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Class of 2k7, Class of 2k8, and Class of 2k9 are trademarks of Greg R. Fishbone, used with permission. The Class of 2k7 logo was designed by Ruth McNally Barshaw, used with permission. The Class of 2k8 logo was designed by Ruth McNally Barshaw and Kristin Tubb, used with permission. All web and print materials are copyright by their individual authors, where identifiable, or by the Class of 2k8 as a collective.
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A Difficult Boy takes place in 1839. To give you a glimpse of what Ethan and Daniel's world was like, each month I'll explore a different facet of American life in 1839.
January, 1839:
The Introduction of the Daguerreotype
Imagine your life without photography; until the 19th century, the only way to get a picture of someone you cared about or a place you liked or an event you had seen would be to draw it yourself (if you had the talent) or pay someone to draw it (if you had the money). Depending on the talent of the artist, the accuracy of the drawing could be very good, or absolutely terrible.
People experimented with various techniques for recording images photographically during the 18th century. By 1826, a French inventor, Nicephore Niepce had succesfully experimented with a photographic techniqe, but it took eight hours to expose the image. Imagine having to sit absolutely still that long to have your picture taken! Another Frenchman, Louis Daguerre, refined the process to reduce exposure times, making the daguerreotype the first commercially successful photographic process. On January 9, 1839, the French Academy of Sciences made a public announcement of Louis Daguerre's new invention.
Daguerreotypes were quite different from modern photographs. There was no negative involved in the process, and the image was made on a piece of glass, so if you broke grandma's picture, it could not be replaced. Although the images didn't take eight hours to expose, you would still have to remain motionless for a minute or more when your picture was being taken. That's why people look so serious in daguerreotypes. If they tried to smile for a whole minute, their mouths would look blurry.
For more information about daguerreotypes:
Check out the Frequently Asked Questions at the Daguerrian Society's web page. They also have a database of daguerreotypes.
To see some examples of daguerreotypes, go to the Library of Congress's daguerreotype collection
If you want to find out more about daguerreotypists, Craig's Daguerrian Registry is an index of American daguerreotypists, with brief biographies.
February, 1839:
William Otis patents a steam shovel
Remember Mike Mulligan and his steam shovel Mary Ann? It was one of my favorite picture books--I remember when Captain Kangaroo used to read it on his TV show. If you're also a fan of Virginia Lee Burton's classic book, Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, you have Pelham, Massachusetts, inventor William Otis (1813-1839) to thank for it. One hundred years before Mary Ann was born, William Otis was patenting his design for a steam shovel. Although other inventors had tinkered with earlier versions, Otis is credited with developing the first one sturdy enough to handle the heavy digging involved in railroad construction. Otis built a prototype in 1835, and in 1837 had refined his "Yankee Geologist" machine to the point where it was being used to build the Western Rail Road from Worcester to Springfield. On February 24, 1839, Otis patented his invention. He didn't live long enough to enjoy his success, however; he died that same year in Westfield--but he lives on in construction sites, Tonka toys, and picture books everywhere.
For more information about William Otis and his steam shovel, see Boston's Back Bay: The Story of America's Greatest Nineteenth-Century Landfill Project by William A. Newman and Wilfred E. Holton (University Press of New England, 2006, pp.86-87). See also "Past and Future of Construction Equipment--Part IV," a paper by Cliff J. Schexnayder and Scott A. David published in Perspectives in Civil Engineering: Commemorating the 150th Anniversary of the American Society of Civil Engineers
(ASCE Publications, 2003, pp. 1-2).
March 1839:
A Good Month or Just OK?
Think people in the 1830s didn't LOL or ROTFLOL? Well, okay, they may have done it, but as far as we know, they didn't abbreviate it that way. But netlingo and textspeak are just new twists on an old practice of making shortcuts for popular expressions. In 1839, you might not LOL, but you might call someone TBFTB (Too Big For Their Britches) or SP (Small Potatoes)--or, if you liked them, they'd be OK. Yup, OK. Now there are more theories on where OK came from than there are emoticons ;) {:-O (You can find a list of most of those theories here.) But the OK expert was Dr. Allen Walker Read of Columbia University. In the 1960s, he was determined to track OK to its POB and DOB (Place of Birth and Date of Birth). According to Read, OK first appeared in print on March 23, 1839, in the Boston Morning Post: "He of the Journal...would have the 'contribution box,' et ceteras, o.k.—all correct—and cause the corks to fly, like sparks, upward." OK was short for "oll korrect"--a deliberately botched spelling of "all correct." Weird? No weirder than "lite" ice cream or Krispy Kreme Donuts. OK got a big boost in 1840 when New York supporters of presidential candidate Martin Van Buren nicknamed him "Old Kinderhook" in honor of his home town and formed an OK Club to back him in the election. Unlike TBFTB, OK survives today.
Want to find out more?
Listen to this NPR story on the origins of OK.
Or read this article about OK from wordorigins.org, where you can learn about the origins of other common words and phrases.
Wordorigins.org is the Web page of David Wilton, author of Word Myths: Debunking Linguistic Urban Legends (Oxford University Press, 2004)--a book you might want to check out if you're interested in an entertaining look at where common words and phrases come from.
TTFN
December 1839:
An Old-Fashioned New England Christmas
Feeling the pinch this holiday season? That economic crunch making your wallet a bit thin? Save some money by celebrating a true old-fashioned New England country Christmas.
Don't waste your money on presents, and leave all those evergreens outdoors where they belong. On December 25, go to work or school as usual. Oh, and if you're an employer and your staff takes the day off? Fire their little heathen butts!
Wait, wait, you say--that's not old-time New England; that's Ebenezer Scrooge before the three ghostly visitations. Well, old Mr. Scrooge would have fit right in with pre-Civil War rural New Englanders. Forget all those Currier & Ives visions of rosy-cheeked children hanging their stockings by the chimney with care and Clement Moore's "Visit from Saint Nicholas." Moore was a New Yorker and--gasp!--an Episcopalian--not quite as horrifically heathenish as a Catholic to those staunch Puritanically-descended New Englanders of the early 1800s, but pretty darned close.
While Christmas was being celebrated in the South and in some of the big northern cities like New York and Boston (which had growing populations of Catholics, Episcopalians, and non-Anglo immigrants), out in the New England countryside, Congregationalists and Baptists ruled the religious roosts. Like their Puritan ancestors, they wanted to distance themselves from anything that smacked of Catholic ritual--especially holidays that they considered to be ancient pagan celebrations thinly veiled in Christianity. In the 1830s and 1840s, rural New Englanders viewed Christmas celebrations with curiosity, mistrust, and sometimes open hostility. Businessmen were annoyed and frustrated when they went into cities like Boston and New York and found some of the stores and offices closed for Christmas. Some ministers even preached anti-Christmas sermons, arguing that Christmas celebrations (especially those involving large quantities of alcohol) did not honor Christ's birth, but were profane mockeries of true Christianity. But eventually Christmas infiltrated the countryside, too--hey, who can resist a chance for a day off work, a big pig-out, and presents, too?
For more than you'll ever want to know about Christmas in old New England, read these two articles at the Old Sturbridge Village Website:
Interpreting Christmas Traditions by Tom Kelleher
Christmas in New England Before 1860 by Jack Larkin
So don't stress over the holidays! Just tell your friends and family that you want to celebrate a traditional Christmas, just like they did back in the good ol' days, when all the men were strong, all the women had no rights whatsoever, and all the children worked 80 hours a week.
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