Commonplace Book 30

Explicit content warning

03/12/19 • 7 min

Historically Thinking

Previous Episode

Episode 101: Yippie-Ki-Yi-Yay

In 1866, a sixteen year old cowboy—the name was literal in his case—named J.M. Daugherty bought 1,000 cattle, hired five cowboys, and headed north for Missouri. In Indian Territory, he took the long way around Cherokee land, to avoid paying them for crossing their lands. As Daugherty told it, some Yankee “Jayhawkers” ambushed him, shot some of his companions, and took him prisoner, accusing him of bringing infected cattle into Kansas. Escaping, the teenager found his cowboys, rounded up the cattle, and then brought them to market. Some of this story is true, and the true parts are probably the strangest. Cowboys were on average incredibly young. Only small numbers of them were able to drive immense numbers of cattle, and drove them for hundreds upon hundreds of miles. And, in the wake of the Civil War, there was always bad blood between “Yankees” in Kansas, and former Confederates in Texas. But there is much else counterintuitive about cow drives, that didn't make it into the movies. Cowboys liked vegetables, for one thing. For another, they were one part of continent-spanning industrial economy. That didn't make it into Lonesome Dove, as best as I recall. With me to discuss the great cattle drives from Texas is Tim Lehman, author of Up the Trail: How Texas Cowboys Herded Longhorns and Became an American Icon, published by Johns Hopkins Press as part of their series “How Things Worked.” For Further Investigation E.C. "Teddy Blue" Abbott, We Pointed Them North Richard Grant, "Recollections of a Cowpuncher"–an article on Teddy Blue Abbott Joseph McCoy, Historic Sketches of the Cattle Trade of the West and Southwest J. Marvin Hunter, The Trail Drivers of Texas Jacqueline M. Moore, Cow Boys and Cattle Men Christopher Knowlton, Cattle Kingdom Lewis Atherton, The Cattle Kings

Next Episode

Episode 102: “Object Lesson” is Not Merely a Metaphor

The metaphor “object lesson” is a familiar one, still in everyday use. But what exactly does the metaphor refer to? In her book Object Lessons: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material World, my guest Sarah Anne Carter reveals that object lessons were a classroom exercise, in wide use during the nineteenth century. She traces them from the Swiss educational reformer Pestalozzi, through his English adherents, to seemingly unlikely outposts of educational revolution as the Oswego, New York school system. And she takes the story into politics, advertising, and racial segregation. Her book is study of intellectual history and of intellectual culture. But Sarah's book, and this conversation, is also about asking questions of things which cannot speak. Sarah's interest in objects comes not simply from her training as an intellectual historian, but as a curator of museums. She is curator and director of research at the Chipstone Foundation in Milwaukee, and is passionate about teaching people the history behind the objects that museums contain. For Further Investigation Object lesson videos from Chipstone Table Chair Cabinet Video from the Chipstone Foundation: "20 Questions to ask an object" The Tangible Things project at Harvard created a series of videos featuring eminent historian Laura Thatcher Ulrich, and Sarah Anne Carter. The third of these is "Look at the Fish", and tells the story of Louis Agassiz and Samuel Scudder.