This will be one of my last blog entries prior to the launch of the Black Gotham Digital Archive so it seems like an appropriate moment for me to step back and take stock of all things Black Gotham.

Looking back. By my count, since the publication of Black Gotham in February 2011 I’ve given some forty-five book talks with three more scheduled for this spring. I’ve spoken in venues as varied as bookstores, museums, historical societies, libraries, academic conferences, college campuses, genealogical societies, churches, and in front of audiences as diverse as scholars in the field, the general public, genealogists, and students from junior high to college. If you’ve missed any of these talks, you can always catch them on YouTube.

In addition, I’ve given several radio interviews ranging from NPR’s Leonard Lopate show in New York to black talk radio covering all regions of the country—Dallas in the South, Madison in the Midwest, California and Oregon in the far West.  I’ve even done some interviews for local New York TV, interviewed by some of my favorite media guys, Sam Roberts at NYC Channel 1 and Brian Lehrer at CUNY TV, Channel 75.  I must say I never seem to tire of talking about Black Gotham!

Beyond talking about the book, I’ve also continued writing about it.  I did two essays for the New York Times online series about the Civil War (“Dr. Smith’s Back Room” and “What Were the Women Doing?“) as well as a Q & A for the New York Times online “City Room.” All these pieces build upon ideas first broached in the book.

Finally, look out for the forthcoming NEH Humanities Magazine.  You’ll find another Q & A in it.

All this work has been well worth it since Black Gotham has just won the 2011 New York Society Library Award for History!

Looking forward. The Black Gotham Digital Archive launch is scheduled for May 20! That date is just around the corner but I feel there’s still so much left to do. Omeka is a lot trickier that it first appears. You can’t imagine how much work goes into creating a website that’s user-friendly. Behind every clickable icon, image, word there’s an enormous amount of trial and error going on.

I won’t give too much away, just enough to whet your appetite. I hope to have five exhibits to show: the first introduces users to my family; the second tours a few early Lower Manhattan places; the third invites users into two African Free Schools of the 1820s and 1830s; the fourth portrays members of the black elite at mid-century; and the fifth examines the fate of family members and their friends during the draft riots. You’ll find a lot more images in these digital exhibits than in the book as well as links to select archival documents where the nineteenth-century voice leaps at you right off the page and links to primary and secondary source books that are now online. With the digital archive, you won’t have to check the index and then shuffle back and forth among pages spread far apart. Just click and you’ll get a new item and information about it.  Enjoy!

Carla L. Peterson is professor of English at the University of Maryland. She currently is completing a faculty fellowship at MITH. This post originally appeared at Black Gotham Archive on April 23, 2012.

The post Taking Stock appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

Although I didn’t realize it at first, I soon discovered that the Lyonses are part of my family as well!  In combing through Williamson’s papers I found out that my great-great-grandfather Peter Guignon married one Rebecca Marshall in 1840, and that Albro married her sister Mary Joseph that same year.  That makes Albro my great-great-granduncle.  Many years later Philip White would marry Peter and Rebecca’s daughter, Elizabeth.

So this note has a particular emotional resonance for me.  It was sent by one Sergeant Rode to Albro on the last day of the draft riots.  The cause of the riots was the federal government’s passage of a draft law decreeing that all male citizens (by definition white) between the ages of 20 and 35 were to be enrolled in the military, and a lottery conducted to determine who would actually serve.  New York’s white working class was angered by what they perceived to be the unfairness of the law.  Political elites, who had decided on war, could buy their way out of the draft; African Americans, deemed to be the cause of the war, were excluded by law from service.  So on July 13, the mob, composed mainly of Irish men and women, took to the streets, wantonly attacking people and property, particularly in the black community.

Albro Lyons lived at 20 Vandewater Street.  The print above shows a typical Lower Manhattan street mixing buildings both residential and commercial, tall and low, frame and brick.  Maritcha had noted in her memoir that the family lived in a large brick building, so it could well have been one of those on the left side of the street.  It combined both the Lyons household and a Colored Sailors Home, and was also a stop on the Underground Railroad.  The mob stormed it three times.  When they had finished, this is what Maritcha had to say about the state of her home: “Its interior was dismantled, furniture was missing or broken.  From basement to attic evidences of the worst vandalism prevailed.  A fire, kindled in one of the upper rooms, was discovered in time to prevent a conflagration.”

The rioters’ goals in attacking Albro’s home were multiple but precise: they sought to strike at the heart of the black family; destroy black property and wealth, which they saw as ill gotten and undeserved; undermine black enterprises; prevent black sailors from seeking “white” work on the docks; and finally eliminate a black community institution dedicated to the abolitionist cause.

What really caught my eye in the note, however, was the reference to “said drugstore.”   Could that have been the drugstore that Philip White had established in 1847 and would keep until his death in 1891?  Philip lived onVandewater Street only a few doors from the Lyonses.  Look again at the print.  If, instead of going up Vandewater you turned left onto Frankfort, at the very next corner you’d come to Philip’s pharmacy.  Like Lyons’s Sailors Home, it was an important landmark in the black community.  When visiting New York some years earlier, black Bostonian William C. Nell had praised Philip as a “practical man” who “conducted his business, preparing medicines, etc., etc., etc. with as much readiness and skill as any other disciple of Galen and Hippocrates.”

How could Philip’s drugstore have been a safe meeting place for a white police officer and a black victim gathering up his few remaining earthly possessions? Williamson gives us the answer in an account he preserved in his papers and must have provided to the New York Times at the time of Philip’s death.  According to the Times obituary:

“When the riot was at its height a crowd of men gathered at White’s store to defend it from attack.  Mr. White was warned by some of the business men that he would be wise if he hid himself.  He said: `What have I to fear?  Even if these men here could not protect me, there are as many men among the rioters who would fight for me as there are those who would injure me.’  Not the slightest attempt was made to harm him or his property.”

Unlike Albro, Philip had made himself indispensable to his local neighborhood.  As the Times obituary noted, he “was never unmindful of the poor, and the services and material of his store were willingly given without pay to any one who needed them.  .  .  .  Scores of poor families were befriended and helped by him not only with medicines, but with food and money.  Those whom he helped had a chance to show their gratitude during the draft riots of 1863.”

Philip had achieved a delicate balance in forging a mutually interdependent relationship between himself and his poor Irish neighbors.  By giving away medicines for free, Philip was helping to maintain the stability of the neighborhood in which he lived and worked, and protect his own position within it.  Accepting his benevolence over the years, his poor Irish neighbors were able to repay him by protecting him during the riots.  In so doing, they were also ensuring that the drugstore on which they depended so heavily would survive the riots and continue to serve them.

Carla L. Peterson is professor of English at the University of Maryland. She currently is completing a faculty fellowship at MITH. This post originally appeared at Black Gotham Archive on March 13, 2012.

The post The Black Gotham Digital Archive: The Draft Riots of July 1863 appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

I’m well aware, however, that much like a printed book a digital archive must create and sustain a narrative arc—consisting not only of a beginning, middle, and end, but also of a certain narrative tension that impels the viewer forward to look, search, discover.  But unlike a book (at least unlike the case of Black Gotham where Yale University Press was incredibly generous in the number of pages it allotted to me) a digital archive seems to demand greater concision and focus.  It seems to be a question of how to get more out of less.

How then does a person of the word like me create a narrative out of images?  At our last MITH meeting, Seth suggested that I might think in terms of organizing my archive by chapters.  But the very term chapter now strikes me as too bookish, so I’ve begun to think more in terms of stories, maybe even episodes, each of which forms what I’m calling a “cluster.”

So far, I’ve identified about eighteen clusters.  I envision that each one will start with a “portal,” a doorway through which the viewer enters.  In the first cluster, the portal will be my family tree: viewers will be able to click on names of family members and meet them through photographs, obituaries, personal commentary, and the like.  The portals of the remaining clusters will be maps that foreground place.  By means of clickable icons, they will pinpoint, and allow the viewer entry into, the many sites—neighborhoods, streets, buildings—that anchor my story.  A first map will introduce nineteenth-century Gotham—its commercial areas, ports, fashionable neighborhoods of the white elite, as well as areas inhabited by poorer folk, whether black, native born whites, Irish or German immigrants.  Later maps will highlight specific sites of particular significance to the black community—churches, schools, institutions—or to individuals—home, work places, etc.—and tell their stories.

But in and of themselves the clusters don’t really create narrative tension.  So how can I organize them to create a narrative that will pull viewers in and stimulate their interest?  I’m thinking that one technique might be that of contrast: for example, the introductory map would be organized around the contrast of wealthy neighborhoods of the white elite to the downtrodden areas that were home to black New Yorkers and lower class whites.

Another technique could be what I call “point-counterpoint” that illustrates how every step forward taken by the black elite was met with resistance by white New Yorkers, forcing them to take at least half a step back.  Proceeding chronologically, I would show how black leaders of the 1820s, ’30s, and ’40s struggled to form a cohesive community by establishing schools and other kinds of institutions, but were consistently opposed by white racists for whom mob violence was often the weapon of choice (the African Grove theater riot in the early 1820s, the 1834 Chatham Street Chapel riot).  At the same time, I would juxtapose black New Yorkers’ sense of themselves—their hopes and aspirations—during these decades against the views of British visitors like Mrs. Felton, Mrs. Trollope, and Charles Dickens, who wrote about the city’s black population from the ignorant, negative perspective of an outsider.  I would also point out how such a juxtaposition is replicated in the 1850s as the rise of black entrepreneurship in the city was met with similar hostile and derogatory reactions from American writers William Bobo, George Foster, and others.  My archive’s narrative arc reaches its zenith (or maybe I should say its nadir) with the draft riots of July 1863 during which white mobs set out to destroy everything black New Yorkers had so painstakingly tried to build.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  I first need to get back to Omeka, create my clusters and enter my data and metadata.

editor’s note: Carla L. Peterson is professor of English at the University of Maryland. She currently is completing a faculty fellowship at MITH. This post originally appeared at Black Gotham Archive on January 27, 2012.

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I had my first training session with Seth Denbo and Amanda Visconti last week, with Kirsten Keister joining us at the end. MITH is using Omeka as the platform on which to build my archive. Seth started off by explaining that Omeka relies on a “vocabulary” known as the Dublin Core through which I’m to enter my “data” and “metadata.” Huh? To me, these were entirely new, and quite daunting, terms until I realized how easily I could translate them into more familiar words. For you Humanities types out there, data is the written text (print or manuscript) to be displayed, and metadata is its footnote. Or if the data is an image, then the metadata is the credit line. So far, so good!

I had only one horrifying moment. We selected an image of the Colored Orphan Asylum as a test case, entered the metadata, and then uploaded the image. It worked beautifully! Buoyed by my success, I decided to upload a second image. Inexplicably, my laptop started to shake and groan. I was convinced it was about to explode, and so of course I started to shake and groan as well. Seth and Amanda thought it was pretty funny but when they admitted that they had never seen (or heard) this happen before, I was close to a meltdown. Sensing my pain, they fetched Kirsten, the Omeka guru, but she too was baffled. A conversation ensued in a language I found utterly incomprehensible and untranslatable, so I tuned out and relaxed for a few minutes. The upshot is that they’re going to investigate the problem and then let me know what I should do.

Despite this little contretemps, the session did succeed in teaching me the mechanics of entering data and metadata. But as I left, I returned to the question of what I’m trying to accomplish and why. I needed to start thinking again.

At my talk at the Massachusetts Historical Society, staff member Jayne Gordon asked why I had chosen to structure my book around the geography of New York City, suggesting that I could surely have chosen other ways of narrating my story. My first response was to reiterate a point I’ve made many times: that in contrast to the Harlem model of the first half of the twentieth-century, where neighborhood and community were co-extensive, nineteenth-century black New Yorkers lived throughout the entire city, in different wards and neighborhoods. The result was that they came into contact with a wide range of the city’s white inhabitants in a variety of interactions, some predictable, some not. I then added that I thought geography mattered because place also seemed to offer black New Yorkers a profound sense of identity. They insisted over and over again that they were citizens of Gotham—a term coined for New York by Washington Irving in 1807—and repeatedly proclaimed their identity as Gothamites.

As I continued talking, it struck me that I might have had a more personal motivation for grounding my story in place, that I might have been drawn subconsciously to the striking differences between my ancestors’ sense of place and my own. In an autobiographical essay titled “Notes of a Native Daughter: Reflections on Identity and Writing” (in Autobiographical Writing across the Disciplines, Duke University Press, 2003), I described how my father’s work with international public health organizations took my family abroad from 1950 through the early 1960s; I lived outside the United States from about age five to eighteen, first in Beirut, Lebanon for almost three years and then in Geneva, Switzerland for almost ten. As a result, I knew very little about my own country. My parents made sure to tell my sisters and me about the many accomplishments of African American men and women—from George Washington Carver and Charles Drew to Jackie Robinson and Althea Gibson—and used Time magazine articles featuring the students who integrated the Little Rock High School and lunch counters throughout southern towns as well as Martin Luther King Jr.’s emergence as a race leader as lessons to teach us about U.S. race relations. I listened carefully to these stories of amazing courage, but knew that these experiences were not mine.

Compounding this problem was the fact that my parents said little about their own family past. As I detail in the Prologue of Black Gotham, my father never told us that his ancestors had come from England and Haiti in the first decades of the nineteenth century to settle in New York and become part of the city’s black cultural elite. And my mother never told us how her mother had left her family and native island of Jamaica in the early twentieth century to come to the United States with her daughter in search of a better life.

Instead, my parents tried to impart to my sisters and me their deep ecumenical conviction—so prevalent in the United Nations and its international agencies in those postwar years—that all nations and races constitute one universal family. That might have been fine in theory, but it didn’t work in practice since I was well aware of the gulf that separated me from the Swiss: I was African descended, not European; English, not French, was my first language; my friends ate cheese and marmite while I devoured hamburgers and peanut jelly sandwiches.

I can best capture my sense of unbelonging through a visit James Baldwin made unannounced to our home in Geneva in the fall of 1953. He was not yet the famous writer he would eventually become and my family had no idea who he was. It was only years later when I returned to the States for college that I realized that our visitor had been the now famous writer and that at the time he was on his way back to visit the Swiss village in the mountains depicted in “Stranger in the Village.” I remember reading the essay with intense interest, focusing in particular on Baldwin’s comments about the extent to which the Swiss villagers felt so firmly rooted in place, secure in their belief that they belonged to the village (or perhaps that the village belonged to them), and his awareness of how this rootedness reflected their sense of shared nationality, culture, and race. Baldwin, the villagers made clear, did not belong; they regarded him “not only as a stranger in their village but as a suspect latecomer, bearing no credentials, to everything they have—however unconsciously—inherited.”

In Baldwin I had finally found a writer who summarized with uncanny accuracy my own uneasy sense of not belonging to a village, of not being rooted in place. I felt that I belonged neither to Switzerland nor to the United States, and that neither Switzerland nor the United States (at least in the early years of my return) claimed me as one of their own. No wonder that in writing Black Gotham I found myself drawn to my ancestors’ conviction that they were Gothamites despite the fact that the city (and the nation) had done their utmost to reject them as “strangers in their village” and “suspect latecomers,” unfit to vote, to attend their schools and churches, and even to walk down their streets. Through them I found my sense of belonging. Now I can wander through the streets of New York City and think triumphantly to myself: “I belong!”

In retrospect, I’m convinced that I wrote Black Gotham to capture this sense of rootedness in place. I now wonder whether the methodological shift I’m performing in the Black Gotham Digital Archive won’t offer me an even more compelling way of achieving my goal. My training session last week made me realize just how my digital archive inverts the relationship between word and image (consisting in large part of place—maps, streets, and buildings). In my book, word was the primary vehicle for telling my story and image functioned as supporting illustration; in the digital archive, image is the primary vehicle and word supporting document. Maybe I’m on my way to answering my question: “What’s the Virtue of Virtuality?”

Editor’s note: Carla L. Peterson is professor of English at the University of Maryland. She currently is completing a faculty fellowship at MITH. This post originally appeared at Black Gotham Archive on December 20, 2011.

The post Beginnings appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

I have several “handlers” (as I call them) at MITH and they are all terrific. Kirsten Keister is responsible for the design of this website which I think is truly elegant—and she did it in record time. Emma Millon is going to teach me how to post my blog entries in a couple of hours so hopefully I will be posting this one myself! Seth Denbo is my number one handler and we have had great conversations about content. He set up a detailed timetable for me a couple of weeks ago, made up of four stages and thirteen items to get through. The problem is I’ve only gotten through one item even though it’s already November 17! The main sticking point seems to be in getting permissions for the images and manuscript material I want to use. Here’s hoping that that gets sorted out soon!

So this waiting period has given me a lot of time to brood. It’s in my nature to be a worry wart, and in particular to revisit decisions I’ve already made and can’t go back on. Except that in my mind I can. So I repeatedly fret over whether I should have written an article on X topic rather than Y, whether I should have opened my chapter with this vignette rather than that one, whether I should have placed my qualifying phrase at the beginning or end of the sentence. For me, the possibilities are endless. So it is with my decision to go digital. Should I have applied for a MITH fellowship? Do I really want to create a digital archive? What am I losing in do so? What am I gaining?  In other words, what’s the virtue of virtuality?

I have to confess that right now I worry most about what I think the virtual world of digital media cannot give me. After the publication of Black Gotham this past February I went on book tour throughout the spring and, after a summer hiatus, started up again in September. Of course, I’ve loved talking about my book and teaching my audiences about New York’s pre-Harlem world. But the best part has been making new friends. I’ll meet somebody at one event, only to see them show up a few weeks later someplace else. This leads to many “Oh my goshes, it’s you again,” hugs, chatter, and laughter.

Sometimes these meetings occur by happenstance. I was introduced to Celesti Colds Fechter at a talk I gave at the New School. She’s writing a biography of a black woman, Amanda Foster, who worked for Washington Irving in his home, became close to him, and is buried near him in the Sleepy Hollow cemetery. I then bumped into Celesti at the ASLH annual meeting where I was giving a paper on black New Yorkers during the Civil War. At other times these encounters are deliberate. Jaime Estrada, a senior at Smith College, heard me talk at the Harlem Book Fair in July and made a point of coming to my presentation at the Museum of African American History in Boston this fall. In one of these truly small world moments, that event allowed me to reconnect with a former Radcliffe classmate, Chandra Harrington who is the current head of MAAH.

Some folks come bearing gifts. At the New School Michelle Materre gave me a CD of a film, That’s My Face, by Thomas Allen Harris, who I had met some weeks earlier at his own event showcasing his new project, Digital Diaspora TV Family Reunion. After we appeared on a panel together at the Congressional Black Caucus Convention, Booker T. Mattison gave me a copy of his latest novel Snitch, which I’m half way through and really enjoying. Others offer dinner. Michael Henry Adams, author of Harlem: Lost and Found and blogger for the Huffington Post, came to my talk at Columbia University and then came to listen to me again at the Schomburg, sweeping me off to dinner afterwards with his friend Tom Wirth. Jasmin Williams has given me friendship. She photographed me when I spoke from the pulpit at St. Philip’s Church last February and then did a lengthy interview with me that was published in the Amsterdam News a couple of months later. Now you can find the two of us having drinks in any one of Harlem’s numerous watering holes. Finally, book talks have led to more invitations. After I spoke at the Reginald Lewis Museum, Donna Hollie emailed me to ask me to speak at the Baltimore chapter of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society.

All of these encounters have reminded me of Benedict Anderson’s contention in Imagined Communities that in the “primordial village” people were able to relate to one another based on the fact that they all lived right next to each other, saw and talked to one another all the time. But, Anderson argued, once a social group becomes larger than the primordial village, its members need to find other ways of maintaining this sense of common belonging. In his words, “all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/ genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.” According to Anderson, in the early modern period they did so by inventing the new technology of print, and imagining one another through the newspaper and the novel. Now, it seems, that new media has become old and we have taken to imagining community through the new digital media.

That’s what’s got me so worried. Will my Black Gotham Digital Archive replace the wonderful face-to-face contacts I’ve had throughout my book tour? Is there a way in which I can think of these two different forms of media not in terms of an either/or proposition but a both/and? Can I find a way to mesh the two together? Can I encounter people through my digital archive and then meet in person to exchange ideas, gifts, and maybe even get together for dinner? I certainly hope so!

___________

editor’s note: Carla L. Peterson is professor of English at the University of Maryland. She currently is completing a faculty fellowship at MITH. This post originally appeared at Black Gotham Archive on November 21, 2011.

The post What’s the Virtue of Virtuality? appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

Here’s what I like: going to the archives and rooting around looking at old documents, admiring early print fonts and deciphering barely legible handwriting; finding little scraps of paper with gold mines of information on them; creating stories out of these scraps and publishing them in essay or book form; talking about them to anybody and everybody willing to listen.

Here’s what I don’t like: sitting in front of my computer trying to engage with new media. I admit to being technologically challenged. I can word process (do people still use that term?) and email, and I love wasting time googling this, that, and the other. But that’s about it. I don’t do facebook (I think you’re supposed to do something with a wall), I don’t twitter or tweet (in fact I’m not sure what the distinction between the two is). I do own a cell phone but the only function that works is making outgoing calls; it’s definitely not for tm (is that short for text messaging?).

So you might well wonder why I went online a few nights ago and, with massive spousal support and encouragement, purchased a domain name: www.blackgothamarchive.org.

Earlier this spring Yale University Press published my book, Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City. It was eleven years in the making, and I suspect it took that long because of my addiction to archival research and playing with narrative form.

An early paragraph in the book explains my general goal:

“We still hold certain truths about African Americans to be self-evident: that “New York State before the Civil War” denotes a place of freedom; that “blacks in New York City” designates Harlem; that the “black community” posits a classless and culturally unified society; that a “black elite” did not exist until well into the twentieth century. The lives of my forbears belie such assumptions. They were born free at a time when slavery was still legal in New York State. They lived in racially mixed neighborhoods, first in Lower Manhattan and then after the Civil War in Brooklyn, at a time when Harlem was a mere village. They were part of New York’s small but significant black community, and specifically its elite class.”

To make my argument, I structured my book around two concepts. The first is generational history, in which I focus on the lives of my great-great-grandfather—Peter Guignon—his son-in-law and my great-grandfather—Philip Augustus White—their families, and friends as entry points into a broader social and cultural history of New York City’s black elite from about 1805 to 1895. The second is social geography in which I illustrate how members of this elite inhabited a series of concentric circles, each broader than the last, that gave meaning and shape to their lives: 1) their elite social circle; 2) the larger black community; 3) city neighborhoods and the city itself; 4) locations beyond the city (ties with blacks in Boston, Philadelphia, etc.); 5) and the world itself (since they originated from all parts of the globe). I argue that in contrast to the all too familiar Harlem model, nineteenth-century black New Yorkers lived throughout the entire city, in different wards and neighborhoods, and came into contact with a wide range of the city’s white inhabitants through a variety of contacts, some predictable, some not.

This past spring I gave many talks to both general and academic audiences about Black Gotham and, after a summer hiatus, have started my book tour again which will continue until March 2012. My audiences have been especially fascinated by two aspects of my work: my exposition of New York’s black history before Harlem, and my use of family to tell a larger history. Many people tell me that they have stories of their own they want told, but they’re daunted by the task of doing years of research, writing a manuscript, finding a publisher, and then attracting readers. I’ve reluctantly come to see the limitations of the printed essay and book. So one of my goals with the “Black Gotham Digital Archive” is to provide a platform on which those with New York family histories can add their own stories. Out of readers I hope to create writers. I’m hoping that the result will be an even more detailed portrait of black New Yorkers in the nineteenth century than my book provides.

________________

Editor’s Note: Carla L. Peterson is professor of English at the University of Maryland. She is the author of “Doers of the Word”: African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North, 1830–1880. She currently is completing a faculty fellowship at MITH. This post originally appeared at Black Gotham Archive on October 31, 2011.

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