The Relevance of History in Oberlin

FreeImages.com/Andrew Mogridge

I recently wrote a post for the Oberlin Heritage Center's blog about a controversial period in the city's history in which a group of activists tried to integrate the town's barber shops.  After doing enough research on local businesses owned by African-American residents to write a month's worth of Facebook posts and a mini-exhibit in the museum's outdoor kiosk, I had no other outlet for fully conveying this story and its complex revelations.  A long blog post proved the strongest way to communicate this message to as many audiences as possible.

Here's an excerpt:

"Examining the history of Oberlin’s barber shops means addressing a situation in which overt discrimination was standard practice, far into the twentieth century and throughout the United States. In 1940, Oberlin had 4,305 citizens, and 897 of them were black.  Yet, by this time, there were no barbers in town who would serve African-American customers in their shops during regular business hours. This post presents the story of how, at the height of World War II, discrimination in the barber shops became a town-wide topic of discussion and, subsequently, a cause for social action."

Read more here.

The pre-history to my blog post is, of course, Oberlin's history as "a hotbed of abolitionism," "the town that started the Civil War," and a very active site on the Underground Railroad where former slaves might choose to stay and then find freedom, prosperity, and a semblance of racial equality.  Yet anyone following news about higher education knows that Oberlin today retains its activist bent and that questions of race and ethnicity have become significantly more complicated.  The history between these two eras is exemplified by the story told in my blog post, and the post provides important context for how social movements in the town may form and how they may succeed.  It allows residents of the town who may remember the some of these brave barbers to understand how this history enabled their existence.

A recently formed organization named the History Relevance Campaign celebrates stories like this one from Oberlin for how productively they demonstrate that studying history benefits numerous aspects of contemporary society.   This campaign has published a Value Statement, which outlines seven reasons history is essential to ourselves, our communities, and to our future.  Using their language, quoted below, it becomes clear how the story of Oberlin's barbershops exemplifies the ways that history can inform an understanding of the community.

History:

• Forms our identities: "...History enables people to discover their own place in the stories of their families, communities, and nation... Through these varied stories, they create systems of personal values that guide their approach to life and relationships with others."
• Makes communities vital places to live and work: "History lays the groundwork for strong, resilient communities. No place really becomes a community until it is wrapped in human memory."
• Creates engaged citizens: "By bringing history into discussions about contemporary issues, we can better understand the origins of and multiple perspectives on the challenges facing our communities and nation."

Since starting as an AmeriCorps Member at the Oberlin Heritage Center in September 2015, this blog post is among my favorite projects I've done.  It feels important and relevant.  It feels like the act of writing this story contributes to remembering parts of the city's history that seem difficult, but that inform how the city views itself today.  I believe it contextualizes places and ideas that are familiar to many people in Oberlin who may not remember this specific story, but that the story also reaches beyond one city to broader understandings of race and civil rights that resonate across the entire United States.  

Stories that work with these two levels of meaning have to be central in local history organizations.  By working with stories that connect past to present, local history museums can make substantial contributions to how their audiences broadly understand historical content.  By connecting local stories to national events, they make historical narratives deeper and more detailed, which can only benefit everyone's understanding of the past.

The Revenant and American Landscape Paintings

I’m deeply far behind on my Oscar movie-watching this year.  In fact, I’ve only seen two of the eight Best Picture nominees (Brooklyn and The Revenant) and besides those, in the marquee categories, only The Danish Girl. 

I’ve thought for weeks about how I wanted to write a post on the way that the two main characters talk about art in The Danish Girl.  They seem to reify over and over again a connection between making art and making oneself that parallels Einar’s transformation into Lily.  But as time as passed, my memories of that movie have become less sharp, and so I’ll talk instead about the movie I cannot quite shake: The Revenant.

The trailers for The Revenant (and… knowledge of the bear) almost put me off the movie before I could see it.  They made it look like a feverish nightmare, the kind of magical realism that’s hard to cope with in a visual medium.  I knew something of the technical feats Iñárritu attempted in using natural light and that the actors suffered under intense physical conditions; I knew from Leonardo DiCaprio’s Golden Globe acceptance speech that the way Native Americans are addressed in the film might set it apart from previous treatments of similar themes.  All the previews I saw made the movie seem like it was geared toward a particular audience—male, survivalist, sadistic—to which I do not belong.

So I was surprised to find that the The Revenant functions as a pretty traditional Western, dealing with man-versus-nature themes, racial issues, and revenge quests that would resonate with movie and television westerns from earlier times.  A main contribution of this new treatment may be, however, that it updates these themes for a new era without sacrificing the historical.  Though there are still aspects of cringeworthy appropriation in the way Native Americans are viewed, they are also portrayed more deliberately as complicated people with quests that parallel (and further complicate) those of the white settlers.

And then there is the scenery, which functions like a highlight reel of all the greatest nineteenth-century paintings and photographs that communicated a vision of the American West to New York and Washington, D.C.  In that era, western imagery did two things: 1) justify the now very troublesome doctrine of Manifest Destiny, or the belief that the United States had a divine right to expand to the West Coast, and 2) emphasize that man’s powers paled in the face of nature’s unpredictable vastness and cruelty.  Iñárritu’s vistas reignite these concepts for the twenty-first century.  Because he uses the landscapes to ground a human story, they have new implications for viewers who may never have seen the paintings they resemble.

In this first pair, mountains and trees frame an opening in the center field--but that opening is then obscured by fog and clouds, suggesting fear and the unknown to one contemplating moving forward.

Scene from The Revenant.

Albert Bierstadt, Storm in the Mountains, ca. 1870, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The second pair structurally resembles the first with the open foreground and the framing by mountains and trees.  The water in both images provides a different kind of expanse, less solid and dependable than land, yet fear is replaced by majesty here.  The colors of the sky, set against the darkness, indicate that man may also be dwarfed by nature's beauty.

Scene from The Revenant.

Frederic Edwin Church, Aurora Borealis, ca. 1865, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC.

And in this third pair, the structure, fear, and majesty of the first two pairs reoccur, yet the weather here adds a different kind of threat to the mix.  In the foreground of each of these images, a man stands against the whiteness of the snowscape.  Though, practically, this figure shows scale, he also emphasizes the intent to continue working within and fighting against the forces of nature.

Scene from The Revenant.

Thomas Moran, The Mosquito Trail, Rocky Mountains of Colorado, 1875, University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson.

Eleanor Powell, Hoofing, and High Standards

There’s been a mashup going around the internet in the last few days in which some enterprising individual has cut together old clips from MGM musicals to make those faded stars look like they dance in time to Bruno Mars’s “Uptown Funk.”  In sharing it on Facebook myself and then explaining my excitement to some of my friends, I discovered a fact that astounded me: no one remembers Eleanor Powell.

Or, perhaps, it’s not a question of remembering so much as that most people under fifty never knew who she was in the first place.  I knew because I watched the That’s Entertainment video series over and over again when I was little and because, even in that constellation of dancing stars like Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire, Eleanor Powell remains deeply noticeable.  She is distinctive.  If she does not quite serve as a feminist figure, the conventions of the era don’t allow it—she was still required to appear in poofy dresses, to woo Robert Taylor or Jimmy Stewart, and to occasionally show off legs toned by years of tap dancing.  But here’s the thing: when she danced with Fred Astaire, they danced side by side and did the same intensely difficult choreography.  None of that “backwards and in heels” compensation. 

My top reasons why I came to love Eleanor Powell:

1)   She wore pants.   The most superficial of my reasons, but the most noticeable.  Long before Annie Hall, Powell wore suits—occasionally a crisply tailored tux or an Uncle Sam-inspired one.  In one number, where she dances with a trained dog, she wears stylish palazzo pants.   Of course, she wore dresses and danced in more theatrical costumes, but, in situations that run the gamut from informal in-narrative dance numbers to formal end-of-film production numbers, the pants she wears communicate that mobility and her talent were more important than the sexuality inherent in showing her legs or flipping a skirt.

2)   She commanded the screen like her male counterparts.  Male dancing stars had the luxury of dancing alone and pretending they weren’t being watched.  Think of Fred Astaire dancing on the ceiling in Royal Wedding or Gene Kelly dancing to “Singin’ in the Rain.”  Women weren’t afforded this luxury until after Powell retired (think of Cyd Charisse), and even then, beauty became the guiding principle for viewing these dances.  Female dancers were expected to entertain, directly to the camera, so many of Powell’s dances come in the movie context of a nightclub or a staged show of some sort.  However, they’re frequently so large-scale that it feels like the entire world turns around her, and they entirely strip on-screen gazers from polluting how she is seen.  In these large production numbers, like “Fascinating Rhythm” in Lady Be Good or the one at the end of Broadway Melody of 1938, the camera follows her whole body, zooming in only on her face at moments that seem to emphasize her skill—her smile remains constant while executing difficult footwork.  When men dance around her, they become faceless accents, meant only to emphasize her acrobatic skill or to complete the kaleidoscopic effects that early musicals reveled in.

3)   Her dance routines were HARD.  There’s this thing that happens with dancing in shows or movies where the choreography is just not that complicated, perhaps because the star is more skilled as a singer or because a total effect seems more important than detailed footwork.  The choreography danced by Powell proved exactly the opposite because it alternated between micro movements of her feet and magnificent turns that only a truly skilled dancer could execute.  Because her dance routines were filmed to emphasize her movements, her crisp tap sounds percussively complement the music.  Powell described herself as a hoofer—a particular kind of tap dancer interested in the sounds the shoes make, combinations of steps, and the natural movements of the arms, as opposed to the regimented, upright tap dancing of a show like 42nd Street.  For hoofers, intense footwork and creating rhythms are more important than anything else.

4)   She worked hard and had high standards for herself.  People she worked with—stars in their own right—recounted how focused she was on getting her footwork right for the cameras.  Esther Williams, the swimming star, remembered how, when Powell made a cameo in 1950’s Duchess of Idaho, she rehearsed until her feet bled, determined to make her one routine as perfect as possible.  When the Bruno Mars mashup sent me into a YouTube spiral, I discovered this video of Powell herself speaking in 1981 about how she and Fred Astaire were such good partners because they always wanted to rehearse one more time—for “Begin the Beguine” in Broadway Melody of 1940, she says, they rehearsed only arm movements for two weeks.

She only made about 14 full-length movies (by Wikipedia’s count), retiring early to raise her son, and then returned to show business with a vengeance later in life, building a popular night club act and maintaining her ability to dazzle audiences with her dancing.   A lot of these movies are hard to find now, or in terms of plot and dialogue, they seem very antiquated.  Tap dancing, as an art form, has been under threat for years, without the same support of organizations that fund programs in ballet, jazz, and other types of dance.  The most successful tappers are the most avant-garde, working far beyond the fundamentals of hoofing to create works that build sonic landscapes or atmospheric effects.  But when I was younger—and a tap dancer—I wanted to be Eleanor Powell.  I wanted to be as good at tap dancing as she was and have the control that she seemed to have in all aspects of her persona.  Even if it’s just a matter of watching clips on YouTube, she is worth remembering.

Bringing out historical thinking

Tutoring often has the benefit of putting me in the way of assignments designed by teachers devoted to helping their students think creatively.  These assignments interest me especially when they do two things: 1) ask students to apply skills and knowledge across disciplines and 2) allow for choice and ingenuity in application.  Because students and educators alike resist memorizing dates and events as ways of learning history, these types of assignments mobilize historical thinking skills that allow students to develop sophisticated understandings of historical information.

I recently encountered two of these smart assignments that I will summarize briefly here.

The first came as a question on a forum, with a student asking for advice on a question her teacher had posed.  She asked: “Is it possible to apply Newton’s Laws of Physics to interpreting history?”  I thought about this for awhile—though I certainly understood these scientific laws at some point during school, I was never the most intuitive of science students.  It seemed to me that the question must be metaphorical, asking something more like: how can we use the relationships that Newton posed between forces, actions, reactions, and so on to understand the forces that guide how historical events come into being?  In that sense, for example, the Third Law, in which “every action has an equal and opposite reaction,” suggests a particular way of looking at cause-and-effect relationships to determine how events beget other events and multiply outward into historical memory. 

The second came during an in-person tutoring session, where I was asked to help a student write a paper that required him to choose a historical object.  The student was then asked to use this object to stand in for an entire historical era.  By discussing the characteristics of the object, its uses, and how it came into being, a well-chosen object could therefore explain the most important trends in thought during its era and present an argument about how that era’s historical events transpired.  The example provided by the teacher used signs from nuclear fallout shelters in the 1950s to illuminate the events of the Cold War—by describing the circumstances in which it became necessary to build fallout shelters and label them with those signs, a student could make an argument about how the threat of communism actively influenced daily life for Americans during that era.  This assignment was, in fact, a research paper for an English class—but one grounded in the object-based inquiry that characterizes Museum Studies or Art History courses and which students usually don’t encounter until much later in their educations.

With assignments like these and careful guidance, students naturalize so many useful thought processes.  They begin to understand not only the nuts-and-bolts elements of history (the people, places, things, and dates), but also how events reach across time and bleed into each other and create influence.  They learn how arguments can be crafted through evidence and logic.  Consequently, they (hopefully) come to understand which sources are better than others, how to extract information from them, and also how to vet this evidence to make sure it is reliable.  These are skills that cross far beyond disciplinary boundaries, and when arguments are made about the importance of the humanities in any society, these broadly applicable skills bolster those arguments.  By moving between specific details and broad issues, by learning to make decisions and interpret information, these are the kinds of assignments that assert the necessity of historical thinking for all students.

Ode to my embroidered owls.

Yesterday represents a triumph of the first order in the acquisition of art!  Feast your eyes on this masterpiece of arts and crafts:

Pictures like this are more rare than you might suspect.  After happening upon a similarly embroidered cockatoo picture, carefully framed under glass, in a furniture resale shop last year, I have checked every thrift store, every antique mall, every used furniture store I’ve encountered since in the hopes of finding more of these kinds of images.  Some of them may be made with yarn, others with silk threads—the process is more akin to that of the Bayeux Tapestry than a homemade cross stitch, and the framed cross stitches you find in thrift stores are frequently labors of love cast aside when that love is outdated or over, not pictures made with the intent to perfect each stroke of thread and display them on walls.

I love having these pictures on my walls because they enliven the bare white plaster more than flat posters.  I always I hated white walls because I grew up in a log cabin, so textured walls feel warmer and cozier to me.  The only other piece I’ve found (and did not buy) that came close to the skill shown in these owls and the cockatoo presented “advice” like a more traditional needlepoint sampler—with a border of stick figures on grass and under schematic stars, it proclaimed that one should forgo books to find true education in nature.  And so another clear problem in selecting needlework to grace your walls is that you may not agree with the sentiments it professes, and there is only so much irony one can include in home furnishings.  Even so, I cannot explain the prevalence of birds as subjects in the best of their works, except to guess that it it’s a matter of form following function with embroidery lending itself to the mimicry of feathers.

Texture distinguishes these owls; it gives them character.  This unknown artist knew how to pack threads together as an expert visual artist knows to vary shading and line to shape forms.  Darker brown stitches give the lighter brown tree dimension, just as stitches in three different shades of grey expertly feather out from the face of the fierce owl at the lower left.  The smaller owl next to him, perhaps meant to be a baby, and the owl at the right each show the yarn being manipulated to create an approximation of the appearance of real owl feathers, the former entirely fluffy and the latter with a fluffy jowl of feathers.  Small orange accents structure the body of that jowly owl, while the owl with the bright yellow eyes at the upper right is built through the airy overlays of cream colored yarn that differentiate its feathers.  It’s possible that this was a kit, plucked from the back of a craft store and executed to perfection, but it still demonstrates considerable effort and skill.

I don’t know what other embroidered birds are out there.  I don’t know if this was trendy in the ‘70s, and they’re only now filtering into the resale shops of greater Cleveland.  I could probably go on eBay and find another ten to decorate all the rooms in my apartment, but that’s not nearly as much fun as sifting through bins in thrift stores in hope that one will peep out at me and beg me to take it home.   Maybe I’ll have the opportunity to branch out into landscapes or animals someday, but if my home becomes a museum for embroidered birds of the world, that’s fine too.