Subscribe to continue reading
Subscribe to get access to the rest of this post and other subscriber-only content.
Tag Archives: History
Second Wave Established – 1920s Great Plains
Yesterday (03/07/2024) on the social media platform Facebook, the Herodotus of the Great Plains, Professor Tom Isern, posted a note of and a link to Willa Cather’s 1923 essay in The Nation called, “NEBRASKA: The End of the First Cycle” (The Nation, 117, September 5, 1923: 236-238). Recapturing Isern’s post here, he said,
“Cather’s 1923 essay is a redefinition of the Great Plains historical identity. Writers such as Owen Wister despised immigrants. Walter Prescott Webb set them no place at the table. Great Plains history was being written by Anglo-Americans, and they owned it. Well, Cather flipped that scenario. She gave immigrants not just a place, but the place of honor. They are the best of us, Cather argues. This she says based on her personal experience and acquaintances; the immigrant presence infuses her Nebraska novels. Literature matters. Cather’s 1923 essay is required reading in my NDSU course on the Great Plains.”
Some more notes on that are below from Isern’s prompt above:
This 1923 essay got me thinking about the larger regionalist movements during this period that are sometimes book-ended (handily) by the two big ones in the first half of the 20th century (WWI and WWII). It seems like if you’re alive, reading this or anything today, props to your ancestors for figuring out how to survive the first half of the twentieth century. And that’s after their ancestors figured out how to navigate the long nineteenth century prior.
Of the 1923 essay, Cather’s following statement smacks thematically of Clell Gannon who, also in the 1920s, asserted his own version of northern plains historical identity into the soil. This phrase by Cather, here:
“When I stop at one of the graveyards in my own county, and see on the headstones the names of fine old men I used to know: ‘Eric Ericson, born Bergen, Norway . . . died Nebraska,’ ‘Anton Pucelik, born Prague, Bohemia . . . died Nebraska,’ I have always the hope that something went into the ground with those pioneers that will one day come out again. Something that will come out not only in sturdy traits of character, but in elasticity of mind, in an honest attitude toward the realities of life, in certain qualities of feeling and imagination.”
Willa Cather, The Nation, 1923
Clell Gannon was doing this sort of literature, art, and history place-making (I have heard the phrase “place esteem,” too) just a couple chess moves north on the northern plains. Either by way of his boat ride with George Will and Russell Reid down the Little Missouri River then the Missouri River (from Medora to Bismarck) in 1925. Or by way of his interior mural paintings in the Art Deco Burleigh County Courthouse in Bismarck, North Dakota. And other such elements.
Another thought from this 1923 essay by Cather is this: we (historians and those consumers of history) are in need of much more research and narrative building with how tribal citizens used their own agency to navigate these decades from the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s and 1940s — really the tinder and prologue to the needed American Indian Movement of the 1960s. Today, Phil Deloria is carving out published research and narrative from this era. In the 1910s and 1920s, Anglo-American historians often overlooked or didn’t include (all but with a sentence or a subordinate clause) Native America in its infinite dynamism during this period. If you get closer to the regions where the regionalists operate, though, Anglo Americans such as Aaron McGaffey Beede start emerging from the research.
In broad brush strokes, Beede advocated for his Anglo-American readership to 1) stop talking (what a concept) and; 2) start listening to and learning the Lakota language. I don’t have the verbatim quote in front of me, but from memory Beede says things to the effect of this: if you want to witness the divine amongst the Lakota, then stop and deliberately learn their language. Once you learn the language, you will hear the creator within that language.
The Bunny and the Egg
It is Easter Sunday, which means over the last couple days I have been eating chocolate eggs and chatting with friends over the best ways and methods to prepare and eat PEEPs (some friends prefer the dry age PEEP, as it changes the resistance a bit). This afternoon friends and family will gather so we can grill (with cowboy charcoal) the t-bone steaks and chicken. Holidays are good and important that way: gives us all another reason to get together.
I caught this NPR piece on the etymology of Easter, the name. It comes from a northern European goddess, Eostra, who was an annual pathfinder for fertility and spring — life, as it is also called. The article mentions the Venerable Bede, and it has been a while since I read any Bede. About a decade to be precise. Bede was one of the many books in my graduate historiography (the history of history) seminar at the University of North Dakota-Grand Forks. We read Bede’s Ecclesiastical history of England, stories about the troubled world of Northumbria from the 5th to the 8th centuries. Those Vikings continued making inroads and eventual settlements in England. As our common narrative goes, it wasn’t until 1066 that the Norman Viking William the Conqueror finally brought the country together (it didn’t go well for Harold at the Battle of Hastings, an arrow in his eye and all).
Bede, though, also wrote The Reckoning of Time, and it is here (according to the NPR) where the bunnies and eggs start making an appearance. Again, not that I’m really going anywhere with this. But it is kind of fun conversation for the Easter grilling this afternoon.
Alzheimer’s, History, Memory, Heritage, Identity…
Here’s a quick post, something that rattled though my brain while reading Stanford University’s advancements in Alzheimer’s disease studies. I know all of us have watched Alzheimer’s disease take a close relative or friend from us, and it may have been all the more distressful because your relative or friend is taken from you even before mortality sets in: we literally watch someone’s memory die before they die. This is super-depressing. When Alzheimer’s destroys the memory banks, it destroys our ability to remember what we did, and this means we forget who we were. If we don’t know who we were, or we don’t know our history and heritage, then we do not know who we are. Again, this is troubling for infinite reasons.
Certainly there is more to be said on this, but I’m just sending a flag into the air on it here. Thanks Stanford University, and the research and development and knowledge-sharing that goes with it throughout the global, university world. Let’s all get together on this and have more public discussions. I’d like to see a panel of Alzheimer’s researchers and professional historians explore why this research is so important. I’ll add it to my bucket list.
Victorian Medallions in Downtown Bismarck
A 2014 photo of the southwest elevation of the Bismarck Auditorium (Belle Mehus).
Yesterday I took a jaunt around downtown Bismarck to capture some images of historic buildings. Autumn has turned to winter, and this means the glorious deciduous leaves are no longer. At least until spring. This also means that it is a great time to take photos of historic buildings (or buildings in general): just like the presence of leaves gives some good angles for photography, so does the absence of leaves. I ended up sauntering around the beautiful Bismarck Auditorium, renamed the Belle Mehus some years ago during a much-needed and -deserved rehabilitation and restoration. An excellent history of the Belle is linked to here on the Bismarck-Mandan Symphony’s Orchestra’s website.
Erected in 1913 and opened in 1914, this auditorium was typical for its time, at least in the sense that opera houses provided the entertainment before the rise of television, radio, movies and iPhones. Traveling opera companies would make the rounds on railroad, stopping in one town after another (much like touring bands today). When visiting historic opera houses, take note of how close they are to the historic railroad: one can imagine an opera company arriving by rail with all the graceful bustle of offloading at the train depot, making their way to a hotel and preparing for one or three days wort
h of performances.
It is fantastic to see opera houses restored, or repurposed. It is literally hard to come by this type of stone and brick monumental architecture, at least today. So that’s what I did yesterday: enjoyed the rehabbed and preserved aesthetics of the Belle Mehus, the Bismarck Auditorium in historic downtown Bismarck, North Dakota. I snapped a photo of the copper Victorian medallion centered at the top of the Belle, too. Michael Gilbertson even drove by, managing to roll down his window in time to give me a drive by “Hi Aaron!”
The large copper, shield medallion with Victorian ornamentation centered on the west elevation at the top of the Bismarck Auditorium. In winter, it is possible to get this photo due to the absence of the leaves.
Cyprus Footage from 2012
While Bill (Caraher) blogged a bit on Punk Archaeology and PKAP today, in a separate but related sphere (parallel trajectories I call them), I stumbled across an audio-video short that David Pettegrew recorded during the PKAP 2012 field season in Cyprus. I uploaded this to my YouTube channel, and I will share it here.
In May and June of 2012, the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project (Dr. William Caraher, Dr. David Pettegrew, and Dr. R. Scott Moore) charged me with trench supervisor duties for an excavation unit located outside of Larnaca, Cyprus. Here in Pettegrew’s video is a wall emerging out of the excavation unit from a 3rd-century BCE Hellenistic coastal fortification. This site is contemporaneous with Alexander the Great and Zeno, the Stoic from Citium. Within the excavation unit, I am to the right, and sorting out the stratigraphic layers with a student and colleague. The student and colleague to my left continues uncovering bedrock at an industrial pace.
Living Heritage
Yesterday, September 11, 2014, was a national and international day of observance. It also was the day of my aunt Mavis Barth’s funeral. Molly and I were asked and had the honor and privilege of being pall bearers. Today, September 12, I took off the shelf my copy of Braddock, ND: 1884-1984, a local and celebratory county history published for the city’s 1984 centennial. I did this because, it seems, I have gotten into a pattern of storing family funeral bulletins inside of the appropriate local county histories.
For example, within this history of Braddock, I also have funeral bulletins from my late Grandfather David Barth (or “Papa Barth,” as we used to call him), which somehow made it into this book, I’m thinking in 2003, shortly after he passed. His brother‘s bulletin was in there as well. And next to Vivian Barth‘s funeral bulletin (my late Grandma Barth), I placed Mavis’s bulletin. Also within the Braddock local history was the front cover of Volume 60, Number 2 (Spring 1993), of North Dakota History: The Journal of the Northern Plains. I have uploaded the photo here.
The caption of the photo is such:
“Front Cover: Iva Edholm, who lived outside of Braddock, North Dakota, sent this postcard picturing the Braddock train depot to his brother Linus Persson in Sweden. It is postmarked July 21, 1909.”
This photo further interested me because of the Barth family history, at least of the arrival of my family surname in the state of North Dakota. On page 108 of the Braddock history, it says, verbatim,
“David L. (Reny) Barth came out to North Dakota from Cleveland, Ohio on October 22, 1908. Leaving a job with the Ohio-Penn Railroad, he came to learn farming in North Dakota. During the first winter he lived in the back room of the Braddock depot. In the spring he moved to a farm six miles south of Braddock. He worked as a farm hand and as a substitute mail carrier.”
So I am kind of piecing together why that front cover issue of the North Dakota History journal made its way into the Braddock book: my great grandpa Barth spent a winter in the pictured depot. Heritage and history is fun this way, and I always hope that I can think about it a bit more than just when family funerals take place.
Threshing and Historical Fuel Sources
As of late, or at least since 2012, or even earlier, I have been thinking about the history of industrialization on the northern Great Plains. I have been encouraged this evening by reading Bill’s comments here, and also just by thinking about how steamboats were the first vestiges of 19th century industrialization, both locally, as noted in serious scholarship on the upper Missouri River, and globally, as expounded on by Maya Jasanoff at Harvard. Humanity has always needed and searched for energy sources. This has taken the form of wood and coal, which powered the early steam engines. This was all before petroleum was embraced and really took hold as thee major fuel source.
So when I look at, say, the September 8, 2014 front page issue of The New Rockford Transcript, and I see the “Central North Dakota Steam Threshers Reunion – September 19-21” 2014, I think of the transition by which humanity went from wood to coal. And how we used that coal to increase agricultural efficiency. And also how events like the central North Dakota Steam Threshers Reunion, or the Crosby Threshing Show, or the Braddock Threshing Bee, is and continues to remain central to our history and heritage. The New Rockford Transcript continues to be delivered to the house of my parents, a subscription my late grandmother Barth always enjoyed receiving (between this and the Emmons County Record). Here is that front page, at least the graphic. And if you want to order your own hard copy of The New Rockford Transcript or The Emmons County Record, just click on the previous two links to be directed to the specific contact.
Crosby Threshing Show
On July 20, 2014, Molly and I went to the Crosby Threshing Bee in Crosby, Divide County, northwestern North Dakota. Years before my Grandpa Barth passed away, he had always asked me to attend the threshing bee in Braddock, Emmons County, south-central North Dakota. For whatever reason, I never made it to the Braddock threshing bee (and I wish I had). I did go to my Grandpa’s farm with him on numerous occasions, though, sometimes stopping at the small-town local bank in Hazelton, and always stopping for lunch at the local deli/cafe.
So yesterday, while walking around the threshing bee in Crosby, I was continuously reminded of my grandpa. And of the advent of industrial agricultural practices, at least as it looked at the turn of the 19th century. I also thought of the novel history, Big Wheat by Richard Thompson. A year or more ago, Larry Schwartz, librarian at Minnesota State University Moorhead, recommended me this book. It’s good, and it gives the reader an idea of what it was like to be a migratory laborer employed by one of these outfits. In North Dakota, large bonanza farming took place in Cass County at the Dalrymple bonanza farm, and the Chaffee bonanza farm, amongst others. I was catching my historical bearings and thinking of all this while wandering through the Crosby threshing bee with Molly.
Below is a short clip of the tractors, complete with coal-burning stoves, whirring gears, and popping pistons.
Aaron Barth
The Edge of the Village 