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Our Day at The Colony

12.10.11

My smart and charming Honors students (and yes, that is how I address emails to them) have been learning about the history of eugenics in America this semester.  First-year Honors students start off with a one credit-hour course in the fall and mine is called Crafting People.  We read historical accounts of eugenics models—Plato, and on the other end of nature versus nurture, Sparta—then we dove right into the writings of Sir Francis Galton, founder of modern eugenics and coiner of the term (plus cousin of Charles Darwin).  Then we took a spin through the Oneida Community’s eugenics program called “stirpiculture” and saw what a voluntary, religiously-based eugenics program might look like and spent some time with Victoria Woodhull, one of the few outspoken female eugenics advocates.

 

For the last month, however, we have been reading about government-sponsored eugenics programs that took place in America from the 1920s straight through the 1970s in some cases.  The college sits right in the epicenter of the Supreme Court case that made involuntary sterilizations of the “feeble-minded” legal: Carrie Buck, the test case for the court, came from the area and was held at the infamous Colony in Lynchburg where sterilizations were performed and all of the trial materials were delivered at the Amherst County courthouse, five minutes from campus.  The Virginia Eugenics Sterilization Act was passed in 1924, and in 1927 it was taken to the Supreme Court where it was upheld in an 8-1 decision, famously summarized by Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes who declared that “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”  (For a great source of information on this period, the folks at the historical collections of UVA’s medical library have put this site together:  http://www.hsl.virginia.edu/historical/eugenics/3-buckvbell.cfm .)

 

We had the extraordinary good luck to give a screening of Rothstein’s First Assignment, a documentary about Arthur Rothstein, the photographer famous for capturing the Depression era on film.  The filmmaker, Richard Robinson, set out to explore the idea of truth in documentary and discovered a terrible secret behind his subject—many of the people photographed by Rothstein came from the same family, one that had been plundered of its children who were sent to The Colony and sterilized there.  With thanks to our good friend Paige Critcher, photography professor and director of the BFA here, Mr. Robinson spent the evening with my class at a pizza party and my students were able to ask him first-hand about the people he had met.  The screening was very well-attended and it is a fascinating piece.  I recommend this documentary to anyone interested in art, eugenics, or both—Richard’s blog about the screening is here: http://rothsteinsfirstassignment.blogspot.com/ and you will see that we had another very special guest, Mary Francis, one of the survivors of The Colony.  One does not get a learning opportunity like that every day.

 

The graveyard at sunset.

Because my smart and charming students were so enthusiastic and they were asking to take a field trip, this year we got a private tour of the buildings and grounds of the former Colony, now the Central Virginia Training Center where they do great work in helping both residential and community members with disabilities.  Today we toured the grounds of the former Colony, where we got to see the building that the sterilizations were performed in (it was appropriately eerie and dilapidated, as several of the students noted).  We were brought around in a bus to see much of the 300-plus acre grounds where the people we have studied would have lived and worked on the farm and even spent time in The Colony’s version of solitary confinement for bad behavior.  We were given an awesome tour of the beautiful cemetery there, refurbished entirely by the gentleman who acted as our guide.  Carrie Buck’s mother, Emma, was buried there (the alleged first generation of imbeciles) and we knew only that she died in 1944.

Students hunting for Emma Buck's grave.

Luckily the graves were in perfect chronological order and my student Fiona managed to find her, much to the delight of the CVTC staff as well.  Finally, we went to the on-site little museum where the staff had been kind enough to make a special history of eugenics display in their library and we got to see things used and made by the people of The Colony and its later patients.

 

We have learned a lot, the students and I, this semester, and seen much of it first-hand.   This largely obscured corner of American history has had a lifetime impact on many people we have studied and even met and so much of it has occurred in our own backyards.

My Honors students.

 

Categories: asylums, eugenics, Honors classes, libraries and archives, museums, unironic use of the word "awesome"
Comments: None

Last weekend in utopia

10.28.11

The Society for Utopian Studies held its 36th annual conference last weekend at Penn State and I must say, that was an unusually well-named conference.  Eric and I had been contacted over the summer about it by a most fabulous alumna from the class of 2000 who is now a professor too so I get to see her at conferences much to my delight.  Both Christa and I work on American religions and the centerpiece of this conference was the unveiling of an archive devoted to utopian studies and a fascinating display of ninety-some books from its collection.

 

Some of the books were performative in the way they were crafted: one gentleman, prefiguring the Kindle by a century, decided that the aesthetics of the pages themselves could help us feel better while reading and creating large margins that he painted in bright, happy colors and inset the text in the center.  Another was a pair of copies of Gulliver’s Travels, one in a huge elephant folio and the other in a little tiny book of maybe four inches high.  (The Lilliputians need to be able to read it, too!)

 

Eric gave an awesome paper on the Great Library of Alexandria and the utopian ideal of collecting all of the world’s knowledge.  Christa gave an awesome paper on the Oneida Community’s eugenics experiment and how its children functioned like a community archive to preserve what was seen as the best in them.  My paper was on the Mormon fascination with hieroglyphic in the century when no one in America could yet read them.  (In fact, it wasn’t until 1866 that Champollion’s cracking of the Rosetta Stone was confirmed as correct, so hieroglyphic had over forty years of well, we think we know what it means.  Maybe.)

 

And there were images galore, of utopian buildings that glowed in different colors to sooth various moods and where drivers parked their hot-air space balloons on balconies designed for that.  We learned about French utopians who took over the site of Nauvoo, Illinois after the Mormons had vacated it and about the Open Utopia project that has free and interactive text of Thomas Moore’s Utopia and related images.

 

And to add to all of this, another of our alumnae happened to be working the conference registration table and we got to spend a good deal of the weekend with Shaheen and her beau.  The area around Penn State has wonderful restaurants and we chowed down on Indian and Thai food.  And I was told by everyone in the know to not miss the Creamery, the university’s on-site ice cream parlor that uses dairy from cows that the students raise.  That ice cream had the most milk fat of any I have ever tasted, thus rendering it sublime, of course.

 

So, cool books, smart people, lovely alumnae, great food, and ice cream with a density more suitable to astronomy than food.  Utopia rocks.

Categories: Alumnae, libraries and archives, Oneida Community, unironic use of the word "awesome", utopia
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The Shrimp of Shame

8.22.11

It has been a very exciting summer with lots of great travel and the edited book is well underway.  We began with a fabulous trip to see the Junior Year in Spain facilities in Seville.  Our most gracious hostess, Dr. Celeste Delgado-Librero, director of JYS, gave us a tour of her utterly stunning hometown and the Sweet Briar classrooms and library there.  She and her staff facilitated every moment of the trip and I am so very grateful for all of their help.  Celeste also now has the singular distinction of teaching me that I do indeed like sardines.  And she drove me around to Christopher Columbus sites!  We all know I love Columbus!  (With great doses of pathos and irony, of course…)

 

Plus I learned one of the most excellent adages ever:  the shrimp of shame.  You know how when a group of people are eating together no one wants to take the last (whatever)  on the plate?  That is the (whatever) of shame in Spanish.  It picks out something so universally true and useful that I never had the vocabulary to speak of before.  And it is proactive, as in, Would somebody please eat the shrimp of shame?  It is going to waste otherwise.

 

Eric and I took many exciting day trips to Córdova, where I hung out with some of my favorite dead philosophers like Maimonides, Granada, where we trekked the Alhambra gardens and palaces, and Italica, the Roman ruins near Seville. We also caught a couple of days in Barcelona as well.  The oranges were literally hanging off the trees and I fear that orange juice has been permanently ruined for me elsewhere.

The Jewish Quarter in Cordoba.

 

This delightful excursion was all in an effort to bring students to Seville for a May-term sort of class.  I will be proposing it this fall so this is strictly and entirely speculative at this point but my hope is that we can do around three weeks using Seville as base camp and the classrooms at JYS for a course on the three major monotheisms in contact.  (Where better than Spain for that?)  The idea, as it is shaping up, is that we would have classes four mornings a week with an occasional afternoon trip somewhere in town followed by weekend excursions to near-by sites.  We would look at Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in moments of both conflict and cooperation and we could visit the homes of some of the most important thinkers in western history as we were reading their works.

Our rain karma was not all that awesome in Granada but I now own a two-euro blue bag!

 

So that is what I am working on for the spring.  I will of course keep you posted.  And in the meantime, don’t waste the shrimp of shame.

The Mezquita, a prime example of multiple monotheisms on top of each other.

Categories: Junior Year in Spain, monotheism, unironic use of the word "awesome"
Comments: 2

Aliens, elementals, and ghosts, oh my!

7.12.11

I am working on a couple of projects this summer, and first up is editing a volume that should serve as a companion to students or specialists who want to learn about Spiritualism and the phenomenon of channeling.  Like all scholarly books, this has been in the works for a couple of years now and is, also like all scholarly books, behind the schedule I had hoped.  But we are a go and this should be sent the press by the fall at the latest.

 

I’ve written about Spiritualism before here—the 19th century movement that inaugurated séances and wide-scale venues for talking to the dead.  We have an incredibly impressive roster of scholars on this topic who are writing about its predecessors, its rock stars, and its influence on later currents like New Thought.  We are also representing beyond the Anglo-American world and I am learning all sorts of things about strains of Spiritualism in France and how those emigrated to various Latin American countries.  One of the primary differences from American Spiritualism is that the French-influenced spiritisme made reincarnation a central tenet in the on-going education of the soul.

 

So the idea of talking to the dead morphs quite easily into the late 20th century with channeling, or having an ancient soul or guide or even alien speak through a living person and give advice to the audience.  The classic posture of Spiritualism here is often combined with the modern fascination with aliens, where outer space beings replace the dead or, more traditionally, saints.  According to these folks, our space brothers care about us and want to help us morally and technologically.  Like the spirits of the dead, aliens are wiser but not infallible or divine—they just know more than we do and wish to communicate that through a human medium.

 

This is my first solo run at editing a major collection and it has been more challenging and time-consuming than I knew.  But the best part is, this is going to be an amazing book and I am the first person who gets to read it!

An 1870 photo of Georgiana Houghton and her spirit guide.

 

Categories: aliens, communication with the dead, ghosts, Spiritualists
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Year end ritual

5.27.11

Our (somewhat famous, if I do say so myself) Senior Seminar dinner was a lovely evening once again.  I wrote about Professor Goulde’s Korean extravaganza here last year.  Well, the students this year decided on Ethiopian cuisine.  (We give them a list of options from our culinary areas of competency.  I learned how to cook some Ethiopian a few years back after taking many taxis through a snowy Montreal to procure it.  I figured my commitment level spoke for itself at that point.)

 

Senior sem dinner always begins with Spanish champagne with strawberries, and then this year chicken doro wat, vegetables alicha, and a spicy red lentil mush.  Probably the most distinctive aspect of Ethiopian fare is that one does not use silverware but rather eats by scooping the food with the spongy bread called injera.  For dessert Professor Goulde made a phenomenal pear tartine.  (He’s always the dessert guy.  I don’t approach his skills in the dulce category.)

 

We had a hilarious evening learning about the students’ lives behind the classroom and their plans for the future.  We are very proud of you and wish you all the best in the world.  And you had better come back to visit!!!

Nom nom nom

The dessert maestro.

Happy seniors!

Categories: the feeding of students, unironic use of the word "awesome"
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Secret Societies: the Greeks, the Masons, and Half the Class

4.3.11

Inventing Antiquity, the class Eric Casey and I are currently team teaching, looks at cultural phenomena from the Classical world and their imitations and interpretations in America.  We are concluding our section on the Eleusinian mysteries and American Freemasons this week.  Teaching about secret societies at Sweet Briar is a special treat because we have some on campus and we also have a host of clubs that are heavily invested in ritual and in tradition.  This first-hand experience just catapults the discussion into a third realm—the ancient world, American history, and the students’ current lives.

 

We read daily from primary source material and our scholarly accompaniment is currently Mark Carnes’s lovely book, Secret Ritual and Victorian Manhood. Carnes argues—very compellingly—that the droves of men who joined secret societies in the nineteenth century found enormous satisfaction in rituals that functioned like rites of passage—the initiate would be put through trials, failures, and endure frightening moments of being blindfolded or surrounded by masked authorities who would decide his fate.  He might even symbolically die and be reborn.

 

As if thinking about this weren’t enough fun by itself, when one can ask, “Does that argument work for your Club X?”  it becomes exponentially more fun.  Plus we had the delightful coincidence that several of the class members were inducted into the Classics Honors Society in a ceremony held at Hollins last week.  And yes, the initiates were led through recitations about historical characters and brought around to learn things at different stations from prior initiates and sworn to secrecy.  (And it may be a clue to the nature of secret societies that I, non-initiate, have been crashing these for years.  In my defense, I do cook for them when they are here.)

The Masonic ladder of knowledge.

Tuesday, though, is a special day to conclude our Masonic readings.  Elijah Fletcher, whose daughter Indiana founded the college, was a Mason and in fact his paternal home in Vermont was the headquarters for that chapter of Masonry.  We will be reading his letters and journals and I have a theory on the founding of women’s colleges and the support of the Masons that I will be floating in the class.  And until I can prove it, I am afraid it will have to be our secret.

 

 

Categories: secret societies, the feeding of students
Comments: None

This year, in Jerusalem

2.25.11

Well tomorrow I leave for Israel.  I will be the college’s lecturer for an alumnae trip and I am very excited to go.  In graduate school I had the great good fortune to get the Benjamin Fellowship in my department that allowed me to go study in Israel at the Hebrew University for a summer.  I have been back a few times since, most recently with SBC students on one of our many joint trips we took with Mary Baldwin College.  Students on those trips will fondly recall my colleague from MBC intoning on the bus microphone, “You can sleep in America.”

We will be seeing a great deal of the country—Tel Aviv, Haifa, Galilee, Jerusalem and the Dead Sea.  I am a seasoned bus yakker and am mentally preparing mini-lectures on the Baha’i, the differences between the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds, and how the Christians were the first to use the codex—that is, the book form rather than the scroll.  I also have two formal lectures and have been amassing maps, mosaics, Baroque painting, and even Google Earth satellite shots of the landscape that all three monotheisms have a stake in.

And it is also a very interesting time to be in the Middle East.  The potent combination of youth and the immediacy of the internet is the new face of revolutions.  I, like everyone, am hoping for the best resolution with the least bloodshed and I will be very interested to hear what their Israeli and Palestinian neighbors are thinking.

Whatever wounds it carries or has inflicted, Jerusalem is still a magical city and I cannot wait to wake up there next week.  I only wish I could pack my students.

Satellite photo of the Old City.

Categories: Alumnae, Israel
Comments: 3

Brevity is the soul of consistency, part one…

2.13.11

Today I would like to give a big shout out to the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology for bringing in Dr. Frederick Smith who gave an awesome talk about the Barbados’ slave economy and the production of rum.  Dr. Smith, visiting from William and Mary, spent a lot of time with our students last week, sitting in on the senior seminars of both anthro and archaeology and giving a great lecture Monday evening.

After being colonized in the 1620s by the British, the Barbadian economy floundered around for a couple of decades, trying various agricultural products like cotton until striking upon the crop that would make them rich—sugar.  Sugar cane was the perfect solution because it was very pricey in Europe and could be used in a multiplicity of ways: the cane had to be processed; the sugar separated and set into containers for distribution to Europe; and the left-over molasses was made into rum.  And the husks of the cane itself were used as fuel, making sugar the precursor to contemporary dreams of sustainability.

However, the extraction of sugar is a highly labor-intensive process and the economy of the island had to change to accommodate it.  Whereas most of the workers on plantations in the 1650s had been indentured servants—mostly poor Irish on the run from Cromwell’s reign—by the 1670s the Barbados plantations were run by enslaved Africans who totaled upwards of 70% of the population.

And the production of rum was only the beginning of the cultural changes.  The drink itself was a common anodyne for the enslaved peoples and the poor white community.  But rum was a mixed blessing for colonists.  It did indeed keep the populace busily intoxicated on occasion but it also fomented the sorts of heated community discussions that tend to happen when alcohol abounds, and Dr. Smith contends that rum played a pivotal role in the 19th century slave revolts that eventually led to emancipation.

During the question period, I asked him what sugar cane processing smells like.  He said fresh-cut grass.  And there you have it.

Sugar cane, c/o Wikimedia Commons

Categories: Uncategorized
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Happy No-longer New Year

2.3.11

Hi folks!  Okay, since my preferred discursive mode of longer, essay-style blog posts is clearly not working for the preferred frequency of postings, I thought I’d try something new as an interim idea until I get this semester under control.  So, without further ado…

Random Things I Have Learned Lately:

(From my for-fun reading over break on food in the ancient world)

  • No one knows how the use of yeast to leaven bread began.  Presumably some crisis took place that made the ancient cook leave her grains long enough for natural fermentation to take place.  Why she came back six days later and thought, “Hey, that smells different and is bubbling!  Let’s see what happens if I cook it!” remains a mystery.
  • The cultures of the ancient Mediterranean also preferred their bread to be as “white” as possible but of course didn’t have the technology to make refined flour.  Their lightest bread would have been somewhere between own current wheat and white.

(From the reading for our class Inventing Antiquity)

  • Slaves could go to the Oracle at Dodona and ask if they should run away from their masters.  (!!!!)
  • If one were really insistent with the Pythia and demanded an oracle when she wasn’t in the right mood, she could freak out and go insane.

(From the Faculty Show last weekend)

  • Do not lay monetary wagers with Professor Loboschefski.  The Psych faculty Know Things.
  • Hot pink boas suit me.

Yours truly.

Categories: Uncategorized, unironic use of the word "awesome"
Comments: 2

The Story of a Life

12.5.10

Last week I asked the Masters class in Education (which I am co-teaching with hub and Classicist Eric Casey) to read MFK Fisher’s The Gastronomical Me.  It is delightful and Fisher has a clarity of voice that only a handful of writers ever do.  The students agreed on both counts and MFK Fisher now has a new and loyal following among our Education students.

I have read a fair amount of autobiography and memoir this semester—in Philosophy of Religion, we read Augustine’s Confessions, Abelard’s Story of My Misfortunes, and selections from Saint Teresa of Avila’s Life.   I didn’t plan it this way; well, I did for the Philosophy class because I wanted the students to see how the idea of the individual as the locus of salvation took root under Christianity.  The Jews rose and fell as a nation and the Romans practiced a religion that centered on the maintenance of the state.  Individual salvation, and thus individual stories, arose with Augustine, whose Confessions is widely considered to be the first autobiography.

For tomorrow the Masters class will be reading selections from Malcolm X’s autobiography and from Billie Holiday’s as well.  They knew each other in Harlem, and each in his and her own way was heartbreaking and heroic and utterly critical for their insights into the tragic state of race relations.  We will be playing several versions of Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” a haunting song about an historical lynching in Marion, Indiana in 1930.  There is a photograph of this event with dozens of white people just standing around looking at the camera with no shame.  As I was reading background on this last night I learned that there were “only” three lynchings that year.  Only.

(I cannot currently verify that the photo in question is in the public domain but it can be found here http://www.americanlynching.com/pic6.htm .)

Billie Holiday in 1949.

Malcolm X is a triumph of education that every teacher secretly hopes to impart a fraction of to her students.  He estimated that his vocabulary was two hundred words when he was twenty.  He landed in jail, ostensibly for burglary but clearly for fraternizing with white women, and took a course on penmanship and English to be able to write to his sister.  Then he took one on Latin.  Then he read everything he could find, staying up most of the night tucked into the one corner of his cell that caught light from the hall.  Then he tore through the library, looking for African people in any of the history books, none of whom were there to find.

Malcolm X in 1964. Both photos courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Malcolm X converted to Nation of Islam, a religion aimed at black Americans that puts Africa and its descendants at the center of its theology.  Having seen how Christianity was used as a handmaiden of slavery, many African Americans found a home in radically racialized religions.  In a poignant section of his autobiography, Malcolm X reviews every single white person he has ever met and finds only one old Jewish man to ever have been kind to him.   Years later, while on pilgrimage to Mecca, Malcolm X confronted his own racism, an understandable but furious hatred of white people.  There, at Mecca, he saw people from all nations and all colors peaceably coming together for a single purpose.  And he had an epiphany.

Every life has a story but some teach more about who we are and who we should be than others.  Billie Holiday and Malcolm X are two such stories, and for writing theirs down, I thank them.

Categories: Augustine, autobiography, Harlem Renaissance, Uncategorized
Comments: 2

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