The most interesting thing I have learned in U.S. History so far, is how tycoons such as Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Vanderbilt came to such a status, depending on their own combinations of luck, hard work, opportunity, skill, and help from the Industrial Revolution. However, not everything was pleasant to learn about when studying the Industrial Revolution. In fact, I was almost brought to tears when I read about the children who, extremely tired after a fourteen hour work day, had water thrown in their faces to keep them awake. The documentary on the Triangle Shirt Waist Factory was equally depressing. Luckily, however, from these events and others like them, America came to the realization that labor laws regarding safety, hours, and wages are necessary for the working class. While I was unpleasantly surprised to learn about the horrors of work-life and home-life during the Industrial Revolution, the images of women jumping from buildings and children being maimed by machines will stick in my memory for at least the next ten years, if not the rest of my life.

     The terrible events that occurred during this time period and the motivation for each of the Industrial Revolution tycoons, have their roots in greed, as do the other time periods we have studied this semester. During the Civil War, yes, Southerners were fighting for the key to their livelihoods, but instead of having slaves, they could have had paid laborers and still made a profit. Because of their greed, they chose to demote African Americans to a less-than-human status in order to justify reducing their cost of living to an unacceptable rate.

     When America began to move West, railroad companies became the new face of American greed, providing desperate immigrants with jobs, sure, but again denying wages sufficient for comfortable lives. In the vastness of West, Americans were still greedy for wealth in land as well, pushing the Native Americans into reservations and harassing them even in their compliance. After the Industrial Revolution, the average quality of life thankfully began to rise, but the greed did not abate. Alternatively, a national spirit of materialism developed, manifesting itself in giant mail order catalogs and the appearance of special clothing for each event in the day, from cycling, to walking, to dining, to dancing, and to sleeping. Although we have not yet studied beyond 1920, I know that this materialism grew into an unmanageable, careless greed, peaking in the “Roaring Twenties” and collapsing in the Great Depression.

     Even today, greed defines our society. We are obsessed with the latest and greatest, and once we obtain whatever we have set our eyes on, be it an cell phone, a car, or a pair of shoes, we immediately take it for granted and move on to the next item on our lists. Although greed is the constant in American History, or at least the eras we have studied this semester, I would choose to call the period from 1865-1920 “The Age of Transformation.” From unit to unit, and within each unit, the American people, their values and livelihoods, have undergone continuous change. Black men gained the right to vote. Machines took over the American economy. With immigration, our culture became more diverse. Essentially, we grew to better respect our fellow man. 

The Gibson Girl's Guide to Glamor

 
When I initially started this project, I knew I wanted to do something with Charles Gibson's, a sketch artist for the New York Times, "Gibson Girl" of the Progressive Era (1890-1920). As I began research, I soon expanded my search to include the evolution women's fashion. My goal was to define how such evolution and the appearance of the Gibson Girl reflected the values and beliefs of society in the Progressive Era. In the first book I browsed through, I found the perfect quote to summarize my goal:

"The instrument of powerful and coquettish women, the fan both conceals and discloses. [Christian] Diors' comparison of the cocktail-party hostess and the eighteenth century woman denotes the relevance of clothing and decoration to the social function of women during these eras. While clearly ornamented differently, these personalities depended on a superficial facade through which to communicate their respective social facility."

- 100 Dresses[1]

A Gibson Girl has brains, beauty, and brawn. She is educated, clever, and can easily converse with men. It is highly possible she is a college graduate from a domestic studies program. She has an effortless beauty, inside and out. Her hair is piled atop her head in luscious curls, her makeup is light, and her outfits and accessories accentuate her figure. Her disposition is cheery, poised, and stately. She cycles, swims, takes walks in the park, attends important dinners, and dances at balls. She even has a specific outfit for each event. This seeming perfection is then spiced up with a more edgy, but still graceful, personality.  She smokes in public (with the men), shoots guns (with the men), and flirts often (with the men). [2] The Gibson Girl takes risks, thereby defying social norms and leading the young girls of the Progressive Era.

Scene with Idealized Gibson Girls

Simply put, the Gibson Girl was the ideal woman of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Women of ages 15-30 strove for her slim waist and lush hair. Charles Gibson had apparently planted the ideal woman in the minds of all Americans. She began to appear not only in the actual women of the Progressive Era, but on everyday items such as broomsticks, plates, parasols, and wallpaper. However, Gibson claims he would not have depicted the Gibson Girl in his drawings if he had "not already seen [her] in the papers." [2] It truly was a change in the minds of the women of this era which brought the changes in fashion and ideals. 

Charles Gibson's Drawings on Plates

Perhaps the Gibson Girl was a compromise between women's and men's views. Other women of the time were not striving to maintain their feminism, but to break past it in order to achieve other goals. This girl was the college girl. The college girl challenged the beliefs established in the Industrial Era such as "men hate intelligent wives" or "the man is the family's breadwinner." Some people even believed that higher education for women would result in women who were "unsexed" biologically, socially, and culturally. [3] Luckily, the women were not unsexed biologically, but they were, however, culturally and socially. Both the president of Harvard and the Theodore Roosevelt claimed that the best of American society would wane and immigrants would take over American society because educated women were not marrying, and/or having as many children, with educated men. The widely publicized Gibson Girl helped to soften this image for the college girl. The Gibson Girls' feminine features were the fan that concealed the acts of women desperately trying to challenge their own stereotype. [3] 

When looking at the fashions of the Gibson Girl and the college girl, there is a noticeable difference which solidifies the idea of the Gibson Girl as a compromise between women's and men's ideals in the Progressive Era. After tracing the minute differences in style year to year from approximately 1850-1920, I noticed several trends towards masculinity, somewhat contradictory to the still voluptuous-looking Gibson Girl. Ornamentation became subdued, the square toe appeared, more chunky heels (like men's army boots in WWI) came into fashion, and dark colors were more popular [4] [5]. These trends were most likely characteristic of the average woman trying to challenge the status quo, not by smoking in public, but by pursuing education in the arts and sciences.

The Gibson Girl style seemed to follow more of the freedom of art nouveau, with her S-shaped silhouette, Athenian inspired chignon, and the smallest waist achieved in the history of fashion. Everything was curvy, yet weightless, complimenting the flirtatious, yet graceful, personality of the idealized Gibson Girl. Essentially, Gibson girl fashion was "unencumbered by bustles and convention." [3] Before her time, women had flat front silhouettes with a bustle-built "table-top" silhouette in the back. Curls had been tight and precisely placed.

For fun, I tried to give myself a Gibson Girl up-do.

In the end, the Gibson Girl was loved by men and women alike in the Progressive Era because she was not too stuck in the past, but neither was she radically futuristic. She had the perfect balance of feminism and the bravery to challenge what was atypical for a woman. Her education gave substance to the entertainment of her beauty and escapades. This focus on outward appearance and need for specific fashions for individual occasions captures the arising materialism of the Progressive Era, while behind her concealing fan, the true Progressive women, the college girls, began their journey towards love (or at least appreciation) from the general populace.

[1] 100 Dresses
[2] This Fabulous Century 1900-1910
[3] The Gibson Girl Goes to College: Popular Culture and Women's Higher Education in the Progressive Era, 1890-1920
[4] Victoria and Albert Museum
[5] Costume and Fashion: A Concise History

This past weekend Randolph School put on a production of "To See the Stars," a play about the strikes of women shirt waist factory workers in New York City. Although the play was not about the Triangle Factory, it gave me perspective on the daily lives of the girls on strike and of the ethnic diversity among the girls. The play was very well done and I enjoyed watching my fellow students perform.

     Native American cultures are often misunderstood as "savage" because of their differences from Eastern culture. In the process of discovering why differences even exist, we come to better understand what is intrinsic to humanity and what is not. The study of cultures which have developed separately from the status quo (as defined by Eastern cultures) helps us redefine what is "normal" and what is "human."One of the touchiest topics in today's modern world is sexuality. Very few people are comfortable accepting anything other than heterosexuality, or even discussing sexuality in general. Native Americans, on the other hand, view sexuality as one with spirituality, where spirituality is something common to every living being.

     Native Americans never looked down on expressing one's sexuality, be it heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, trisexual (where partners include opposite sex, same sex, and self) , or asexual. Polygamy is a widely known characteristic of Native cultures which supports this claim. While one wife was pregnant or nursing, it was common for the husband to seek out other sexual partners. For this reason, divorce was not a major ordeal for Native Americans. Such a societal setup is almost entirely rape and prostitution free. Freely expressing one's sexualtiy, from heterosexual to asexual, was also encouraged among the adolescents of these cultures. A study was done on the sexual activity of adolescents in relation to interconnectedness with those around them, and increased interconnectedness was found in older, more sexually active individuals, a trait highly valued in Native cultures.

Click here to read more about evidence of acceptance of sexuality in Native American cultures.

     Sexuality was not only encouraged in Native American cultures, however. It was viewed as an expression of one's spirituality as well. Native Americans define spirituality as their tribe's set of beliefs about creation, how the world works, and the significance of each individual. Interconnectedness is a main theme across Native American spiritualities. It then follows that individuals who are more interconnected, so to speak, have an increased significance in society. As sexuality was seen as a manifestation of spirituality, Natives believed that homosexual/bisexual/trisexual/hermaphroditic individuals had a higher power and authority. These individuals are now known as "two-spirits," because they are believed to have a window into both genders, either physically (as in the case with hermaphroditism) or psychologically (as in the case with sexualities other than heterosexual and asexual). The most famous example of a two-spirit is the Zuni Man-Woman, from a Tewa Indian Pueblo.

The picture above is of a hermaphroditic Zuni Man-Woman. In the Tewa culture, the sun represents man and the moon represents woman. Men were also seen as the right side of society, while women were seen as the left. Men also did not wear as much clothing as women for the purpose of ease during hunting (depicted by the bow and arrow). Women worked as hunter-gatherers (depicted by the ears of corn). In Hopi depictions of the Zuni Man-Woman, the woman half has the hair up in a bun, representing the fact she is an eligible, unmarried woman. In Plains Indian cultures, two-spirits were often made chiefs.

Above is a picture of a Hopi two-spirit with the characteristic hair style.

Click here to read more about sexuality AND spirituality in Native American Cultures.

Link here to pictures.

Before anthropologists began to see that in studying Native American sexuality they were learning about the inherent tendencies of humans, they, perhaps inadvertently, made Native cultures seem extremely wrong and savage. The term used by early anthropologists to describe two-spirits was "berdache," a term which in french means "sodomite." Luckily, we are now finally uncovering the truth about Native American beliefs, values, and views on sexuality and spirituality.

Link to above picture here

Other links I used (and which influenced my ideas) are below:

Video on Sexuality and Spirituality in Indigenous Cultures This video opened my mind to how the study of sexuality across cultures is something that is not one dimensional.

Study on Relationship Between Adolescent Sexual Activity and Interconnectedness with Friends, Family, & Community Members This study gave scientific support to the connection (identified by many Native American cultures) between spirituality and sexuality.

Native Americans Before the Arrival of European Religion(s) This site helped spark my interest in sexuality and spirituality, where I had originally been interested only in Native American religion (which I now know is properly referred to as spirituality).

Two-spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Spirituality, and Sexuality This ebook was my main source. My favorite part was reading about one of the author's experiences going to live in the Tewa culture (where she had to pick up most of the language when she got there) to research berdache misconceptions.

Popular imagination has a distorted view of the American cowboy. Cowboys are normally viewed as men who freely chose to stray from organized society, who were heroic, who used violence only in the name of justice, who were charming, courageous, and decent, and who were one with nature. In fact, however, cowboys were low paid workers at the bottom of the social ladder. They have been free from Eastern American society and free to roam throughout nature, but they were still bound by their work and lower social class.

Not only does popular imagination have a distorted view of the American cowboy, it also has a distorted view of the "Wild West," altogether, sprouting from its misconceptions of the cowboy. A cowboy free to roam wherever he wants in the arid deserts of the West paints a picture of uninhabited, non-diverse land ready for exploration by Easterners. A cowboy who is respected by townspeople for putting Indians in there place paints the picture of war only between Easterners come West with Indians. A cowboy who is obsessed over across generations paints the picture of a singular Western culture, centered around the cowboy. None of these pictures, however, are real. In truth, the West was a region of diverse terrain; the Rocky Mountains, the Great Plains, the Redwood Forests, and the Mojave Desert offer huge ecologic diversity. Before Easterners came to the West, the land was indeed already inhabited by Indians, Spaniards, and Mexicans, many of whom had established permanent settlements. While Indians did fight with Anglo-Americans, many tensions lay within the Indian tribes themselves, and the cowboy was not the one to go fighting when the time came either; the U.S. Army fought the wars. No Western society was cowboy-centric; rather Mexican/Spanish settlements revolved around ranching and Indian tribes revolved around either farming (as is the case with the Pueblo Indians) or buffalo hunting (as is the case with the Plains Indians).

How could popular imagination be so blatantly wrong? Some stretching of facts is acceptable, but the view shared by most is almost completely fictional. The leading factor contributing to this obscuration of facts is mainly the popular works of fiction created at the time of migration to the West, contemporary with the American cowboy. Literature by Twain and Wister, paintings by Remington and Moran, even accounts from Teddy Roosevelt portray the West in its idealized form; an empty frontier offering freedom. Because of this popularization, many other aspects of the West have been forgotten, such as the former authority of Mexican ranchers, the initial success of Chinese immigrants turned sour by discrimination, the building of the Transcontinental Railroad, and the transformation of states into territories even at times as a result of women suffrage.

Before learning about the Post-Civil War South, I only knew that Lincoln was assassinated, the states somehow reunited, and slaves were freed.

After formally (re)learning more of the specifics of Reconstruction, what most stands out to me includes the following:
- The 13th amendment abolished slavery
- The 14th amendment defined citizenship
- The 15th amendment granted suffrage to all citizens
- The 17th president was Andrew Johnson, who was disliked and even impeached for violating the Tenure of Office Act
- The 18th president was Ulysses S. Grant, whose presidency was full of corruption because of stock deals with a railroad company and whiskey rings
- The 19th president was Rutherford B. Hayes, who gained office (over Samuel Tilden) only because Southern democratic leaders made a deal the Republicans. The deal basically exchanged Hayes' win for removal of Federal troops from the South
- The Crop-lien system was similar to sharecropping, but was facilitated by country stores which eventually gained a monopoly over supplies in the South. Inflated prices contributed to the debt brought on by the crop-lien system where farmers would pay with future, not-yet-harvested crops.
- Segregation went into the 1960s; not very far from present day. It is now easier to see why black culture is still very distinctive. The characteristics of this culture were formed during Reconstruction, when blacks segregated themselves from white culture and their past lives as slaves by developing autonomous communities complete with their own schools and churches. This autonomy coupled with the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments define the black view of freedom.
- The KKK may still live on today (although it is more pro-white rather than anti-black supposedly), but Congress did put laws in place to deter the Klan from persecuting black citizens, including the Enforcement Acts.
- Other laws, however, were made in the South to skirt around the new amendments and maintain white supremacy, the picture of freedom for the average white southerner. These laws were the Jim Crow Laws.
- The Jim Crow laws have their origins in the Plessy vs. Ferguson Supreme Court Case, where segregation was ruled legal if accommodations for both races were equal.
-These laws were enforced legally, of course, but illegally as well through lynching. Lynching became something many white southerners looked forward to, even celebrated. It not a private happening either; local authorities and families came to lynching events.
- There was an anti-lynching movement, but it was fairly unsuccessful. Ida B. Wells, a female black journalist, was instrumental in this movement. Her success despite the times is astounding.

It is important for people to know and understand the history of the place in which they live so that 1) They do not make the same, or similar, mistakes, and 2) They understand why the economies, social structures, and infrastructures of the place in which they live are the way they are.

As a Southerner, I now know from where many persisting social stigmas come: black stereotypes, farmer stereotypes, and antebellum/white southerner/rebel pride stereotypes. To me, tracing this sociology is one of the most interesting parts of studying history.

The last post was a link to the animoto video I made summarizing the main, general view I have of America: that America is a country of the leaders. The clip emphasizes that America leads in invention, innovation, exploration, freedom, and equality.These things are multi-faceted; they encompass much.

For example, equality can include gay rights, immigration laws, the first amendment, health care, public education, and these are just a sample. However, America leads in other things too, although to some these other areas may not seem as serious. Undeniably, America also leads in pop culture and fast food.

Animoto Video: America, A Country of Leaders View Here

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