Adam Arenson

More than Just a Prize: The Civil War and the West

Adam Arenson — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 12:16:38 PST

How to unify the insights of the history of the Civil War Era and the study of the American West.

"Back to the Battlefield: Field Notes from a Cultural Civil War Historian" series for Civil War Memory

Adam Arenson — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 11:05:43 PDT

A link to my series of posts about cultural and political concerns on Civil War battlefields.

New York Times Disunion series

Adam Arenson — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 10:59:48 PDT

A link to my contributions to the New York Times' Disunion blog.

Facing Out from the Academy: How to Expand Your Writing & Engage a Broader Public

Adam Arenson — Tue, 24 May 2011 08:39:43 PDT

This teleseminar discusses how (and why) to communicate your work beyond the university, including the use of a website, blogging, Facebook, and Twitter. It shows you how to see the broader conversation that would be enhanced by better understanding your research findings. It discusses how scholars have used electronic media to extend the reach of their writing, why expanding your writing beyond academic journals leads to greater productivity, and the secrets to success in blogging, writing op-eds, and working with the media.

Review of Missouri’s War: The Civil War in Documents, ed. Silvana R. Siddali. Missouri Historical Review 105.2 (January 2011), 117-118.

Adam Arenson — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 21:22:14 PST

A review of Missouri’s War: The Civil War in Documents, ed. Silvana R. Siddali, a groundbreaking collection of primary sources reflecting the full breadth of the Civil War in Missouri.

After the Underground Railroad: Finding the African North Americans who Returned from Canada

Adam Arenson — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 11:41:14 PST

The Underground Railroad which fugitive slaves followed from the antebellum South to Canada is now a well-known story. But what of those who returned? In his ongoing research, Arenson explores this little-known aspect of nineteenth- century African American history: the return of blacks from Canada to the U.S. after the Civil War.

Frontier Cities: Recovering Encounters at the North American Crossroads of Empire

Adam Arenson et al. — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 12:34:35 PST

The twelve essays in this edited volume argue for the intersections of colonial and frontier historiography; of the American West and global history; and of urban-studies and postcolonial modes of inquiry. Themes include the intimate negotiations in cities as homes to many cultures; the self-assertion of cities as cultural spaces; and the propinquity and environs essential to cities as economic sites. I co-wrote introduction and framing materials, and edited essays by Elliott West, Timothy Mahoney, Matthew Klingle, and Alan Gallay.

The Home Savings Bank Art Project

Adam Arenson — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 14:01:13 PST

For more than three decades, Millard Sheets and his studio of artists designed Home Savings and Loan banks throughout California, studding their iconic projects with mosaics, murals, stained glass and sculptures that celebrated both family life and the history of the Golden State. This study recovers the history of this public art, from the commissioning of the first bank branch in 1952 through the recent history of the properties’ sale. It advances contemporary urban history by chronicling a corporate investment in public memory, describing how this interplay of community banking and public art fostered an image of community in California’s notoriously spread-out suburbs through invocation of classic scenes of local and state history. The website documents my ongoing research through its Image of the Week series.

Review of Empire’s Edge: American Society in Nome, Alaska 1898-1934 by Preston Jones Pacific Historical Review 77.2 (May 2008), 330-332.

Adam Arenson — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 11:04:12 PST

A review of Empire’s Edge: American Society in Nome, Alaska 1898-1934, an extremely valuable portrait of an Alaskan community, seemingly on the edge of the world but dreaming of itself as an ordinary American town.

The Double Life of St. Louis: Narratives of Origins and Maturity in Wade’s Urban Frontier

Adam Arenson — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 13:32:13 PDT

A half-century after Richard C. Wade's landmark history The Urban Frontier: The Rise of Western Cities, 1790-1830, this retrospective essay considers the development of St. Louis in relation to evolving notions of the frontier as a space of intercultural encounter, and the maturation of a city economically in relation to its cultural and political conflicts. It reviews the scholarship on the city of St. Louis since Wade wrote, and suggests new avenues in the city's history.

The Great Heart of the Republic: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War

Adam Arenson — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 21:40:32 PDT

The Civil War revealed what united as well as what divided Americans in the nineteenth century—not only in its deadly military conflict, but also in the broader battle of ideas, dueling moral systems, and competing national visions that preceded and followed. This cultural civil war was the clash among North, South, and West, as their leaders sought to shape Manifest Destiny and slavery politics.

No site embodied this struggle more completely than St. Louis, the largest city along the border of slavery and freedom. In this sweeping history, Adam Arenson reveals a city at the heart of the cultural civil war. St. Louisans heralded a new future, erasing old patterns as the United States stretched across the continent. They tried to reorient the nation’s political landscape, with westerners in the vanguard and St. Louis as the cultural, commercial, and national capital. John C. Calhoun, Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, and John Brown tracked the progress of the cultural contest by monitoring events in St. Louis, observing how the city’s leaders tried yet ultimately failed to control the national destiny.

The interplay of local ambitions and national meanings reveal the wider cultural transformation brought about by westward expansion, political strife, and emancipation in the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction. This vibrant and beautifully written story enriches our understanding of America at a crossroads.

Saving the Bank’s Artistic Assets

Adam Arenson — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 12:51:34 PDT

Save some memorable banks! For three decades, Millard Sheets and his studio artists created mosaics, murals, and sculptures for the Home Savings banks in California. Sold in 1999 to Washington Mutual, some of the locations were decommissioned as banks. Now, with the sale of Washington Mutual to Chase being completed, this artwork is again under threat. Historians, preservationists, and partisans of public art should work to identify and preserve these unique looks at California's history and memory.

Celebrate their freedom, not the ugly case bearing their name

Adam Arenson — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 15:49:13 PDT

One hundred fifty years ago, Chief Justice Roger Taney announced the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford. Yet then something changed the lives of Dred and Harriet Scott and their daughters, Eliza and Lizzie, at least as much as the Dred Scott decision did: They became free. The day should come when their emancipation is more celebrated than their court defeat is observed.

The Power of Oklahoma City

Adam Arenson — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 15:33:56 PDT

I can’t remember what I was doing at 9:02 a.m. Central Time, on April 19th, 1995, when the bombing happened. It was a Wednesday. How did I hear? I think I knew of the tragic events only later in the day. I did not stand around the television that morning, as I and so many did on 9/11. Last week, a business meeting took me to Oklahoma for the first time. The impact of the memorial was instant and visceral. The memorial works. And my hopes for such a successful memorial at the World Trade Center site are fading. I pray that those in New York can succeed at this unwanted task at the level that Oklahoma City has.

Blog Posts and Interviews

Adam Arenson — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 15:13:14 PDT

Ongoing contributions on the resources and methods of writng engaging history. See posts and podcast interviews.

Ansel Adams’s Eucalyptus Tree, Fort Ross: Nature, Photography, and the Search for California

Adam Arenson — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 15:01:50 PDT

This article considers the image of California evoked in the unusual Ansel Adams photograph Eucalyptus Tree, Fort Ross, California (1969), a Polaroid Land image of the garrison fence and an aged eucalyptus tree. Considering the participation of Russian occupation, Australian cross-pollination, Carleton Watkins’s early photographs of redwoods, automotive and tourist images in the creation of this distinctive California place, the article argues that to understand Ansel Adams’s work, we must not remember his Yosemite images and forget him at Fort Ross. Eucalyptus Tree, Fort Ross, California is still beautiful even as it jars the human presence back into the frame. California—vast, sprawling, variegated—can only be contained in an accretion of images, emotions, and people, as their hopes, their dreams, and their fears form this puzzle of a place.

The Role of the Nossa Senhora Aparecida Festival in Creating Brazilian American Community

Adam Arenson — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 14:51:37 PDT

Once a year, the Brazilians who live in the Boston area come together at St. Anthony Church in Cambridge to celebrate the festival of Nossa Senhora Aparecida (Our Lady who has Appeared), view the statue of the Virgin Mary that has brought miracles to the people of Brazil, and honor to this patroness. The festival, attended by hundreds, is primarily religious but also seems to have important cultural aspects. Is there a Brazilian community? If so, what role does this festival play? The researcher attended the festival in 1997, providing questionnaires in Portuguese and English, taking photographs, and arranging to interview the parish priest. With references to studies of the Brazilian community in New York city, he determined that the festival plays an important celebratory role for a Brazilian community that is mostly hidden but not nonexistent, a group of people who maintain ties to Brazil through interacting with each other, worshipping together, and speaking Portuguese, carving out a distinctive space despite issues of immigration law and the influence of the other Luso-American communities in the Boston area.

Libraries in Public before the Age of Public Libraries: Interpreting the Furnishings and Design of Athenaeums and Other ‘Social Libraries,’ 1800-1860

Adam Arenson — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 13:40:04 PST

Before public libraries became common in the United States, both elite and striving men sought out social libraries to read business newspapers, attend lectures, appreciate art and good company, and generally learn or relish in respectability. For single male clerks living in rented rooms, the library served as a crucial "third place," away from home and work, where sociability and education could flourish. This chapter describes how elements of the private library, the parlor, and the bookstore informed the furnishing and design of the social library. It reveals how the spaces were intended to be utilized--and what legacies remained for the design of public libraries.

Dred Scott vs. the Dred Scott Case: History and Memory of a Signal Moment in American Slavery, 1857-2007

Adam Arenson — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 16:06:44 PST

The Dred Scott Case centered on the Scott family—Dred and Harriet, and their daughters Eliza and Lizzie—but in the recorded history, after March 6, 1857 the Scotts suddenly fade, as if their lives ended that day in the courthouse. They did not. Elsewhere I have examined how the Dred Scott decision catalyzed the transformation of St. Louis politics, turning Missouri toward gradual emancipation just as the South’s proslavery advocates were declaring victory. And I have described how the Scotts’ lives were recovered to memory through the actions spearheaded by their descendents. Here I chronicle how the legacies of the Dred Scott Case were long divorced from the fate and commemoration of the Scott family, in political rhetoric as well as scholarly dialogue. To reunite the Scott family and the Dred Scott Case is to add the human cost to the legal significance of this signal moment in American history.

A Cultural Barometer: The St. Louis Mercantile Library as National Institution, 1846-1871

Adam Arenson — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 15:39:19 PST

The St. Louis Mercantile Library, from its founding in 1846 to its 25th anniversary in 1871, demonstrated a growing influence on the local community and the national network of libraries and museums. Working from previously uncatalogued institutional archives, this paper argues for the library as a social, cultural, literary, and scientific institution of national standing, key to how St. Louis interests shaped their vision for the future.