City of Westwego Historic Museum

Description

The Westwego Historical Museum is housed in the historic Fisherman's Exchange/L.J. Bernard Hardware Store Building on Sala Avenue in Salaville, Westwego's Historic District. While telling the unique story of the people of Westwego, the museum features a completely restored turn-of-the-century general store, furnished period upstairs living quarters, and a main exhibit area boasting thousands of artifacts and historical treasures.

The museum offers exhibits and tours.

Cheney Homestead [CT]

Description

Timothy Cheney, farmer, miller and one of America's famous clock makers, built the Cheney Homestead about 1785. A brook to the south of the home afforded water for the grist mill which he operated with his son George.

On October 25, 1798, George Cheney brought his bride, Electa Woodbridge Cheney, to the Homestead to "keep house". To the couple were born eight sons and one daughter. With the exception of George Wells who had died, and Seth and John who became well-known artists, the brothers joined in establishing the Mt. Nebo Silk Company. The firm later incorporated as Cheney Brothers and became world famous as a leader in the silk industry.

Heritage Center of Dickinson County [KS]

Description

The Center consists of two historical museums and surrounding outdoor exhibits. The Historical Museum depicts life on the plains during the American pioneer movement and westward expansion periods. Exhibits treat topics including Native American and pioneer life, railroads, agriculture, and the Victorian and cow-town eras. The Museum of Independent Telephony recreates the unique flavor of early independent telephone system history with hands-on displays of antique telephones, insulators, switchboards, and pay stations. Outside is the Pioneer Community, with actual buildings from around the county and the Parker Carousel, a national landmark carousel. Exhibits include a log cabin, barn, store, phone office, agriculture equipment, windmill, chickens and more.

The center offers exhibits, tours, educational programs, and occasional recreational and educational events (including living history events).

Folsom Historical Society and Museum [CA]

Description

The Society's Museum focuses on exhibits exploring Folsom's native people; the discovery of gold and the formation of mining camps; ethnic groups who contributed to this area; the formation of the town and the growth and establishment of the railroad, prison, and powerhouse; and later efforts at gold mining. The Museum's Pioneer Living History Center allows visitors a look at Folsom's past through vehicles; machines; equipment; and replicas of a miner's shack, blacksmith shop, carriage shed, and more.

The society offers educational and recreational events; the museum offers exhibits, tours, and educational programs.

Polson Flathead Historical Museum

Description

"Share in the Homestead Heritage of the Mission Valley and Flathead Lake area as it is preserved in the Polson-Flathead Historical Museum. Other area museums focus on the Native American presence in the region, but our museum focuses on the pioneers and homesteaders who first inhabited the region. See the development of the area progress over the years through viewing real-life exhibits such as

*The Trading Post, actually see what it was really like to shop in the only store in the region in the 1880's!
*The Flathead "Monster"!
*Marvel at the stagecoaches and buggies that carried passengers to, through and from the Valley!
*Old time Fire Trucks!
*Stand in the middle of a true-to-life kitchen from the 'good old days' and imagine what it was like to cook a meal, wash clothes or preserve food with few labor saving devices!"

Christian Heurich House Museum [DC]

Description

Visitor to this Victorian mansion can step back into family life in Washington at the turn of the century. The Victorian interior decorations and furnishings remain largely unchanged since it was built in the late 19th century. Looking very much like a medieval castle, this 31-room mansion was designed by John Granville Myers for local brewer Christian Heurich, between 1894–1896. The interior is predominately Renaissance and Rococo Revival.

The house offers tours.

Rise of the Automobile

Question

How did the rise of the automobile affect U.S. economics, culture, and society?

Textbook Excerpt

Textbooks assemble three main narratives in automobile history: Henry Ford and the Ford Motor Company, the rise of modern industry, and the rise of leisure culture.

Source Excerpt

In primary sources, the automobile stands at the center of shifts in American definitions of work and the "good life."

Historian Excerpt

The textbook portrait misses the critical economic, social, and cultural importance of the automobile age, and the complexity of the automobile's development and impact on American life.

Abstract

The car is something that all students recognize and, in all likelihood, use every day. Considering the many aspects of the automobile and auto use can spur them to think about the fundamental changes that accompanied America's entry into the 20th century and our continued development today. Explore three main textbook narratives and other ways of examining the complex history of automobiles in America.

Innovation and Technology in the 19th Century

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Genius of Electricity, statue by Evelyn Beatrice Longman
Question

How did innovation and technology change life in the 19th century?

Answer

There were two technological innovations that profoundly changed daily life in the 19th century. They were both “motive powers”: steam and electricity. According to some, the development and application of steam engines and electricity to various tasks such as transportation and the telegraph, affected human life by increasing and multiplying the mechanical power of human or animal strength or the power of simple tools.

Those who lived through these technological changes, felt them to be much more than technological innovations. To them, these technologies seemed to erase the primeval boundaries of human experience, and to usher in a kind of Millennial era, a New Age, in which humankind had definitively broken its chains and was able, as it became proverbial to say, to “annihilate time and space.” Even the most important inventions of the 19th century that were not simply applications of steam or electrical power, such as the recording technologies of the photograph and the phonograph, contributed to this because they made the past available to the present and the present to the future.
The 1850 song, “Uncle Sam’s Farm,” written by Jesse Hutchinson, Jr., of the Hutchinson Family Singers, captured this sense that a unique historical rupture had occurred as a result of scientific and social progress:

Our fathers gave us liberty, but little did they dream
The grand results that pour along this mighty age of steam;
For our mountains, lakes and rivers are all a blaze of fire,
And we send our news by lightning on the telegraphic wires.

Apart from the technological inventions themselves, daily life in the 19th century was profoundly changed by the innovation of reorganizing work as a mechanical process, with humans as part of that process. This meant, in part, dividing up the work involved in manufacturing so that each single workman performed only one stage in the manufacturing process, which was previously broken into sequential parts. Before, individual workers typically guided the entire process of manufacturing from start to finish.

This change in work was the division or specialization of labor, and this “rationalization” (as it was conceived to be) of the manufacturing process occurred in many industries before and even quite apart from the introduction of new and more powerful machines into the process. This was an essential element of the industrialization that advanced throughout the 19th century. It made possible the mass production of goods, but it also required the tight reorganization of workers into a “workforce” that could be orchestrated in various ways in order to increase manufacturing efficiency. Individuals experienced this reorganization as conflict: From the viewpoint of individual workers, it was felt as bringing good and bad changes to their daily lives.

On the one hand, it threatened the integrity of the family because people were drawn away from home to work in factories and in dense urban areas. It threatened their individual autonomy because they were no longer masters of the work of their hands, but rather more like cogs in a large machine performing a limited set of functions, and not responsible for the whole.

On the other hand, it made it possible for more and more people to enjoy goods that only the wealthy would have been able to afford in earlier times or goods that had never been available to anyone no matter how wealthy. The rationalization of the manufacturing process broadened their experiences through varied work, travel, and education that would have been impossible before.

For more information

J. D. Bernal, Science and Industry in the Nineteenth Century. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970. First edition published 1953.

Thomas Parke Hughes, American Genesis: A History of the American Genius for Invention. New York: Penguin Books, 1989.

Jack Larkin, The Reshaping of Everyday Life: 1790-1840. New York: Harper Perennial, 1989. First edition published 1988.

Walter Licht, Industrializing America: The Nineteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.

Carroll Pursell, The Machine in America: A Social History of Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.

Trade Routes and Emerging Colonial Economies

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Newsprint, Sale of Africans from the Windward Coast, New York Public Library
Question

“What was the impact of trade routes on emerging colonies in the Americas?”

Answer

Good question and one that is often answered a bit too narrowly. The key issue is whether trade routes promoted resource extraction and/or economic development, and if the latter, what sort of development. Of course, the most famous route, with the greatest impact on New World colonies, was the Triangular Trade, which had some variants. In addition, though, there were several versions of a simpler two-way transatlantic trade, from the UK to the northern colonies, from France to Quebec, and from Spain/Portugal to Latin American places. Last, and less known, a transpacific trade took shape in the 17th century, connecting the Philippines with Mexico through the west coast port of Acapulco. So here we have at least half dozen routes to assess in terms of impacts.

These ventures, plus those made by Spanish and Portuguese slavers extracted over nine million Africans from their home terrains between the 16th and 19th centuries

The core of the triangular trade, ca. 1600-1800, was the exchange of slaves for materials and goods – African captives brought to eastern Atlantic ports, exchanged for gold or British manufactured products, then transshipped brutally to colonial depots – Charleston, New Orleans, the Caribbean islands, and in smaller numbers, New York, for example. There, captives were again sold, for cash or goods (sugar, tobacco, timber) which returned to a UK starting point (often Liverpool). Yet this sequence was not the only one, particularly in New England, where merchants sent rum and other North American goods to Africa, secured slaves for auction to sugar plantations in the Caribbean, and brought liquid sugar (molasses) to American shores for distillation into more rum. Though this sounds tidy, actually, rarely was either triangle completed by one ship in one voyage; each triangle stands more as a mythical model than a description of standard practice. Nonetheless these ventures, plus those made by Spanish and Portuguese slavers extracted over nine million Africans from their home terrains across the 16th through the 19th centuries. That’s quite an impact, creating slave economies from Virginia to Trinidad to Brazil. Another three-sided trade involved slavery indirectly, as when Yankees sent colonial goods to the sugar islands, shipped to Russia to exchange sugar for iron, which returned to New England.

Trade did not automatically translate into sustained development

Bilateral trade is simpler to grasp, and yet may depart from our current notions of exchange. The Kingdom of Spain extracted precious metals from Latin America, sending back goods for colonizers, especially through Veracruz, which became Mexico’s principal east coast harbor. By contrast, French trade with Quebec was a constant drain on the monarchy’s funds; often goods sent to sustain some 50,000 settlers cost more than double the value of furs gathered and sold. However, Virginia tobacco sold to Britain at times created high profits, but this single-crop economy proved vulnerable to commodity price fluctuations (Cotton’s southern surge came after the American Revolution.). Clearly trade did not automatically translate into sustained development, though port cities did prosper, not least because they became anchors for coastal shipping within and among colonies. At times, expanding trade could irritate the colonizing state, as when Mexican merchants created a long-distance 16th-18th century trans-Pacific route from Acapulco, trading an estimated 100 tons of silver annually for Chinese silks, cottons, spices, and pottery – resources the Crown thought should be sent to Madrid instead. Overall, my sense is that colonial trade routes deepened exploitation of people and nature appreciably more than they fostered investment and economic development.

For more information

Bailey, Anne. African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Boston: Beacon, 2006.

Bjork, Katherine. “The Link That Kept the Philippines Spanish: Mexican Merchant Interests and the Manila Trade, 1571-1815.” Journal of World History 9 (1998): 25-50.

Bravo, Karen. “Exploring the Analogy between Modern Trafficking in Humans and the Transatlantic Slave Trade.” Boston University Int’nl Law Journal 25 (2007), 207-95.

Evans, Chris and Goran Ryden. Baltic Iron in the Atlantic World Leiden: Brill, 2007.

Hart, Michael. A Trading Nation: Canadian Trade Policy from Colonialism to Globalization. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2002.

Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, Jamestown Settlement, and Yorktown Victory Center[VA]

Ostrander, Gilman. “The Making of the Transatlantic Slave Trade Myth,” William and Mary Quarterly 30 (1973): 635-44.

Rawley, James and Stephen Behrendt. “The Coastal Trade of the British North American Colonies,” Journal of Economic History 34 (1972): 783-810.

Bibliography

Canny, Nicholas. “Writing Atlantic History; or, Reconfiguring the History of Colonial British America,” Journal of American History 86 (1999): 1093-1114.

Price, Jacob and Paul Clemens. “A Revolution of Scale in Overseas Trade: British Firms in the Chesapeake Trade, 1675-1775.” Journal of Economic History 47(1987): 1-43.

Rawley, James and Stephen Berendt. The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A History. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005.

Spanish Colonial Trade Routes

Tips to Trappers

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Julius Rosenwald
Question

What was the Sears Roebuck publication, Tips to Trappers? Were there other ways in which Sears Roebuck and its rival Montgomery Ward tried to win over farmers?

Answer

Sears Roebuck, like its competitor Montgomery Ward, built its business as a mail-order company. Consequently, many of its customers were farmers or at least lived far away from big cities. The majority of Sears Roebuck customers also ordered out of the Montgomery Ward catalog.

In the early 1920s, many of Sears Roebuck's rural mail-order customers wrote to the company asking them to set up a way for trappers to sell their furs. Beginning in late 1925, Sears Roebuck & Company, through the Sears Raw Fur Marketing Services, began buying furs from independent, rural trappers. Trappers would mail packages of their prepared muskrat, mink, otter, raccoon, fox, badger, beaver, weasel, skunk, and opossum pelts to a Sears depot. At first there was only one in Chicago, but the company soon increased the number of depots around the country, including ones in Philadelphia, Dallas, Seattle, Memphis, Kansas City, Des Moines, Denver, and Minneapolis.

Sears would grade the pelts and either promptly send the trappers a check or give them credit toward purchases from its general merchandise catalog. If the trapper was unsatisfied with the value Sears gave him, he could return the check and the company would return the furs. The vast Sears catalog carried a line of Victor, Oneida, and Gibbs traps, scents, and pelt stretchers, as well as firearms, ammunition, decoys, and a wide selection of farm equipment and supplies.

In this way, Sears Roebuck became one of the largest fur buying companies in the country. The trappers generally found the company's fur grading to be accurate and the prices paid to be fair, especially for good, large skins. The company had found a way to help their rural customers by giving them a market for their furs that was as close as their mailboxes. Farmers trapped for sport and recreation, but also to control the wildlife population that threatened their crops.

Sears Roebuck mailed more than 7 million copies of an annual publication, Tips to Trappers, a magazine of about 30 pages in length, written and edited by "Johnny Muskrat" (a trapper, as well as a Sears spokesman) "and his trapper friends."

Tips to Trappers had articles and photographs showing the best ways to find and trap animals and prepare their pelts, as well as letters from readers, techniques from renowned trappers, information on state trapping seasons and limits, news on the fur market, and instructions on how to prepare and mail pelts to Sears. Included in each issue were shipping tags for mailing packages to a Sears raw fur depot.

Sears Roebuck also ran the National Fur Show in different cities around the country each year from 1929 to 1958. Pelts that had been submitted to Sears depots during the year were judged at the shows and cash awards (and even new cars) were given for the "best prepared" pelts, regardless of their ultimate value. This helped promote and teach the company's suppliers and clients about the best ways to handle pelts.

Johnny Muskrat also had a regular radio show during the 1920s and 1930s on Sears' own Chicago-based radio station WLS ("World's Largest Store"), and then elsewhere in the country through station affiliates. He and his occasional trapper guest would talk about how to set traps, dry pelts, and other techniques. Muskrat also discussed fur market conditions, tips on camping and hunting, and pioneer life in general, as well as reading letters from his listeners.

Radio station WLS was the voice of the Sears Roebuck Agricultural Foundation, which Sears began in 1924 as a means to increase its outreach to American farmers. The programming on WLS was a mix of music and entertainment (such as its annual sponsorship and broadcast of the "National Barn Dance") designed to appeal to a rural audience, as well as regular shows for farm listeners that were devoted to growing, harvesting, and selling crops.

The Sears Roebuck Agricultural Foundation offered advice and instruction by mail to farmers and their wives who wrote to the company. The Foundation also supported rural agricultural agents, farmers' markets, cooperative associations, 4-H and FFV chapters, agricultural demonstration projects, and scholarships to agricultural colleges.

Sears Roebuck and Company's second president, during the 1920s and 1930s, Julius Rosenwald, was a true philanthropist who viewed the Sears Roebuck Agricultural Foundation not just as a way to capture customers for Sears, but as a means to improve the lives of Americans living in rural communities. He was, for example, responsible for Sears' extensive support for Historically Black Colleges, especially in the South, and for the establishment of almost 5,000 schools for African American children in the region.

After 34 years in the fur buying business, Sears Roebuck decided in 1958 to focus on urban customers and retail stores, and so discontinued, among other things, the Sears Raw Fur Marketing Services and the publication of Tips to Trappers.

For more information
Bibliography

Sears Archives

Jerry R. Hancock, Jr. "Dixie Progress: Sears, Roebuck & Co. and How It Became an Icon in Southern Culture," M.A. Thesis, Georgia State University (2008): 50-60.

Johnny Muskrat, Trapping and Fur Farming. Chicago: Sears, Roebuck and Company, 1927.

Johnny Muskrat, Tips to Trappers. Chicago: Sears, Roebuck and Company, 1932-1958.

"Johnny Muskrat to Broadcast on Seven Stations," Pinedale (Wyoming) Roundup, December 26, 1929.
Scott Childers, Chicago's WLS Radio. Chicago: Arcadia Publishing, 2008.

Boris Emmet and John E. Jeuck, Catalogues and Counters: A History of Sears, Roebuck and Company. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950.

Peter Max Ascoli, Julius Rosenwald: The Man Who Built Sears, Roebuck and Advanced the Cause of Black Education in the American South. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.

Gordon L. Weil, Sears, Roebuck, U. S. A.: The Great American Catalog Store and How It Grew. New York: Stein & Day, 1977.

James C. Worthy, Shaping an American Institution: Robert E. Wood and Sears, Roebuck. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984.

Anne Koenen, Mail-Order Catalogs in the US, 1880-1930: How Sears Brought Modernization to American Farmers. Paderborn: Universitat Paderborn, 2001.

Frederick Asher, Richard Warren Sears, Icon of Inspiration: Fable and Fact about the Founder and Spiritual Genius of Sears, Roebuck & Company. New York: Vantage Press, 1997.

Cecil C. Hoge, The First Hundred Years Are the Toughest: What We Can Learn from the Century of Competition between Sears and Wards. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1998.

Frank Brown Latham, 1872-1972: A Century of Serving Consumers: The Story of Montgomery Ward. Chicago: Montgomery Ward, 1972.

Thomas J. Schlereth, "Country Stores, County Fairs, and Mail-Order Catalogues: Consumption in Rural America," in Simon J. Bronner, ed., Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America. New York: W. Norton & Company, 1987.

Doug Golden, When the Beaver Was King. West Conshohocken, PA: Infinity Publishing Company, 2006: 32-35.

Will Troyer, From Dawn to Dusk: Memoirs of an Amish/Mennonite Farm Boy. Coral Springs, FL: Llumina Press, 2003: 153-158.