Percelli: $205,293 OR; $50,000 FM. Catalogu­ Migneault: $305,790. Support of New Mexico's project for 15 humanities teachers from the ing of 2,000 newspaper titles and the microfilm­ participation in the U.S. Newspaper Program Boston area on 17th- and 18th-century Restor­ ing of 250,000 newsprint pages, as part of the by entering 2,600 newspaper titles into a ation comedy, the works of James Shirley to U.S. Newspaper Program. PS national newspaper database. PS those of William Congreve. ES Oakland Museum, CA; Therese Heyman: U. of South Carolina, Columbia; Catherine W. U. of Chicago, IL; Ralph A. Austen: $23,892. $40,858. Documentation of photographs by Horne: $234,000. An exhibition, publications, A masterwork study project for 15 Chicago Dorothea Lange, 1885-1965. PH and educational programs on African American elementary and secondary school teachers on Philadelphia Jewish Archives Center, PA; celebrations in South Carolina from emancipa­ the African oral tradition. ES Franklin C. Muse: $57,071. Microfilming of tion to the civil rights movement. GM records of the Jewish Publication Society, U. of Texas, Austin; Thomas F. Staley: including institutional documents, publication $228,869. Development of working guidelines committee reports, scrapbooks of reviews, and procedures for the application of the diethyl author correspondence, and Bible materials. PS zinc (DEZ) process for mass deacidification of DISCOVER archives and manuscript collections. PS President and Fellows of Harvard College, Cambridge, MA; Sidney Verba: $2,746,884. Williamstown Regional Art Conservation Microfilming of 30,810 brittle volumes from the Laboratory, Inc., MA: Gary C. Burger: $285,000. HUMANITIES! library collections that relate to American Endowment for staff research and develop­ business history, American education history, ment, intern training, outreach services, and Italian history, and Russian and Soviet history workshops. CP and culture. PS Yale U., New Haven, CT; James R. Vivian: Research Libraries Group, Inc., Mountain View. $750,000. Endowment for humanities programs CA; Patricia A. McClung: $906,224. Microfilm­ at the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute, ing of 11,703 brittle books from collections in which brings the university and public school Yale, Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, and Stanford teachers together to improve humanities important to scholarship in American history, teaching and learning in the local schools. CE Asian studies, Turkish history, and the history Yale U., New Haven, CT; Marcia A. Watt: of science. PS $1,916,518. Microfilming of 20,100 embrittled SUNY Research Foundation/Buffalo, NY; volumes from the library's collections of materials Frederick C. Tahk: $166,666. Endowment of con­ important to research in political science and servation internships for third-year graduate stu­ the history of economics. PS dents in the Art Conservation Department. CR Saint Bonaventure U., St. Bonaventure, NY; Richard P. Reilly: $250,000. Development of library collections in the humanities by estab­ lishing a restricted endowment fund. CE Six issues of Humanities Saint Joseph's College, Rensselaer, IN; John 11 P. Nichols: $375,000. Construction of a new Language & Linguistics for only $ . humanities core education center. CE Ohio State U., Columbus; Frederic Cadora: Southwest Texas State U., San Marcos; June $44,768. A summer institute for secondary C. Hankins: $151,200. A four-week summer school teachers on Arabic language and cul­ institute for 30 Texas high school history and ture. ES English teachers on definitions of ethical citizen­ ship in literary, historical, and political texts. ES U. of Wisconsin, Madison; Joan H. Hall: Company or personal name $79,207. Production of master and service Stanford U., CA; Charles Palm: $953,783. copies of 1,843 audiotaped interviews with Additional address/Attention line Microfilming of 60,615 items from the Hoover informants who participated in the fieldwork for Institution's pamphlet collection dealing with the Dictionary of American Regional English revolutionary change in 20th-century Europe. PS between 1965 and 1970. PS Street address Texas A&l U., Kingsville; Joe S. Graham: WETA-TV, Washington, DC; Richard Hutton: $200,000. A traveling exhibition, catalogue, $562,000. Endowment of a program fund for the City, State, ZIP Code and programs on the history and significance initial research and development of humanities of the ranch in South Texas from 1750 to the productions. CP Daytime phone, including area code present. GM U. of Arizona, Tucson; T. L. McCarty: $162,701. An 18-month collaborative project for 35 Arizona □ Check payable to the Superintendent of Documents elementary and high school teachers that includes a summer institute, an academic year □ GPO Deposit Account workshop, and a weeklong seminar on native □ VISA or MasterCard Account Americans in the Southwest. ES Literature U. of Arizona Press, Tucson; Stephen F. Cox: Credit card expiration d a te ------$237,500. Creation of an endowment fund to Auburn City Schools, AL; Elizabeth D. Burgess: cover publication costs of scholarly works in $24,135. A masterwork study project for 14 the history, philosophy, language, and litera­ middle and secondary school English teachers ture of native American and Latin American of Auburn, Alabama, on African American cultures. CR literature. ES U. of California, Berkeley; Joseph A. Rosenthal: Bank Street College of Education, NYC; Judith Signature 3/92 $82,314. A conference to develop a curriculum R. Pasamanick: $381,172. Three four-week model designed to train conservators of circu­ summer institutes for 120 New York City ele­ lating library collections and the administrators mentary and middle school teachers on the MAIL TO: Superintendent of Documents, who will teach the methods and plan the proj­ narrative process of the oral tradition of folk Goverment Printing Office • Washington, D.C. ects that will implement the curriculum. PS tales and other genres. ES

HUMANITIES DEADLINES DEADLINES DEADLINES

DIVISION OF EDUCATION PROGRAMS James C. Herbert, Director • 786-0373 Area code for all telephone numbers is 202. Deadline Projects beginning

Higher Education in the Humanities • Lyn Maxwell White 786-0380 ...... April 1, 1992 October 1992 Institutes for College and University Faculty • Barbara A. Ashbrook 786-0380...... April 1, 1992 October 1992 Core Curriculum Projects • Frank Frankfort 786-0380...... April 1. 1992 October 1992 Two-Year Colleges • Judith Jeffrey Howard 786-0380...... April 1, 1992 October 1992 Elementary and Secondary Education in the Humanities • F. Bruce Robinson 786-0377...... March 15. 1993 December 1993 Teacher-Scholar Program • Angela lovino 786-0377...... May 1, 1992 September 1993 Special Opportunity in Foreign Language Education...... March 15, 1993 October 1993 Higher Education • Elizabeth Welles 786-0380 Elementary and Secondary Education • F. Bruce Robinson 786-0377

DIVISION OF FELLOWSHIPS AND SEMINARS Marjorie A. Berlincourt, Director • 786-0458 Deadline Projects beginning

Fellowships for University Teachers • Maben D. Herring 786-0466...... June 1. 1992 January 1, 1993 Fellowships for College Teachers and Independent Scholars • Joseph B. Neville 786-0466 ...... June 1, 1992 January 1, 1993 Summer Stipends • Thomas O'Brien 786-0466...... October 1, 1992 May 1, 1993 Travel to Collections • Kathleen Mitchell 786-0463...... July 15, 1992 December 1, 1992 Faculty Graduate Study Program for Historically Black Colleges and Universities...... March 15, 1993 September 1,1994 Maben D. Herring 786-0466

Younger Scholars • Leon Bramson 786-0463...... November 1, 1992 May 1, 1993 Study Grants for College and University Teachers • Clayton Lewis 786-0463...... August 15, 1992 May 1, 1993 Summer Seminars for College Teachers • Joel Schwartz 786-0463 Participants...... March 1, 1993 Summer 1993 Directors...... March 1, 1993 Summer 1994 Summer Seminars for School Teachers • Michael Hall 786-0463 Participants...... March 1. 1993 Summer 1993 Directors...... April 1, 1992 Summer 1993

DIVISION OF PRESERVATION AND ACCESS Georse F- Farr- Jr-- Director • 786-0570

Deadline Projects beginning

National Heritage Preservation Program • Richard Rose 786-0570...... November 2, 1992 July 1993 Library and Archival Preservation Projects • George F. Farr, Jr. 786-0570...... June 1, 1992 January 1993 Library and Archival Preservation/Access Project • Barbara Paulson 786-0570...... June 1, 1992 January 1993 U. S. Newspaper Program • Jeffrey Field 786-0570...... June 1, 1992 January 1993

To receive guidelines for any NEH program, contact the Office of Publications and Public Affairs at 202/786-0438. Guidelines are available at least two months in advance of application deadlines. Telecommunications device for the deaf: 202/786-0282.

46 MARCH/APRIL 1992 DEADLINES DEADLINES DEADLINES

DIVISION OF PUBLIC PROGRAMS Donald Gibson, Director • 786-0267

Area code for all telephone numbers is 202. Deadline Projects beginning

Humanities Projects in Media • James Dougherty 786-0278...... September 11, 1992 April 1, 1993 Humanities Projects in Museums and Historical Organizations • Marsha Semmel 786-0284 .June 5, 1992 January 1, 1993 Public Humanities Projects • Wilsonia Cherry 786-0271...... September 11, 1992 April 1, 1993 Humanities Projects in Libraries • Thomas Phelps 786-0271 Planning...... May 1, 1992 October 1, 1992 Implementation...... September 11, 1992 April 1, 1993

DIVISION OF RESEARCH PROGRAMS Guinevere L. Griest, Director • 786-0200 Deadline Projects beginning

Editions and Translations • Margot Backas 786-0207 Editions • Douglas Arnold 786-0207...... June 1, 1992 April 1, 1993 Translations • Martha Chomiak 786-0207...... June 1, 1992 April 1, 1993 Publication Subvention • Gordon McKinney 786-0207...... April 1, 1992 October 1, 1992 Reference Materials • Jane Rosenberg 786-0358 Tools • Helen Aguera 786-0358...... September 1, 1992 July 1,1993 Guides • Michael Poliakoff 786-0358...... September 1, 1992 April 1, 1993 Challenge Grants • Bonnie Gould 786-0361...... May 1, 1992 December 1, 1991 Interpretive Research • George Lucas 786-0210 Collaborative Projects • David Wise 786-0210...... October 15, 1992 July 1, 1993 Archaeology Projects • Rhys Townsend 786-0210...... October 15, 1992 April 1, 1993 Humanities, Science, and Technology • Daniel Jones 786-0210 ...... October 15, 1992 July 1,1993 Conferences • David Coder 786-0204...... January 15, 1993 October 1, 1993 Centers • Christine Kalke 786-0204 ...... October 1, 1992 July 1,1993 International Research • Christine Kalke 786-0204...... April 1, 1992 January 1, 1993

DIVISION OF STATE PROGRAMS Carole Watson, Director • 786-0254

Each state humanities council establishes its own grant guidelines and application deadlines, Addresses and telephone numbers of these state programs may be obtained from the division.

OFFICE OF CHALLENGE GRANTS Harold Cannon, Director • 786-0361

Deadline Projects beginning

May 1, 1992 December 1, 1992

HUMANITIES 47 SECOND CLASS MAIL NATIONAL ENDOWMENT POSTAGE & FEES PAID FOR THE HUMANITIES NATIONAL ENDOWMENT 1100 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW FOR THE HUMANITIES Washington, D.C. 20506 PUB. NO. 187526 Official Business Penalty for Private Use. $300.00 ISSN 0018-7526