A new chapter

It has been too long since I posted on here, so I'm starting up again.
I've been meaning to do this for a while but wasn't sure what to write about, seeing as I am not currently writing or researching a dissertation.

I suppose starting with, or rather finishing, where my last post left off is a good idea!

I might well start a new blog for my Postgrad when I can think of a good title. I definitely haven't just spent the last half an hour googling 'History blogs' and 'history puns'...

Pretty much the best I can come up with is 'AnAmericanistStuckInEngland' which isn't a pun, or funny, at all. It just describes me.
I thought of Herstory but it's taken by someone who has never made a single blog post and should feel ashamed of themselves.

So on to me!

I graduated from Newcastle with a First in History in July 2016! It was an incredible day.

Here is proud me.

I was over the moon! Of course everyone would love a First but I went into University hoping to get a good 2:1. Not sure how I managed to scrape over that 70 line, it was a close call, but I am glad I did!

I could not have done it without my partner Joseph, who was there in America with me, putting up with the hours I spent marveling at at Dorothy's slippers (NMAH) and buying out the gift shops (who doesn't want a mini Constitution in a bottle, and 25 bookmarks from the Library of Congress?), and waiting patiently while I took hundreds of photos of text panels in the museums so I didn't have to read everything there and then.
Turns out most of the photos I took of text were rather blurry and I never read most of them at all.

Actually, what I will do here is to copy and paste the Acknowledgments page of my dissertation, because it says everything I want to say here really.

This dissertation would not have been possible without the help of Professor Susan-Mary Grant who gave me much encouragement and support and always made me feel like I could do it when I thought I could not. Thank you to the Charleston Jazz Initiative and the Avery Research Center, whose staff were patient and helpful, fetching me endless boxes, and photocopying pages and pages at my request. Also thank you to John White and the College of Charleston who very kindly gave me a place to stay in Charleston whilst using the library’s archives.

Thanks to Bob and Margo for the tour of the Alabama Jazz Hall of fame and the taste of an Alabama BBQ, and thanks to Hilary, Jake and Kerstin whose house became our home in Washington D.C.

Thanks to my mum and dad for your endless support, and to everyone else who read my blog whilst I was in the US doing the research for my vacation scholarship and dissertation.

Thanks to Brian for keeping me sane and always giving me an escape when it got too much. You might not like Jazz, but I hope you enjoy reading about it.

And finally, I dedicate this work to Joseph Shaw who accompanied me around endless museums and archives in the United States. I could not have done it without you.

It was all a great adventure, and it paid off!

And now here I am in February 2017, back home in Sheffield (I made my decision, did I mention?), as a Masters student at the University of Sheffield.
Changing my Twitter bio finally, to sell myself as an actual Postgraduate rather than an aspiring one, was a proud moment for me.
Being in Sheffield has its positives and negatives. The University itself is brilliant and the staff I've met and been taught by are wonderful.

I might leave it here for now and carry on soon about what I've been up to at Sheffield. Maybe on a different blog, to leave this as my research blog. I'll let you know.

Take care my small band of probably two followers,

Em x

Fini

Hurrah, my dissertation is submitted!
Now I await my judgement.

Over summer I aim to condense these 10,447 words into a shorter article with an aim to getting it published. I'm hoping this will generate more blog posts.

I've recently been corresponding with Jeffrey Green (http://www.jeffreygreen.co.uk/), a British historian who has studied black music in Europe, and written several articles on The Jenkins band which I used in my dissertation, as well as a biography of Edmund Thornton Jenkins. His insight has come too late for use in the above work, but he has been very encouraging and complimentary!

His website is fascinating and contains photographs and research he has compounded over the years, it is well worth a visit. I used some of his information on the Jenkins bands in my dissertation.

In other news I am currently less than two weeks away from finishing my degree, and trying to decide between Sheffield, Newcastle, and Northumbria University's to undertake a Masters in History. If anyone has any advice please get in touch, this decision is proving tough!

Emily x

Charlestonia

It has been about 4 months since I posted on this blog so I thought I should make an update as I near the end of writing up all this research into a dissertation.

The video below is a recording of 'Charlestonia: A Folk Rhapsody', composed by Edmund Thornton Jenkins ('Jenks'), the son of Reverend Daniel Jenkins who began the Orphan Aid society.

It's well worth a listen and a watch, there are interesting photographs and sketches of nineteenth-century life in Charleston.

What is unique about this piece is that though George Gershwin is thought to have been the first composer to mix African-American folk influences within European classical music, Jenks can be heard doing this a few years before the famous Rhapsody in Blue was written.

Admittedly the above doesn't grip you quite as much as Rhapsody in Blue and lacks the glissando Clarinet entry at the beginning, but it is a marvellous piece of music in its own right. All the more interesting for its unique place in African-American history.


Many of Jenks' works remain unpublished and indeed this composition was found again in 1994 in Columbia College and performed first by The Charleston Symphony Orchestra. The above recording is by VocalEssence Ensemble/Philip Brunelle, in Minneapolis.

Image courtesy of John Chilton, A Jazz Nursery. 

Edmund Jenkins remained in London after the Anglo-American Exposition in 1914 which the band performed in. He considered many of the young musicians at his father's orphanage not serious enough and preferred the more favorable racial climate of Europe. Out of London's 8 million population, there were around 40,000 African-Americans: too small a number to segregate. 

He attended London's Royal Academy of Music for seven years, and became an esteemed Clarinetist and composer, winning prizes such as the Charles Lucas prize, Battison Haynes prize and the Ross scholarship.

Jenks died from appendicitis and pneumonia in 1926 at only 32 years old. His music has sadly been forgotten over time, but his legacies remain as strong as the Orphanage bands his father helped create.

The original program of the world premiere of Jenks' 'Charlestonia', performed in London's Wigmore Hall in December 1919.

Possibly the shortest blog post I will write

"…to let loose a brass band of thirteen Negro children upon an urban population suffering from nerves is likely to create almost as many orphans as it would relieve."

- Daily Telegraph (London), September 9^th 1895. 

Good old British humour. 

The gender balance in Carolina's orphanages

I've been spending today doing some research into orphanage institutions in the South between the 1890s and 1920, and found some partial answers to questions I have had relating to gender in the orphanages that arised from my observations of studying the Jenkins orphanage.

The questions I had were:

Whether there were as many young orphan girls in South Carolina as there were boys, and if they were in the orphanages why weren't they mentioned much? And if there were not as many, why, where did they go if they left the state, and how typical were the ratio of girls to boys in similar orphanages...?

This morning I was reading Peter Bardaglio's book Reconstructing the Household (1995) and found a reference to an 1896 statute in Tennessee which stated:

''...Said board of managers, directors or trustees may, at their discretion, require the parents of such indigent children to surrender all right and claim to the control of them, and to consent for the said asylum to provide homes for them… for the purpose of caring for and educating them, teaching them trades and household duties generally.''


Statues like these were introduced during the 1890s around the South, giving orphanages the right to take children away from their family if the guardians were deemed unfit to care for them.

I knew I had to follow this up, and find some more primary source material to help me answer my questions, though when first looking I wasn't particularly looking for gender-related evidence. I managed to find a range of documents on http://docsouth.unc.edu, unsurprisingly mostly relating to North Carolina as the website's material comes primarily from the libraries at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Two of them however were 1861 sources which discussed the (white) Orphan House in Charleston. The N.C documents consist of annual reports of both black and white institutions between 1899 and 1911, along with different pleas for donations, such as the one pictured below.

Image from 1939 pamphlet 'My Future Depends Upon You!' at http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/myfuture/myfuture.html


The Oxford Orphan Asylum was North Carolina's first orphanage, opened in 1873, and took in white children. Ten years later the The Colored Orphan Association of North Carolina was opened in the town of Henderson in August 1883.

The Charleston Orphan House was opened much earlier in 1790, showing South Carolina was way ahead of its neighbor state in provision for poor and destitute children.

The Jenkins Orphanage band, however, South Carolina's first orphanage for black children, was opened in 1891: 8 years after North Carolina's first African American orphanage.

Studying these institutions did not give me direct answers to all of my questions, but certainly gave me a clearer picture of some comparisons that can be drawn between Charleston and elsewhere in the South.

From examining the documents it is apparent that in the case of the Colored Orphan Asylum located at Oxford, N.C, the ratio of boys to girls was actually 2:3 between 1899 and 1911. This rather suggests that orphanages were somehow more inclined to take female children in than male children. In comparison to the Jenkins orphanage, this is surprising as it is the male children that are referenced far more in advertisements and newspaper articles. It is likely that the Jenkins orphanage in the neighboring state of South Carolina followed a similar pattern of taking in more girls than boys, though clearly the girls were less talked about by outsiders.


In the white orphan house in Charleston, the By-laws of the institution in 1861 say that $150 is given annually to the clothing of the boys, and that $80 is given by the City Council 'for the purpose of aiding the object of the State Legislature in the provision made for the education of the boys of this Institution.' (http://docsouth.unc.edu/imls/orphan/orphan.html)

Interestingly it is 'boys' that are mentioned here; no such provision for girls are listed, although girls are talked about elsewhere in the document. Reading the document through the language is very gendered: nearly twice as many references are made to boys than girls.

Strikingly, there is a significant different between the state provision of the North Carolinian and South Carolinian black orphanages. ‘The Legislature of North Carolina in the year 1891 granted an annual appropriation of $1,000 to the Asylum; in 1893 it was increased to $1,500; in 1895 to $3,000; and in 1897 the Legislature raised it to $5,000.' Yet I have not found evidence that the state of South Carolina donated to the Jenkins orphanage, except that the city of Charleston itself gave only $1,000 annually to the orphanage. 1912 donations from the North and collections by the Jenkins orphanage band exceeded donation from the city by ten times.

Yet the Jenkins bands were not the only orphanages sending out travelling choirs - the white Oxford Orphan Aslyum in North Carolina sent out groups of three or four children during the summer accompanied by teachers to give singing performances throughout the US to raise funds. It is quite definite that the sort of music the white children sang was very different to the rowdy and innovative brass bands of the Jenkins children!

Common goals of the documents show these orphanages were seeking 'racial uplift', to change the accepted view of African Americans as criminals into a more positive one. Ideas of education, apprenticeship and training are clearly in line with Booker T. Washington's promotion of industrial and vocational education for southern African Americans when he opened Tuskegee University in 1881, where students were expected to work hard and have skills in areas other than academics. This certainly compares to the orphans' industrial work on the farm opened by Reverend Daniel Jenkins alongside his Orphanage in Charleston.

Another common theme between these white and black orphanages is of course religion, and the message that helping the orphans is what God wants is seen in many references to Jenkins Orphanage. The 1900 annual report of the Colored Orphan Asylum in Oxford was organized by the Wake Baptist Association and the Shiloh Baptist Association, and had originally been named "The Colored Baptist Orphan Association of North Carolina," Soon the name was changed and the religious association was removed, so that 'when the doors of the Asylum were first opened . . . the most needy colored orphan children were invited to come, regardless of denomination"’ (http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/asyl1900/asyl1900.html)

These reflections do not answer all of my questions on the gender balance in the orphanages, but it is clear that while there are clear similarities between orphan houses in North Carolina and South Carolina at the turn of the century, there are also some marked differences. Girls appear to be better represented in the North Carolina orphanages, both black and white. The ratio of black children in orphanages in North Carolina were two girls to one boy, though I am not much closer to answering why the representation is lower in material on the Jenkins Orphanage.




Image courtesy of http://avery.cofc.edu


The question of gender in southern orphanages during the Jim Crow era is something I will of course carry on researching, and I will hopefully be able to update my blog soon with more answers!

Poster!

This is my completed poster for the vacation scholarship scheme which I submitted a few weeks ago. The University's celebration evening of the scholarship program was on the 18th November and was a really enjoyable evening.

Apologies for the tiny text below, I am not a computer expert and must find a way to get the PDF to convert to a larger JPG image.

Blurred again! I will master my incompetent technology skills one day.
I did get questioned about the rather low resolution of the bottom-centre photo on the poster.

Anyway, I'm pretty pleased with my poster and am really enjoying continuing the work in my dissertation. I know I haven't posted here in a while, hopefully I will be making some more posts soon!

Emily x

PS.

Through my work as the North-East administrator for the human rights organization 'Journey to Justice' I have written a short blog post for their website drawing on some of this research, entitled 'Racial Stereotypes: How Far Have We Come?'

The link is here if you would like to read it http://journeytojustice.org.uk/racial-stereotypes-how-far-have-we-come/ 

Charleston's real 'Porgy'

To any readers who may have heard of American composer George Gershwin, or indeed anyone who has ever heard the song 'Summertime' (hopefully everyone), I've discovered some really interesting things about the opera Porgy and Bess whilst doing this research on Charleston.

Gershwin's famous opera is based on DuBose Heyward's novel, Porgy, a novel set in 1920s Charleston which traces the lives of poor black Charlestonian's. Neither the play or the opera was performed in Charleston until 1970 because of the racial climate which forbade it.




The main character Porgy is based on the black crippled beggar Sammy Smalls who was arrested in 1924 but later released. I've always been a fan of the songs and overture of Porgy and Bess, which now means more to me having visited and studied the city where it was originally set. And The Jenkins Orphanage Band were the band in Charleston that Heyward describes in his novel (I understand the passage is copyrighted so I cannot produce it here).

I've also just learnt that the song 'Summertime' is actually about the feelings of the survivors from the devastating hurricane of 1911.

After world war one, when the rest of the nation was busy building themselves as modern progressive cities, Charleston was alone in the South for wanting to look backwards and preserve its past. The city has always been proud of its heritage, and is willing to accept, and publicize, the large part it played in the slave trade. Walking past the swaying palmetto trees on the seafront and the rich southern planters homes, and comparing them to the rundown parts of Harleston village and the derelict county jail next to the original home of the orphans, you can almost see Sammy begging on the side of the street with his goat cart, and see the disgust of former slave owners adjusting to a world in which cotton and rice were no longer king.
.

The county jail:

Below: a few examples of southern planter homes

And, seeing as we're talking about Heyward, he is coincidentally a descendant of one of only four South Carolinian signers of the Declaration of Independence (Thomas Heyward Jr.). Joseph and I signed a version of the document in the 'Old Provost and Exchange' building, and also got to dress up, which I suspect was really an activity for small children. So naturally, photographic evidence was needed.