"Sharp, quirky, and occasionally nettlesome", Walking the Berkshires is my personal blog, an eclectic weaving of human narrative, natural history, and conservation science with the Berkshire and Litchfield Hills as both its backdrop and point of departure. I am interested in how land and people, past and present manifest in the broader landscape and social fabric of our communities. The opinions I express here are mine alone.
Supposing you had this photograph in your attic, in among the other family accumulations, and nothing was written on the back to tell you anything about it.
Don't let this happen to you!
The next Cabinet of Curiosities blog carnival will be right here at Walking the Berkshires on May 19th. Now is the time to post about that the tea your ancestor shook out of his breeches after the Boston Tea Party and passed down through the generations, or the oddest roadside attraction you visited on your last vacation. Now is the time to tell us about your collection of coprolites (or the one your "friend" has if you don't want to own up to it).
Bring me your stories behind the historical or religious relics, artifacts, mementos, talismans, specimens and ephemera in your steamer trunks, sock drawers and dusty fireplace mantles. Dazzle us with the oddities you have found in the World Wide Wunderkammer.
Submission deadline is May 18th at 12:00 p.m. EST. You may e-mail them to me at greensleevesenviro AT sbcglobal DOT net or use the submission form.
Cabinet of Curiosities #6 is experiencing technical delays but will be posted at Bioephemera later this week. For those who can't wait to get their monthly dose of the unusual, the exotic, the incredible stuff we have hoarded away in our attics or on our hard drives, you could do far worse than to pay a visit Cryptozoology.com for the latest Bigfoot news, and see how your 10 ten list of favorite monsters compares with the one posted at LiveScience. Personally, I've always been partial to Dryads, Naiads and Oreads, such as the lovely Echo, above, being ignored by Narcissus. Very Pre-Raphaelite of me, I know.
Welcome, lords and ladies, to April's bimonthly "Early Modern" edition of Carnivalesque. The Early Modern period, as all good historians know, refers to that glorious span of three centuries (1500 - 1800 CE) during which the English learned to appreciate the many virtues of vegetables:
Before: "Beware of green sallets & rawe fruytes for they wyll make your soverayne seke." - Boke of Kervynge (1500)
After: "Then, says she, I believe there is a piece of cold buttock and carrot which will fit you - Nothing better, answered Jones, but I should be obliged if you would let it be fried. To which the landlady consented, and said smiling, she was glad to see him so well recovered: for the sweetness of our hero's temper was almost irresistible, besides, she was really no ill-humoured woman at the Bottom..." - Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749)
There is a profound difference, I am sure you will agree, and no doubt the English and Film majors among you caught Fielding's consummate metaphorical pairing of food and sex. Those were the days. The Swiss perfected martial arts for the masses and Henry VIII wore a codpiece. This is not dry, academic bunk, friends; this is hot and heavy history, with content good for a1,000 hits an hour, or at least another bodice-ripping season of The Tudors. Why everyone doesn't blog about this stuff is beyond me. It's all in the delivery. "Give me my long sword, ho!"
This was also a period of profound climate change, during which the "Little Ice Age" in Europe put an end to medieval wine production in southern Britain, with winter carnivals on the frozen Thames cold comfort in exchange for frequent crop failures and advancing glaciers that swallowed alpine towns. It was a time of adaptation and expansion, when new world tomatoes forever changed Italian cuisine and London had to burn to save it from devastating plague. Pop music, then as now, was hardly children's fare, as witness this charming bit of ribaldry by Orazio Vecchi (1550-1605), reintroduced to modern ears by the great (though alas, presently scorpion-stung) Richard Thompson in his 1,000 years of Popular Music:
So ben mi ch' à bon tempo Al so ma basta mo' So ben ch' è favorito Ahimè, no' l posso dir Saluti e baciamani son tutti indarno a fè Passeggia pur chi vuole che 'l tempo perderà
Take my word for it [those of you who do not read archaic Italian]; for all the cheatin' going on, this could be a Country and Western standard.
Not to be outdone, Executed Today offers up Major Thomas Weir, who "had had a distinguished military career and an exactingly pious public life among Edinburgh’s strictest Presbyterians. So it came as something of a surprise when, after being struck by an illness, he up and copped to a lifelong sexual relationship with his sister Jean … and a lifetime of hitherto unknown black arts, powered by a Satanic walking-staff. He was so far from being suspect that town elders at first thought him daft." This prior pillar of society was ultimately strangled and burned at the stake in 1670. Elliot Spitzer, on the other hand, will probably get a book deal out of his double life as "Client 9", or at least his own talk show.
"Human occupation of the site dates to prehistoric times but some of the activity uncovered was more recent. A stone-lined spring that may have been a “holy well” was full of offerings from the 17th century, including 125 strips of cloth from dresses, cherry stones and nail clippings.
There was evidence that the well had been filled and the site destroyed to hide what went on there.
Each of the feather pits, which are“ about 40cm square by 17cm deep (15 by 6in), have been carefully lined with the intact pelt of one swan and contain other bird remains."
Natalie Bennett of Philbilon delights in the harmonic convergence of three of her main interests - women, nature and history - in Sylvia Bowerbanks’ Speaking for Nature: Women and Ecologies of Early Modern England. Quoth she; "this is an impeccable well though-out, academic book, that examines its characters in the terms of their own time, while applying understanding and research of the following centuries." High praise indeed.
Serendipities finds another great read and exploration of Vision in Early Modern Culture in Stuart Clark’s Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford University Press, 2007). "The book argues that contrary to what theories of the rationalization of sight and the invention of perspective suggests, vision came to be characterized by unreliability and uncertainty in the early modern period."
"The Portuguese were well aware of the precariousness of their situation. Their technology – fortifications, weaponry, and sailing ships armed with artillery – was of little advantage in African conditions. In confined coastal waters and on rivers, the sailing ships were vulnerable to concentrated attacks by large war canoes and often fell prey to determined African parties. Metal armour was a torment in a tropical climate. The late 15th and early 16th century firearms were often too clumsy to have more than a psychological effect against small or moving targets.While the Portuguese certainly could look after themselves militarily, African weaponry and tactics were still highly effective against them, and poisoned arrows caused horrible damage."
Although the early modern period in Japan has a different chronology and influences all its own, this post by Pink Tentacle struck me as worthy of inclusion in an Early Modern Carnivalesque, and not just because I am also the progenitor of the Cabinet of Curiosities blog carnival, where anything that has to do with mythical 16th century disease critters would surely find a home.
Follow the Knox Trail - This web site contains a page for each of several dozen locations along his journey through NY and MA where bronze plaques were installed in the 1920's. Parochial plug: Knox and the boys slogged through the southern Berkshires on their way to Boston.
This June is the 250th anniversary of the Battle of Carillon. 1,000 reenactors can't be wrong. See you at Fort Ti.
Investigations of a Dog delves into the historiography of the English Revolution as seen through the lens of the far Left. Read the whole thing, especially to get to the coda: "Seventeenth-century England was so far from consensus that even the weather was ideologically contested."
The next edition of will be of the ancient/ medieval sort at A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe. Be sure to submit your finest for May's edition, and if you like you may use the handy submission form. Bon Appétit!
Strap on those brass goggles and gas up the zeppelin, honey. The 5th edition of Cabinet of Curiosities is heavily into Steampunk. What could be more curious than a branch of speculative fiction spawning an entire alternative lifestyle for retro, do-it-yourselfers with a flair for dark wood and brass rivets?
Steampunk is a fantasy genre where form trumps function and sword canes co-exist with ray-guns and pith helmets. It is also a style of art and design. The Boston Globe describes it this way:
"Steampunk has its roots in science fiction literature, where it describes a corner of the genre obsessed with Victoriana and the idea that the computer age evolved alongside the industrial. Steampunk stories, which started appearing with regularity in the 1980s, eschew clean and orderly visions of the future in favor of gas-lighted streets, steam engines belching toxic smoke, and dastardly villains inventing strange technologies. Dirigibles rule the air, and the upper classes employ clockwork servants to serve their meals."
Steampunk tips its hat to the works of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, as well as Twain, Lovecraft and, one assumes, Frank L Baum, whose oeuvre has many beloved Steampunk elements (Tin Man, Tik-Tok and those great green goggles). Films like Wild Wild West and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, while box office duds, are classics of Steampunk sensibility. 19th-century inventors Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison are often cited as Steampunk idols, but I would think there would be ample room in the pantheon for Alexander Graham Bell:
"Alexander Graham Bell Note the name and note it well Father of the modern age His inventions are all the rage Of course there was the telephone He’d be famous for that alone But there’s 50 other things as well From Alexander Graham Bell"
From there you can follow links to the wondrous creations of AlexCF, a retrofuture cryptozoological assemblage artist, who will be more than happy to show you his wares. His necropathic spectregraph (shown at left and auctioned at eBay) looks particularly handy for all you spiritualists.
If you are really having trouble with gaslight poltergeists, then Ectoplasmosis! recommends you call a Steampunk ghostbuster. The gentleman in question (pictured at right) was spotted at the 2007 San Diego Comic Con last summer.
"Beautiful, weird, hand-machined -- this is not just art attached to an existing quartz movement, but a fully realized working pendulum clock out of brass and rice paper. The particular clock's inspiration is based on the calligraphy of the numbers."
Steampunk is where the cool kids from shop class go to play. The grand master of this gears 'n goggles breed of engineers is Jake Von Slatt, proprietor of The Steampunk Workshop where keyboards get tricked out in electrolytic etched brass and fellow DIYers take his ideas and run with them.
The most recent elaboration on a Von Slatt theme is this much envied MacMini monitor and keyboard, pimped out in Steampunk glory by Dave Veloz.
All it needs is a Steampunk furnace mouse with glowing LED coal!
If you are not handy at hand-tooling machinery, you can still get your Steampunk on with all sorts of fanciful garb through the Aether Emporium.
The Heliograph profiles some Steampunk fashion pinups from photographer Kat Bret if you are in need of further inspiration.
Nor is the Steampunk aesthetic restricted to some Anglo-American tech-nexus. From Uruguay, Marie shares some fantastical Steampunk illumination devices.
Given all this mad tinkering, it is not surprising that Penny Dreadfully Steampunk is all the rage at Esty: purveyors-at-large of all things handmade.
Going Like Sixty observes that late boomers, like Steampunk itself, are "suitably old, but mysteriously advanced."
You can get your very own Pavoni PG-16 Romantica 16-cup Espresso Machine in brass for just under 1K at Amazon - a must have for the Steampunk dream kitchen - or maybe you can get your gauntlets on this Etienne Louis, mechanical hedgehog looking design (at right), previewed at ESP Visuals. Actually, it looks even more like a WWI era anti-ship mine to me, but maybe the coffee is just that potent.
Janice Brown of Cow Hampshire is a collector of Granite State historical oddities, and for this edition of Cabinet of Curiosities she offers up a cautionary tale of the perils of 19th-century self-doctoring in Hanover NH: Death by Sponge in 1851.
"The more I research this old framed piece of embroidery, the more I wish I could "hear" all the stories of the inmates who had a hand in making it. I fear my telling of just this part of the story is only the beginning of some tales unlike any heard before. Everyone says "if walls could talk" but this is a case of wishing that individual threads sewn into a simple cottage scene could tell the story of the individual who stitched the thread into the picture."
"There is a beautiful surfeit of things of brass and wood, and apparently the museum itself is reached through a medieval church with beautiful flying machines (such as the Eole bat-plane...) hanging from intricately carved ceilings. A visual feast; where beauty and science are dramatically entwined, where history smells of varnish, tarnish and soot, and where three-wheeled steam carriages rest proudly next to hand-cranked cinomatographs."
Louis Roderiguez of ...What I Know Now explains the primary function of the Smithsonian to his UK readers as preserving the Junk of the Nation that defines a people. That sounds very much like the function of my house, except it preserves the junk that defines me.
The Museum of Hoaxes shares this Victorian poster for S. Watson's American Museum of Living Curiosities, complete with Australians in what could only be described as their native dress if they were from an alternate universe (click to enlarge).
And then there is the private collection of China's Dr. Liu Dalin, a professor and sociologist at Shanghai University, who is also curator of more than 1,000 objects housed in The Ancient China Sex Culture Museum.
"...if like me, you like to collect things from the natural world, a search for “Coyote Skull” brings back about 91,300 images. Searching for a skull to put into your very own cabinet of curiosity? Searching “Coyote Skull Retail” brings back over 66,000 sites, but you may want to further qualify your search terms. As of my typing this, there are nearly twenty different human x-ray images for sale on eBay (over a dozen of them in eBay Stores). In fact, on eBay, you can find things like crocodile teeth, meteorites, or the disarticulated skeleton of various small mammals. Building your own Wunderkammer is just a PayPal account away...."
Some people use the World Wide Wunderkammer to amass virtual collections of the most remarkable things, like Ethan Persoff's 21 image assortment of paper-based condom envelopes from the 1930s-1940s. If any were made in China, no doubt Dr. Dalin could find a place for them in his Shanghai Museum.
Also at EP.TC, a collection of comics with problems that includes my personal favorite: a 1956/1962 Planned Parenthood comic about birth control called Escape from Fear with the lowbrow lead-in: "Joan and Ken Harper's marriage was on the rocks - because they loved each other!"
Jessica Palmer, whose delicious blog Bioephemera makes her the ideal host for the 6th Edition of CofC in April, shares some of mixed-media artist Ron Pippin's Steampunk creations in this post From the Mad Taxidermist's Attic.
Famous Ankles discovers that the Forbes Magazine Building on 5th Avenue houses Malcolm Forbes' renowned toy collection.
"The first stuff was toy boats. Magnificent, wondrous, perfect toy boats. Hundreds of them. They were exclusively not modern. I didn’t notice anything that looked less than 50 years old. Most looked much older than that. I got the feeling that these were Malcolm’s and, being raised a child of wealth, he got every one he ever wanted (and he wanted a lot of them). They were shown with very few placards, but mostly as if to say: “I got a zillion of these things, here they are in bulk. My collection is the greatest in the world!”
And, by George, it probably is. They were mostly steamship-type boats and they looked like they had a complete life and a wonderful time on small ponds throughout NYC over the years. None of them, at least offhand, looked like a true collector might want them: absolutely pristine and without blemish. Instead, they looked like they had been played with a lot by a boy (or a bunch of boys) with every intention of enjoying them to the max."
L.H. Crawley of The Virtual Dime Museum has just the sort of post that I had in mind when I launched this carnival. She proudly displays samples from her Cabinet of Curiosities: Yellowstone Park Stickers, circa 1940, part of a collection of sixty souvenir stickers brought back by her grandparents who made a trip there from New York by train.
"The Dom Museum’s Kunst und Wunderkammer is the lovingly recreated and restored collection once belonging to the villainous Archbishop Wolf Dietrich. Wolf Dietrich held the title of Archbishop from 1587-1612, and it was he who tore down the original Salzburg Cathedral after it was ravaged by fire, and had it rebuilt in baroque style. Today the magnificent Cathedral is the centerpiece of Mozart’s hometown (and the site of the troubled composer’s baptism). But in the late 1500s, the archbishop’s decision to tear down the damaged cathedral enraged the citizens of Salzburg. He showed complete disregard for valuable sculptures and gravestones, destroying them all. His construction crew didn’t stop at gravestones, as they plowed up the entire cathedral cemetery, unearthing and dumping the bones of the dead atop the debris. The citizens had their revenge years later, when Wolf Dietrich was arrested and imprisoned over salt mining rights; the very salt mines which gave Salzburg its namesake and 16th century riches."
March is when most of the United States springs forward with Daylight Savings Time, so be sure to recalibrate your TDAH-meter and remember that not everything that happens in alternate Steampunk time lines stays in alternate Steampunk time lines...
And that concludes this Steampunk-inspired edition of Cabinet of Curiosities. If you like what you've seen, why not check out the links to previous editions of Cabinet of Curiosities here? Be sure to wind up your rosewood laptops for the April edition, hosted by Jessica Palmer of Bioephemera. Get out your collection of mechanical mice, dust off your rattle bags and submit your entries for the 6th Cabinet of Curiosities directly to Jennifer at cicada AT bioephemera DOT com or via the handy pneumatic submission form. Let me know if you'd like to take a future edition out for a spin and I'll make sure there's plenty of coal in the hopper.
And if you need any more convincing that Alexander Graham Bell was ever so Steampunk, just crank up your graham-o-phone and sing along with RT...
"...Graham Bell, Alexander, It is tantamount to slander To call him just a scientist Why his inventions top the list Edison, he was a thief And Tesla nuts beyond belief But Alexander was a gent So philanthropic, so well meant
Founded Science Magazine Wrote a book for kids Because he was a caring fellow Gave a hand to Helen Keller Of course there was the telephone He’d be famous for that alone But there’s 50 other things as well From Alexander Graham Bell..."
Cabinet of Curiosities comes home to roost at Walking the Berkshires for its 5th edition on March 17th. Submissions may be sent here or to me directly at greensleevesenviro AT sbcglobal DOT net by midday on Sunday the 16th. This carnival has built up a great head of steam, and all it lacks is your post, dear reader, on the strange and unusual accumulations stashed away in your steamer trunks or proudly on display as virtual conversation pieces. Or perhaps you have encountered someone else's wunderkammer that deserves the spotlight. Bring it on, be it ever so weird and wonderful. Tell me why you have kept your children's baby teeth or why you are custom converting a Gaslight Justice League. That's why we're here.
Here is an image with much to tell about matters of race and memory in contemporary America. I am confident that just a few years ago, its subject matter - a black American soldier menacing a fallen white enemy with a bayonet - would have been deemed too provocative and risky for a venerable manufacturer of high end toy soldiers to bring to an American market. Yet last year, the 115-year-old W. Britains company did just that.
True confessions time, here. I am a collector of matte finished toy soldiers in this scale and from this company, though I concentrate on the American Civil War period and not, as it is known in the international collector trade, the American War of Independence. This is a reflection of the expense of this hobby and lack of display space rather than lack of interest in other periods. Sometimes I think the ideal job for me would be dioramist in residence at some well endowed and indulgent museum. I've had this interest since I was in kindergarten.
I was prompted to think about this two-figure set from Britains AWI range while engaged in this thread at Civil War Memory. Kevin Levin's special area of interest is Petersburg's Battle of the Crater. He and some of his readers drew attention to the utter absence of the many black soldiers who fought there from depictions of this battle marketed by Conte Collectibles, another high end toy soldier company and one I have patronized in the past. Conte also has an extensive plastic play set business and its Civil War range represents the Crater. Although Conte has produced four excellent African American figures from the colored 54th Massachusetts infantry regiment, none of these are reproduced in plastic and are not included part of the 192 figures in its Crater play set, or Conte's other two plastic play sets compatible with this item.
Another true confession. I own hundreds of these matte finished ACW toy soldiers after a decade of collecting, and yet I have yet to purchase either Conte's 54th MA figures or the few (inferior) sculpts of this unit produced a number of years ago by W. Britains when it was under different ownership. It is not that I do not like them - Ken Osen, who now is head sculptor for W. Britians, did the Conte figures and they are excellent - but there was always another group of toy soldiers that I wanted more, and I rationalize waiting on these because there were fewer situations when I could deploy them in a diorama, as colored troops came into active service at the midpoint in the war. Since this collection is a substantial drain on my discretionary income, I've had to make hard choices about what investments to make.
These justifications don't really cut it. I don't have the space to set up the dioramas of my dreams and the figures are many ranks deep in an upstairs bookcase in my home. At the very heart of the matter, this collection is an expensive adult hobby playing out a boyhood fantasy, and none of my toy Civil War soldiers (or playmates) back then were black, either. Except for a brief period when I was a teen-aged Civil War Reenacter in a Confederate cavalry troop based in upstate New York, my orientation has always been toward the Union perspective. But I am still left with a quandary and second guessing my excuses.
I cannot speak for others who collect these kinds of figures. I do know that the ACW period tends to do well in markets East of the Mississippi and has less of a draw elsewhere. I can only assume that the vast majority of collectors are male and with sufficient disposable income to lay out the considerable sums required every year to feed this rather addictive habit. The only colored regiment from the American Civil War that the general public is aware of is the 54th Massachusetts, made famous by the movie "Glory", and that is why it alone is represented in the small number of figures available that depict black soldiers. And though I am an exception, as a rule there is far more interest both the reenacting and the toy soldier collecting communities in confederate subject matter.
The American War of Independence, on the other hand, has a stronger international market for toy soldier collectors, particularly in the British Commonwealth. I do not know the sales generated for W. Britians by the three figures of the 1st Rhode Island Light Infantry, a unit brigaded with the New Jersey troops commanded by my ancestor Elias Dayton at Yorktown, but they clearly were seen as appropriate subject matter. The light company of this regiment, which these figures actually depict, was part of Lafayette's command and fought in the assault of Redoubt #10 along with my ancestor Aaron Ogden. The regiment had several segregated companies of black, mulatto and Indian soldiers, thought African American soldiers were integrated in some regiments and militia companies during the war. Others fought for their freedom in British and Hessian units.
Collectors of British military figures, particularly those depicting the Victorian era, are accustomed to depictions of Tommy Atkins facing racially diverse adversaries. W. Britains has a new Zulu War line in both traditional glossy and matte finish that looks to be extremely popular with collectors. The Zulu line in particular takes great pains to accurately depict the various regiments in Cetshwayo's' impis without round-eyed caricature. I would love to collect these figures, but I do not. I stick with the American Civil War. It is not worth risking a divorce by expanding my habit to other periods and the size of my collection thereby.
So we come back to the question of why the Civil War regiments on my shelves are still monochrome when there are several appropriate figures available to represent those African Americans who fought in blue? And would spending the $90 bucks or so it would take to rectify that omission really buy me indulgence? I am sure it is not so simple, though I am left uneasy about its implications. What we learn from our innocent play as children creates assumptions and blind spots that even as reflective adults we may not readily recognize. When I played "Civil War" as a boy, I did so in my own image. Perhaps it is that simple. All I know for sure is that this stuff is hard.
Thadd at Archaeoporn has done a splendid job with Cabinet of Curiosities #4 : The Choose Your Own Adventure Edition. I feel like a proud parent seeing my blogchild out on her own, and Thadd has put his own creative spin on this carnival. If you would like the chance to do likewise in coming months, you need only but raise your hand. In the meantime, enjoy!
My blogchild is on her first date. This month's Cabinet of Curiosities blog carnival will be hosted at Thaddeus Nelson's Archaeoporn on February 18th. Submissions can be made directly to Thadd at <tjn2104 AT columbia DOT edu> or via the handy submission form.
Supposing you had this photograph in your attic, in among the other family accumulations, and nothing was written on the back to tell you anything about it.
will be of the ancient/ medieval sort at 
