Book Review: The Same Ax, Twice

Same Axe Twice: Restoration and Renewal in a Throwaway Age, by Howard Mansfield was recommended to me by a colleague at the museum. This book is not just a look at history, it is specifically how we use history, recreate history, honor it, and interact with it today. Every chapter is a series of vignettes of different historical reenactments and recreations: the first airplane, people who make their own telescopes, Civil War Battle reenactments, and more. It turns out there are a ton of really diverse ways that modern Americans are interacting with the past. Mansfield talks about how we here in New England have been interacting with the past since the Victorian era with the invention of “Old Home Days” as a means of cultural celebration and mourning the loss of family members moving away from their local roots.

Mansfield is from New Hampshire, and writing with an incredibly local perspective. This is particularly interesting to me, having grown up here a lot of the villages and towns are familiar. The history of this region is something I grew up with. I think the book would still be interesting to folks outside of the state who enjoy regional sociological studies, but that could just be me. As someone who has both consumed the tourism of the region, as well as worked in the tourism field here, I agree that nostalgia is a part of our touristic appeal. Nostalgia is an odd concept, but one that is important when discussing how people view history, and in this case, New Hampshire history. A few years ago I tried to read “The Past is a foreign country” by David Lowenthall and I admit I did not get very far in that book before I had to return it to the library. “Same Axe” reminds me of Lowenthall’s book, in a smaller format.

I found the whole to be fairly melancholy: guys reviving old engines are described as puttering among the exhaust and nostalgia. American progress is described as a sad state of affairs. After a section on the Nevada atomic test sites Mansfield concludes: “American places are but a moment’s bright flash, followed by long, confused memories.”

But the diversity of history presented and the amount of connections that people were making to the past was inspiring for someone like me who often wonders if I am alone in my obsession with change over time.

Howard Mansfield has written a number of other books on history, I’ve also been told I have to read “In the Memory House” and any number of his other books. I think I’ll wait until a sunny day though, just in case they are as mopey as “Same Axe.”
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Looking at Old Houses

Oh you poor neglected readers! I'm so sorry I have not updated in so long. Many life changes happening here that have left me exhausted most of the time. Stephen and I are a month and a half away from having a baby! Inviting Alysa into our life was a great experience, so now that we've had a teenager we're going back and staring from the beginning. We can't wait to bring another little reenactor into the world.

As if adding to the family was not crazy enough, we're also moving, Right now my commute to work is an hour and twenty minutes, one-way. So I spend almost 3 hours in the car every day driving to and from work. That is not going to be okay once I'm a new mom, so we're selling our current house and looking to buy closer to the museum. Right now I'm fairly convinced that selling a house is more stressful than being pregnant, though it could be just that the house deadlines are approaching much more rapidly, and my pregnancy has been very uncomplicated so far.

I do intend to write up a blog post about the latest reenactment I attended, which will basically be my last until after the baby is born (none of my reenacting clothes fit me, and as I mentioned, I'm constantly exhausted.) Today I thought I'd write about house hunting. Since Stephen and I love history, and there are a ton of historical houses available in New Hampshire, many folks have asked if we're looking to purchase a historical house. The answer is a tentative maybe.

I grew up in a house built in 1795 so I know the pitfalls very well: they are drafty and hard to heat, they are always dusty and for those with allergies or asthma (Like Stephen and myself) they can be a health problem. They require constant maintenance since some part of the structure is always getting old and in need of replacement. As a historian I also know the value of old houses: they tell the stories of their community, you can trace the different ages they have witnessed on the walls and floors. Also, they are probably going to last for at least another 200 years if not more, as long as someone who loves them treats them well.

When doing our initial online house searches we are much more likely to bypass a house built in the 1980s (I don't like split-levels and we both hate wall-to-wall carpeting) and look more seriously at a house built in 1890. Go back much further (there was one house in our price range listed as built in 1760) and I get worried, unless it has been well cared for, and the insulation has been updated, that house could be a nightmare to look after. Our focus is much taken up with work, reenacting, and soon to be parenthood, we are looking for a home, not another project.

But I find old houses so hard to resist! This past weekend a central chimney cape with a lovely barn caught my fancy, and I am totally in love. The kitchen is horrible, the whole thing needs work, and the stairs are an accident waiting to happen, but the house is nestled right into the land, it looked so welcoming, and had a lot of great stories to tell. I can imagine all our books feeling right at home in those rooms, and listening to the sounds of the house at night. I can picture the gardens and the rope swings, the living room and the sewing room, Stephen's workshop.

Well we've only just started looking, I'm hoping there will be other houses out there, ones that will require less work, but maybe still have a hint of history about them.



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Historical Society in Society

I have a confession for you, my readers: I have never been to visit my local historical society. As far as I know, it is located less than a quarter mile from my house. I drive past it almost every time I leave my driveway. We’ve lived here since early 2009, we spend most of our free time driving all over New England to do history stuff, but neither Stephen nor I have stepped foot inside the local historical society.

Why oh why are we so neglectful? How could I claim to be into history and not at least stick my head in the door in the past three years? My current experience with history is exciting and adventurous; my past experiences with historical societies have all been pretty boring. Sometimes when I drive by there is an “open” flag out, but I’ve never seen anyone hanging out, any events happening there. I haven’t seen any flyers in town, or mailings about it, nothing on the municipal web page. I’m not sure if there is anything there beyond a little “schoolhouse.”

I really should find out. I think I’ll wait until the weather is better and I can walk down.

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Inspiration - Colby Junior College Yearbooks

I work in the Alumni Office of a small college in New Hampshire. My job does not normally have a lot to do with my obsession with history, but sometimes it does, and those times can be really magic. Last fall I got to pick up a visiting alum at the airport, she had gone to school just after World War II and told great stories the whole drive north.

Colby Jr. students during WWII

I occasionally get to work with the school’s archives, tracking down photos, or looking up facts about the college from way back. The archivist is really friendly and loves to talk about the history of the school, and the newest photos they are digitizing, or the latest bunch of letters that have come in. Last year I was tasked with making a valentine card for all the alumni who are married to other alumni, so I asked the archivist if there was anything valentine related in the archives. She found a charming 19th Century card that was a lovely patterned orange and red with a poem in the middle. It was a bit cheesy, but Valentines Day is a bit cheesy and I got to explain inside the card that it came from the archives, which was a nice college connection.

There is a long-standing college tradition, one day in the fall the president rings the college bell and cancels class so that everyone can go climb the local mountain. Mountain Day goes back fairly far and I love the photos from the 1890s and early 1900s of the sporting types exploring the great outdoors. Then there are the photos of May Day, where the ladies of Colby Junior College dress in white and dance barefoot in the fields.

May Day 1949

Occasionally the Alumni Office gets an inquiry that can only be answered by going back to the old yearbooks. In January I got a call from a gentleman who was trying to locate his wife’s college roommate. His wife had just passed away and he wanted to contact her roommate, who had been the maid of honor at their wedding, and had been close for many years after college. He could not remember the roomate’s name, only her college nickname! Though we have a lot of alumni information in a database, it is not an easily searchable database, and not all the nickname information is in there, so the easiest way to find her was to go to the yearbooks. I found his wife’s record in our database, which gave me the class year: 1949, then I went to the yearbooks. I am totally a braids and knee socks kind of gal, and I admit by the time I was through turning every page of that yearbook, I was wondering how hard it would be to make a Colby Junior College blazer.

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Yards!

Many years ago I was lucky enough to work as a costumed interpreter at Strawbery Banke Museum in Portsmouth, NH. My first role was that of the Widow Wheelwright. At first I would sit in the dim kitchen sewing on a piece of cloth and thinking about how miserable Martha Wheelwright must have been, but as the summer grew warmer I was given permission to move my chair out to the yard where the light for my sewing was better, and where I could see more of what was going on in the busy museum around me. The Wheelwright yard was not much --a patch of grass, a few flowers around the door and some fruit trees taking up most of the space—but I loved it especially on sunny days. Not too long after I started I was given a wooden wash tub and told I could interpret laundry day. I could not have any fire, and I could only have water and soap out in the yard so I would not damage any of the period furniture inside, but it was something else to do, and very nice on a hot day to splash about and strew laundry all over the fruit trees. At one point a small pile of firewood showed up in the yard, I don’t remember who put it there or why (since I definitely was not allowed to burn it) but I had fun stacking it, and telling visitors how I had no income but a neighbor was nice enough to give me some wood for use in cooking and laundry etc.

I spent a year as a costumed interpreter then went back to school, but I returned the next summer to work in the gardens at SBM. I did not get to do much in the Wheelwright yard, it was a pretty sparse yard, but I got to work in a number of different yards and gardens all over the museum:  the 17th century raised beds, the 1940s victory garden, the Victorian flowerbeds and glass house, the early 20th century immigrant yard (complete with vegetable patch and clothesline!) At the same time I was taking classes at schools and museums all over the Pioneer Valley about museum work and public history. In a small amount of time I managed to take three classes on Material Culture, I became good at studying people by studying the stuff they’d left behind. I looked at baroque chairs, early colonial houses, grave markers, tools for harvesting a cranberry bog, and more.

I finally managed to put it all together in a series of papers on the place of the yard in Colonial American life. I was (and still am) convinced that before the age of central heating/AC and electric lighting, people spent much more time doing the sorts of chores we now consider to be indoor chores in an outdoor location. Why in the world would someone sit inside to sew when it was so much brighter outside? Why would one do the messy jobs like laundry and butchery indoors when the cleanup is so much easier outside? I looked at archaeological evidence of paved yards, outbuildings and trash heaps, I studied art history for drawings and paintings of yards in active use, I looked at laws governing fences in 18th Century New England, and much more. I think of all the academic papers I’ve written I am still most proud of those works on the material culture of the Yard.

Just a few mornings ago, when looking at the artwork of the day that is delivered to me electronically by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I was struck by this 17th century drawing:

At first I was thrilled because it was only a century off from the lives we are portraying over at Das Geld Fahnlein but upon looking at the drawing, it actually was not much use for us. The details are indistinct, and we’re not portraying peasants doing harvesting sorts of tasks. But I took the time to go look for other drawing from the same series and took a good look at the October drawing:

and looking at that one I realized what had struck me about the first image. They are both yard scenes! Scenes of people working at their daily tasks in an out of doors (but not far from buildings) setting. Looking at the yard scenes made me feel all warm and happy.

A historical movie can have varying levels of historicity but to me if it contains a yard scene, it will have a space in my heart. Ever After has an early scene showing laundry being spread out on the hedges to dry, and the recent Pride and Prejudce movie has some delightful scenes set in the yard, including a montage showing the passage of the seasons reflected in the different sorts of farm work going on in the yard. Pure magic in my opinion!

Some people like to re-create the great battles of the past, some folks focus on clothing, or skills, or on the buildings of the past. If I could re-create anything from the past with no restrictions, I think I would have to make myself a yard. A simple, working yard, paved with cobblestones or hard packed dirt. With chickens and a plot for vegetables and herbs. A nice sturdy fence and some fruit trees. Buildings for the animals, harvest storage, maybe a workshop. And plenty of space to bring out chairs and baskets of sewing so I could sit in the sun and enjoy my yard. Read this entry on entry page

Dancing my way to History

When I was a teenager I attended several contra dances with my parents’ friends, but that was a long time ago. Since moving back to New Hampshire in March of last year, I’d been attempting to get to a contra dance, now I’ve been to 2.

For those of you who do not know, a contra dance is a line dance, but not the country western type. It is a bit like a square dance, but without the funny clothes. It is a bit like English country dancing, but totally based in New England. These pages do a better job than I at explaining it: Wikipedia, YouTube Videos.

Contra dancing interests me at this point in my life for the same reasons it did as a teenager: dancing is fun and it is a cool thing to do in the evenings; but it also interests me for its regional and historical significance.

Celebrating Regionalism
Since college I’ve lived in Massachusetts mostly, but last winter we bought a house in New Hampshire. It was not a big move geographically, but it felt big since we were buying a house, in another state, and in the state where I grew up. As part of the whole “settling down” thing I feel like I should get more involved locally but I have very little desire to attend any school board meetings, and making friends in a new region is a slow process. As part of the process I decided to look up local contra dances since I remember it as one of the fun local winter activities. Besides, contra dance attendees are friendly, local folks, who are a little quirky, just like me.

Nelson
When I mentioned to my mother that I was looking for a contra dance for Stephen and I to attend she talked to a contra dancing friend who highly recommended the dance out in Nelson, NH. She said it was very authentic and a good place for beginners. I looked at a map and thought: Nelson is in south western NH and I live in south-central NH, how far away could it be? It turns out it is over an hour away, up twisty country roads, long past cell phone service, where cable television fears to tread. Stephen and I drove there on the second Saturday of December (Nelson’s weekend dances happen on the second Saturday) not long after a snow storm. The roads were still icy, and it was dark dark while we were driving since the dance started at 8 and the sun had gone down at 4:30.

The GPS drove us past the hall once, but on the way back we found the building, attached to the town library, all lit up with a few folks just going in. The hall is a quirky little hall, where the floor slopes away towards one corner, so folks all night end up dancing downhill and everyone ends up squished into the bottom corner. The band was doing a sound check as we arrived, it was two younger men on a guitar and a fiddle that had no problem filling the hall with music. We got there early and got to chat with some of the organizers, then got a quick lesson in the basic steps by the night’s caller.

The way contra dances work is that there is a series of steps that make up all of the dances. These include a lot of swinging one’s partner, things like do-si-dos, and moves to change places up and down the line. At the beginning of the dance the caller will explain which steps this dance will need, in their proper order so folks can walk the pattern once. Then once the music starts the caller will call out the moves just before you do them, so half way through swinging your partner the caller will say, “now hold hands and circle round” so the dancers remember what comes next. It all started coming back to me as we started dancing, and Stephen had very little problem catching on because we’ve both danced English country dances, which are the grandparents of contra dancing. Besides, all the other dancers were happy to steer us around to make sure we ended up in the right place if we ever messed up on a step.

The most fun thing about the dance was definitely the people that we met. There were folks of all ages and dancing ability, everyone was super friendly, and interested in us since we were new and also friendly. If ever there was someone sitting out a dance because they did not have a partner, someone, probably a complete stranger, was sure to ask them to dance the next round. Everyone was that concerned abut keeping everyone involved and having fun.

What I had failed to mention to anyone at the start of the dance, was that I had had pretty bad allergies in the morning so I had taken a strong decongestant. By 8 in the evening I was still all fuzzy headed and having trouble focusing. Needless to say all the spins and swings made me incredibly dizzy, so I had to sit out every other dance just to get my bearings back. But Stephen was having fun dancing with new people and the dances were fun to watch even if I had to sit out. We did not stay too late, and I was incredibly miserable and car sick the whole ride home, but it was totally worth it.

The Connection
Why is this entry in a blog on Living History? Because contra dancing is a grand tradition that goes back to the founding of the United States. The hall in Nelson had hosted similar dances since the early 1800s, and similar dances had been danced in Nelson since before it was a town. Technically this falls more under a living tradition that living history, but to me it is the connection to the past that is important. That there is a dedicated group of folks, that there are tons of these groups all over New England, who keep an old-fashioned type of dancing alive, and make it their own, is magical to me. The folks I talked to were all aware of their participation in a longstanding tradition, and of that tradition’s place in the history of their region.

Sudbury
This past Friday Stephen and I participated in a “contra” dance even closer to its historical roots. A Massachusetts rev war reenactment group holds a 12th night celebration at an old tavern and inn. The festivities include a 12th night cake, a flag ceremony, a crowning of the king and queen, and tons of dancing. It is open to the public, we got there through a friend of a friend and could not pass up the opportunity to both gussie up our colonial outfits and do some more contra dancing.

The inn was fantastic, all the rooms were restored beautifully, and the hall just fit everyone in. The dancing was an older style, somewhere in between the English country dancing we did at faires and the modern contra dancing we’d experienced last month. The dances were still done in lines, and there were a few swings and do-si-dos but there was more variety of moves, and the dances were all slower in tempo than at the contra dance. I was glad that there were 6 of us there who knew each other so we could switch up partners, since this group seemed a little less inclined to ask strangers to dance.

Everyone was still friendly, and Stephen ran into some friends he had not seen in well over 10 years. It was different dancing in big skirts and restrictive tops. The dances that I sat out I spent a lot of time watching the different styles of colonial footwear spin past. One of the most striking parts to me was knowing that this reenactment group had been celebrating in this hall for the past 40 years; so there was triple history: the history of12th night dances in the American Colonies, the history of the inn, and the history of the reenactment unit itself. I am glad we were able to make new connections there too. Read this entry on entry page