Time Warp Wives?

Time Warp Wives: Meet the women who really do live in the past: "Meet the 'Time Warp Wives', who believe that life, especially marriage, was far more straightforward in the Thirties, Forties and Fifties." This is a fun little article from the UK tabloid The Daily Mail about three women who supposedly live as if it were a different decade--the 1930s, the '40s and the 50s, respectively.

The article is a spinoff from a BBC 4 program Time Warp Wives. You can watch excerpts here. "And it's not just about vintage clothes and vintage decor," the BBC tells us, "they have vintage values!" Such as? "We've been married for 13 years and we're extremely happy because we both know our roles," says faux-50s housewife Joanne Massey (pictured here), who met her husband at a Fifties convention: "There is none of the battling for equality that I see in so many marriages today." The other women are also living in imagined pasts. "Back then, the world just seemed a sunnier place," says Diane Rowlands of the 1930s, a decade that saw an economic depression and the spread of fascism. She does confess that it was "an austere time between the wars."

These women fall under the broad category of historical reenactment--or as I prefer to call it, playing dress-up. Like Civil War or other historical reenactors they project into the past what they want to find there.

Unless of course the whole thing is a media hoax--which it may well be!

Henry David Thoreau, Climatologist

A fasinating article from the New York Times about a group of researchers using Thoreau's journals to map climate change:

"On average, common species are flowering seven days earlier than they did in Thoreau’s day, Richard B. Primack, a conservation biologist at Boston University, and Abraham J. Miller-Rushing, then his graduate student, reported this year in the journal Ecology . . . 27 percent of the species documented by Thoreau have vanished from Concord and 36 percent are present in such small numbers that they probably will not survive for long. Those findings appear in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“It’s targeting certain branches in the tree of life,” Dr. Davis said. “They happen to be our most charismatic species — orchids, mints, gentians, lilies, iris.”

Of the 21 species of orchids Thoreau observed in Concord, “we could only find 7,” Dr. Primack said."

(Photograph of Walden Pond from the Walden Woods Project website.)

Not Northwest History: A Colonial Abortion Drama

Today I am immodestly showing off a web page of my own teaching-oriented research: A Colonial Abortion Drama. The page is a collection of grand jury testimony surrounding a 1741 Connecticut incident in which an unmarried young woman named Sara Grosvenor became pregnant and . . . well, you can read what happens. It is sadly fascinating tale.

I became aware of the Pomfret case from reading Cornelia Hughes Dayton's groundbreaking article, "Taking the Trade: Abortion and Gender Relations in an Eighteenth-Century New England Village," which appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly in 1991 (here is the JSTOR link). It was Dayton who uncovered the case and she uses it to show us how gender relations and attitudes towards illegitimacy were changing in 18th-century New England.

Dayton quotes from the grand jury testimony only selectively, but it was clear from the article that the full testimony was riveting. I am from a village in Connecticut a few towns over from Pomfret, so on a trip home I visited the cemetery and made a couple of trips to the Connecticut State Archives to photocopy the documents and do some additional research.

After months of transcribing and editing from the testimony I finally got the webpage up--and discovered that very day that Woody Holton at the University of Richmond had beaten me to it with his own excellent site on the trial. It is interesting to me how we differed in presenting the material. Holton provides not only the testimony but also a "cast of characters" and chronology page. I didn't do these because I want my students to figure out those things for themselves. And yet I hold my students hands with a historical introduction to frame the documents, and an after word about what happened to some of the major characters and how I became interested in the story. I even managed to get George Washington in there.

My page on Sara Grosvenor was to a part of a larger project, tentatively titled Voices from the Margins: A Multicultural Reader for United States History. The idea is to create a primary source reader for college history classes that highlights documents from peoples, regions, and events that are either neglected or misrepresented in standard textbooks. Also, the book is meant to go heavy on sex and violence. I created three chapters about five years ago before I was distracted by my involvement in Teaching American History grants. I hope to get back to the project soon.

(I will feature my other two completed chapters in subsequent posts.)