History doesn’t change but our interpretation of it does. It’s all the same events and and the same material culture (as far we can discover it), but when we look back on it we often see different things than our ancestors did.
I’ve been looking for a good example to add to my “toolkit” of elevator speeches, and here it is. Victorian pornography.
We think of the Victorians as being prudish. So prudish, in fact, that we joke about it.
At the same time, it’s pretty clear the Victorians thought it was okay to look at pictures of naked ladies as long as they could be defined as “cultural.” Make it a painting of a naked lady posing as a Greek goddess and you were home free.
Now we have #ArtActivistBarbie and #MuseumActivism. This couldn’t have happened unless our culture changed. Now that it has, our view of the Pre-Raphaelites and Neo-Classicists can also change. We don’t see the same thing when we look back that we used to.
This thing about soft porn disguised as culture makes perfect sense to me. Remember here that I’m an Ethnic Mormon, so I tend to be a bit stricter about some things than the general culture.
When I was a kid we lived in Las Vegas. We were living there when Caesar’s Palace opened. 1966, I think. My parents used to take us out to eat after church on Sundays. Sometimes we ate at casinos. I remember the first time we went to Caesar’s Palace. Pull up, park, and walk up a long path to the front doors. And that path was lined with statues of naked Greco-Roman gods. I couldn’t believe such a thing was allowed in public. (I would have been 10.) My sisters kept their eyes on the ground. My parents didn’t even notice anything was wrong. So worldly, they. That was the day I learned about the hypocrisy of art.
Now, I think I’m go to go follow @BarbieReports and @wmarybeard. There might be something more learn here.
Malatiah Luce, of Martha’s Vineyard married a woman named Eleanor Harley or Harlow. Everything I’ve found about her online comes directly or indirectly from Charles Edward Banks’ 3-volume History of Martha’s Vineyard (1901, 1966):
59. Malatiah(3) Luce, (Thomas(2), Henry(1)), b. 1710; res. T., husbandman; m. Eleanor Harley (or Harlow) 5 July 1738, who was b. 1715 and d. 18 Feb. 1787. He d. 3 May 1801. (Banks 3:255).
I’ve pushed a bit from time to time to see if I could take the line further. It seemed to me she was probably really a Harlow because there was a Harlow connection on the Vineyard. I never found anything but I spun some good theories. And, predictably, many people copied my texts without attribution.
About a year ago I tried again. This time scrapping my old theories and starting from scratch.
I already had an extract of the two records on which Banks based his information. Tisbury Vital Records shows Elenor Harley and Malatiah Luce, married 5 July 1738, and Elanor, w. Meltiah, [died] Feb. 18, 1787, in 73d y.
Tisbury Marriages
So we see the primary source says she was a Harley. Banks must have had the same thought I did, that she might really have been a Harlow.
If we calculate her birth from her death it looks like she should be born 1712/13, even though Banks says 1715. Doesn’t really matter. Some play in the dates wouldn’t be unusual.
I was blown away to find, almost immediately, a simple and direct record of an Eleanor who is probably her: Elenor, christened 17 August 1712 in Boston, daughter of Robert Harley and Elinor. This must be the Robert Harley and Eliner Kerr who were married in Boston on 15 November 1711 by Cotton Mather.
Second Church of Boston
That’s it then. Now we can move to looking for her parents’ ancestries.
Old Theory
Here is the last iteration of my old research on Eleanor’s ancestry. An earlier version presented a theory about how she might have been connected to the Plymouth Harlows. I touch on that theory here, and dismiss it.
Her ancestry is unknown. There are some speculations, but no evidence.
Although her marriage record calls her Elenor Harley (Tisbury Vital Records) it seems certain her name was Harlow rather than Harley. There was a Harlow family on Martha's Vineyard but no other references to a Harley family in this area. Moreover, her daughter Mary's first child was Harlow Crosby (born 15 December 1768).
Theories about her origin include the following:
She might have been an otherwise unknown daughter of (Deacon) Robert Harlow and Susanna Cole.
She might have been an otherwise unknown daughter of Benjamin Harlow, and a granddaughter of Sgt. William Harlow.
She might have been an otherwise unknown daughter of Thomas Harlock and Hannah.
She might have been an indentured servant from England.
It is widely believed Eleanor was one of the Plymouth Harlows and therefore a descendant of Sgt. William Harlow (FamilySearch (2017)) but there is no evidence. A genealogy of this family published in NEHGR does not show an Eleanor (Adams 1860: 227-33), but is undocumented and contains known errors.
The Plymouth Harlows were connected with the Holmes and the Wests, two families who lived on the Vineyard a generation later. Rebecca Harlow of the Plymouth family married 1730 Jabez Holmes. His cousin John Holmes came to the Vineyard about 1757. Rebecca's nephew Robert Harlow married 1749 Jean West, of Tisbury, and Robert's brother James Holmes married 1757 Jerusha Holmes, who was niece of Jabez.
FamilySearch shows Eleanor as a daughter of Robert Harlow and Susanna Cole (2017), and therefore a sister of the Robert Harlow who married Jean West, and of the James Harlow who married Jerusha Holmes. The relationship is problematic, however. The chronology is too tight. Eleanor is thought to have been born about 1714/15, which would make her about 23 at the time of her marriage and would tally with her death record, which says she was in her 73rd year. However, Robert Harlow and Susanna Cole weren't married until October 1717. They had their first child Ebenezer Harlow 16 months later, in April 1719. Their subsequent children follow the usual Puritan pattern of a child about every two years until 1752, with each birth duly recorded at Plymouth, and no child named Eleanor. There is no room for Eleanor in this family.
Justin Swanström, 11/1/2010, rev. 9/30/2017.
Sources
Adams, Theodore P. “The Harlow Family” in The New England Historical and Genealogical Register, Volume 14(1860), pp. 227-33.
Banks, Dr. Charles E. The History of Martha’s Vineyard (Dukes Co. Hist. Soc., 1911, 1966).
“Family Tree,” database, FamilySearch (http://familysearch.org : modified 23 May 2017), entry for Eleanor Harley (https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/details/LHJ6-TFB); contributed by various users.
I’m a fan of using networks to break through genealogical brick walls. My shorthand for this is “People tend to marry someone they know.” When you’re studying a community it helps to start mapping everyone. Look at their relatives, look at their neighbors, look at the other people who sign the same documents. It’s time consuming but not hard.
It’s called social network analysis. I remember reading something from Tony Proctor at Parallax View, I can’t put my finger on it right now. I also remember seeing something with the leaders of the American Revolution. Can’t find that either.
Instead I find some old bookmarks about researchers who analyzed the social networks in three epic poems: the Greek Iliad, the English poem Beowulf, and the Irish Táin Bó Cuailnge. It turns out these three have the characteristics of real-life social networks.
Then, the researchers analyzed four works of “modern fiction”: Fellowship of the Ring, Harry Potter, Les Misérables, and Richard III. The social relationships in these are flatter. They don’t have the interlinked connections with other characters that people have in real-life networks.
I feel like I could almost have guessed, even before I read about the study. In high school I read Gone With the Wind, with some of my friends. As a group we ended up having many different discussions about idealizing the past and distorting the evils of slavery. In among the politics and ethics, I also thought this novel was a bit unusual in the number of relationships among minor characters. Kathleen Calvert. The Tarleton twins. Mrs. Mead. It’s common in novels. I thought it might be that Margaret Mitchell based the story on real life, just because of the network depth she gave it.
Now I’m going to go figure out where I’ve stashed all my info on social networks. Must be around here somewhere.
NNDB: Tracking the Entire World. Retrieved Apr. 15, 2020. “The NNDB Mapper is a visual tool for exploring the connections between people in NNDB, linking them together through family relations, corporate boards, movies and TV, political alliances, and shadowy conspiracy groups. Maps can be saved and shared for others to explore.“
Here’s a guy, someone I watch now and then on YouTube, complaining that White Americans have no culture. It’s hard to know what to make of this. It’s an idea generally associated with White Supremacists, but I don’t think that’s his point.
He says most white Americans lack a sense of culture and a sense of racial or ethnic identity. He says culture is not just behaviors. He’s defining culture as a shared history, shared values, and looking alike.
He sees it as a serious problem. I disagree. Strongly. Where he goes astray, I think, is that defining culture in a way that is not measurable—which is the net result of excluding behaviors. He isn’t defining culture, he’s defining ethnicity then using an undefined set of beliefs and values which are presumably the same across the entire group as a proxy for “white culture”.
But are they really? In my world, the values of my suburban cousins, my cowboy cousins, my Mormon cousins, my Episcopalian cousins, my city cousins, my rural cousins, my rich cousins, my poor cousins, all have significant differences from one another. The culture they share, defined by shared history and shared values, has nothing to do with being White. The culture they are has to do with shared participation in American subcultures. Nothing to do with being White.
Along the same lines, let’s remember that our WASP ancestors found it easy enough to feel separate from and superior to immigrants, even immigrants who are now included under the label “White.” I don’t know anyone moaning about White cultural identity who is willing to face the prejudice White Americans felt toward the Irish, Eastern Europeans, and of course Mexicans. Historically, being White didn’t get you very far if it wasn’t Anglo.
Beyond that, our friend sees consciousness of identity as an essential element of culture. “To know that you share a sense of purpose in life, the same sense of purpose in life, with millions of other people as part of a culture is a glorious thing.” Taken as a whole, he’s not saying White people have no culture. He’s saying we aren’t aware we have a culture.
That’s not my experience, and I don’t believe it was the experience of our ancestors. For the most part, we live our lives inside our culture. It’s as invisible to us as water is to a fish. We become aware of our unique cultures only when encounter different cultures. I am never so aware of myself as a city boy as when I’m visiting country cousins; never so aware of myself as a Westerner as when I’m in New York City; never so aware of myself as an American as when I’m in Europe.
When I think of invisible culture, I also think about religion. This is a connection I’ve smiled about since I was in my teens. If I can see the culture in religion then it doesn’t seem so much like religion to me. I like the cultural element in my religion to be invisible to me. When I go to services at an Episcopalian or Lutheran church, it’s just plain, ordinary church. When I read about or attend a ceremony with Buddhists or Hindus or Neopagans, it something exciting and strange and at least a little bit exotic. The spiritual element gets lost in the “tourism”.
Finally, our friend is missing the element of time. He assumes we belong to the same culture as our ancestors. This is another clue he is confusing culture with ethnicity. It’s easy enough to see we have a different material culture than our ancestors, but perhaps not so obvious that frequently we also have different values.
Very often these differences in values across time end up being enshrined in the politics of liberal versus conservative. Those who are moving on versus those who want the world to stand still. My point will get lost if I choose an example that’s too emotionally charged, so let’s say rodeo. (Not perfect. This is still going to offend people.)
I like rodeo. That surprises most people because I’m politically progressive. We went to rodeos when I was a kid. I continued to go as an adult. After I “came out” I started going to gay rodeos (IGRA). Many of the people I know think rodeo is cruel to animals. The world is changing, and in this case I’m on the cusp. In another generation there might be no rodeo for anyone. When that happens, will rodeo be part of our culture or not? The world will have changed because the values we share will have changed. (And it would be a mistake to see those values as White.)
In the end, I can’t see the argument that White Americans have no culture. First, equating culture with ethnicity is a sleight of hand from the start. Second, culture is something that would normally be invisible to its participants. And third, culture changes over time. All this fretting about the loss of “White” culture isn’t very practical. It’s not grounded in reality.
I pulled this old article by James Palmer out of my bookmarks last night. I’ve found my interests wandering lately from the Middle Ages to the American West.
Don’t know why that is. If I had wanted to do western history, my parents were total geeks. I was mysteriously attracted more to medieval stuff, and now I’ve been doing it for 50 years or more.
So, I’m asking myself, “why study the Medieval world?” I’ve been particularly interested in the processes of ethnogenesis and group identity.
Palmer teaches a course called Power and Identity after Rome. He says, “This is a good topic to get students into. Arm them with some ‘origin legends’, some medieval historical writing, and a bit of archaeology, and get them to assess the relative merits of the two sides. Students can quickly find themselves developing critical skills to form cogent arguments on the basis of fragmentary evidence, while working on the ability to make independent judgements. Plus they are engaged in a current debate while doing so, namely what it means for an individual or group to invent, develop or appropriate a particular identity label.“
Does talking about how to learn medieval history seem off-topic for a post about my wandering interests? It’s not. There’s an intimate connection between how you learn and what you learn.
Palmer continues, “Exploring the past is often to enter an intellectual gymnasium. It is a place to practice critical and analytical skills, while one learns to be forensic in one’s approach to information and the construction of arguments. It is a place in which the imagination can be used and trained. Hopefully my students can take the skills they develop and do interesting things with them.“
This, I think, is why this Palmer article interests me. History is an intellectual exercise. It’s hard. It’s work. It requires discipline and reading and thinking. I’ve wandered away from the world where there are people with an academic interest. The people I know are having fun with wild, crazy, way out stuff. Many of them, genealogists included, want to play modern fantasy with some medieval color.
So, the American West is the more grounded option right now. And, I’m learning something from it. I always thought it was like a fish trying to study water. For someone embedded in the American West it’s hard to get distance. I’m learning, though, that the modern West is not the Old West. I’ve missed out here, assuming I already know. More on that later.
