Tag: History

Looking for God in the details

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe is often credited as the origin of the quip, “God is in the details,” but the phrase actually goes back much earlier.

Still, however tedious but essential, details do extend to the minutia of building and sustaining a marriage, a family, and a wider community. You can also apply it to any number of other things, including business, sports, the fine arts, politics.

In researching Quaking Dover, I am left with many gaps in the records of Friends’ godly endeavors. When, for example, did Dover Friends cease to run their own schools?

In addition, in writing a history, the details can drive one mad.

May I suggest the devil’s at work there, too?

The Metropolitan Opera broadcasts take on a new tone

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

One of the benefits of donating even a modest amount to the Metropolitan Opera’s broadcast fund is that you receive an annual schedule booklet, 36 colorful, glossy pages with the casts, broadcast times and estimated lengths, and summaries of the plots. The booklet arrives a month or two before the next season begins, and I keep mine as wonderful future references.

The upcoming Saturday matinee broadcasts, which start airing on Dec. 9, have already been controversial, due to the company’s shifting focus toward increased contemporary and sometimes realistically gritty works. The first presentation of the season, in fact, is Florencia en el Amazonas, inspired by the writings of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and only the third Spanish-language opera to be performed at the Met. (Carmen, after all, is in French and will be heard on Jan. 27.) Other works from our own era are Dead Man Walking (Jan. 20), X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X (Feb. 3), Fire Shut Up in My Bones (April 27), John Adams’ opera-oratorio El Nino (May 4), and The Hours (May 18).

That unprecedented string of operas by living composers doesn’t mean the usual masters aren’t on the menu. Mozart (3), Wagner, Verdi (4), Puccini (3), Bizet, Gounod, Donizetti, Johann Strauss Jr., and Gluck are all in the lineup, with two of the dates yet to be announced. Conspicuously absent is Richard Strauss.

Two of the archived presentations feature my favorite-ever conductor, Max Rudolf: Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro on Dec. 30, with Victoria de los Angeles and Cesare Siepi, and Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore on April 6, with Luciano Pavarotti, Judith Blegen, and Ezio Flagello. As one conductor once told me, Rudolf could have been famous, if he had wanted that. At the Met, he worked largely behind the scenes as Rudolf Bing’s artistic administrator before going to Cincinnati and rebuilding that city’s great orchestra.

Also of note is that the long-running broadcast series has a new sponsor, the Robert K. Johnson Foundation, only the third in its history. The series was underwritten by Texaco from 1940 to 2003, followed by Toll Brothers luxury homebuilders (2005 to 2023).

Gee, have Texaco’s red-star gas stations been gone from the landscape 20 years already?

Even tradition changes.

My genealogical research experience was a plus

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In my mid-30s, a decade after I started worshiping in the Society of Friends, I heard that my great-grandfather had been a Quaker who moved from North Carolina to Ohio after the Civil War.

I’d no clue and was shell-shocked, in a good way.

That soon got me into genealogical research with another, older, cousin, which in turn led me to others through correspondence. Many of the results can be found on my Orphan George blog.

Central to that research were Quaker Meeting minutes and learning to interpret those records. For family data, they can provide some of the best information before the census of 1850, the first to name everyone in a family, along with ages and some other facts.

Serving as clerk of Meeting and in other roles also deepened my understanding of the faith and practice.

While I gained some skill navigating this field, other researchers specialized in public records, such as wills, tax filings, and property maps.

Admittedly, working as a census taker in 2020, I did develop a sympathy for lapses and errors in the federal population documents.

When it came to researching Quaking Dover, I found myself returning to others’ genealogical summaries, where one version differed from another, as well as other records. I knew to treat what I saw there as tenuous but still helpful.

Somehow, though, it felt familiar.

Doodling around with the origins of ‘Yankee’

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The label does have a range of applications, from residents of the six-state New England region or Connecticut in particular to a Manhattan professional baseball team to anyone north of Dixie (often prefaced with “damn”) to anyone from the USA who lands in a foreign country.

Along with the shortened “Yank.” Or its many uses as an adjective.

The word’s origins, though, are contested.

  1. The earliest recorded use is credited to British General James Wolfe in 1758 when he complained about the Americans under his command. The British continued to use it in a derogatory fashion. The pompous fools.
  2. A largely dismissed theory had it arising in a French word for English-speaker that the Wyandot rendered into Y’an-gee.
  3. Another had it being adopted when New Englanders defeated a Native tribe who had identified themselves as Yankoos – meaning invincible. Problem there is the tribe must have been invisible all along.
  4. More likely is a derogatory Dutch-language origin in the early 1600s through New Amsterdam, beginning with the name Jan, for John, pronounced Yan. One theory has Jan being applied to any Dutch-speaking English colonist, a kind of winking acknowledgement that they could converse. How about having it originate among those Dutch-speaking Englishmen? I haven’t seen that suggestion before.
  5. Or it may have been imported from the Old World as Jan Kaas, “John Cheese,” a generic nickname the Flemish had for Dutch in the north.
  6. Or Jan might have been combined with another popular Dutch name, Kees, into Yankee, as English-speakers turned it against the New Netherlanders.
  7. And then those New Netherlanders soon slapped the word on English colonists in nearby Connecticut.
  8. By 1681 there may have even been a Dutch pirate, Captain Yanky or Yanke. The Dutch settlers, now subsumed into the English colony of New York, may have seen the Brits as pirates. Sounds awfully late in the timeline for me. I think it was definitely widespread slang before that.
  9. By the time of the Revolutionary War, the song “Yankee Doodle” was well established. Whatever its original intentions of mocking the Americans as simpletons, New Englanders took it as a badge of honor, macaroni and all.
  10. Somehow, after the Revolution, it became a synonym for Protestants descended from New England Puritans and their values. Take “Yankee ingenuity” as a prime example.

None of these quite convince me, but I feel Scottish, Swedish, and even Persian roots are even less likely.

Looking for witches among the Quakers

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

One of the first things the Puritan authorities examined for after arresting women preaching the Quaker message in America was physical proof of their being witches.

I have no idea about the specifics – and am not sure I want to know. Still, their obsession with the naked bodies strikes me as creepy, even pornographic.

After publishing my book Quaking Dover, the thought struck me that the Puritans must have seen Quaker worship as some kind of séance. Not that we were trying to communicate with the dead, but rather be open to the presence of the Holy Spirit, or Christ.

Of course, that Holy Spirit was translated at the time as Holy Ghost. Yipes! Sounds like Halloween, no?

From my perspective, Ghost is way too limiting for that Spirit, especially when Christ is seen along the lines of Logos in Greek philosophy.

It’s far more revolutionary and liberating than you’d think. One way builds religion as a kind of legal system with punishments and rewards. The other builds it as a set of relationships.

Now, to stock up for those little trick-or-treaters who will be knocking on our door. I promise not to put religious tracts in their bags, tempting as the opportunity might be.

 

There’s much more to Salem than witch hysteria

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Through much of the colonial era, Salem was one of America’s ten biggest cities. In addition, it was closer than Boston to Dover, and like Dover it was settled by West Country English fishermen before the Puritan migration flooded into New England.

Salem’s first Quakers suffered some of the most intense persecution for their faith found anywhere, and they were instrumental in bringing that faith to Dover.

What I didn’t realize was that Salem was long the only Quaker Meeting in the Massachusetts Bay colony. The other early Meetings in today’s Massachusetts were actually in the Plymouth colony.

Details on Salem Meeting’s existence were scarce until I was pointed to Carla Gardina Pestana’s Quakers and Baptists in Colonial Massachusetts.

Her study breaks off before the Salem Meeting shifts to Lynn, where it was once the largest or second largest Friends congregation in New England. And then that, too, faded from sight early in the 20th century.

Pestana’s sensitive telling of Friends through the period includes her sense of Quakers as family oriented, communal, even what she calls tribal. I would still like to see the story of what happened to Salem Friends in the industrial era, but she provided consolation for my own conclusions in Quaking Dover.

As for Salem, its unique Peabody-Essex Museum ranks in many categories in the top ten art institutions in America. It’s definitely one of our favorite destinations. Its grounds even include a reproduction of Salem’s first Quaker meetinghouse, built about the same time as Dover’s.

As if his Merrymount antics weren’t enough

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Other than the broken wedding engagement, I’ve seen no hints at Thomas Morton’s sexual orientation, as if such distinctions were even worthy of notice back then in colonial New England. But, as far as I’ve found, he never did wed.

Beyond that, I’m left feeling the Puritans were afraid the Quakers would lead to something similar to Morton’s scandalous presence a few decades earlier.

His Merrymount settlement was, I’m convinced, a significant moment in early New England history that few people know about, one sharply at odds with the resulting Puritan image. It was, you know, a kind of hippie commune with friendly relationships with the Natives. Not that Friends would have engaged in dancing, much less doffing their clothes, around a maypole. As well as perhaps many of the other things that cause a lot of people to congregate on Salem, Massachusetts, this time of the year.

Let’s just say it heightened the tensions.

If you don’t know about Merrymount, my book Quaking Dover offers an introduction.

 

Can it really be a whole year since the book appeared?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Have to admit it’s been an exciting, though not exactly lucrative, past 12 months since Quaking Dover appeared in print. The 255-page volume is quite different from my earlier publications. It’s history, rather than a novel or poetry, and its tone and outlook pushed my journalism training in new ways. I’ve even come to see this as my major creative nonfiction opus.

Reader reaction has been enthusiastic, and the book’s perspective has challenged the conventional take on New England history and its impact on the rest of America.

Friends Journal magazine called it an “eminently well-argued and documented account,“ while others declared it “a rich feast of a book” or said “It’s like you’re speaking right to me! It’s not like a history at all!” or simply “enjoyed your conversational writing style.”

Unlike my novels, its publication led to a festive book-release party in the Dover Quaker meetinghouse, followed by other events – some of them with unique PowerPoint visuals – in Dover, New Hampshire; Haverhill and Cape Cod, Massachusetts; and Eastport and Pembroke, Maine. Ten in all, and all well received. Didn’t get to do that with the novels. I’ve even had strangers stop me in the street to tell me how much they like my reading. And creating the presentations and accompanying illustrations has been fun in a whole new way for me.

One thing that’s impressed me is the way this has connected with people. It’s about places they live in or have visited, about families and communities they know, about values they share. It’s more concrete than fiction but no less personal.

Overall, it’s sold close to the U.S. average of 200 copies a year. Considering that the book is, at its core, the story of a small congregation in a small city in a small state, I’ll take that as a good start.

Older than it seems

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Dover: where New Hampshire started. Leading to the second-oldest state in New England.

And then? Dover was already 200 years old when the textile mills took over the town.

Note, too, that Dover’s mills predate the more celebrated ones at Lowell, Lawrence, and Manchester on the Merrimac River.

It was hardly a fringe settlement in terms of action.

More twists on the Portsmouth-Dover rivalry

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The two small cities that emerged on the New Hampshire side of the Piscataqua River ultimately found themselves rivals.

While Dover, hidden upstream, developed earlier and had much of early Maine on its side, Portsmouth took on its own character.

Portsmouth had a harbor, for one thing, and as waters upstream became polluted with sawdust from the mills, along with the clearing of forests miles inland from the banks, Dover’s wharves and landings faded in importance. Its goods were relegated to small local vessels called gundalows, which could maneuver the shallow waters, and then repacked into larger ocean-going vessels rather than continuing directly.

All of that then had Portsmouth emerging as the focus for trade, connecting it to towns up and down the Eastern Seaboard and beyond rather than anything much inland.

The center of Dover, meanwhile, kept creeping upstream from its waterfront origins at Hilton Point. Its outlook turned increasingly up-country, powered by the waterfalls along the Cochecho River and the mills, along with farming and timbering.

It was a common pattern in New England, so I’m told. The merchant class of the harbor settlements kept informed on activities along the coastline and destinations overseas but knew little to nothing of what was happening just five miles inland. The inland points, for their part, had little interest in distant locales.

By the time of the American Revolution, Portsmouth boasted of some impressive Georgian houses owned by wealthy seagoing merchants, some of them signers of the Declaration of Independence. (The squalid, roughnecked, red-light neighborhoods that went with all that seagoing were left more unspoken.) Dover was far more modest, about 50 years away from emerging as a major textile manufacturing center, with the red-brick mills.

George Washington visited Portsmouth but not Dover. You get the picture.

The character of the two communities continued to diverge after that, and they still do. Today, Portsmouth is driven in large part by tourism, both as a destination and as a stopping off point for almost all of the motor traffic in and out of Maine. In contrast, Dover sits quietly to the north, though the new bridge at Dover Point makes the place more accessible.

~*~

The other two towns of New Hampshire’s first century also had different personalities.

While Hampton sat on the Atlantic coastline, it lacked a harbor. Nor was it inland enough to have the waterfalls to power manufacturing. Its base remained agriculture.

Exeter, further inland, did have the falls but somehow also took on a more cultured tone. It’s a story I anticipate hearing of more.

~*~

I was often puzzled that so few folks in Portsmouth knew anything about Dover, just a dozen or so miles away. Not so for Dover residents when it came to Portsmouth, the smaller of the two.

That just may be changing, however, with the downtown renaissance in Dover and the increasing commercialization and crowding of Portsmouth from the funky, artsy edge we so enjoyed just 30 years ago.

The one thing that hasn’t changed from the late-Colonial era is that Portsmouth remains more monied. Some of that, at last, just may be migrating northward, toward family-friendly Dover.