Immersive Visitor Involvement at Living History Museums, or, Blacksmithing and You!

One of the things that always gathers crowds at living history museums are blacksmiths at work. It’s easy to understand why. Smithing isn’t often practiced these days. My spellcheck doesn’t even recognize it as a word. In this industrial age I’d wager the vast majority of the objects in your house, from the clothes you wear to the computer you’re using to read this blog entry, were created in a distant, far off land so far removed from where these goods ended up that it takes some prompting to remember that these objects were produced by human hands and machines in a process that took time and energy. It’s fascinating to watch something take shape on the anvil under the hammer and in the blacksmith’s fires, to go from raw material to finished product.

At Fort Edmonton Park, there are two smithies: one on 1885 street, home to a blacksmith I know for a fact has made it a personal goal to become competent in almost every skill possible before he dies, and in the 1846 fur trading fort, which is used by several more blacksmiths, including this awesome volunteer who often comes to staff parties dressed in costumes that include a minotaur and Robert the Bruce, complete with broadsword. He’s also skilled at leatherworking. Our blacksmiths tend to be a skilled bunch all around.

Here is the longtime Fort blacksmith, pictured wearing a lady’s hat from 1885 street wielding a dag he forged himself, because he is an awesome human being. Photo from 2009 by Lauren Markewicz.

Now, as I may have mentioned before in my heavy post on “historical authenticity”, at Fort Edmonton and many other living history museums, health and safety always trumps the nebulous concept of “historical accuracy.” The forges at Fort Edmonton remain roped off to visitors at almost all times, whether or not the site is in use – even with no fires lit, it still contains numerous sharp/heavy/dirty implements and many dark corners and tripping hazards. Enter at your own risk. The blacksmiths have special health and safety training as well, and I’m going to burst the historical bubble just slightly here… there are always modern fire extinguishers hidden just within reach inside the blacksmith’s work space. Always. And they’re regularly checked. And everyone in costume aside from the junior volunteers needs to have up to date First Aid certifications. So that nurse I portrayed last year on 1920s street, and the nurse who’s there this year? They can actually help you if you’re in the park with a first aid emergency, and will rely on modern first aid training not historically accurate procedures. Just in case you were wondering.

So what am I getting at here with all of this health and safety talk? If you wanted to come into the forge and try your hand at blacksmithing at Fort Edmonton? Sorry, no can do. And for good reason. Please be content to watch metal take shape in the skillful hands of the trained blacksmith behind the safety lines.

This isn’t the case at other parks. I visited Fort Langley in the summer of 2011 with a friend.  (And got pretend-married à la façon du pays to my friend in a fur trade style marriage program: perhaps more on that in a later post.) Fort Langley (near Vancouver) is also a living history museum, centered around a single fur trade era fort. They are all about visitor inclusion in their programs. Not that Fort Edmonton isn’t, but those at Langley involve their visitors in some programs in a more extensive way than Fort Edmonton  that gives them more of an experiential encounter with living history than they would as a spectator. One of the things I was shocked, and then pleased, to see, was visitors being allowed into the smithy. Observe:

Forging a metal hook at Fort Langley. Interpreter on the right, inexperienced visitor on the left. Note safety precautions and close supervision. Photograph by Lauren Markewicz.

You will note that my friend is wearing an apron, heavy gloves, and protective glasses. I wasn’t even allowed inside the building (the photos were taken from an open wall) because I was wearing sandals: closed toed shoes only, a sensible policy which I completely agreed with. My friend made a pretty nifty burnished metal hook (with a decorative twisted stem) in less than fifteen minutes under the close supervision of the blacksmith. And it was awesome.

Now, I’m sure that there are tons of insurance factors at work – Fort Langley is also a federal institution, whereas Fort Edmonton is run by the city that bears its name, and their funding and policies come from very different sources. (Some parks take insurance considerations to an extreme, and won’t serve food made in stoves by costumed interpreters to visitors, though thankfully Fort Edmonton continues, as far as I am aware, to happily serve visitors bannock and other dishes made by interpreters.) I’m sure it took a lot of negotiation and paperwork from someone on site at Langley to get such a program up and running, even with safety precautions. I’m not saying that Fort Edmonton should start putting that kind of visitor inclusion in practice. I’m not sure it would work in that context, considering the larger numbers that Fort Edmonton gets. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from observing and being a visitor, if you see one visitor doing something cool, everyone wants to try it, particularly if it’s free. This is the case with 1920s motorcar or horse rides, climbing on the palisades of the fort, or blacksmithing. It would be impractical in the Fort Edmonton situation: the blacksmith would do nothing but teach visitors how to smith, and coal and other supplies are expensive. That’s not to mention the insurance paperwork. However, this program worked extremely well at Fort Langley during a slow time of the season where there wasn’t the expectation that everyone would be able to try their hand. The exclusivity of the experience also added to visitor enjoyment: we felt special. We (he) had acquired a new skill and he probably remembers the experience – and the procedure – of blacksmithing far more than I did as an observer and photographer.

Testing the strength of the newly-forged hook by hanging one of the heavy metal tongs on it. Success! Photo by Lauren Markewicz.

Experiencing living history should not be limited to the interpreters in costume. Actually forging a clothes pin yourself is a very different experience from watching someone else, no matter how skilled, do it. It’s why interpreters at Fort Edmonton are encouraged to involve visitors in any activity they are doing, be it beadwork, knitting, pie baking, or (sometimes) driving an antique car. (Though, sorry, no getting behind the wheel unless the car is off and it’s for photographs… and you have the express permission of a person in costume.) Immersing oneself in history is much more easily done if the visitor is not simply an observer, but an active participant in the proceedings. That’s one of the main advantages of living history over, say, historical documentaries: visitor involvement and immersion in the experience of being in the past. (Or at least an approximation of it.) Being a blacksmith – being capable of the act of smithing something – is extremely cool, and extremely rare in North America in the twenty-first century.

Disclaimer #1: I am no longer an employee at Fort Edmonton Park. I am currently employed at Library and Archives Canada for the summer, mostly working in a cubicle with super cool classified documents that I can’t tell you about without having to kill you after to preserve secrets. (Different kinds of shenanigans are going on behind the scenes at LAC, though, in ways that I can’t talk about yet.) I miss being paid to bake pies, knit socks, drive motorcars from the 1920s and chat with visitors about fun historical facts. Hence, the blog: I miss you guys! But my bigger point is that I am no longer officially affiliated with Fort Edmonton, so anything I say about the inner workings or policies of the park should in no way be taken as an official endorsement of any type of behaviour or park policy or anything at all really. But please enjoy them nonetheless!

Disclaimer #2: My friend got to try his hand at smithing at Fort Langley several years ago. Please do not travel to Fort Langley expecting/demanding the full blacksmith experience and cite me as the person that promised you this. I have no idea if they still follow this policy or perform this program. But hey, maybe they do! If you’re in the Vancouver area this summer, you should check it out. Just in case you can forge your own metal object. Because it was awesome.

View(s) of Spirit Island

Consider this photograph, taken when I was on holiday in Jasper National Park three years ago with my family.

Spirit Island, Maligne Lake, Jasper National Park, 2010. Photograph by Lauren Markewicz

I’m quite proud of it. It’s a beautiful view, if I do say so myself. The way the trees and the mountains frame the island, the richness of the colours of the water and the plant life, the starkness of the lighting because of the storm clouds, the stillness of the water… Only I could have taken this photograph, right? It’s a big lake. There has to be thousands of possible shots for tourists to take, right?

Postcard 7957.
The Camera Products Co (Publisher) . The narrows, Maligne Lake, Jasper National Park, Alberta. Vancouver: Published by The Camera Products Co., 1731 Dunbar Street, Vancouver, B.C, [ca. 1940]. Courtesy of Peel’s Prairie Provinces.

Nope. I’d wager that many people who have visited Maligne Lake have taken a photograph almost precisely like this one, at least in terms of composition. Do a quick Google Image Search, keywords “Maligne Lake.” Fully half, if not more, of the photographs are narrow variations on the theme of this small island. And this isn’t anything new.

Maybe the photographs are in black and white, or are coloured by hand. Perhaps the resolution changes with the settings and/or quality of the camera, or there is more or less snow or greenery depending on the season. Maybe the trees on the island have grown, or there is a different log floating in the foreground. There are slight changes in angle based on the photographer’s height, or perhaps it is framed slightly differently according to the photographer’s eye for the scene. Nevertheless, in composition and choice of subject there is a striking consistency in shots taken at Maligne Lake.  If you further refine your Google image search to “Maligne Lake Spirit Island”, the similarities in composition are even more narrow.

Postcard 8271.
Weiss J.A (Photographer) . Maligne Lake, Jasper Park. Jasper National Park: Photographed and Copyrighted by J.A. Weiss, Jasper National Park, Canada, [after 1930]. Courtesy of Peel’s Prairie Provinces (click image for link).

Why is this the case? Is this the photograph that Jasper’s tourism industry “wants” you to take?

Historian David E. Nye, in “Visualizing Eternity: Photographic Constructions of the Grand Canyon”, speaks to the initial difficultly Americans had in attracting tourists to the Grand Canyon. Put simply, it was too big. Ironic, I suppose, because that’s its biggest draw, today. When you imagine the Grand Canyon, you picture “bigness” in your head. But unless it’s the new “Skywalk”, do you “picture” any particular aspect of the Grand Canyon? Since the nineteenth century – well, since the popular rise of tourism period – tourism and photography have been intrinsically linked. It’s a cliché; tourists are inseparable from their cameras. They seek out the most photogenic things for the express purpose of capturing their image. The search for the perfect shot becomes bound up in the touristic experience. So much of touristic sites are viewed through the camera lens. What sites become havens for tourists are often determined by how pleasingly they can be photographed.

But what of the things that can’t be photographed? You can’t fit the entirety of the Grand Canyon into one frame, or even a panoramic shot. Nye argues that that is one of the reasons why the Grand Canyon was so slow to become popular: because it was difficult to photograph. The best shots that showed the most depth could only be taken from the bottom of the canyon, where very few tourists visited. Some early photographers tried to treat the canyon as sort of the reverse of the more familiar mountain landscapes, with little success. What do you train your photographic gaze upon, when the subject of your gaze is so gigantic? The photograph needs a focus, particularly something that is unique to the region, if your goal is to attract tourists there and not elsewhere. In the case of other national parks, it could be a geyser or a waterfall… or an island. I think that that’s what’s happening in these photographs of Maligne Lake. The mountain landscape is gorgeous, but a bit too big to comfortably fit into one frame. Or, if you do take a photograph of the mountains, there’s nothing strikingly unique about it. Spirit Island functions as a wonderful focus, and a symbol for this lake in particular. The landscape surrounding it, by contrast, isn’t atypical of the many other dozens of lakes in the region. Spirit Island and the eye-pleasing composition found there is an identifiable image and symbol of the region. Hence, its appearance on hundreds of postcards and in innumerable tourist scrapbooks.

Postcard 8272.
Gowen Sutton Co. Ltd (Publisher) . Maligne Lake, Jasper National Park. Vancouver: Published by the Gowen Sutton Co. Ltd., Vancouver, B.C, [after 1921]. Courtesy of Peel’s Prairie Provinces.

Spirit Island on Maligne Lake resides in Jasper National Park, which is protected by the Canadian government as a preserve of the natural bounty of the Canadian nation. (Fewer people know of the First Nations who were removed from the “park” upon its creation in the early 20th century, to make sure that the land remained untouched and unused… unless you were a tourist.) Today, to get to Spirit Island, you must go by boat – you must buy a ticket, or theoretically rent a canoe, but it’s a long, long paddle over about 15 km of gorgeous landscape if you do. (Few seem to photograph the passage in between the dock and the island. Or, at the very least, they aren’t considered as striking as the ones of Spirit Island.) You are deposited on this island for about 20 minutes to take in “the view”. You would be a foolish tourist indeed to forget to bring your camera out to photograph this place. Why Spirit Island? Why not the mountains around it? Why not use Spirit Island as a platform to get out into the lake? Why not take photographs from the boat? Tourists have the option of moving about the dock or going through the trees… but many don’t seem to do so. Apparently, it has been determined over the years by consensus that this is one of the best views – the best of angles – to capture the spirit of Jasper. It fits neatly into your camera’s frame. It is uniquely identifiable as a place. Hence, its overwhelming representation on postcards of the region.

But it doesn’t have to be photographed in this way. Observe:

Where could this photograph have possibly been taken?! I recognize nothing! Photograph by Lauren Markewicz.

In case you haven’t guessed, this photograph was also taken at Spirit Island – it’s visible in the right of the frame. I had moved about five or ten metres to the left to take this shot. I believe it to also be a fine photograph. The mountains and the island dip down towards the centre of the frame, and the land also meets the water at precisely the middle of the shot. We can see the reflections of the mountains and the sky in the water. I like it, but it’s not a “postcard-worthy” shot. This photograph isn’t nearly as iconic as, well, the photograph of Spirit Island that’s on all of the postcards where the island appears front and centre.

Oh, and as an ultimate sign of betrayal and false advertising: Spirit Island? It isn’t even an island most of the time, except when there’s spring melt-off. It’s a peninsula. I suppose “Spirit Peninsula” doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Except in this case. Here, it’s an island.
Postcard 8273
Taylor G. Morris (Photographer) . The Narrows, Maligne Lake, Jasper National Park. Jasper: Photographed and Copyrighted by G. Morris Taylor, Jasper National Park, Canada, [ca. 1940]. Courtesy of Peel’s Prairie Provinces.

Post-Script: If you have never been to this region of the Canadian Rockies, you were probably pronouncing the word “Maligne” in your head like the word “malign”, and are probably wondering why such a beautiful area is referred to by a word with such negative connotations (“evil or malignant in disposition, nature, intent or influence”). It is in fact pronounced more like the original French, “Ma Ligne” (I guess on a map it kind of looks like a straight line?). To clarify, for the monolingual anglophones among us, it is pronounced more like like “mah-lean”, as in “lean meat.”

One more postcard for the road – this time, with bonus tipi and canoe.
Postcard 8276.
Photogelatine Engraving Co (Publisher) . Maligne Lake. – Jasper National Park.. Ottawa: Photogelatine Engraving Co. Limited, Ottawa, c1942. Courtesy of Peel’s Prairie Provinces.

Further Reading (and Viewing):

Nye, David E. “Visualizing Eternity: Photographic Constructions of the Grand Canyon.” In Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination. Edited by Joan M. Schwartz. London: I.B. Tauris: 2003.

Peel’s Prairie Provinces Postcard Collection.

What is “Historical Accuracy”?

Abstract (or TL;DR): An academic with living history experience muses on ideas of “historical accuracy”. True historical accuracy is impossible to achieve, but is an ideal to which one should aspire in living history museums, historical re-enactments, and historical dramas. “Accuracy” is not simply a matter of paying close attention details of costume or setting, and reconciling them with modern health & safety regulations, but also involves attempting to portray the more intangible aspects of the past.

Come on, guys, don’t you know that watermelon-headed fur traders didn’t start wearing Glengarry hats with beadwork like that until the late 1850s, not the mid-1840s? Do your research! (“M. Melondeau” in the Fort Edmonton Employee Break Room, summer 2011)

This will not be the last you hear from me on the subject of historical accuracy. The nebulous ideas of “historical accuracy” or “historical authenticity” are things that are often bandied about a lot in discussions of living history museums, historical re-enactments, and historical dramas. But what does it actually mean?

It’s not just as simple as avoiding the tell-tale square bulge of an iPhone in one’s apron pocket when portraying an Edwardian maid, not having late Victorian gentlemen sporting aviator sunglasses, or eschewing the use of late twentieth century slang in a nineteenth-century fur trading fort. Let’s get this out of the way straight off: it is impossible to be entirely historically accurate. Full stop. It is an ideal to strive towards, but is never entirely attainable. We do not live in the past. We have (unfortunately) not yet acquired the ability to travel in time. Much ink has been spilled by historians in past decades, and they have generally come to the consensus that we cannot know everything about the past, let alone translate that to writing and then costumed interpretation or re-enactment. (“History is all a construct!” is one of the catchphrases among the Public History MAs at Carleton University, an exclamation which is often accompanied by us throwing our hands up in the air in despair.) However, simply because the “perfection” of complete historical accuracy is physically unattainable doesn’t mean we should just pack in our bonnets and petticoats and give up. What an interpreter can do is provide the veneer of “historical accuracy”: something that doesn’t break one’s “historic bubble” unnecessarily. That means, on a most basic level, avoiding jarring anachronisms in dress, speech, and behaviour, and doing one’s best based on the information available. (Be prepared to do a lot of reading, and get a lot of practical experience in historical skills.)

Some exceptions are made, of course, as I would always tell visitors who enjoyed pointing out, say, the fire extinguisher hidden behind the door next to the wood burning stove. (“Hey, is that supposed to be there? I’m not sure that they had these in 1920!” they would say with a wink as they waited for me to finish baking a saskatoonberry pie.) I will always flat-out tell them that safety of course trumps historical accuracy at all times. I also portrayed a nurse, a veteran of the Great War: would you rather I used my twenty-first century First Aid training, certified by the Red Cross, in a medical emergency in the park, or the historical skills I’ve learned about in the course of my research, in the name of historical accuracy? Can you actually require interpreters at your museum to wear corsetry, or to abandon their inaccurate glasses? In the example of the fire extinguisher, I like to use the (often mocking) comment made by visitors as an entry point into discussions of fire safety in the early twentieth century, and I often surprise my audience by then talking about the surprisingly long (though not so surprising, if you think about it deeply) history of fire extinguishers. As an interpreter, I always liked to make everything into some kind of learning experience for the visitor. I don’t respond to sarcasm with snark, but with interesting historical facts! So yes, while we wouldn’t have had an extinguisher like this modern one in this particular farm in the 1920s, it isn’t difficult to imagine a surprisingly similar one in its place. Though its primary function isn’t an interpretive tool, but an adhesion to modern fire safety laws, the idea of having a fire extinguisher there is “accurate” (or at least not inconceivable). However, its modern appearance means that most people would view it as “historically inaccurate”.

Often, I feel “inaccuracies” are most often jarring,and easy for a critic to identify, when they are physical, tangible objects, like those fire extinguishers. Historians and history enthusiasts revel in pointing out little inaccurate details, such as the use of what look to be late Victorian boots in the 2005 version of Pride & Prejudice, or any number of aspects of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies: most notably, cursed zombie pirates. Costume details are very visible and fascinating to analyze and debate. Is it “typical” of the time period, or even possible for them to have? Is the silk print of that dress, or the cut of that coat, “accurate” to the time period, based on the sources we have? How dirty were people, really, in the past, and so how much dirt should be on my skin to “accurately” portray a medieval peasant? And, most importantly for re-enactors and costumed interpreters: what about the smell?

It’s the less tangible things, like beliefs and inner motivations, that are more difficult to portray on screen or in person. How to you act out the deference of a servant to their employer? How do you explain the goals of early twentieth century women’s suffrage activists without colouring your interpretation with knowledge of the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s? Yes, some (but not all!) corsets may have been uncomfortable, but would they have gone on about it as much as they like to do in movies? (Having worn a corset for extended periods of time while in costume, and knowing what I do about etiquette and the strict avoidance of drawing attention to bodily functions, I’m going to hazard a guess and say that no, they didn’t whine nearly as much.)  “Inaccuracies” in the discourse of a time period are really what I now notice in films.

Take, for example, the character of the obligatory-sassy-heterosexual-love-interest in A Knight’s Tale. (Caveat: this film uses anachronisms in a very self-conscious and often effective way. Click here for a defense of the anachronisms in the film.) This character grated on me for several reasons. Many of this character’s scenes involved mocking 1970s-style critiques of women’s gender roles in medieval French society. Would an historical figure even conceive of mocking them in this way? We don’t know! But it “sounds” very wrong to me, and overall rings “untrue” in a way that many other anachronisms in the film didn’t. This was also coupled with the really, really odd modernist costume choices for that particular character. This type of costuming makes me shake my fist at the sky, considering how many other gorgeous and more “accurate” choices they could have made for the time period! (See: so many good examples from art history.) Though I am admittedly no expert in medieval French fashion, in none but the broadest strokes do they even vaguely resemble the fabric, cut or style as laid out in books like Le Costume français. These aspects of the film do double-duty to annoy my historian’s sensibilities. Anyway, in summary: good film in terms of plot and most of the characters, though full of deliberate inaccuracies (many of which are successful in achieving a specific cinematic purpose, and that I found quite entertaining). However, I couldn’t get over that one character, her attitude, and her costume, which rang so “false” to me. Much of my vehemently negative response to that one character was an emotional one which came out of my reaction to the perceived historical “inaccuracies” of her character. She was embodying a modernist mocking tone I hear too often – everything about the character was designed in my eyes to show how “backward” and “stupid” they were in the past, which is a dangerous path to take. I am fully aware that many may disagree with me on this point. The film may have been satirizing historical dramas, but I seriously couldn’t get over this character.

In complete contrast, I am going to profess my love for Downton Abbey in at least trying to get some of the attitudes ”historically accurate” to the time period… in addition to their glorious costuming achievements. Some reviewers have derided the story line in Series One in which Gwen, a housemaid, has ambitions to become a secretary. This is a very modest goal by modern standards, but to her, in that specific time and place, it was almost insurmountable. It was also entirely believable for the time period they were portraying. You can’t have everyone bucking the patriarchy in historical dramas; by dismissing the modest goals of characters like Gwen the Aspiring Secretary and insisting that they should be worrying about, say, the right of women to vote or not wear a corset, you also dismiss the experiences of all of the awesome ladies who have had to live, historically, under what we today consider oppressive conditions. Do you have to espouse post-1970s feminist rhetoric to be considered a strong woman, particularly in historical interpretation? No. (I will likely expand on this in a later blog post.)

Downton Abbey’s actors also pay close attention to etiquette, posture, and behaviour which is still relatively rare in costume dramas and even many costumed re-enactments. The series isn’t perfect, and it isn’t “history”. Of course the plot requires some stretching of historical events, and the series does like to “name drop” historical events and people quite often; I’m looking at you, Lord Grantham, with your casual mention of Ponzie schemes! Nevertheless, overall, in my opinion, the series does an excellent job at striving towards “historical authenticity”, especially in comparison with many others.

I have so many more thoughts – and feelings – on “historical accuracy.” In fact, I probably should be more careful with my terms and distinguish between “authenticity” (which is a real buzzword in the field of public history) and “accuracy”. I have a feeling that “accuracy” can be applied in a much more scientifically “objective” way, and that “authenticity” has more to do with discourse and subjective interpretation, but there must be more to it than that… Does anybody have any thoughts or reading lists on the subject? Regardless, this post is not the final word on the subject (though I would of course be flattered were it considered to be so). Consider it my first foray into musing on the subject.

(Apologies, as well, to those who would draw a sharp distinction between what people in costume do in living history museums, historical dramas, and historical re-enactments. There was some slippage in terminology. However, I defend this take because they are all concerned with notions of “historical accuracy”.)

Now I’d best get back to my knitting. By which I of course mean the research and writing of term papers.

Big Long Disclaimer: the authority I perceive myself to have on this subject comes from several different places. I write as someone who worked for the past four years at Fort Edmonton Park, a living history museum in, you guessed it, Edmonton, Alberta, which portrays four different time periods. I worked on 1920s street and in the 1846 fur trade fort. I am not currently employed there, due to internship requirements in my current course of study, but I hope to go back in the future. In addition to this practical experience in costumed historical interpretation, I am currently pursuing a Master’s in Public History at Carleton University in Ottawa, which is where I have been learning a lot of my theory. I am also a fan of historical dramas and have done extensive reading online on the subject of historical interpretation (as you are likely doing, dear reader). In short: I have worked as a paid employee of a living history museum and have done a lot of deep thinking, research, and writing on the subject in a specialized program at the Master’s level. I have not been involved historical re-enactments, though I would love to be someday, and I am not involved in any historical costumed dramas (yet). My ideas come from a very specific set of experiences and academic background. Feel free to engage in friendly debate, particularly if you have a different set of background experiences in the field! Verbal fisticuffs only, please.

Terminology used:

• Interpreter: (often accompanied by the words “costumed historical”): my former job title at Fort Edmonton, the living history museum. We were/are people who “interpret” history to the public. We are not re-enactors, who of course have their own definitions of what they are and what they do – I do not profess to speak for them. Our main goal as costumed interpreters is to interpret/teach aspects of the past to visitors in the present. By using this term, we acknowledge that what we are saying and doing is only one possible idea of the past, and not objective historical “Truth” with a capital T (which, as many attest, is impossible to achieve or nonexistent).
• Public History: roughly, interpreting/presenting history to the public, as seen in museums, archives, documentaries, and many other mediums. There are only a handful of Public History programs in North America and beyond (there’s a conference here in Ottawa in a few weeks which I am very excited to attend!), and everyone defines it slightly differently. The Carleton Centre For Public History will soon be coming out with a series of podcasts on the subject (I performed one of the interviews), which will likely be linked here on the blog when they do come out.

Blog Posts Coming Soon (or soon-ish):

• First versus Third Person Interpretation
• Presentism, or, Playing into Visitor Expectations, for Good or Evil
• Using Artifacts as Props, or, Get Your Historical Driver’s Licence

Making Public History

Or, How to Teach Six Year Old Girls About the Suffrage Movement

People  often underestimate children. They underestimate their capacity to understand things about the past. Yes, 1990 was ages ago. (“I wasn’t even born yet!” One said. “It was a GOOGLEPLEX ago,” said another who liked big words.) 1970 was even longer ago. 1913? That was when the dinosaurs lived. 

But there are plenty of things that they can understand, and quite well at that. This evening, I  volunteered to come in to speak with a group of Sparks. (Incidentally, this photo contains a fraction of those who were there – imagine twenty-five little girls in pink and blue running around – no wonder I look a little bit frazzled.) I was initially invited to come in on International Women’s Day (the invitation came from “Rainbow Spark”, whose alter ego is a serious business history professor at Carleton University, and one of my teachers.), but it happened to fall on the week before the Underhill Colloquium, where I was already beholden to present my research, finish off my research, move furniture, and so on, we arranged for me to come in this week instead. Regardless. How do you explain the infinitely complex women’s suffrage movement to twenty-five six year olds? Do you begin with Seneca Falls, 1848? With the rabble-rousing suffragettes throwing bricks in Britain? Hunger strikers against President Wilson? When?

First off, forget dates. It is interesting to get them to speculate on when they think that women got the right to vote. Through consensus, they decided that it must have been 1970. But really, dates aren’t what you want them to get out of this.

Step One: get a costume. Or some sort of visual aid, like photographs. Personally, I prefer the costume route, not because of the inherent associations with childhood (which I question), but because it’s so much easier to interpret the past to them when you can use your own body and clothing as a prop. It promotes interest – who is this strange person? After being introduced (as “Hazel”, a special guest), one of the girls asked me about what I was wearing. I led in with the “in the time of your grandmother’s grandmother”, which is an easier thing for them to grasp than a date or a number of years. I had them compare what I was wearing to what they were wearing. A lot of them fixated on the small detail of my hatpin. They were mightily impressed that I couldn’t shake off my hat with it in. I also asked them about why they thought I was wearing something like this, and it wasn’t just because I was “oldey-timey”. I had seen them doing cartwheels and playing tag earlier, and I asked them – do you think that I can do things like that in this dress? There was a unanimous “no”.

Step Two: ask them questions. Lots of questions. Don’t lecture. Give them information in small pieces, leading them along. Why do you think I wear this? What do you think I learned in school? (Rainbow Spark pointed out that a lot of them went to a school in an older building that still had signs for the girls and boys sections – why did they separate everyone?) And then of course – what does my sash say? What does “votes” mean? I actually got a very coherent answer from the hive mind. (Rinse and repeat Step Two throughout the session. Never forget Step Two.)

Step Three: Put the girls in another person’s shoes. Get them to think about what you’re trying to say, and get them to relate to it, emotionally. After having “voting” explained, we had a mock vote, on what kind of ice cream we would theoretically have for dinner. The initial vote was split pretty well, about 16-11, chocolate:vanilla. Then, I said that only the people wearing blue could vote in the next round. We got a very different result. Then, only those wearing pink had the vote. I could have also done leaders-only, what color socks/hair, if they wore glasses, etc. I asked them how it felt, not to be able to vote, to choose. Then I dropped the bombshell – a hundred years ago, in 1913, women were not allowed to vote.

Step Four: Discuss, always asking questions. Let them talk. I asked them why they thought people didn’t want women voting (and they all commented on how strange the notion was). Earlier, before I was introduced, they had been discussing cookie-selling safety, which included never crossing the street unless you were with an adult. One girl had piped up “unless you are an adult”. I told them that a hundred years ago, sometimes even women who were adults were not allowed to cross the street or go for walks without an adult – a man. (A bit of an oversimplification, but it was common for women to be escorted everywhere). We had them, again, speculate on when women did get the right to vote. It was difficult when I was asked by the Spark leader – well, when did women get the right to vote? Not an easy question to answer. My response? “It’s complicated.” First women in Manitoba in provincial elections in 1916, then, Saskatchewan and Alberta, then eventually BC and Ontario, federally after the war… and finally Quebec in 1940. I didn’t bombard them with dates. I listed a few provinces, but they understood that it didn’t happen all at once. At that age (at many ages), they don’t care about dates. History isn’t about dates. It’s about experiences, about the sequence, not the exact dates or the politicians who made it happen. I think of history as, well, a story, with many different subplots. I just gave them a hint at one of them.

Step Five: reinforce. They played games later on, but they got to vote on which game to choose. They chose Simon Says, and Rainbow Owl made it “Oldey-Timey Simon Says” – “Simon Says put on your long skirt,” “Simon Says put your hair in a bun,” “Simon Says put in your hatpin,” etc., and they acted it out. They got to draw pictures – of me in my dress, hat and sash, and then on the reverse, they got to draw a modern day women. A few gave the latter blue or purple hair. We duly inspected them, and pronounced them masterpieces.

Yes, I don’t know how much sank in. Yes, I was honest with them at the very end, when they asked me about my age. I said that I had two answers: 23 and 123. How could this be? I am a student who likes to talk about the “olden days”. And then I impressed upon them how much fun learning history was. Hey, you get to dress up and teach people about it. How much fun is that? (And read books. Lots and lots of books.)

The Art of Medical Photography

Consider this photograph. Well, all right, consider this cropped digital scan of a lithographic copy of a photograph. What do you see? Nothing terribly unusual in the photographic conventions of mid-nineteenth century portraiture. A respectable-looking man in military uniform sits, half-turned towards the camera.

This image loses its perceived normalcy and becomes incredibly intriguing when you look at the rest of it, in context:

This image is the reproduction of a medical photograph which appears in the Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion. (The “war of the rebellion” in the title is what we now call the American Civil War, 1861 – 1865) This text was a compilation of Union medical and surgical records from 1862 – 1866, compiled alongside pension records and specimens from the Army Medical Museum, which was also founded by the U.S. Surgeon General’s Office in 1862. It was published over several years about a decade after the war’s conclusion. One of the men associated with the museum and archive, George Alexander Otis, was also one of the leading men responsible for the compilation of The Medical and Surgical History. There are six massive volumes of this text, which has been described as 55 pounds worth of information. I have seen them in person, in the Health Sciences library’s special collections room at the University of Alberta. They are chock full of statistical and textual data (which has been very much noticed and studied by medical historians), but also intriguing examples of visual culture: early medical photographs.

In this example, we can see four different men who are meant to represent four “types” of ankle amputations. However, despite the clear expository and pedagogical purpose of the creation of these images, there is something more to it. There is a very clear link in the composition of these images to contemporary portraiture. Why is it that the photographer and the compiler of the text chose, time and time again, to depict the entirely of the body of these patients, instead of cropping around the “relevant” part, the injured leg? Why do we need to see the face when studying the ankle?

Body parts were depicted in this text in isolation, but most of the time that was in the context of photographed scientific specimens: skull fragments, leg bones, etc. These body parts were usually from deceased men. If the body part was attached to a live person, they were usually, with some of exceptions, depicted in their entirety, especially if it was on a full page lithographic plate. I could only find a few of examples of images in which the upper body was pictured outside of the frame, usually as smaller drawings within the text itself. In the vast majority of cases, these men were not anonymous. These lithographs are accompanied by an embarrassment of information: name, rank, battle where injured, when injured, where they were sent, the treating surgeon, the steps of their recovery, whether they applied for/received a pension… even bowel movements are described. These men are not anonymous.

Why are these men depicted in “portrait style” medical images? These are a few possible answers. Any, all, or none of them could be true.

1) Photographs were often perceived in the nineteenth century as being neutral gazes, free from subjectivity (science’s old enemy!). They were simple mechanical reproductions of “reality” as it stood before the lens. Therefore, photography is ideal for scientific purposes like this one. However, it was the early days of photography yet. Perhaps this was simple the “normal” photographic convention: how one photographed the human body. Just as common photographic portraiture took its “artistic” cues from painted portraiture, so did medical images take their cues from photographic portraits.

2) There were advantages to viewing the entirety of the patient. For example, one can see potential expressions of pain in the face. The look of the injured limb can be compared with that of the healthy one. One can also see if the injured limb if the limb can support the person’s weight, if the subject is standing and received an injury below the waist, or if an injured arm needs to be rested on the back of a chair because it cannot hold itself up.

3) Perhaps the composition of these images is not a matter dictated by photographic convention, but medical practice at the time. The Civil War marked the last gasps of the humor theory of disease in which the body must remain in constant balance through purging, bleeding, depletion/excretion, etc. In fact, bleeding had been firmly rejected only at the very beginning of the war. Nevertheless, as in the late antebellum period, many doctors continued to view their patient’s health holistically, a holdover from this idea of the body’s humors being out of balance. Thus, it makes sense to depict the entire body, because what can you learn from one part of a whole?

4) Potential respect for the dignity of veterans. Other medical images contemporary to this set, including photographs from France in the 1850s of psychiatric patients and exceptional medical cases (such as crazily bent spines or terrifying facial tumors), were depicted with far less dignifying aspects, and the patients were often made anonymous or synonymous with their conditions. One author describes the photographs serving to make the subject into object. That is not what is occurring in these American images from the Medical and Surgical History. Once again, these men were not anonymous and were not treated synonymously with their injuries. Immediately after the war, many amputees were viewed with respect by the American public: their empty sleeves were testament to the ultimate bodily portrayal of their patriotic sacrifice. The veteran was celebrated in poetry, song, and other discourse (though this idealization may have done little to actually help them economically). Nevertheless, this lack of anonymity and fairly dignified portrayal of these men as individuals may be a reflection of the respect afforded to veterans of the victorious North, as compared with the portrayals of French psychiatric patients. It may also explain the conspicuous lack of photographic portrayal of any of the injured from the 180,000 strong African American contingents of the Union army (or, rather: in my perusal of two of the six volumes I could not spot any).

Medical imaging really highlights the tensions between photography’s uses in “artistic” genres, such as portraiture, and “objective”, “scientific” ones. Drawing a hard and fast line between examples of “art” and “science” are not as straightforward as many would think.

These thoughts were originally shown to the wider world (or, at least, at Carleton University) at the Underhill Graduate Student’s Colloquium on March 7th, 2013. A seminar paper will soon follow. If this is something that interests you (as it interests me!) please don’t hesitate to message me. If you have any other intriguing examples from the early days of photography, particularly medical imaging, please share it with the rest of the class.

Further Reading

• Dammann, Gordon E. and Alfred Jay Bollet. Images of Civil War Medicine: A Photographic History. New  York: Demos Medical Publishing, LLC., 2008.
• Figg, Laurann and Jane Farrell-Beck. “Amputation in the Civil War: Physical and Social Dimensions.” Journal of the History of Medicine & Allied Sciences Vol. 48 Issue 4 (October 1993): 454-475.
• O’Connor, Erin. “Camera Medica: Towards a Morbid History of Photography.” History of Photography. Vol. 23, Number 3 (Autumn 1999): 232-244.
• Otis, George Alexander and J.J. Woodward. Reports on the extent and nature of the materials available for the preparation of a medical and surgical history of the rebellion. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1865.
• Trachtenberg, Alan. Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans. New York: Hill and Wang, 1999.
• United States Surgeon General’s Office. The medical and surgical history of the war of the rebellion, 1861-65, Volumes 1 – 5. Washington: Government Prints Office, 1875. (Available in digital form online, links at the bottom of this blog post.)
• Wells, Liz, Ed. Photography: A Critical Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.
• For more examples of screenshots from the Medical and Surgical History, you can also visit one of my Pinterest boards in which I screen captured intriguing or representative pages.)

A Family Trip to Vimy Ridge, 1936

52C 3 6.1  20100116-002, Canadian War Museum Archive

Last semester, you may recall I was working on a project on the subject of the Vimy Ridge sculptures, which involved my own experience as a tourist to Vimy Ridge as well as archival research here in Ottawa.  I have also already written about another interesting find in the Canadian War Museum archive.  Often, in the course of performing archival research, the juiciest of finds are completely accidental; they happen to be place in the same fond as something else your search terms (or friendly neighborhood archivist) pulled out for you. It’s the pleasant surprise of running across something so unexpected that can really make these documents so memorable to individual researchers.

This is one such document. Now, to refresh your memory, the Vimy Ridge monument in North-Eastern France was meant to commemorate those Canadians who died in France during the Great War but whose bodies were never found. It was not completed and unveiled until 1936. (Incidentally, the dedication of this monument was one of the few major public events that King Edward VI performed during his short reign that year.) Several thousand Canadian veterans and their families attended the unveiling ceremony, travelling vast distances by boat and train. Called the Vimy Pilgrims, they were shown around England and Northern France in grand style in highly scheduled programs, ending with a visit at Buckingham Palace in London. This photo album documents one such journey of the family of a Canadian veteran, Corporal Henry Botel.

In many ways, particularly in the poses and “types” of images, these photos resemble the same sort of ones that would be taken on a family holiday to Europe today, for all that they were taken 77 years ago. There are shots of famous monuments from the ferry/steamship, triangles of family members photographed in groups in front of various landscapes, the family with their luggage, photos of travelling acquaintances, and of course crowds of other tourists swarming an “important” site with the relevant friend or family member in the foreground.

Paging through the album, it was odd for me to retrace these family’s steps in photographs. I do not know these people, but I know these places. That is my personal connection to this album. I have unwittingly visited most of the locations pictured in their album, just over seventy-five years later. I have followed this route, which is roughly depicted in chronological order (which was easy to verify, as the War Museum’s archive also contains their printed itinerary.) After a series of images of them leaving Montreal by ship, I had an eerie sense of déjà vu when I turned the page and suddenly saw a photograph taken at train station in Amiens (pictured above, centre). I have visited this city before, and I have distinct memories of pacing up and down the platform (and, once, racing down it to make a connection, after my train got in late) in between transfers. The look and style of the trains and the passengers may have changed, but the backdrop hadn’t. The structure of the platform, and even the sign announcing the stop’s name, hasn’t changed overmuch in the last seventy years. The Botel family also visited Rouen, a city to which I feel particularly attached after living there for seven months last year. I recognized the style of housing and the city’s coat of arms immediately, though the foreground contained many more smartly dressed men in caps that I remember being there. And of course there are the photographs of the Vimy memorial itself; then, recently built, but when I visited it, recently restored. The marble gleams like new in my own memory and my photographs, matching these images from three quarters of a century ago. I felt like the photographs in this album could have been taken by me. Minus, of course, the tremendously large crowds of men in uniform and their neatly-dressed wives and children.

Then there are pages like the above. Again, I recognize the place – or at least the type of place. Military cemeteries in Europe tend to resemble each other very closely, with their rows upon rows of near identical gravestones. My great uncle fought in the Great War and survived until the 1970s (though he made it out with one less leg than he had gone in with). I had no grave to visit, and three quarters of a century later, I had very little personal or familial emotional connection to these cemeteries. That was very much not the case for the Botel family. Often, the compiler of the album scribbles a quick explanation – sometimes just a date, or a place – to accompany the photograph. In this case, the photograph is of the little girl who is so often pictured elsewhere in the album: Frances Botel, the veteran’s daughter. She is pictured here next to a neat row of war graves. The caption reads “Charlie’s grave, Aubigny, France.” (Likely Aubigny-au-Bac, which is in the Nord Pas de Calais, a very war-torn region.) The girl smiles awkwardly, head tilted at an odd angle, squinting in the sun. The site is important to the family; Charlie’s identity would have been self-evident for the photographer and for the compiler. She would be too young to remember the war or this long-lost Charlie, but it was felt to be important to visit and be photographed visiting this site. To me, it is odd that they should be smiling in a graveyard, but perhaps that’s just what you do when someone points a camera at you: you smile.

Martha Langford in Suspended Conversations: the afterlife of memory in photographic albums speaks of photo albums almost in the same terms of oral histories; they are performances. Photo albums are ideally understood when it is mediated by someone who knows its contents intimately. These unpublished albums are generally compiled for a very small, private audience: friends, family, and those who would appreciate its contents. Because of this limited audience, often photo albums have few, if any captions, and the people and places that appear most often are often the least labelled, because their names would have been obvious to the observer. It was the odd locations and passing acquaintances, those who wouldn’t necessarily be immediately recognized, that are labelled. Ironically, in the very act of preservation, by donating a family photo album to an archive, one divorces this set of images from much of its meaning, because the album is separated from that source of oral, unwritten information.

That being said, under what circumstances are albums acquired by archives? Are they donated by family members who want their family history preserved? Or are they donated, alternatively, by family members for whom the album no longer holds any meaning or personal memories? Or do they find their way into the archive in a more roundabout way, through antique markets and specialty collectors, as mere examples of intriguing or “typical” examples of an age?

Henry Botel died in 1977. Judging by the control number, a large collection of his documents from the time of the war through to the Vimy Pilgrimage were donated en masse to the War Museum in 2010.  Taken together, the curator and researcher can learn from the additional documents that the mysterious “Charlie” whose grave was visited was Charlie Murphy of the 75th Battalion. Such information can only be found by reading through the supplementary documents provided with the album, which could also have been missing this and other crucial information. These documents together tell a very  compelling and fascinating story, full of at times surprising, contradictory reminders of the era: an advertisement in their Vimy Pilgrimage Guide for the 1936 Olympic Games in Nazi Berlin appears alongside ads for European tourism with captions like “This time… in peace”. However, are these supplemental textual documents any substitute for an oral narrative? Reading photo albums is really a performance, best done by someone who was there, or who knows the people picture, pointing and explaining throughout all of the little details that might otherwise be overlooked or remain unknown.

Further Reading

This photograph album is only one of many holdings on the subject of Corporal Botel’s family’s trip to Vimy Ridge held by the Canadian War Museum. Inquire with your friendly neighbourhood archivist to take a look at them for yourself!

Chambers, Deborah. “Family as Place: Family Photograph Albums and the Domestication of Public and Private Space” in Picturing Place: Photography and the geographical imagination. Edited by Joan M. Schwartz and James R. Ryan. London: I.B. Tauris, 2003.

Hucker, Jacqueline. “‘After the Agony in Stony Places’: The Meaning and Significance of the Vimy Monument.” Vimy Ridge: a Canadian Reassessment. Edited by Geoffrey Hayes, Michael Bechthold and Andrew Iarocci. Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2007.

Langford, Martha. Suspended Conversations: the afterlife of memory in photographic albums. Montreal, QC: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001.

Scott, Jill. “Vimy Ridge Memorial: Stone with a Story.” Queen’s Quarterly 114, no. 4 (Winter 2007): 506-519.

“The Vimy Ridge War Memorial Unveiled.” The Illustrated London News, August 1, 1936. (If anybody is desirous of a PDF scan of this edition, I happen to have one! Feel free to message me.)

A Matter of Life or Limb

“To amputate, or not to amputate? That is the question.
Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
Th’ unsymmetry of one-armed men, and draw
A pension, thereby shuffling off a part
Of mortal coil; or, trusting unhinged nature,
Take arms against a cruel surgeon’s knife,
And, by opposing rusty theories,
Risk a return to dust in the full shape of a man.”

American Civil War era poem, quoted in Ira M. Rucktow, Bleeding Blue and Gray: Civil War surgery and the evolution of American medicine (New York: Random House, Inc., 2005), 219.

 

While perusing my old notes on Civil War medicine for a current research project, I ran across this parody of Hamlet’s great soliloquy. It really does summarize some of the agonizing (if you’ll forgive the terrible pun) choices faced by wounded soldiers during the American Civil War.

The thing is, I feel that people, if they know one thing about Civil War medicine, it’s that it was “barbaric”. The word “butchery” comes up a lot. Piles of severed limbs, men with grimy hands wearing blood soaked aprons and wielding butcher knives.

And yes, there was some of that. But there was so much more.

People don’t tend to question the conditions that led up to such “butchery”, which, as shocking images, did of course get stuck in the popular memory a lot more than, say, the regimental surgeon who also pulled teeth if you needed it, splinted broken fingers and whined at the men to dig better latrines. (Or to use the latrines that they had been forced to dig already.)

If there are only five doctors and a handful of pre-professionalization nurses (often convalescing soldiers who aren’t quite up to snuff for regular duties but can probably hold a tray or wrap a bandage) to help you after a big battle and there are about five hundred wounded men pouring in and they all have to be treated right now… yes, you are going to have to be quick and fast at your job. Which will involve amputation.

(Incidentally: yes, they did use anaesthesia during the Civil War. Quite a lot of it, actually. Many historians estimate (guestimate?) that about 90% of operations during the war were performed with either ether or chloroform, and the 10% that didn’t were mostly in the South, which had supply line problems.)

A lot of people, by which I mean “the public” (AKA non-academics), members of the modern medical profession and even historians (I’m looking at you, military historians who just want to make a statement about the horrors of war!) still propagate exaggerations and misinformation about the state of Civil War surgery, acting outraged that the surgeons of the era couldn’t predict innovations such as germ theory (which wouldn’t happen for another decade or so), that there were a lot of unnecessary amputations, and so on. Honestly, if you’re going to be presentist like that… Just think, how perfect is medicine today, in 2013? In a hundred years, won’t people look back on our era and, shocked, exclaim, “What do you mean they cut people open during surgery? That’s barbaric! Why didn’t they use [laser whatsits]? What do you mean, some people drank ten cups of coffee a day? Didn’t they know about the horrific effects of  [X, Y, Z]?” It’s all relative, but we have a particular need to be harsh judges of medical practices in the past, perhaps because the medical profession is viewed as a sort of straight, steady line of progress, instead of the wobbly vaguely upward line I feel it really was – in fits and starts, with some backtracking, and continually changing.

But I digress. Why weren’t Civil War surgeons as bad as we think they are? For your consideration:

1) The types of ammunition being used during the Civil War were not like those of today, which move so quickly that they cauterize the wound as they go in. Minié balls and musket balls ripped through flesh and often brought bits of dirty clothing into the wound, causing it to fester. These heavy slugs were also more likely to shatter bone, which, almost invariably, grew infected.

2) Ambulance systems were still in their infancy, and so it wasn’t unusual for men to be lying on the field for over a day, sometimes up to a week, dying but not dead, before they were “rescued” and brought to a doctor. How much could a surgeon do at that point?

3) Yes, this era was pre-germ theory. But pro-sanitation! Get rid of that miasma (which everyone knows causes disease), so clean up those wounds quickly, introduce fresh air, clean bandages, get any and all filth away from the men. (Fun, shocking fact of the day: Florence Nightengale, that secular saint of a nurse, was pro-sanitation but anti-germ theory for a surprisingly long time, only giving in near the end of her life. Why? Because she felt that germ theory offered no new treatment plans, nothing different from what she was already doing.)

4) Theoretically, a more delicate operation like resection (removing a section of damaged bone) could save that man’s limb. But if you have another hundred men lying around you screaming in pain waiting for their operation, do you really have time for a longer, protracted procedure? The cost of that man’s semi-functioning limb would be the lives of several of his comrades.

So, all in all, if you are shot, say, in the upper arm, you will likely have a shattered bone with bits of whatever was on the exterior of your coat and shirt pulled in with the projectile. You are unlikely to get timely medical care because of the nature of battle, the ambulance system, and the overworked nature of the surgeons… leaving aside the roll of the dice as to whether you get a competent surgeon in the first few years – the examinations were much more stringent later in the war, but there were fewer surgeons around, too. “Laudable pus” is expected as a natural part of the healing process; your limb is going to get infected, likely badly. Amputation is, in all honesty, the best option for your survival.

Life or limb. You choose.

Further reading (and I can recommend so much further reading on this topic):

Johnson, Steven. The Ghost Map: the story of London’s most terrifying epidemic – and how it changed science, cities, and the modern world. New York: Riverhead Books, 2006.

Schmidt, James R. Civil War Medicine (And Writing): A Blog on Civil War-Era Medicine and My Own Research and Writing (AKA Shameless Self-Promotion).

Rucktow, Ira M. Bleeding Blue and Gray: Civil War surgery and the evolution of American medicine. New York: Random House, Inc., 2005.

United States Surgeon General’s Office. The medical and surgical history of the war of rebellion, 1861-65, Volumes 1 – 5. Washington: Government Prints Office, 1875. (Part III, Volume II, at least, available in its entirety here.)

Wilder, Burt G. Practicing Medicine in a Black Regiment: The Civil War Diary of Burt. G. Wilder, 55^th Massachusetts. Edited and introduced by Richard M. Reid. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010.

The Mystery of the Historical Photobomb and the Missing Source

A few years back (which is the equivalent of centuries, in internet terms), I was shown this photograph by a friend of mine who knew I was interested in researching the American Civil War.

The photo appears to show a group of seven (in reality, eight) men in what looks to be military uniforms. One man on the far left may be holding a baseball bat and ball. There is some kind of canvas screen or tent behind them. And, hidden on the far left of the frame… a face.

The way it was explained to me (as I recall) was that it was the earliest known incident of “photobombing”. Now, for those not in the know (by which I mean the “uncool” ones in our midst), photobombing is the “art” of leaping into a photograph where you are unwanted, usually to the amusement of nobody but the photobomber. That being said, there can be a few hilarious exceptions, as seen in this photoset of photobombing celebrities.

Photobombing, by definition, is a sneak attack, executed with utmost speed and, at times, discretion – many people don’t realize that their photos have been photobombed by someone in the background until (back in the day, because I am a historian) the photos had been developed or (today, because I am a hip and cool cat) uploaded onto facebook and mocked by one of your tens of thousands of facebook friends (10,000 is a normal number of friends to have on facebook, right?). You would think that photobombing would be impossible if, you know, the photobomber had to hang around for thirty seconds or so for the shot to be exposed. Right?

Right. Apparently, as my vague memories of my friend’s story tells me, this photograph was taken during the American Civil War, when exposure times were commonly, what, at least 15 seconds, which is why as far as I know there are no photographs of the actual battles of the Civil War. The action would happen too fast to be recorded on film. The leadup and the aftermath of these battles were very often photographed, to gruesome effect. But I digress.

My friend informed me that that man hiding under the bench on the bottom left is a man from a rival regiment. (How can we tell that? The shoulder pips? The hat?) Clearly(?), this man snuck into the photograph by hiding under the bench, and thus managed to be photographed for posterity.

Now, I am currently the teaching assistant for a second year American History survey course, so when the subject of Civil War photography came up, after I thought of the usual gruesome examples of Civil War photographs  (and some not-so-typical but also gruesome images: more on those in a later post), my mind immediately went to this historical example of photobombing, because I quite like to hook my students with a quick historical comic or image to get them initially engaged in the discussion we were going to have that class.

However, being the good little historian I am, I wanted to find the original source so we could discuss the image in detail. When I found it on my favourites list, it turns out I was linked to it from Retronaut.com. Not a problem. They often cite the source their images come from, even if it’s not written on the page in the description box. Except they didn’t this time. No other information, either, just the title: “19th Century Photobomb”.

So I knew I’d have to go deeper. A few months back, via Twitter, I was linked to this blog post which drew my attention to a little-known Google search option: you can search not just by text but by image. Seriously. Check it out. It’s really neat, and can be very useful for people trying to find out more about an image. However, it’s not a perfect system. I managed to find quite a few other websites that showed this particular image, but when they cited their sources, they almost invariably led right back to the Retronaut page I’d begun with, or an eloquently-named website called i-am-bored.com which also had no further sources. That one called it “One of the First Photobombs Ever: The Civil War,” but they don’t explain where they got that information either, despite apparently having enough spare time to be bored enough to post this picture. (You’d think with that much spare time on their hands they could put me out of my misery and write a bit more?) It looks like everyone else had just spotted it on either of these two pages and reblogged it without thinking anything more of it.

But where did it come from? I honestly couldn’t tell you. And that bothers me more than I thought it would. I want to talk about it, I want to show it to people, to point to the humour in the story, the unique ways people in the past weren’t all that different from us today: we still have the same urge to sneak into photos where we’re not wanted, for instance. However, I don’t feel that I can keep repeating the story I was told without knowing more about what I’m looking at. Do I even know that this was taken during the Civil War? I’m not comfortable stating with certainty from the uniforms we see that these are even members of the American military. By itself, stripped of context, it is still a fascinating image, but I’m projecting my own impressions and thoughts upon the men pictured.

So I didn’t show it to the students. I probably could have spoken about the same things I spoke of here, or even the reasons why we reblog photographs like this because of their aesthetic value or what we think they are, divorcing them from their original contextualizing explanations, if such explanations ever existed in the first place. Right now, I have this imaginary caption in my mind that accompanies this image. It would read something like “The [number] [State] Regiment, 1863, and an unwanted addition from the rival regiment, the [different number] [State].” However, I don’t want to contribute to the misinformation so common on the internet when it’s so easy to make yet another copy of the same picture and yet so apparently difficult to create a link back to the original source – if, again, such an original ever existed in the first place.

Further Links:

Civil War Photography Slideshow via Discovery News

Time Photos: Faces of the Civil War

And just for fun: The Three Most Notorious Photobombers on the Internet, Part I and Part II, via Cracked.com

The Gaze of the Sioux Indian Medicine Man

I ran across this postcard on Peel’s Prairie Provinces a few months ago, and I was struck by it for a multitude of reasons, only some of which I can put into words. (What specifically is the “punctum” for me with this image, to borrow Barthes’ terminology?), I find myself noticing details – the three lines on the left side of his coat, indicating it to be a capote made from a Hudson’s Bay Company point blanket (still all the rage), a slightly furrowed brow, the gleam of a ring on his finger, his slightly hunched almost defensive pose, the casual way he holds his pipe.

But most of all I feel that I was struck by his gaze, staring directly at the camera – and therefore, us, the viewers, over a hundred years later. What is communicated in this gaze? What, if anything, can we know of this man?

Recently, I read a fascinating article by Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins, “The Photograph as an Intersection of Gazes”, which was a chapter in a book on different aspects of reading and understanding National Geographic magazine. They pointed out something startling to me about choices in representation of the “gaze” of their photographic subjects. Namely,  when it came to different types of posing in photographs, (“to a statistically significant degree”), “Those who are culturally defined as weak – women, children, people of color, the poor, the tribal rather than the modern, those without technology – are more likely to face the camera, the more powerful to be represented looking elsewhere.”(199)

Subaltern peoples, particularly in the cases of women and children, are often depicted photographically staring directly into the camera. (Think about the famous Afghan girl.) It is perceived as being more both a more direct and more naïve gaze; perhaps they are curious about the camera or the person who wields it. Those with power, who are perceived to have intellect and so on, are often depicted gazing into the distance, as if they have more important things on their minds than the camera taking their photograph. Thinking back on examples of photography in the 19th century, I can picture many examples of photographs which fit this mold. Think of all of the depictions of Queen Victoria in which she is in profile or slightly off-centre. Traditionally, however, working class folks (“the rougher classes”) were depicted with direct gazes, whilemiddle- to high-class subjects with a (at times) more casual lounging posture, gazing to the side as if lost in thought. Both, especially in a studio setting, are constructed poses, but what I find intriguing are the subconscious ways in which such poses speak to the individual’s personality and background (at least as imagined by the photographer and viewer).

That being said, these authors were speaking of a specific set of photographs accompanying photo essays published quite some time after the postcard above. (Judging by the use of “N.W.T.” (Northwest Territory) instead of “Alberta” to designate the location of Qu’Appelle, and the format which places the message on the front alongside the image instead of the reverse with the address, this postcard likely predates the formation of Alberta as a province in 1905). However, the photographs were selected by the magazine editor because in some way they were compelling photographs that helped them tell the story they wished to tell. Whether consciously or subconsciously, the editors selected photographs that fit into this model, and rejecting others. Creators of postcards, too, wanted to sell compelling images that didn’t jar overmuch with the understandings their purchasers held of the world, a region or its peoples.

As a viewer, I definitely feel a sense of connection with the man depicted in this photograph. The purchaser and sender of this postcard certainly must have felt some element of this connection as well, judging by the message on the front: “Dear Teddy: – How would you like to greet this man? – Aunt J—(Jason?)” Photographs like this one facilitate imagined encounters between the “Indians” of the West and interested (likely white) parties elsewhere. Intellectually, I understand that the man pictured in this image was looking at a photographer and his camera lens, but due to the nature of the medium, he seems to be looking directly at me, erasing the distance of both time and space. Photography – and photographic postcards – facilitate such connections.

Nevertheless, in the case of postcards at least, such imaginary encounters are not accompanied by much information aside from just enough to tantalize the receiver. Is he truly a medicine man? How does he live? What does he believe? We think that we know this man – we meet his gaze as he “meets” ours – but how much can we truly know of him?

 

Further Reading:

Francis, Daniel. The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture, Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1994. (E-book at least partially found here.)

Lutz, Catherine A. and Jane L. Collins.  “The Photograph as an Intersection of Gazes,” Reading National Geographic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993: 187-215.

Every National Geographic magazine ever.

How to describe photography to someone who has never before seen a photograph:

“The daguerreotype is not merely an instrument which serves to draw nature . . . [it] gives her the power to reproduce herself.”

-Louis Daguerre (1838, from a notice circulated to attract investors.) Quoted by Susan Sontag, On Photography, 188.

I find this quotation absolutely fascinating for a number of reasons, chiefly because of the date: 1838, a year before photography (or, rather, the technique which would come to be known as “photography”) was debuted to the scientific public in 1839.

How do you describe photography to someone who has never seen one before? For whom the concept is entirely new?

We are so inundated with photographic images today that the very idea is foreign to us. The majority of us have been exposed to photographs since we were babes in arms. There are so many things about photography that we take for granted, simply because it has been a part of our reality for so long. One of these widely accepted concepts is, of course, that they encapsulate and depict a perfect representation of “reality” as it once stood before the camera lens. They have a sense of authority, of truthfullness, that sketches and paintings can’t hope to imitate. I’m really only just beginning to contemplate the enormity of just how problematic that statement is; even ignoring the obvious examples of photo alterations and photoshopping, issues of framing, posing and choosing what is worth photographing in the first place are all elements that make me scrutinize even the most innocuous of images. Regardless: what is a photograph? What is it to someone who has never seen one before, nor really contemplated the possibility of one?

A common trope in early descriptions of photography is the idea of almost anyone but the photographer himself (or herself) being responsible for the image. Now, we tend to see photography as an art form, but that is the result of a long struggle on the part of photographers to be recognized as legitimate artists. It was far more common in the 19th century for other metaphors to be used: the sun “drew” the image, or, as in this case, nature has been given “the power to reproduce herself.” It gives the photographic subject an interesting sense of agency. It’s almost as if the subject itself is the artist.

I find the early debates and discussions around the nature of photography as art or technology absolutely fascinating. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to see one’s likeness imprinted permanently on glass for the first time, in a (relative) instant.