DR. JOSIAH CLARK NOTT “NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Dr. Josiah Clark Nott HDT WHAT? INDEX DR. JOSIAH CLARK NOTT DR. JOSIAH CLARK NOTT 1804 March 31, Saturday: Josiah Clark Nott was born in Columbia, South Carolina, a son of Federalist congressman and attorney Abraham Nott (February 5, 1768-June 19, 1830). Ludwig van Beethoven published something that virtually amounted to a retraction in the Wiener Zeitung, acknowledging that Artaria and Co. had not been involved in any way with the publication of his quintet. In Newport, Rhode Island, Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: Seventh day afternoon 31 3rd M 1804 No life. the day spent as usual in my occupation ———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT Dr. Josiah Clark Nott “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX DR. JOSIAH CLARK NOTT DR. JOSIAH CLARK NOTT 1824 Josiah Clark Nott graduated at South Carolina College. LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Dr. Josiah Clark Nott HDT WHAT? INDEX DR. JOSIAH CLARK NOTT DR. JOSIAH CLARK NOTT 1826 Josiah Clark Nott received the diploma of a medical doctor at the University of Pennsylvania. He would serve for a year as an attending physician at the Philadelphia Almshouse. THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Dr. Josiah Clark Nott HDT WHAT? INDEX DR. JOSIAH CLARK NOTT DR. JOSIAH CLARK NOTT 1828 Dr. Josiah Clark Nott would serve for a year or two as a demonstrator of anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania. THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Dr. Josiah Clark Nott HDT WHAT? INDEX DR. JOSIAH CLARK NOTT DR. JOSIAH CLARK NOTT 1829 Dr. Josiah Clark Nott began medical practice in Columbia, South Carolina. By this point David Walker had moved his clothes business from 20 Brattle Street to 42 Brattle Street. He had heard of, and embraced, a disasporic model of the development of the arts and sciences, whereby “learning originated” among the colored peoples, colored in a spectrum from “yellow” to “dark,” of Egypt and ancient Ethiopia, “and was carried thence into Greece, where it was improved upon and refined.” The question is not whether such a surmise is accurate (pace Martin Bernal) but instead, where did a self-educated person such as Walker obtain such a historical surmise? Well, we must note at the very start that this surmise is remarkably similar to an attitude of respect for North African culture which was expressed in classical antiquity by such writers as Herodotus. Also, however, two years earlier, in 1827 in an American publication titled Freedom’s Journal, similar sentiments had been expressed. James W.C. Pennington would carry this thesis forward in 1841, in A TEXT BOOK OF THE ORIGIN AND HISTORY, ETC., ETC., OF THE COLORED PEOPLE. Thus began Afrocentrism in defensive reaction to the colorless prejudices of white historians. W.E. Burghardt Du Bois has attributed the notorious Southern penchant for violence to hegemony: The white people of the South are essentially a fine kindly breed.... Perhaps their early and fatal mistake was that they refused long before the Civil War to allow the South differences of opinion.... Man act as they do in the South, they murder, they lynch, they insult, because they listen to but one side of a question. Meanwhile W.F. Edwards was providing, in DES CARACTÈRES PHYSIOLOGIQUES DES RACES HUMAINES, physiological data on the differences between the various human races which would be of influence upon the 1842 treatise INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON MODERN HISTORY, WITH THE INAUGURAL LECTURE DELIVERED IN DEC., 1841 by Thomas Arnold, upon Joseph Arthur, comte de Gobineau’s 4-volume 1853-1855 treatise ESSAI SUR L’INEGALITÉ DES RACES HUMAINES, upon the foundational 1854 textbook of the new racialist American anthropology, Dr. Josiah Clark Nott and George Robins Gliddon’s TYPES OF MANKIND: OR, ETHNOLOGICAL RESEARCHES, BASED UPON THE ANCIENT MONUMENTS, PAINTINGS, SCULPTURES, AND CRANIA OF RACES, AND UPON THEIR NATURAL, GEOGRAPHICAL, PHILOLOGICAL, AND BIBLICAL HISTORY: ILLUSTRATED BY SELECTIONS FROM THE UNEDITED PAPERS OF SAMUEL GEORGE MORTON, M.D., AND BY ADDITIONAL CONTRIBUTIONS FROM PROF. L. AGASSIZ, LL.D., W. USHER, M.D.; AND PROF. H.S. PATTERSON, M.D., upon the British literary critic and classic classist Matthew Arnold, and thus (eventually) upon the development of Aryan racial theory. THE SCIENCE OF 1829 Golly, 1829 sure was a year in which we were going in all possible directions! HDT WHAT? INDEX DR. JOSIAH CLARK NOTT DR. JOSIAH CLARK NOTT 1832 March: Dr. Josiah Clark Nott got married with Sarah (Sally) Deas, 22-year-old daughter of James Sutherland Deas and Margaret Chestnut Deas. HDT WHAT? INDEX DR. JOSIAH CLARK NOTT DR. JOSIAH CLARK NOTT 1833 Dr. Josiah Clark Nott became a surgeon in Mobile, Alabama. January: Birth of James Deas Nott. At last, some theorizing about human skin colors that is racial without being racialist! The origin of “Gloger’s Rule,” according to which melanin pigment in the skin affects its ability to manufacture vitamin D. A darker complexion impedes accumulation of too much vitamin D in the tropics, while a lighter complexion allows extra vitamin D production in marginally sunny climates. Too much vitamin D can cause hypervitaminosis symptoms. Too little can cause bone malformation, and a woman with a deformed pelvis can easily die during childbirth. “GLOGER’S RULE” WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF Dr. Josiah Clark Nott “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX DR. JOSIAH CLARK NOTT DR. JOSIAH CLARK NOTT 1834 August 17, Sunday: Charles Darwin reached the top of Mount Campana in Chile. Birth of Edward Fisher Nott. An instrument for force feeding should a slave attempt to escape through self-starvation: HDT WHAT? INDEX DR. JOSIAH CLARK NOTT DR. JOSIAH CLARK NOTT 1835 Spring: The Nott family relocated to Paris, where Dr. Josiah Clark Nott would obtain additional surgical training and scientific education. CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT Dr. Josiah Clark Nott “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX DR. JOSIAH CLARK NOTT DR. JOSIAH CLARK NOTT 1836 James Deas Nott died in Paris at the age of about three or four. The tiny body would be taken back to the United States by the parents for interment in Columbia, South Carolina, and then the Nott family would relocate to Mobile, Alabama where Dr. Josiah Clark Nott would establish, with Dr. Richard Lee Fearn, a joint practice at 62 Royal Street. DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD. Dr. Josiah Clark Nott “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX DR. JOSIAH CLARK NOTT DR. JOSIAH CLARK NOTT 1838 January: Birth of Henry Junius Nott. HDT WHAT? INDEX DR. JOSIAH CLARK NOTT DR. JOSIAH CLARK NOTT 1839 The Phrenological Association met in Birmingham. THE SCIENCE OF 1839 Hiram Powers finished his white marble bust of President Andrew Jackson, for which Jackson had sat to be modeled from life while at the White House at the age of 68. “Make me as I am,” the old man had instructed, which pretty well excluded carving the bust out of ebony, perhaps even out of hickory! The bust is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It would be interesting to determine how craniologically PC or non-PC this bust is, in consideration of contemporaneous phrenological theory. Dr. Charles Caldwell, a racist who was a professor at a university in Kentucky, had at this point become the most popular phrenologist in America partly by pandering to the American need for a scientific legitimation of genocide. Who knows what the white man knows? — The white man knows. However, the mainline American scientific establishment –under the leadership of the American school of ethnology based in Philadelphia– would over the course of the next ten years take this cudgel away from phrenology, by developing their own scientific legitimations for genocide that could not so easily be dismissed as a sideshow-tent fad. You may have been exposed, in your early schooling, to some of this ethnological material, in the strange scientific case study called “the Dukes versus the Kalikaks” — in which the names of two Appalachian families were changed in order to protect innocent victims of scientific study and in order to protect guilty perpetrators of scientific fraud. In this day and age, to be against slavery was to be antiscientific. In this year Alexander Kinmont’s TWELVE LECTURES ON THE NATURAL HISTORY OF MAN and Professor HDT WHAT? INDEX DR. JOSIAH CLARK NOTT DR. JOSIAH CLARK NOTT Samuel George Morton’s CRANIA AMERICANA; OR, A COMPARATIVE VIEW OF THE SKULLS OF VARIOUS ABORIGINAL NATIONS OF NORTH AND SOUTH AMERICA: TO WHICH IS PREFIXED AN ESSAY ON THE VARIETIES OF THE HUMAN SPECIES. ILLUSTRATED BY SEVENTY-EIGHT PLATES AND A COLOURED MAP (Philadelphia: J. Dobson) changed the American focus for such theorizing, by supposedly demonstrating that the inferiority of the Native American race was based on breeding rather than on environment, a conclusion supported by detailed scientific examination of the world’s largest collection of human skulls (world’s largest in pre-Nazi times, that is). The intellectual faculties of this great family appear to be of a decidedly inferior cast when compared with those of the Caucasian or Mongolian races.