Going back to the beginning of when I first read Watkins, I guess I should call her since it's 1857, was actually finding the language somewhat difficult and feeling that this was a lot to slug through and that the Sojourner Truth are these kind of short sentences and to the point and really kind of skimming over this document initially and saying, my God, this is just a lot of words and, you know, how am I going to make sense of it. Couldn’t she have spoken more simply and just kind of given us the bottom line? So the need to kind of sit down and say, okay, be patient, take an hour out and just look at this speech and try and figure out what’s going on.

And so the first thing reading through and I guess the first thing I noted was all of the different geographies that came into play. And so then saying, okay, well, you know what can I do with this? And realizing that she’s then trying to put together an international context in which then to examine U.S. slavery. And then the other thing is to say, well, why all of this heavy-duty language? These sentences, some of them go on for five, six lines and you get short of breath and so I think it takes real practice at least for somebody today to be able to really speak these sentences aloud. So another thing was, like, why does she have such long sentences? I mean why not break it down and be more like Sojourner Truth?

And in fact when you read about rhetoric of the period there was a movement apparently in the 1850s and '60s towards a more colloquial style so towards the style more of what Sojourner Truth was using but maybe not so folksy. And so Abraham Lincoln is pointed out as one of the key turning points, one of the pivotal figures in moving American rhetoric to what scholars have called the more democratic style.

So one of the things when you get over being annoyed with Harper for using these really, really long sentences, is to say okay, so what was she doing? And I remember kind of going through that process and what she’s doing is really reclaiming classical rhetoric. So I think what I did was go to my books on classical rhetoric and say, boy, she really studied with Cicero. And what she did here was to figure out the way Cicero and other Latin rhetoricians spoke and to incorporate that in her speaking style which is one of the reasons why these sentences are so long.

And then the question is why? And I think that one of the things that she was doing is much more educated, was to claim the ability for blacks at this time to use classical rhetoric and this was then the whole idea that blacks in fact have a soul and they also have a mind and they’re capable of inserting themselves into western traditions. The western tradition here is that of classical rhetoric. So that her claim to authority I guess I would say is doubled. It’s her knowledge of history and her being able to say, I can make these statements because I know history. I know world history and I can compare what’s going on in the United States to what’s going on in the rest of the world. And her other basis of authority is, my language is that of the classical tradition and I am part of this time-hallowed tradition of classical rhetoric which goes back to the Latins since the Roman period.

One of the things that’s so compelling is kind of the intimacy of the tone and here she is feeling that she can speak directly to God and God isn’t a big abstract entity out there that you have to look at with any kind of reverence, but he’s there with her and they’re having a conversation, so I think that that’s something that’s really powerful.

So when I was talking before about the issue of authority, the authority that she has that she asserts here is the authority of personal experience. My personal experience is that I can go out in the field and I can talk to God. God listens to me and God answers me. And I think that that’s what the basis of her authority is here, this kind of personal relationship that she can have with God and converse with him.

We don’t have very much in terms of the way in which Sojourner Truth’s audience reacted to her. It’s hard to tell. I think that audience reaction here might have been somewhat mixed. Because Sojourner Truth couldn’t read or write, we never know exactly what she said and what she intended. So everything about her is constructed and reconstructed. So did she actually give the speech like this or not? We don’t know. And we have to rely on the authority of Olive Gilbert in order to say, well, you know, look, this is what she said or maybe it's approximation or maybe she really didn’t.

Almost all of the accounts of the time say that basically she didn't speak standard English and that she spoke in the language very much like what’s here and all of the speeches of hers that get reconstructed by her white women friends have this kind of language. And so people refer to her language as peculiar, eccentric, idiosyncratic, and quaint. But the image that you're supposed to take of Sojourner Truth is that of an illiterate person who couldn’t speak standard English. I’ve come up across a couple accounts which say that in fact she did and that she was quite capable of speaking in standard English. So one of the issues one could talk about is did her white women friends, or whites in general, want Sojourner Truth to have this kind of folksy image? And what purpose would that serve?

Some of the things that I think that we can consider when we look at these speeches is first of all the question of audience. Who were they speaking to? And in the case of Sojourner Truth and Frances Harper the audiences are quite similar. They’re white and black women or white and blacks, not just women, but a mixed white and black audience. The black people obviously would be antislavery abolitionist people. We can imagine that the white audience might be composed of both abolitionists and people who are on the fence, and so one of the ideas is to convince them of the evils of slavery. So one of the things to consider always when dealing with speeches is who is the person talking to? This is really essential.

Another thing that I think is really interesting and here we can only kind of imagine, is here are these women braving these conventions, speaking out in public to a mixed audience, what was called a promiscuous assembly, of male and female members of the audience and that was what was really considered to be taboo, was speaking to this promiscuous assembly. And so one of the questions which I think is really interesting is what did they do with their bodies? Did these women try and speak in a way that my body isn’t here, just listen to my words and don’t pay attention to my body? So the whole idea is that engaging in this kind of public speaking a women would de-sex herself. Either take away her sexuality or actually masculinize herself. So many times these women got shouted at from the audience and they’re saying, “You’re a man!” And so one of the proofs became having to prove your femininity. So another, I think, interesting question is what do you do with the body?

And in contrast to Truth, and this is what I think is so interesting and where I think these issues of the body and self-presentation are so important, is that in all of these accounts it’s very clear that Harper tried to disembody herself. So the accounts, and they’re many and they’re quite lengthy, Frances Harper got up to speak on the occasion of etc., etc. She stood there, one of the comments is quiet, very few gestures, that she keeps her body very still. There’s a lot of attention to the quality of her voice. And so her voice is rendered as melodious and musical. And her language is pure and chaste. So very different from Truth, who as I said before spoke with her body and was very happy to thrust her body and make that part of her speech. And what we have with Harper, I think, is a kind of disembodiment, almost don’t see me. I am here speaking in front of you, but don’t see me. Don’t look at my body and simply pay attention to my voice. So I think it’s fascinating to contrast the two kind of different speaking methods of the two women.

Another question is the authority to speak. Where do you get your authority to speak? If you’re a women and you’re supposed to be domestic and in the household and you're out there speaking about a very public issue, antislavery, where do you get that authority? And then in what you say, what is the basis for the authority of what you actually say? And the last thing is more kind of close attention to the language and the style of the speech itself. What are the rhetorical techniques that you are going to use in order to persuade your audience? So I think these are some of the really important questions that one can ask when looking at these documents.

The first thing that I would do is talk to students about the 19th-century voice and that the 19th-century voice is really quite different from the 20th-century voice and that it takes a while to get used to it. And then to move on from there and to say, okay, well what can I do with this unfamiliarity? And just to, you know, read the passages over to maybe look for the personal voice. You know, we all want to know "I the speaker," what makes this Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's speech as opposed to anybody else’s.

But then to realize that part of the 19th-century voice is the omission of the eye, of the personal, and that Truth is in fact much more exceptional in that way than Harper. That it is very, very hard to find any kind of personal voice or the reliance on personal experience in these 19th-century women. And that they were very determined to keep themselves, their private self in the background. That’s not what we’re about or there's this kind of reticence and this sense of privacy, which we’ve totally lost in the 20th century. But really kind of my private business is my private business. And that I am here doing the public work of racial uplift or of abolition, of anti-slavery.

One thing that you can do, and this involves more primary research, you can go and look for other versions of the speech. So for example, Sojourner Truth's very famous “Ain’t I a Woman” speech is not the only version we have, there are at least three or four others. So if you go and look at that you find that was the—“Ain’t I a Woman” speech first came out, I think, in 1863 and the version was by Frances Gage, so a white woman abolitionist. And of course Sojourner Truth gave the speech at a women’s rights convention, sometime in the early '50s. So one of the things to think about is that Frances Gage was there but didn’t write up the account until 10 to 12 years later.

If you go to the newspapers of the time, the anti-slavery newspapers, there is in the Anti-Slavery Bugle, which comes out of Ohio and it’s a white abolitionist paper, about two weeks after Sojourner Truth gives that speech there is a rendition, a version, which would then be our first version of the speech. So one of the things one can do is compare those two versions and there are in fact interesting discrepancies between the two. If I remember correctly, Sojourner Truth says all of these things and then she says, “Ain’t I a woman.” That “Ain’t I a woman” phrase never appears in the 1851 Anti-Slavery Bugle version. Instead she says all these things and ends up by saying, “and I can do as much as any man.” So that’s not the same. “Ain’t I a woman” and “I can do as much as any man” is not exactly the same.

So one can go and do kind of this kind of mined archives, find other speeches and do this kind of comparative work. And then I guess what you can do is speculate on why the person writing up the particular version did it in that way. Well, first of all you have to say that we don’t know whether Sojourner Truth ever said “Ain’t I a woman” or not. We just don’t know. Assuming that she didn’t, why then would Frances Gage want to say that?

This is an inventory. An inventory and appraisement of the goods and chattel of a man named Thomas Springer in 1804. And an inventory is a list of the possessions of someone that's taken after that person dies. It's usually the head of the household because that's who owns the possessions. Therefore most of the inventories we have are inventories of men. And it's a document that's created by the fact that wealth in the late 18th, early 19th century, is not so much in the form of things in the bank or things in the stock market, but real estate and actual moveable goods. So when someone dies, the county court appoints appraisers, local men, to go out and look at an estate, see what's there, list it, and estimate its value. And these documents are of immense interest to people who want to know about the possessions and the living standards of people in the past. Particularly about people who aren't famous, or whose things were not saved. You can get a sense of what did this man own at least at the time of his death. What was in his household?

Thomas Springer is someone I got interested in—his possessions are something I got interested in, as a museum curator. It was my job to figure out what this man owned because we, at the Smithsonian, owned the house that he lived in. This was a house built in the 1790s and it's built of logs. And it was collected some time ago. My job was to go back and find out everything I could about the people who lived in this house. Not just Thomas Springer, but his wife, Elizabeth. It's hard to find out about Elizabeth—she doesn't have the inventory. Although there may be hints in here about her life, too.

Like many of these inventories it begins with the wearing apparel of the deceased. The basic thing is coats, jackets, shirts, trousers, hats, boots, drawers. Those are valuable items. You can see that clothing are valuable. They're valued here in 1804 at 30 dollars. You can look at the list of how things are valued and get a sense of what were expensive things and what were cheap things. Many inventories are like this. They're simply a straight list. A few go room by room. They list different rooms. They say, "In the parlor, there was this." Those are usually the inventories of the most well-to-do people because they have a lot of rooms. This man lives in a one-room house, perhaps with a loft upstairs. So you have to picture the inventory men coming through and as you read their list you can get a sense, to some degree, not just of what Thomas Springer may have owned, but of how it may have been arranged or organized.

As you go through you begin to see a place where they tell us certain things about particular belongings. I'd ask the question, "What's really surprising?" Well, one thing is this man owned one thing worth 40 dollars. It's a piece of furniture which is a really expensive item and that's an eight-day clock. One looking glass worth one dollar and an eight-day clock: 40 dollars. So that's kind of interesting. That's a luxury item. And it's certainly a luxury for a farmer to own a clock. You don't need the clock to know when to milk the cows. And that's a sign that this man doesn't live too far from Wilmington, where he's very likely to have purchased this clock. And he's interested in what is a scientific piece of equipment and an expensive one. There's a point as you go down through the list you can learn about . . . unfortunately you get to read something like this in many inventories: "a lot of books, 50 cents." And I'd love to know what the books were. My guess is a bible, okay, what else? I'd love to know what he was reading. But it does suggest people in this household were literate. It doesn't simply say, "a family bible" which might be there whether people read or not. This suggests some people are reading.

You certainly get a picture of a few of their behaviors. They have teacups and a tea table, so they're probably partakers in the afternoon or evening ceremony of tea. There's a part where it seems they've gone from the house, outside. After a lot of "Queensware," which is ceramic ware, you start finding "saddles, saddlebag, blanket and bridle, axes, maul and wedges, sledges, and a crowbar." Here, maybe we've moved to the barn. Maybe we've moved to an outside building of some sort. "Two spinning wheels." Alright, there we're getting a sense possibly, of what women in the Springer household may have done. Maybe that tells us a little something about Elizabeth.

The most shocking thing in the list, that takes you up short, is we find listed, right among the artifacts, people. "One Negro man, named A something-something-Ace." "Nine years to serve. Valued at 180 dollars." Below that, "one old Negro man, a slave, 66 years old named Will, valued at zero." One's first response I think is, as I say, just of shock, that we've been listing horses and bridles and now we've got people, and it reminds us about this time period, that that's a routine, this is a possession. But there's also something else in this list that's interesting. There is one, one of these people is a slave. This is in Delaware in 1804 where slavery is really dying out. It's not as profitable as it is to the South. But here's the "Negro man named Ace, nine years to serve." And that suggests to us that what Ace did was what a lot of African Americans did which was that they negotiated for their freedom in the years after the American Revolution. And that he had some form of agreement with the Springers. That he would work for a certain amount of time, for his freedom, or he would work for a certain amount of time for a set amount of money at the end of it.

To begin with you have to figure out what they are, which in some cases is really hard. A corner cupboard, I sort of have an image of, or thought I did. "Decanters, jars." But something like "Queensware" is worth going and looking up—either in a dictionary or in a local museum or in a ceramics history. "Queensware" is imported ceramics, kind of middling. You can find images of it. Again, you'd always want to compare. That is, in many cases there are very fine examples of something and not so fine examples of something. So you'd want to get a sense of what did most people own. Is this person typical or atypical? Looking at the artifacts themselves is a great help.

The other thing I should mention about moving to artifacts is that there is a wealth of knowledge that people who've studied material culture have about what was typical in certain regions at certain times. And that doesn't mean that your one inventory may not be atypical because he may, his six leather-bottomed chairs, maybe they're a family heirloom and they came down from somebody in some other part of the country. That's possible. But given what we know about how expensive it is to transport things over land or to put chairs on a ship and ship them out, that's unlikely. They are likely to be fairly locally made or at least locally sold. They may have been brought in by boat from say, Philadelphia to Wilmington. And there's a lot of studies that material culture scholars have done to figure out what specifically did people own.

I think probably the main thing about these inventories is that they're most valuable when you have a great number of them and many of the studies of them have been quantitative. So we know what people in say a given county—if you could go to this entire Hundred, Mill Creek Hundred, of New Castle County in Delaware, in a 10-year time period and go through and see what different people owned, that would give you a good idea about what some of these things were. And which of these things were typical, which of these things were extraordinary to this family, if anything. If that's the same or different than it is in other parts of the country, you'd want to know that.

The first thing I'd want to do is know a good deal more about Thomas Springer. It's really hard to know much about him with only this. So, I'd go track down . . . luckily I can find him in tax lists, find out what he's listed as owning at different moments, how much he paid, find his will. I can find a record of his marriage, and his children's birth in the local church. And I can find the deeds of his sales. So I'd want to find out as much as I can about him. And then I want to find out about other people who live in Mill Creek Hundred, or New Castle County, those other people on the tax lists. What their lives are like, how much land they own, what possessions they have. So that I can tell, is this man typical or is he exceptional in some way? And for that I'd want to then locate the document in the context of other documents, particularly in this region. And compare this inventory with the inventory of other people in Northern Delaware in this time period. Maybe take a 10-year period of time and see, of people who die, and paying attention to how old they are when they die. What do they own? How much is it valued at? So I think, that, first Thomas Springer, find out more about him. And then find out more about the other people around him in his community and what's going on in the region in general.

I think what's interesting; the other final context is the context of change in material culture. And probably what's most interesting there is the house itself. Because it's very easy to have an image of 18th-century houses and early 19th-century houses as being several different rooms, high style, with separate parlors, bedrooms. A central hall in the Georgian style. That's what you see when you go to most historic houses because the ones that have been saved are these very nice houses of well-to-do people. And here's a really ordinary house. It's small. We'd have a hard time being comfortable living in this space. And there's no evidence particularly, that Tom Springer or Elizabeth Springer or their children had a hard time living in this space. And this as it turns out is extremely typical. Most people in the early 19th century are still living in one- or two-room houses made of wood. Not made of brick, not fancy, nothing permanent, nothing meant to last all that long.

I was always interested in Melville, in college and thereafter. And then I got interested in New York City culture and started to be interested in the relationship between the—let's call it the sophisticated form of Melville's work—and cultural forms that grew up around the new New York City in the 1840s, 1850s. "Bartleby" seemed to me, and still seems to me, a strikingly interesting example of how an artist takes the cultural forms of his time and makes an interesting work of art.

I think the reason I wanted to go back to it is actually, it's the complex point, but I think it's evident on the first reading, which is. . . . I suddenly got very interested in "my heart in my mouth." In other words, "my hand in my pocket and my heart in my mouth." In other words, your hand in your pocket where the money is, and your heart is in your mouth and I started to suspect or to see that this is perhaps part of a pattern of portraying this narrator as a particular kind of sentimental narrator type. Not a bad man, but not the man who reflects the author directly. I was interested just in the stunning clarity of the end of this encounter. The isolation of both of these people.

In other words, Bartleby standing there in those empty rooms, folded up as if the book is closing. The folio—he's been behind a screen the entire time that he's been with the lawyer. And this then is folded up, leaving him "the motionless occupant of a naked room." It's a word that's used often to describe Bartleby in the story: motionless.

Anyway it seems like a culminating moment of the way the story works. It has a strange combination to me of quotidian New York life. The carts come, we move the furniture, we do all this regular stuff in the law office on Wall Street. And this obscure sense of ceremony and the suggestion that something larger is going on here. And that the word "something" is a word the lawyer often uses. Look: "I stood in the entry watching him a moment, while something from within me abraded me." Something—he'll always say—"something prompted me to think this, something prompted me." In other words, it's precisely what he is inarticulate about that makes the reader wonder what these "somethings" are.

I come from the discipline of literature. And I spend a surprising amount of time, even at this late date, reading it. That is to say, reading it, rereading it. It is always something of a trial, a mystery to me how much time it takes, even though theoretically you have the competence. But it's a matter of sitting there reading, rereading, and doing some very elemental, non-cultural analysis things, first at least. Even a supposedly highly competent reader, someone like me, who's done this a lot, repeats again and again something of the experience of the amateur. In other words, I come to a text with excitement and a certain amount of terror because I don't always get it. Or I don't understand enough of it. Or I come to understand something new this time. Sometimes the new thing overturns what I thought before.

Knowing what the words mean, knowing what the dramatic situation is, decoding anything that is obscure. Being able to say what it is. This is structuralist in the sense that a purist might say, "No, leave it," you know, "don't translate it." But I think in practical terms for me, and for students, it's very important to be able to say what it is. Which isn't as simple a matter as it sometimes seems, what the words mean. And then interpretation becomes a matter of beginning—and this again is a structuralist idea—of beginning with the oppositions, the repetitions.

What's exciting about this for me, for my own reading, and to tell to the students, is that it actually gives them something to do. In other words they say, I say, "Did you look up all the words in the dictionary?" And then they say, "Well, yes" and then I say, "Well, what does 'lintel' mean?" And they say, "I don't know." In other words they don't look up all the words in the dictionary. We don't, none of us do really. And then, they can look at oppositions, something that I think we, or most competent readers almost do automatically, without knowing it. In other words, what is the contrast, what's up, what's down. Very simple things that a student can do. What's repeated? What's the pattern? What's the image pattern, and so on.

I'm not sure that until last night when I selected this passage, that I remembered that he uses the word "folio" there. This might sound trivial to many people, but to someone like me who's thought about this a lot, right, and then I immediately lingered—this is part of the reading, interpretation, criticism business—"folio," wait a minute, I've skipped over that in my brain this whole time, these 20 years. "Folio," that means like a book! And he's folding up, the image, in other words, is not simply of folding up the screen. It's folding up the story, it's folding up the book. This is, I believe I'm saying to you honestly, brand new to me. And it comes from something that I tell my students day after day after day. Look up the words, think about what the words mean. It's the simplest of advice but it's the hardest to follow.

A teacher said to me in college—I didn't understand the poems of Wallace Stevens. Just didn't get it. I went to the teacher in his office. And he said, "Look up the words in the dictionary." And I of course was an English major and was insulted by this and I said, "I know what the words mean." And I was actually quite angry, left the office angry. Went back to my dorm room, quite privately, put the Stevens book in front of me and looked up the words in the dictionary, and it was as if the veil had been lifted from my eyes. Even the words I quote unquote "knew the meanings of," I didn't know the fullness of.

Bartleby appears to people, to students, in things like this. [holds up an anthology] This is a perfectly wonderful anthology, but it is—you know, Bartleby appears in here on page 2,330. And it appears in a thicket of perfectly wonderful things from American literature, often now including some cultural documents. But still, this is the form and most students think of literature in this form. This is one of my greatest frustrations because of course it originally appeared monthly, by Putnam's Monthly magazine, in simple paperb—it's very rare, by the way, to see them this way at all anymore because these were bound later. "Bartleby" appeared in two issues of this, November 1853 and then another one December 1853.

What I do for some undergraduate classes, and probably all graduate classes, for example, is to xerox the entire issue of the Putnam's Monthly and have them read that. This is a small step, but an important one to see what's around it. To understand that, for example, there are lots of lawyer stories written about New York. That it's a genre of popular fiction in New York during the period. There are a whole slew of lawyer's stories, some of them even published in Putnam's.

There was one after "Bartleby" in June 1856, Putnam's Monthly published a story about a New York lawyer and a mysterious scrivener, "The Counterfeit Coin" it was called. It's narrated by a genial, unaggressive lawyer. This is the beginning of that story: "Late one Saturday afternoon in a certain December, I sat by a good sea coal fire in my office, trying to muster courage enough for an encounter with the cold winds and driving storm outside." Just at that moment there is a knock on the door. The lawyer is surprised that anyone has come and he is taken aback to see a poorly-clad young woman who has trudged through the storm. She is a freelance law copyist and he engages her, and so on, and then there's a mystery, and a story. These are often related to lost heir stories, which were very popular in the period too. The notion is that somewhere in your lineage was great, great wealth. And that these mysterious characters wandering around were in fact the lost heirs.

This of course is, from the perspective of Melville, a sentimental, trivial version of the strange character on the street story. But it also illustrates the difference in how Melville handles the materials. Those stories, the ones I'm talking about, often end with the revelation. In other words, the revelation of the parent, the revelation of the source, in other words, he comes home again. The lost child comes home again or is adopted into the family, or some identity is. . . . And Melville of course leaves that completely unresolved. Even though the character of the narrator is very similar to the character of the narrator of the other pieces, that's the subtlety. Is that it looks an awful lot like, and is an awful lot like, the popular versions of itself. The narrator is very similarly handled by Melville, but the story subtly opens up the whole story of confrontation with the other classes in New York—with the other, with the new New York. And that move opens up the whole cultural text of what's going on in New York in the period.

It depends whether I set it up with a contextual system around it. In other words, if theirs a contextual system around it, I want them to be able to see the relationship to the other documents. But I want - I want all things it wants. I want - I want the ability of the English major to interpret - to reinterpret and criticize and I want inside that the ability to see the relationship to the cultural text. So I want them to be able to understand at least that occurred in a particular time and place. In another words, I want them to be able to -- reinterpret and then within the interpretation moment understand how that goes out to the ideology of the period, right - to the text to the other text of the period. So that they understand that anything that appears in front of them, as a text, is sort of torn from some place. It comes from someplace.

I'm very persuaded by the reading the text twice issue. Some of the most successful courses I've taught, including a memorable one on Moby-Dick, which was read Moby-Dick at the beginning of the course, and then read a whole slew of other stuff—Dickens, newspapers of the period—just as much as you can get in. And then read Moby-Dick at the end of the course, making them swear an oath that they're really going to read it again, even though they've read it at the beginning. And it's simply astonishing what happens at that moment.

This is based on one of the most wonderful educational experiences I ever had, which was in high school, in art history class. Where the school where I was at just hired some artist, I think off the street, to teach art history. He wasn't a regular faculty member. And he showed us slides, old master slides, for 15 minutes: "click-click-click-click-click-click." And we sat there the way we always do with old master slides—"familiar-familiar-familiar." Then he stopped. And then for the second 15 minutes he showed us 20th-century, late-20th-century paintings: abstract expressionists, bright colors, splashes of color, brightness. And we didn't understand that, but we knew something was happening there. And then—this is the genius of it—he showed us the same old masters again for the final 15 minutes. And it was just, I remember to this day, it was just an astonishing educational experience. Suddenly you saw the color in those paintings. Suddenly you saw shape in the old master paintings. Suddenly you saw, in other words—he, by the way, didn't say anything the entire time, he just showed 45 minutes of slides. And all these years later I, as you can tell, think of that moment, and try to enrich the understanding of the text.

In that case it was color and shape and form and so on. He had another very simple trick, which is he took us to a museum and made us stand in the room and close our eyes. And he said, "Okay, now think red." Still eyes closed. "Okay, now open your eyes and look around the room." Again it's just, "Shooooo!" "Close you eyes. Think blue. Look around the room. Close your eyes. Now think all colors all at once." Again, I do this every time I'm in a museum. I have no idea what his name was, by the way.

This particular image struck me, not only because of its early date—this particular image was done in 1853, less than 15 years after the introduction and invention of the photographic medium—but also because of its size. Most 19th-century photographs that you look at are quite small. And this is a full-plate daguerreotype that has been encased in this gilded frame. Obviously a tremendous amount of care has gone into constructing this image. This would not have been something that would have been bought for next to nothing. Somebody would have invested a certain amount of money and that the photographer has gone to extraordinary lengths to try to create, some type of souvenir maybe, a document that speaks to these tourists' experience at this very special American landmark—Niagara Falls.

When I saw it the first time, it of course reminded me of snapshots that we all take of family members on vacation at scenic landmarks whether it be Yosemite, Yellowstone, here the example being Niagara Falls. But as I looked at it more and more, it was obvious that this was a very carefully constructed image that was not simply spontaneously done. That it follows certain pictorial traditions in terms of the visual iconography of Niagara Falls, and that there was nothing spontaneous at all about it.

When reading photographic texts, I typically follow three lines of inquiry. And let me just review very briefly what those questions are. The first question of course is: "What is it?" For there is not one photography, but there are many 'photographies.' It is important, I think, to have students acknowledge or to understand the great variety of different formats, techniques, approaches; so it's very important to look very closely at what it is. In this case, "it" being a full-plate daguerreotype from 1853.

A second question would be: "How has the photographer figured his or her subject?" Indeed, what is the relationship between the photographer and his subject? What decisions has the photographer made in creating this image?

And a third series of questions that I would ask of a picture like this would be: "How is this photograph being used? What is the context in which this image is being seen?" Photographs are not made in a vacuum, there are reasons for taking pictures like this and I think it's important that—and this is what makes me excited as an historian—to try to unearth what this picture is about, why it was created, how it was used, how this subject that was depicted here was understood.

If we go inside the picture itself, you'll notice how a group of these tourists have been lined on the very brink of the American Falls. One of the things that strikes me as particularly curious is the fact that all these characters have their backs to us. They're not facing the camera, as we might typically do if we were standing at a tourist landmark today. One all of a sudden asks, "Are these people even aware they're being photographed? Has the photographer somehow surreptitiously taken their photograph?"

And as an historian, we don't necessarily have the answer—I don't have the answer for that question. But what I do know, of course, is that there's a long visual tradition of posing figures in front of sublime landscapes that goes back to 18th-century English landscape aesthetics. One of the things is the great number of these pictures that are absolutely identical to each other, except for the very fact that there are different configurations of characters here at the brink of the falls. Obviously you begin to understand that this particular image is not unique, it’s part of a well-constructed formula that the photographer has set out.

Actually the photographer has made, in this case, a great number of very deliberate decisions. So what are those decisions? Well, first of all he's decided to take pictures at this particular site itself. Why Niagara Falls as opposed to Trenton Falls, or the Potomac River? Well, Niagara Falls is this sort of "National Icon"; it is a landmark that Americans have invested with a great deal of significance—patriotic significance.

Other decisions that the photographer perhaps is making include what he has chosen to include and to leave out. I find it particularly interesting in this view that he does include a tree on the left-hand side of the image. It sort of frames the picture; it suggests that this is the left-hand margin of our picture. That he has also within the frame tried to capture the panoramic sweep of the falls. If you've ever been to the falls, you know that there are…it's not just one single fall, it's a series of three or four individual falls—American Falls, Horseshoe Falls—and here the photographer has tried to provide information about the entire panoramic sweep. That's another, I think, very deliberate decision.

Who exactly is Platt Babbit? Where did he come from? What is his background? Does he have artistic training? What type of business does he run? How has he gotten to this site? And, what of course is his relationship to the subjects that he's photographing?

A little bit of research will reveal that Babbit carved out a very successful career as a commercial landscape photographer in the service of tourism. Which provides a nice bridge in to a fourth concern, which would be that this photograph participates in the cultural practice of tourism; a phenomenon that grew into a mass-market phenomena in the mid-nineteenth century at places like Niagara Falls. And I would argue that photography was instrumental in defining the boundaries of the modern tourist experience. For photography taught people where to go, what was worth seeing. Photography educated the eye of the tourist, showing him or her how to see a particular site.

And last of all, photography served as one of the central rituals of one's tourist experience. These people are tourist who have traveled—as records from hotel registries at Niagara Falls indicate—from as far away as, not only New York and Boston, but also London and Paris. Niagara Falls, thanks to photography—and at the same time the promotional efforts of other tourists developers like the railroads and the hotels are responsible for advertising places like this to a clientele that reaches not only throughout the United States, but as far away as Europe as well. And these are those who have the disposable income at the time and the inclination to go to a place like Niagara Falls.

First of all would be to Niagara Falls itself, and to try to understand what this landscape actually looks like. I mentioned earlier that photographs are very interesting documents because they seem to be transparent windows into this site. And yet, at the same time, this is not all that Niagara is, that this transparency is not so…this is a very constructed image. So, I would sort of understand…where else could he have set up his camera? What other perspectives could he have used to shoot this picture? I'd also look at guidebooks—guidebooks to Niagara Falls. Where are the tourist developers, the hotels, the railroads, encouraging people (visitors) to go to see these particular images? For often times there are elaborate descriptive texts that shape how one navigates one's experience at a place like Niagara Falls. Interestingly, many of these tourist guidebooks were illustrated with engraved reproductions of photographs—by Babbit—in a sense holding out the photograph, "Here it is. This is what you're looking for. This is your goal," in a sense.

And then of course, another level of research involves trying to understand Babbit as a businessman. How did he make a living? Is all that he did landscape photography? Was there a market in the 1850's for simply landscape photography? Who was underwriting him? What is the machinery responsible for creating the tourism infrastructure at a place like Niagara Falls? One thing right away that you think about, of course, is the railroads. And there is some evidence that in looking at railroad archives related to lines that went to the falls, that Babbit was being commissioned to take photographs; that these railroads were buying his images to be used in their promotional materials.

I think looking at local newspapers, that speak to his sort of business at this very specific site, and what you learn, of course—if you do that type of archival research—is that Babbit had a thriving studio right on Main street in Niagara Falls. That he had commercial arrangements with souvenir shops at the site itself. That he had a little business pavilion, right next to his pavilion here at the brink of the falls. So that though we only see in the image itself a bunch of tourists lined up at the falls, in fact behind the picture is a vast world of information about Babbit, that I think allows us to better understand how we get to this [i.e. to the picture].