Stories From The Stacks

From sidewalks to roads to buildings, concrete surrounds us in our daily lives, but we rarely stop to think about it. In this episode, Vyta Baselice (Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at the George Washington University) talks about her efforts to understand how concrete became the quintessential modern building material, showing up not just in big construction projects, but in everything from coffin vaults to imagined building projects on other planets.

In this episode, we talk with University of Virginia Ph.D. candidate Alexi Garrett about her efforts to uncover the lost history of female business owners in the nineteenth century. At a time when married women’s property and income passed to their husbands, some single and widowed women were able to carve out economic niches for themselves, even becoming heads of major industrial concerns. But these women had to tread the fine line of gender roles as well, and often emphasized their femininity over their business acumen. Garrett tells the story of Rebecca Webb Pennock Lukens, who, through inheritance, marriage, and widowhood became the head of the Lukens Steel Company in Coatesville, Pennsylvania in 1825. She walks us through the documents she found in the company’s records at Hagley, helping us understand why Lukens focused on romance and marriage in her autobiographical memoir, and how Lukens’s social status growing up allowed her to escape the prospect of indentured servitude that girls from poorer ba

Nicole Mahoney (doctoral candidate at University of Maryland: College Park) discusses early elite Americans and their interest and obsession with French high culture.

In this recorded lecture "Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape," Francesca Russello Ammon explores how postwar America came to equate this destruction with progress. Although the decades following World War II were marked by rapid growth and construction in the United States, those years were also a time of large-scale destruction. In order to clear space for new suburban tract housing, interstate highways, and urban renewal projects, wrecking companies demolished buildings and earth-moving contractors leveled land at an unprecedented rate and scale.

In his talk, Alan Meyer provides an engaging account of private aviation, taking the audience inside a community that required exceptionally high skill levels, celebrated facing and overcoming risk, and encouraged fierce personal independence. Meyer uses the rise and fall of the Ercoupe, a personal plane lauded for its safety and intuitive operation, to show how ideas about pilot skill influenced the market for small airplanes in the postwar era—and the makeup of the flying community. Despite the Ercoupe's revolutionary—and life-saving—design, it was largely spurned and ridiculed by this community of mostly male aviators, who valued the high barriers to personal flying. Through the failure of the Ercoupe, Meyer explains how the technology of flying continued to reinforce these values.

Jesus Ruiz (Ph.D. candidate at Tulane University) discusses his research on the ideological origins of the Haitian Revolution. He explains the historical significance of the war and describes the Hagley materials that are pertinent to his research. These sources include journals from Louis de Tousard, Cambefort and others.

In this author talk on "Industrial Design for Modern Life," Dr. Danielle Shapiro explores the life and career of John Vassos, a Greek émigré who rose from anonymity as an advertising artist to become one of the pioneering founders of the industrial design profession. As the Radio Corporation of America's (RCA) leading designer, Vassos shaped the aesthetics of modern technology in the postwar era and became one of the most influential industrial designers of the twentieth century.

Ryan Tate (Ph.D. candidate at Rutgers University) discusses his research on the development of coal mining in the Fort Union coal formation in the American West during the 1970s. See more at hagley.org/storiesfromthestacks

Cari Casteel (Ph.D. student at Auburn University) discusses her research in the cultural and technological history of deodorants and anti-perspirants. Why was deodorant marketed solely to women at first and how did the consumer boon after WWII changed that? Casteel explains how she is using Hagley Museum and Library's collections of old advertisements and the papers of designers and marketers like Irv Koons, Raymond Loewy, and Ernest Dichter.

Linda (University of Montana) and Marsha (Kansas State University) Frey discuss their use of the du Ponts' family letters to support their research on the French Revolution. In the interview they discuss some of the challenges the du Ponts faced as a family during the French Revolution, such as Pierre Samuel's imprisonment in France and the problems of getting mail in and out of a country in a near constant state of war.

Davor Mondom (Ph.D. candidate in the history department at Syracuse University) discusses his research on the politics of the Amway corporation and the Chamber of Commerce. He describes how both organizations supported free market ideals and the Reagan administration. Mondom also describes the ties between the two organizations and discusses how Jay van Andel, a founder of Amway, led the Chamber of Commerce.

Listen to the full interview in the Hagley Digital Archives (digital.hagley.org)

A clip from a longer interview available in the Hagley Digital Archives (digital.hagley.org)

Laura Perry {Ph.D. candidate, English department, University of Wisconsin} discusses her research on cellophane in the poetry of Sylvia Plath. Perry's research seeks to understand why Plath used cellophane imagery instead of other similar materials. To engage with this issue she is consulting DuPont's cellophane advertisements as well as the findings of consumer focus groups.

Dr. David Kinkela (professor of history at the State University of New York: Fredonia) discusses the history of plastics and plastic ocean waste. Kinkela traces the impact of plastic products from their initial stages of development and advertisement as a new modern convenience to the realization that the world's oceans are full of floating pieces of plastic garbage.

In this episode, Nicholas Osborne discusses the history of savings banks in America that served the emerging middle class in the nineteenth century. He traces the difference between how these banks were supposed to encourage their customers to handle their money and how they actually did. More at hagley.org

Dr. Ana Maria Otero-Cleves (assistant professor at the University of the Andes in Bogota, Colombia) discusses her use of correspondence from the Lanman and Kemp company and their business deals with Latin America, especially Colombia.

Eva McGraw (Ph.D. candidate in art history at CUNY) discusses her research on the Civil War naval art of Xanthus Smith. Smith painted naval engagements of the Civil War and during the war he was a sailor and the personal secretary of Samuel Francis du Pont. Smith tried to make his naval engagement paintings as accurate as possible, he did this by corresponding with the officers of the ships that he painted. Many of his works featured then new ironclad ships.

Jesse Tarbert discusses a time in the 1920s when good government meant big government. He explains how the Republican party sought to make the federal government run like a large corporation while the Democrats attempted to keep the federal government small and state level government strong. Tarbert is a Ph.D. candidate at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.

Dr. Roger Horowitz discusses at the Hagley Museum and Library the history of modern kosher food and the growth and development of the kosher food industry in the 20th century. In explaining how Coke became kosher he talks about how rabbis used Jewish law and modern chemistry to determine what food products were kosher and how food manufacturers could change their ingredients and methods to adhere to Jewish dietary law. Horowitz also discusses the mass appeal of kosher foods to non-Jewish consumers. He cites a statistic that at one time only one quarter of kosher food purchasers were Jewish. Horowitz concludes with a brief section on kosher meat production and how the output of a once large industry has become a specialty product due to issues of economy and changes in the meat industry. Throughout the lecture Horowitz discusses his own family history and personal background, having grown up in an observant Jewish household.