Kristina's Open Stacks Blog - KRISTINA R. GADDY

KRISTINA R. GADDY

Today's Folk Music & the Protest Roots

9/3/2017

Read my profile of Eli Smith on OZY.

This past April, I had the opportunity to attend the Brooklyn Folk Festival in New York City's most hipster borough. The event was co-founded and is produced by Eli Smith, the multi-instrumentalist string band musician of the Down Hill Strugglers. The music he booked was a curated experience of great folk and traditional bands from New York and across the country. His music is deeply rooted in the history of folk and traditional music in the United States, and he brings in the complexity of that history when he books other acts too. And through this type of music, he wants people to create, think, and resist.

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.

Across the Atlantic

4/2/2017

Midwife Problems, and Solutions, Part 2

This is part 2 of a series on the history of midwifery in the U.S. and Sweden. Click here to read part 1.

Like Hannah Karlen, Rosa Fineberg was alone when she had arrived in Baltimore in the 1890s. Fineberg had also been a midwife in her previous home, Russia, and planned to continued her work in the predominantly Jewish neighborhood of Jonestown.
Almost daily, she stepped out of her house carrying a large black leather bag. She walked by kosher meat markets and a butcher (who much to the dismay of the city health officials sometimes kept chickens in the basement), a kosher grocery store that advertised wares in Yiddish, and the Russische Shul where she attended temple. Every week, sometimes twice a week, and sometimes even twice in a single day she was called to deliver a baby. Her patients called her Tante Rosa and trusted her.

Rosa Fineberg around the turn of the 20th century, courtesy Jewish Museum of Maryland.

Kosher butcher in Jonestown, with the basement chickens, from Janet Kemp's Housing Conditions in Baltimore, 1907.

Rosa's daughter Sarah with her husband, Max Siegel in 1899, courtesy Jewish Museum of Maryland.

Fineberg's daughter Sarah thought her mother had a special, healing power, that was at times unexplainable. When Sarah went into labor in 1901, she called her mother to deliver the baby. And if her mother hadn't been a midwife, she probably would have called another midwife and not a doctor. A midwife’s delivery fee was five to ten dollars, much less than a hospital or private doctor would ask for, and in a time before medical schools were regulated, being a doctor didn't necessarily mean anything.

In Baltimore city, over 150 midwives delivered over 4,000 babies a year, and in every city and town in the U.S., you could find a woman delivering a baby, calling herself a midwife. But just like there were no regulations for doctors, there were no regulations for midwives. Why didn't the U.S. regulate the medical profession? And what did that mean for the health and safety of babies and mothers?

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.

Happy Valentine's Day!

2/14/2017

I always loved finding old greeting post-cards when I worked at the archive. What better day to share some of my favorites?

Classic cupid cherubs are always a good choice for telling your valentine how much you care...

But then, you can also get more original. These are two of my favorites. I couldn't decide if the one with the Dutch children is poorly translated, or if it is supposed to be wrong, as if they can't quite make their English flirting correct. And I've definitely printed copies of the tickle card. I find it such a great image of how couples had to flirt in the early 1900s.

Magical Maps of T.M. Fowler

1/12/2017

Map held at the Library of Congress.

When I was working in central West Virginia, I would often see these birds-eye view maps of small towns, like Buckhannon or Elkins. I quickly realized that there was no way the artist - the maps were signed T.M Fowler - could actually have been looking down on the city. There wasn't a hill or mountain at those angles, and he surely wasn't ascending in a balloon to get the right perspective. How did he do it?

Maryland Emancipation Day

11/1/2016

"Mr. President, it is my desire to be free," Ms. Annie Davis wrote to Lincoln on August 25th, 1864.

Although it had been more than a year and a half since President Lincoln's Empancipation Proclamation, the answer to Davis's question was "No." The executive order that more than 3 million enslaved Americans would be freed didn't apply to any border states where slavery was still legal, and even to some areas of the south like New Orleans, the to-be state of West Virginia, and the area around Newport News, Virginia. Davis lived in Bel Air, Maryland, and that physical location meant that in August of 1864, she was not free. She would have to wait until November 1st, 1864 for the decree from the Maryland General Assembly and a new state constitution.

Belair Aug 25th 1864
Mr President
It is my Desire to be free, to go to see my people on the eastern shore my mistress wont let me you will please let me know if we are free and what i can do. I write to you for advice please send me word this week or as soon as possible and oblidge.
Annie Davis
Belair Harford County, MD.
Belair Harford

Today, Maryland is thought of as the Mid-Atlantic, with barely any relationship to the south. But the fact is that the state is south of the Mason-Dixon line, and before Washington, D.C. brought transplants from all over the United States, I've seen references to suburbs like Kensington and Silver Spring as being "sleepy southern towns." More importantly in the context of today, Maryland Emancipation Day, this was a slave-holding state, a fact that many people seem to forget when talking about Frederick Douglass, a fierce abolitionist who was enslaved and worked in the Inner Harbor of Baltimore City, or Harriet Tubman, a heroic Underground Railroad worker born on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. During the Civil War, the state also had
many southern sympathizers, including the man who shot Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth (like Annie Davis, a resident of Bel Air, Maryland).

"Slave Statistics," a record of the enslaved people in Maryland and their owners at the time of emancipation exists for some counties in Maryland, but not for Harford. I haven't been able to find anything else about Annie Davis in a brief search. I want to thank Mr. C.R. Gibbs and the Reginald F. Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture for the Maryland Emancipation Day Lecture, where Mr. Gibbs shared this powerful letter.

Lost Witch Song from the Wizard of Oz

10/27/2016

Image of the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodsman, and Dorothy from the 1902 production of "The Wizard of Oz."

While searching through the Levy Collection at in the Johns Hopkins Sheridan Libraries Special Collection for witch images, I came across "The Witch Behind the Moon," and it was so complex that I thought it deserved it's own post.

The Witching Hour Arrives...

10/11/2016

It's October! That means we can start with Halloween-themed posts, right?

I was recently made aware of the fact that there are a number of sheet music covers with witches in the Lester S. Levy Collection at the Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries Special Collections. So just in time for Halloween, I'll share some of them here!

The Celebrated Witches Dance crops up in sheet music archives across the country, especially this edition transcribed by Wm. Vincent Wallace, and printed in New York City in the 1850s.
Originally titled "Le Streghe," or The Witches, it was published in 1813 for violin accompanied by piano. (You can hear and see a performance of the original arrangement here.) The flighty staccato notes and quick runs punctuated by longer, more melodic sections definitely evokes what the cover to the right depicts.
This edition was published by William Hall & Son in New York City. Hall seems typical of sheet music publishers during the mid 1850s - he not only published this Americanized European classical music, but sold the instruments (pianos, guitars, melodeons, and woodwinds) to play it.

The Drunkometer

8/29/2016

Read my article on OZY.com about the Drunkometer.

From "Intoxication Tests - Chemical Tests in Action," reprinted from Public Safety Magazine, published by the National Safety Council, 1948. Courtesy of the National Safety Council.

Not everything great can make it into an article, so I've included some more images and documents here on the blog!