Kristina's Open Stacks Blog - KRISTINA R. GADDY

KRISTINA R. GADDY

Willem Van de Poll's Maroon Dancing in Suriname

8/17/2022

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On the way up the Suriname River, a bar in a Maroon village that served Parbo Bier. When we traveled to Suriname in 2018, guides and guidebooks alike made it clear that taking photographs of Maroons in their villages was unacceptable.

There was a point—well, I’ll be honest, there were many points—where I was getting out every book from the academic and local libraries in Baltimore about Suriname, Haiti, Jamaica, Caribbean dance, Vodou, Obeah, and so many other subjects vital and tangential to Well of Souls. At the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, I found a copy of Willem Van de Poll’s Surinam: The Country and Its People. I didn’t know anything about Van de Poll, but the 1951 publishing date intrigued me. In a 1941 paper by Harold Courlander, I found a reference to a gourd banjo in Haiti, and thought it entirely possible that a gourd banjo or a wooden-rim banjo might turn up in Van de Poll’s photos.
The book is a mix of Van de Poll’s photographs and reportage on Suriname’s history and what Van de Poll saw as he traveled in the country. I later learned that he traveled with the Dutch Royal family as their photographer, including on trips to Suriname. His photographs, while useful and at times gorgeous, are also literally taken through the lens of a Dutch colonialist who was working for the monarchy. Suriname was still Dutch Guiana, and from some of the photos, I was definitely getting mid-century National Geographic exoticism vibes.

But as I flipped through the book, I was keeping an eye out for photos and descriptions of music, dance, instruments, and religion.

Godmother of Banjo Research: Dena Epstein

7/27/2022

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New York, 1952
The smell of books lingered in the air as card catalog drawers clinked closed and creaked open. Dena Epstein walked through the golden light bouncing off the stone walls. She might have felt at home in any library, even if she had never been there before. On this day in 1952, she found herself in the New York Public Library, a monument to curiosity and learning in the heart of Manhattan. Dena had studied music and library science, and had worked as a music librarian. At thirty-six years old, her career as a librarian was temporarily on hold as her husband worked a government job and she took care of their children.
Not working in a library didn’t seem to suit Dena, though. She wanted to engage her mind, she wanted to have interesting things to think about. Unanswered research questions nagged her. One of those questions made her come to the library from her home in New Jersey.

"Lorena" sheet music cover by Ehrgott, Forbriger & Co. Lith. Cincinnati (no date). Courtesy Lester Levy Sheet Music Collection, Johns Hopkins University, Public Domain.

More than ten years earlier as a graduate student, Dena had written an essay on music publishing in Chicago from 1858 to 1871. Even though the Music Library Association published the essay, she’d come across a song during her research that piqued her interest. Her essay covered songs published during the Civil War, songs that became popular in the Union and the Confederacy, even if they were written by northerners and published in Chicago. She wanted to know more about “Lorena,” one of the most popular songs in the Confederacy, a fact that she found curious, since it was published in Chicago. She could never find much about the song’s author Henry D. L. Webster, and thought she might have a mystery worth pursuing.

William Adams and the Sounds of KenGar

6/16/2020

“‘Getting Up Cows,’ that’s what it’s called, ‘Getting Up Cows,” William Adams said. “An old fella played that. He was a cracker-jack old fiddler, though, I don’t believe he could beat me….”
Mike Seeger hadn’t come to the neighborhood to record Adams initially, but now he wanted to hear any tune the Black fiddler could remember, even if he forgot it halfway through or couldn’t remember the name.
“I forget how that goes, though, I haven’t played that since a long time ago,” the 72 year-old Adams continued before he put the bow on the fiddle’s strings and hesitantly pulled the tune from deep in his memory. In the end, it sounded like he might have just last played it a week or a year ago, not some 20-odd years earlier.

The 19 year-old white Seeger listened intently as a brown strip spun from one reel of his Magencord recorder to the other, putting Adams’s notes indelibly down on tape. This was the first time he’d gone into the field to record a musician, but it wouldn’t be his last. This was probably the first and definitely the last time Adams’s fiddling was recorded.

This field recording wasn’t taken in some rural hamlet or deep holler, it was less than five miles from Seeger’s home in the well-to-do suburb of Chevy Chase outside Washington, D.C. And yet in 1953, when Seeger stepped into Adams’s neighborhood of KenGar, segregation left this community so separate from the white towns and neighborhoods surrounding it, a white person might drive by without even knowing it was there.

Bad Science, Bad Parent

3/23/2018

What would happen if you raised your baby and a baby chimp together, as brother and sister, in the name of science?

Don't worry, you don't have to try. In 1930, scientist Dr. Winthrop Niles Kellogg did just that. Read more about the crazy (bad) experiment in my article on OZY.

If you want to check out the full report on the experiment, Kellogg's book is available via HathiTrust, and there are some good newspaper articles from when the research was made public in 1932.

The Women of the Hull-House

3/20/2018

Inspiring women, innovative approaches to living and learning, and pioneering social justice work: sound like something from the #metoo or #TimesUp movements? Maybe, but it was also how women at the Hull-House in Chicago lived and worked over 100 years ago.

Smith Hall of the Hull House, 1910.

While I was in Chicago in February, I had a chance to visit the Hull-House and be totally amazed by these women, who I already knew a little bit about. Here is a tour and brief history of the settlement house.

The Colored Hockey League of the Maritimes

3/7/2018

Think hockey is a white sport? The fast-paced action and some signature moves are thanks to a pioneering Black Hockey League that changed the game forever.

Read my piece on OZY.

The Africville Sea-Sides, c. 1922. Team members include: Aaron 'Pa' Carvery, Frederick Carvery, James Carvery, Richard Carvery, William Carvery, Jr., James E. Dixon, William Carvery Sr., T.G. MacDonald, Richard Dixon, James Paris, Jr., and Mantley. Photo from the Public Archives of Nova Scotia.

The Coloured Hockey League of the Maritimes was truly innovative in so many ways, and I'm glad that George and Darril Fosty researched the story in their book Black Ice: The Lost History of the Colored Hockey League of the Maritimes, 1895–1925. I can't remember where I first heard about the anecdote that led me to the Fostys' book, and I didn't know much about the history of Black Canadians in Nova Scotia or the Maritimes, but I've found some cool research of which I hope to share more.

'Communist' Legionnaires Take Over a Town

1/8/2018

On May 1, 1950, Communists took over a small town in Wisconsin. Except that every part of it was totally fake, a stunt meant to scare and warn Americans about what communism was really like. Newspapers, photographers, and newsreels (like the video below) captured the day and make the story a nation-wide news phenomenon.

Read the full story at OZY.

Communist Party USA booklet, available via the National Archives.

The Communist Party USA called out the stunt for being a total misrepresentation of what communism was, but the Legionnaires thought it was successful.

June 1950 article in The American Legion Magazine about the stunt.

Pumpkins & Parties!

10/13/2017

Friday the 13th has enough scary stuff, so here are some cute photos of kids celebrating Halloween festivities!

This whole post was inspired by this one photo, from the Upshur County Historical Society in Buckhannon, West Virginia. In a collection of thousands of glass plate negatives, this gem appeared. The photographer Fred Brooks was a naturalist working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, so many of the photos in the collection are of diseased trees or insects. But since he had the camera, he also took photos of his children (like this one) and the travels he took around the United States. (I'm pretty sure this is his daughter Dorothy and the photo is from 1920-22.)

Rewriting History: The Lee-Jackson Statue in Baltimore

6/5/2017

You never know what you'll find in a box.

Last year, my friend Erik found a recording titled "Dr. Freeman's speech dedicating the Lee-Jackson Monument in Wyman Park" in a friend's record collection. The 33 1/3 LP was homemade, and the fact that it dealt with a seemingly out-of-place confederate statue in a city park about two miles from his house intrigued him.
He shared the recording with me, and I knew the story of the recording had to be told through audio. My radio-producer friend Nadia Ramlagan and I started researching the the speech, the event, the artist, the donation, and produced a radio piece that aired last week on the Marc Steiner Show.
The story explores the history of the statue, and how that history should be a part of the debate about what to do with the confederate monuments in Baltimore today.

1948 cover of Baltimore Magazine, with a feature story on the monument.

Listen to the piece and explore our research.

Midwife Problems, and Solutions

3/19/2017

(Hey! I'm trying something new here, with a series of short, interconnected posts based on research and archives I visited in the fall of 2015, relating to Swedish midwifery and comparing it to the U.S. Let me know what you think in the contact section.)

Hanna Karlen arrived in Boston on October 11, 1901 with four pieces of luggage. She was 36, traveling alone. On the ship's manifest, Karlen called herself a nurse, a statement that wasn't totally accurate.

"The readers of Jordmodern might be interested in hearing something about their colleagues and our work across the Atlantic."

She had trained as a midwife in Sweden, and she must have already known that in the U.S., being a nurse was more respected than being a midwife. Karlen made her way to Elizabeth, New Jersey, a town just outside Newark. In the city directory, she also called herself a nurse.
She assessed her professional situation quickly, and in 1902 wrote to the editors of the journal of the Swedish Midwives Association, Jordmodern.