Monthly Archives: March 2022

Blog post 2 – Early Revolution Judaism!

by Michael Stein

I used the Digital Public Library of America database, which was super easy to look through. I’m very interested in Judaism, especially in the early American South, and I wanted to look at the images about Judaism that would pop up. I found two that interested me specifically: 

“Gemaskerd bal, by gelegenheid van het Joodsche Purim-Feest,” in English “Masked ball, on the occasion of the Jewish Purim Festival,” which is a Dutch piece by Pieter Wagenaar, Jr., dated 1780. (left)

and 

“A Rabbi dressed for Prayers,” dated 1816, by a man named T. Hamilton, who was probably just the publisher. (right)

These were both engravings, but nearly forty years apart. I sort of assumed that the pictures I might find relating to Judaism would be negative and stereotypical, but it seemed like these pieces are just outsiders trying to understand the social practices and customs of Judaism. The first piece is relevant because it’s on Purim, which just happened this past week. It shows a beautiful scene of a magnificent party, men and women all dancing by candlelight. I will say that it looks a bit creepy, just because it’s in the dark and the way the dancing is drawn looks a bit unnatural, but it seems to be a relatively positive image, and I was surprised to see that they did not have any wildly stereotypical Jewish dress on or anything that labeled them as Jewish other than the title of the engraving.

The other piece I picked was about the Rabbi. This was a bit more interesting to me because I can relate it to myself. I’m what’s called a Reform Jew, meaning that we don’t do a lot of the practices that more conservative branches do, except that recently, I’ve begun to take on more and more of those conservative practices, specifically, wrapping tefillin, which is an everyday commandment. In this picture, we see a Jewish man wearing a tallis (tasseled prayer garment) and tefillin around his head and arms (phylacteries). Although the man looks a little bit cross eyed, it seems like again, this piece was used just as a sort of study and identification piece. 

Both of these pieces could be used to answer questions about religion in the United States in this period. The first piece could answer questions about social life – it’s always important to look at holidays and large scale gatherings like this one, because we want to see how people interact with each other. The second piece could answer questions about the typical dress of a group, which can help us understand how we look at stereotypes and discrimination in the United States today. 

I was expecting to find more anti-Semitic rhetoric in these pieces, but I guess a lot of those stereotypes either had not made it over from Europe yet, or we had a group of researchers who were devoted to telling scientific fact. It’s funny to see how not that much has changed. Just last week, there was a Purim Festival over at the Charleston Aquarium, where we all got together and danced!

Early Attempts to Distinguish American from British English

by Dahlia Watson

Last semester in my English course on New Romanticism, we had an assignment similar to this one in which we searched through archived lyrical Ballads from the Romanticism period. Both times I thoroughly enjoyed accessing historical literary information that isn’t typically instructed in the classroom. This time around I was more engaged and interested because the artifacts provided insight on my country’s history. I was most intrigued by Noah Webster’s “The Grammatical Institute of the English Language” published in 1804. This 136 page descriptive linguistic outline functions to “furnish schools with a collection of rules or general principles of English grammar” (Webster 3). As a linguistics student, I have always desired to understand the significance of prescribed grammar and the stigma against descriptive grammar. In the History of English course offered at the College, I learned that during the second half of the eighteenth century, a movement formed intending to ‘freeze’ the English language in an attempt to avoid the degeneration of the language. English writer Samuel Johnson’s dictionary played a significant role in outlining standards for semantic connotations in English. Noah Webster followed Johnson’s lead but his publication was significant in distinguishing a unique American standard of English. The preface of his grammar book includes personal anecdotes about his decisions to include idiomatic expressions which have been criticized by linguists but he believes they demonstrate the adaptability of the English language. The preface further details his credibility by attesting to his long hours of studious attention to patterns and phrases commonly used in America. The beginning of the book is really interesting because it reads just like an introductory linguistics textbook, explaining the significance of grammar and differentiating between written and spoken speech. He continues these thorough explanations by describing, with correlating examples, all the parts of speech and their functions. I couldn’t help but to notice how the examples he uses such as “doth” and “mayest” have not been preserved within the language. While some of Webster’s “correct grammatical constructions” would cause confused and concerned glances if uttered in conversation today, other assertions are still stressed in grammar classes today but still are commonly used incorrectly in speech. The distinction between “who” and “whom” is observed on page 41 and still continues to baffle native English speakers today. 

Also, the use of the subjunctive was extremely challenging to me when I began learning my second language because I realized that I commonly use the subjunctive incorrectly in English. Instead of correctly conjugating the verb to be as “If I were you,” I frequently say “If I was you,” and I don’t remember a single time when it caused a miscommunication. While some of these grammatical elements are omitted in today’s speech, other definitions such as those for nouns, adjectives and verbs almost identically align with modern grammar textbooks today. 

Examining the first ever American grammar guide further confirmed my knowledge of the inevitably of language change. Webster’s ability to outline all the rules, with provided examples and specific exceptional cases requires a lot of thorough study and significant technical writing skills. It’s to say, Webster constructed a document which has had a significant impact on the development and social understanding of American English. Although Webster intended for his “Grammatical Institute of the English Language” to establish a set standard for how English should be taught and spoken in America, he forgot one thing in his acknowledgement between the difference between written and spoken speech; spoken speech is forever evolving and cannot be regulated by prescribed grammatical rules. 

 

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433069256646&view=1up&seq=28&skin=2021

The History of Insurrections and Shay’s Rebellion

by Josh Wood

For Blog Post 2 I decided that I wanted to learn more about Shay’s Rebellion. It was never touched on much when I was receiving my primary or secondary education which makes me feel as if I’m missing a key piece of information. I initially struggled with using the databases as I have never used them before (oops). After I finally figured it out, I came across a scanned copy of the book above Provided by the Digital Public Library of America and preserved by the University of Pennsylvania. The first thing that I noticed was that the book was published in 1788 one year after the end of Shays rebellion meaning this was a retrospective with a fresh point of view. However, unsurprisingly, the appearance of this book is anything but fresh. The pages, every single one of them, have yellowed considerably, and every single one of those yellowed pages has a unique set of stains as well.

As well as a plethora of unknown stains, the book’s pages are also dotted with droplets of ink. This small detail, while seeming innocuous, is incredibly cool in my opinion. This is because assumably each set of dots is unique to each individual book as they were all hand-pressed by a highly trained team of printers. Finally, the last thing that I found to be interesting on an aesthetic level was the use of the “long s” which is something that I never had any idea existed. Before doing some background research, I found myself incredibly confused as to why the printers would have used the letter f instead of an s as it kept causing me to misread words.

As it pertains to the content, I was disappointed to find out that Shay’s rebellion was only mentioned briefly. This unfortunately means I’m going to have to find information on It elsewhere. The information that was presented in the book while not being what I was looking for was however still interesting. It stated that the reason for its publication was to look back on the issues that caused upheaval within our new nation so that we can learn from them and keep it from happening again.

A Discovery in the Digital Archives

1787 Massachusetts Disqualification Act.

by Tabetha Judy

Originally, my online trip to the archives was pretty overwhelming. Each site that I checked out was packed with information and I had no idea where to begin. But I decided to stick with the Digital Public Library of America and found an easier way to sort through all of the information. On the website, they had sets of primary sources. So I headed there and found that there was an entire collection of primary texts from 1754 to the 1820s. I immediately noticed that there was a set dedicated to Shay’s Rebellion that caught my eye.

This is where I found out that Massachusetts passed a disqualification act in 1787. The act states that anyone who participated in Shay’s Rebellion could not serve as a juror. But through more research on this act, I learned that this went beyond not allowing participants in the Rebellion to be jurors. I learned that participants in the rebellion also lost their ability to vote, were not allowed to serve in town or state government, and were not allowed to go into certain professions for three years. Interestingly, a conditional agreement was created that if any participants pledged allegiance to the state after May 1,1788 then each disqualification in the act would be pardoned.

I did not find the actual text too difficult to read, with the exception of a few oddly spelled words (by our modern standards of course). But it was somewhat clear what the text was stating. I did find the layout of the text to be interesting, as it follows a column newspaper-like pattern. Originally, I found this layout to be a bit odd as from the image I saw, this did not appear to be clipped from a newspaper. But through some more online research, I found out that this did appear in the Daily Hampshire Gazette. It is still unclear if the layout of this act was purposely done for a newspaper, but this helped provide a possible explanation. I was unable to find the conditional agreement that would pardon each disqualification from the act. Which caused me to wonder if there was a separate act passed and how that information was communicated to the public.

This item felt like a perfect match as we just discussed the allusion to Shay’s Rebellion in The Contrast. I also remember us discussing in class how the population of those who were eligible to vote was incredibly small. This act provides even more context to that idea as virtually any government position was unattainable for rebellion participants or anyone who was not wealthy. As well as how voting was so exclusive at this time. I also found it interesting that pledging allegiance would pardon participants from these disqualifications. Since those involved in the rebellion were angry at the government and felt corruption was present in politics, I feel there were probably very few who agreed to those terms. I was unable to find how long this act was in effect or how many participants did agree to the conditions for a pardon which I feel would have made this even more interesting.

While I had some previous experience with digital archives, it was for an education course. So this experience was out of my wheel house and it took me a good bit to get the hang of looking for possible items on the suggested archive websites. The section dedicated to items from the time period for this course was very helpful and I feel I’ve gained a much better understanding of the implications of Shay’s Rebellion. This is a period of history that was often quickly passed over in my previous history courses so I enjoyed exploring the archives and learning more about this interesting act!