Oct 26, 2005

More Noted Things

by Cliopatria

1491: At Maroon Blog, Jason Broander notes that Charles C. Mann's 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (Knopf, 2005) is finally in print, four years after Broander read a precise of it in Atlantic. There's a review of the book up at Salon, but Jason's note is, itself, impressive:"The book makes me want to switch from Ancient Rome and Greece in my academic specialization to instead studying this amazing revision of history." Mann is inclined to exaggerated claims, I think. There's no evidence that native Americans had so elemental a technical innovation as the wheel, for instance, but if Mann's challenge to the standard narrative promotes interest in the field, more power to him.

Marginalia: Interesting as the article and the inquiry it discusses is, I was disappointed that Jennifer Howard's"A U. of Toronto Professor Puts Marginalia at the Center of Her Work," CHE, 21 October, (subscriber only) failed to mention Zoltan Haraszti's John Adams and the Prophets of Progress (Harvard UP, 1952) as a pioneering work that used the marginalia by Adams in books by other people to help us understand his thinking. As the bibliography at Wikipedia suggests, Haraszti's book ought to be re-issued. I wouldn't say that about many 50 year old works of history.

When There's No Evidence: There's been an interesting exchange at H-AmStdy and H-Slavery. A Communications professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, inquired for a Master's degree student about surviving evidence of the use of quilts as markers on the underground railroad in ante-bellum America. It's a notion that was given popular circulation in a book by Jacqueline L. Tobin and Raymond Dobard, Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad (Doubleday, 1999). Subsequently, the notion has taken root in elementary and secondary curricula, on the internet, and in public memorials. We apparently even have a museum in Atlanta that claims to exhibit its work. It's appropriately located near Underground Atlanta, where tourists get fleeced in even worse causes.

Scholars have repeatedly debunked the notion. Reputable historians like David Blight and Paul Finkelman point out that in all their research in ante-bellum and post-bellum primary sources they've never come across reference to the use of quilts as underground railroad markers. There is no known source of reference to the notion prior to 1929, by which time virtually everyone who might have participated in the underground railroad was dead. Tobin and Dobard cited quilt patterns that are not even known to have existed in the ante-bellum period. Finkelman points out that if the underground railroad had been so substantial a phenomenon as its latter-day promoters sometimes claim, the border states of Delaware, Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri would have been emptied of slaves by 1860. Tobin and Dobard claim African origins for quilt patterns that have no clear African origin, but, even if they had an African origin, what would that have to do with an underground railroad in the United States? The really interesting question, as one person noted, is why do we have a felt need to believe that quilts were used as markers on the underground railroad.

More Comments:

Dave Matthews - 10/26/2005

As for why it would stick around at the elementary and high school levels, there may be a few other reasons:
1. It makes a good story with a clear-cut moral. When I was a kid we learned all sorts of legends about Washington and Lincoln as if they were true. Now, the heroes are Harriet Tubman and Martin Luther King. My younger daughter came home recently with a clever quote from a young Dr. King that I could have sworn I heard as originating with a young Mr. Lincoln, and probably came from neither.
2. Discrediting any story about a race-sensitive topic like the Underground Railroad can lead to charges of racism by people who don't take time to hear what is really said. The same daughter has come home with some wild tales that have found their way over (via classmates)from AfroCentric "history." Luckily, her mother is from West Africa, and can straighen her out pretty quickly on many of these matters. I'm guessing that most teachers would be very reluctant to correct such misinformation, or at least very careful in how they do it.

All in all, I'm sure that an historian is bothered far more by this sort of misinformation than I am, as a parent. I just tell my kids that what they learn is basically correct, if simplified; that some embellishments always occur to illustrate points; and if they want to know a more complete or correct version, I point them to good sources at the library and on the internet.

It's good for kids to develop a respectful scepticism about what they learn from their teachers at an early age; it softens the blow when, later on, they find out that much of what they thought they knew isn't really so.

Jonathan Dresner - 10/24/2005

I suspect that the answer to the question "why do we have a need to believe that quilts were used as markers" has more to do with our 20th/21st century inability to imagine the kind of social networks which existed in 19th century society. Once we developed and became accustomed to wireless and wired communications, advertising and modern spycraft, it became extremely difficult to understand how a social institution like the Underground Railroad could function without analogous techniques and technologies.

It could also have to do with our difficulty in making heroes out of lawbreaking conspirators: if the U.R. functioned as a loose coalition of people who passively signaled and waited for escaped slaves to wander by, it seems more charitable and less deliberate than the creation and maintenance of an extra-legal network.

Once the legend got going, of course, people would be thrilled to find that their heirloom quilts were evidence of the moral courage of their ancestors.

Just some thoughts ...