The Chapter focuses on implementing the U.S. Lighthouse Society's goals in the Chesapeake Bay area, particularly with regard to the lighthouses and lightships of Virginia and Maryland: It seeks to preserve and restore existing lighthouses and protect, preserve, and disseminate lighthouse history.
The chapter offers educational programs (specifically, speakers available for school presentations).
The Franklin Heritage Museum presents the local history of Franklin, NJ via historical photographs and artifacts. The museum is housed within structures which once belonged to the Franklin Mine's New Jersey Zinc Company.
The museum offers exhibits.
From the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History:
"To many, the Great Plains are part of the 'Great Flyover,' whose landscape and history alike are flat and featureless. But in this region in the middle of the nation, cultures have mingled and clashed for thousands of years. We will focus on the nineteenth century, though we will also examine the first peoples and the continuing cultural exchanges of the twentieth century. We will begin with the physical setting, plants, and animals, and consider early humans in both Native American traditions and anthropological/archeological studies. Europeans arriving in the sixteenth century accelerated the long history of change and evolution, initiating more than three centuries of converging peoples and cultures, new centers of power, flourishing trade, calamitous epidemics, and cultural and material intrusions from around the planet. We will visit Bent's Fort to see a cultural crossroads illustrated through one family. We will also examine cattle ranching, homesteading, scientific explorations, and the depiction of the Plains in art."
When you think of life at sea, what comes to mind? Excitement? Danger? Pirates? Johnny Depp? This quiz has a bit of all of the above, with the exception of Mr. Depp. Test your knowledge of renowned maritime disasters and confrontations.
1. On December 5th 1872, the Mary Celeste was found sailing empty of all crew, but with all valuables—including her cargo of raw alcohol—still aboard. The yawl (a small boat) was missing, and two cuts were made to the bow of the ship. Which of the following theories was proposed by one of the captain's relatives?
a. Warm weather made the alcoholic cargo release gas, causing cargo barrels to explode and the crew to abandon ship.
The captain's cousin, Oliver Cobb, and the vessel owner, J.H. Winchester, felt that the cargo caused minor explosions in the hold. Following the explosions, the ship would have been abandoned in extreme haste, as such explosions were known to splinter and sink vessels.
The official opinion on the Mary Celeste was that the crew sampled the alcohol, killed the captain and his family, damaged the bow of the brig to make the vessel appear unseaworthy, and waited for another captain to "save" them from their vessel. Others held that the ship was becalmed. As it slowly drifted toward shore, Briggs and his men set out in the yawl, to avoid being onboard if the ship wrecked. However, they did not tie the yawl to the Mary Celeste; and when the wind started again, the ship abandoned them. Many other theories exist, and this remains one of history's mysteries. (Incidentally, there were no African Americans among the crew—though Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a fictionalized account in which African American crewman mutinied.)
2. In November 1819, a vessel was struck and wrecked by a sperm whale the crew had seen before, at previous whaling sites. What is the name of the ship?
b. The Essex
Having survived the wreck, 20 crewmembers set out from the Essex in small rowboats with minimal supplies. Over the course of three months, they floated about the South Seas, suffering from the heat, dehydration, and starvation. The evacuees eventually resorted to cannibalism when their food stores were depleted. Eight men survived, including the captain, James Pollard, Jr., and Owen Chase, author of the best-known firsthand account of the disaster. The story of the Essex inspired Herman Melville to write his famous novel Moby-Dick.
3. The 1904 loss of the New York excursion steamer the General Slocum resulted in over 400 dead. Which factor did not contribute to the loss of life?
b. Inaccurate nautical charts
On June 15, 1904, the General Slocum departed on the annual Sunday School excursion of St. Mark's German Lutheran Church. However, unbeknownst to passengers and crew, a fire had broken out in a storage room. Many passengers died of burns, and others drowned, unable to swim. The steamer's defective life preservers added to the death toll. The preservers' insides, made of finely-ground cork, quickly became waterlogged when the preservers' rotten covers fell away. One survivor told of a woman with three children. The mother and two girls could swim, but one daughter could not. The daughter was put in a life preserver and tossed overboard, where she immediately sank.
The General Slocum disaster was recognized internationally because of the loss of so many women and children.
4. In December 1717, Blackbeard captured the sloop Margaret. What did the pirates take from the ship?
c. Cutlasses, hogs, books, and navigational tools
Captain Henry Bostock reported his losses as cutlasses, hogs, books, and navigational instruments—not the traditional image of pirate booty. However, the hogs would provide fresh meat; the books provided entertainment on board a ship where the crew often had little to do (pirate crews could be roughly 80 men strong, as compared to the 12-man crew of a merchant vessel); and accurate navigation was crucial at sea. When we think of pirates and maps, we imagine mythical treasure maps, but maps were vital to any ship—the more the better, as they were often inaccurate by as much as 600 nautical miles. Also, pirates were essentially democratic, so crews determined destinations by common vote. As a result, pirate ships often took odd, zigzagging routes, rather than tried-and-true sea paths, making maps still more valuable.
If you are curious about the Mary Celeste, one interesting online resource is "Sinbad's Genie and the Mary Celeste", a weather-related theory for the ship's lack of crew, written by a meteorologist.
For more information on the General Slocum disaster, try the National Archives and Records Administration's online exhibit Slocum Disasters, June 15, 1904. The page offers an image of the steamer, a contemporary newspaper page on the disaster, and the vessel's enrollment certificate.
North Carolina Digital History provides a brief biography of notorious pirate Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard. To learn more about the wreck of his ship and about a pirate's material possessions, head to the Queen Anne's Revenge Shipwreck Project, which offers artifact images and an archaeological site map.
Edward Hazen's 1837 Panorama of Professions and Trades described hundreds of occupations to which a young person might aspire in Jacksonian America. Match the names of the occupations below with Hazen's illustrations of them:
1. Glassblower
2. Milliner—a maker and trimmer of hats and other accessories
3. Schoolmaster
4. Cooper—a maker of barrels and other casks
5. Dyer
6. Cabinetmaker
For more engravings and descriptions of early 19th-century careers, skim through the full text of Edward Hazen's The Panorama of Professions and Trades. It covers more than 60 occupations, including soapboiler, comb-maker, goldbeater, and lithographer, with descriptions of the work of each craftsman and of the products he or she created.
Though originally printed in London in 1807, The Book of English Trades, and Library of the Useful Arts was reprinted in the U.S. in 1811. Like Edward Hazen's Panorama, the Book provides a brief description of many occupations, but also offers a history for each, and a summary of the education and certification necessary to pursue each trade.
For something a bit more contemporary, Eric Sloane's A Museum of Early American Tools presents line-drawn illustrations of tools from early American craftsmanship.
Many developments in the manufacturing, wholesale buying, distribution, and advertisement of merchandise helped create the success of the urban department store. Several technological innovations also contributed. Arrange these in chronological order (1=earliest, 6=latest):
First department store in America
First rapid transit railway in America
First skyscraper in America (building with a structural steel frame)
First passenger escalator
First passenger elevator
First catalog mail order business
1. The first American department store was, depending on one's precise definition of a department store, either A. T. Stewart's "Marble Palace" on East Broadway in New York City in 1846, or R. H. Macy's store at 6th Avenue and 14th Street in 1858, or the Zion's Cooperative Mercantile Institution (ZCMI) in Salt Lake City, established in 1868.
2. The first successful passenger elevator, constructed by Elisha Otis, was installed in 1857 in Eder V. Haughwout's five-story china emporium at 488 Broadway in New York City. This allowed buildings with more floors that could be easily accessed by customers.
3. The first rapid transit railway in the U.S. was the elevated train built in New York City starting in 1868. New York's subway opened in 1904. This allowed easy access to downtown locations for potential customers.
4. The first catalog mail order business was begun in 1872 in Chicago by Aaron Montgomery Ward.
5. The first building in the U.S. to use structural steel in its frame—the first "skyscraper"—was the ten-story Home Insurance Building in Chicago, at the corner of La Salle and Adams Streets, built in 1884. This innovation allowed behemoth multi-floor buildings in downtown real estate centers.
6. Escalators, first installed at a few elevated train platforms in New York City in 1900, soon appeared in several New York City department stores, including Macy's, and within a couple of years appeared in Philadelphia and Chicago department stores.
From about the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century, the urban department store embodied America's highest ideal of retail shopping. It offered a variety of durable goods at various price levels in a single store.
By the beginning of the 19th century, customers at the largest department stores in New York, Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia could expect to enter, not just large "general stores," but expositions of the products of the world. In addition to making purchases, they could also receive various services and advice on merchandise and fashion. The customers could expect to be provided with doormen, taxicab service, waiting rooms for reading, writing, and telephoning, and assistance buying theater tickets, as well as full-service post offices that issued money orders and wrapped parcels, and railroad offices for making reservations, purchasing tickets, and checking luggage. Elsewhere in the building were hairdressers' shops and barber shops. Most department stores also had "style theaters" with fashion shows, as well as one or more tearooms, lunchrooms, or restaurants, and even a physician in attendance at the service of the customers.
One of the crowd-pleasers at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia was a vast hall in which carriage-makers from America and Europe exhibited examples of the models of carriages and wagons they made. Match the images of the horse-drawn vehicles displayed at the Fair with the names of the models.
A.
Landau
B.
Brougham
C.
Buggy
D.
Rockaway
E.
Cabriolet
F.
Phaeton
Up to the 20th century, men shipped out whaling—risking their lives and spending up to five years at sea per voyage. Why? Because whalers lit the world, providing oil for lamps and for the machines of the industrial revolution—at no small cost to the whale population. Test your whaling knowledge.
1. Many idioms and words we use today arose from maritime jargon. Which of the following is not true?
b. "Blackstrap" was a sailor's nickname for tar.
"Blackstrap," today used for thick molasses, was a nickname not for tar, but for a cheap wine typically served in the Mediterranean. Sailors stationed in the area were said to be "black-strapped."
As for the other terms, cooks were permitted to keep a portion of the "slush," or fat scum from boiling meat, in the ship's stores. They then sold the fat to tallow merchants, providing the cooks with a handy "slush fund." Plates were generally square in the British Navy, for easier storage—leading to our adoption of the phrase, "a square meal." Finally, the word, "junk" originated as a word for rope worn to the point that it was useless for anything beyond making fenders or friction-reducing sail cushioning (baggywrinkle). Eventually, according to the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, it also was used to refer to the meat, often of poor quality, fed to sailors, and then to anything discarded or broken.
2. There are many whales in the sea, and each had its own peculiarities noted by whalers. Which of the following is not true?
a. American whalers sought out the blue whale, as its immense size provided the most blubber, and therefore, profit.
Blue whales were unmanageable with American whaling technology. (Groups with more advanced tools, such as the Scandinavians, did hunt them.)
Right whales were given their name based on their by-products and the comparative ease of the kill. Sperm whales were similarly prized; however, they often dove deeply when injured. Secured to the line of a harpoon, attendant whalers had to sever the line fast, or follow the whale to the bottom. John Smith was interested in whaling in early America. However, he failed to locate any whale species considered valuable at the time.
3. Among seafaring tales, few are as well known as Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Which of the following is not true?
c. The name of Ahab's vessel, the Pequod, is taken from a type of indigenous vessel used in Rokovoko, the island from which the character Queequeg came.
The Pequod is likely named after the Pequot, a Native American group native to what is now Connecticut. Rokovoko (or Kokovoko in some versions) is a fictional island created by Melville.
Moby Dick is thought to be based on a real white sperm whale, known as Mocha Dick. As for the chapel in New Bedford, the pulpit was added after the release of the 1956 film Moby Dick, starring Gregory Peck. The pulpit was redesigned to meet the expectations of tourists, disappointed by the lack of the prominent film feature. Finally, the Coffin and Starbuck families intermarried in the 17th century, creating a long line of Quaker whalers. Both Coffin and Starbuck remained Nantucket surnames.
4. Different groups of people were considered bad luck on ships, and treated with suspicion when on board. Which of the following groups was not considered a risk?
b. One-eyed men
There was no stigma attached to sailors or passengers with one eye—although this was not true of the cross-eyed or "swivel-eyed."
Finns were believed to whistle the winds, have the second sight, or be in league with the Devil. In contrast, preachers, as men of God, could cause harm to vessels carrying them, as the sea was considered godless. Bringing a godly individual aboard was taunting the sea. Similar superstitions, although less common, applied to the Bible. Last, but not least, women were generally considered ill luck on board. However, a naked woman would bring favor to the voyage by shaming the sea into submission. This sparked the tradition of naked female figureheads. Women were also believed to be the best navigators.
5. One final question, a "grab bag" of whaling fact and fiction. Which of the following is not true?
a. A sea shanty is a type of dance, akin to a jig, in which the watch would take turns performing.
Sea shanties were, in fact, work songs, used to time tasks that required group coordination, such as furling sails. They featured call and response singing and were highly rhythmic.
Whaling expeditions chose to freeze their vessels into the ice knowing that they would be among the first whalers in prime hunting locations come the thaw. One of the better known captains involved in the practice, George Comer, also used the winter to conduct ethnographic studies of the local Inuit. Lewis Temple, an African American man, did invent the toggle head harpoon, which released a hook on the harpoon head when it entered the whale. This prevented the harpoon from easily sliding out of the wound, and revolutionized the whaling industry. Scrimshaw was a recognized whalers' art. Common forms included pie crimpers, walking sticks, and corset busks, frequently given to sweethearts as gifts.
Want to know more about the history of whaling in America? The best place to start would be the museum of "the city that lit America," New Bedford, MA. The New Bedford Whaling Museum offers a multitude of sources to introduce you to the fascinating world of the country's now defunct whaling industry, from the biology of whales to the life of the whalers. Six online exhibits cover everything from whaling ports to U.S. whalers and the opening of Japan. Also be sure to read over the curriculum guide which looks at the uses of whale products, signing up for a whaling voyage, conditions at sea, sailors' free time, whaling tasks, and information on whaling and conservation today. The packet includes primary sources, making it easy for educators to introduce whaling as a vital part of U.S. history—without ignoring its environmental implications. Finally, the Collections Search (accessible from the main page) is a fantastic resource for artifacts and prints to illustrate handouts, PowerPoint presentations, or other materials.
Should the opportunity ever arise, be sure to visit in person! In addition to the museum, the area offers the sailors' chapel mentioned in Moby Dick, a National Park Service visitor's center, and a modern working waterfront.
From the Kansas Cosmophere and Space Center blog:
"Mike McGlone, a NASA education specialist, will present a Teacher Workshop at the Cosmosphere on April 19 and 20. McGlone will focus on the Hubble Telescope, which was deployed 20 years ago."
"The presentation will touch on multiple aspects of telescopes, astronomy and the Hubble in particular. He will discuss the history of telescopes and how they work, the electromagnetic spectrum, how distance is measured and how the Hubble is used to classify galaxies. He will also talk about the challenges in servicing the Hubble, including the space environment, spacesuits and spacewalks."