Reading Olive's Letters

When historians are in the archives, it is as close as they will physically come to the people they are studying. When reading letters on thin yellowed sheets of paper, I take special note to small details. A slight stain makes you curious - was there a coffee drip? Smudged writing suggests that perhaps the letter writer was in a hurry. My favorite small details are fingerprints generally caused by the smudged ink of a fountain pen. When you can see the fingerprint of a person that lived a hundred years before, you feel closer to them...it's a detail so intimate that you wouldn't have noticed had you been their best friend.

Reading letters, as I found out today, can also be quite sad. As a historian, you generally know what's next in the "big events" and use the archives to gather your detailed information. Before reading through her letters, I knew that Olive Schreiner gave birth to her only child that died shortly afterwards. The incident was so painful that she never really fully recovered. It's tragic, but the incident is so far removed from my reality that it is difficult to really care. It's not until I am sifting through her letters and looking at her fingerprint on the smudged ink that the details become more important to me. Her series of letters to a close friend is quite painful to read when you are a historian that knows the events that will occur. For 8 months she discusses the baby, and plans for the baby. Her health is perfect and she claims she never felt better. One quote in particular stuck out:

September 15, 1894: "I am very well. It's not the little tiny baby I look forward to as much, but the little child when it grows older, and I can tell it stories and take it for walks with me. Cron is very anxious it should be a little girl, but except for this...I shall be as glad if it is a boy as a girl.”

When you know the big picture to the small details it can be almost painful to read Olive's letters at times.

Wandering

Tomorrow I'm leaving for South Africa. I'll attempt to keep my posts aligned with the subject matter of the blog (although I may have trouble finding nostalgic reminders in South Africa).

Although I'll miss my little monkeys while I'm gone, I've enjoyed traveling alone the couple of times I have done so in the past. I'm a wanderer anyways, so it's nice not to have a set schedule or itinerary to follow. Below are some images I captured during these "wandering" moments when I had no idea what I was looking for.


Grove of pines on Emperor's grounds - Tokyo


Kyoto


Stumbling upon this-Kyoto


Or this 13th Century Church (I'm standing inside looking out)...somewhere in Eastern Ireland


The cows seemed to notice that I was an out of towner as I walked past them...



These trips were four years ago. I've changed a bit since then and am probably not as much of a "wanderer" as I used to be. I wouldn't change a thing about those trips to Japan and Ireland, however, and hopefully I still have some of that wandering spunk in me. I think I do.

If I had a box...

If I had a box that I kept artifacts of the past in...

What would I keep in it?


A weenie whistle found at a yard sale when I was a teenager.


A worn and faded photograph of me and my mom - she was younger then than I am now.


Old band stickers from my favorite band, the Smashing Pumpkins


My sanitary napkin disposal bag collection (unused!)


My favorite book from when I was young (Andrea, I'm planning another blog on the illustrations).


An image captured from one of my strongest childhood memories: Nana had just walked me down to the ocean, but the waves scared me too much, so I walked back, slightly embarrassed.


A CD carefully crafted for me from a dear friend


My kindergarten drawing book


A card from church camp, where I worked for five years and lived for 18


My bath people (I lost the third one) and a few of my fisher price people (frank, paul, and peppermint patty)


My cat sammy and my mom's reflection


A note from Kristy that summed up our understanding of high school German class


A picture of mom and Nana. I was just born and mom was just married in the spring. Her and nana look like strangers to each other in this picture, you can see it in their body language. She reminds me so much of myself.



Of course, I have three of these boxes, I could never fit everything in just one.

Christmas Lights

We got the Christmas lights up just in time for the first snowfall. I found most of these large bulb strands at thrift stores. I like their vintage look, and with any luck, they won't get hot enough to burn down the house. Now if I could only finish grading and then perhaps I could start on the Christmas cookies.

Future Uncertainties and Past Realities

This day has culminated into a series of small panic attacks over various events and deadlines that resulted from one thing - this damn dissertation. This morning Zach woke up at 7:30 and rushed out the door to start his first day working on MSU's student organic farm. I envy his ability to be useful to society. I sometimes have this feeling teaching...but geez, I swear this dissertation will be the death of me! When these panic attacks set in, it's usually a good time for me to realize how quickly everything will pass by, and how fortunate I've been in my life thus far.

I have an album I've been keeping for the past couple of years. It's a collection of photographs I've picked up at antique stores.


The collection is partly a memorial, small, insignificant, and unseen, (but a memorial nonetheless!)to these people. I don't know why anyone would ever want to sell or toss aside these memories of their ancestors, but at some point they did. It probably has something to do with how people handle death when it occurs (or don't handle it). I've been careful to keep the collections together, so as to not mix families. When a new family collection starts, I have carefully labeled it (even though I don't know the families' names).


Part of the reason I keep the album is also to have an idea of life 50, 80, or 100 years ago.

Not an actual idea, but a nostalgic idea. I've been slowly covering my life with objects of the past. It provides me with a reality I'm unfamiliar with (isn't this ironic for a historian to say?)and thus, one that is obviously a romantic illusion. Almost everyone looks happy in these pictures and certainly no one is writing dissertations! Most importantly, people have homes, farms, families, and possessions that are valuable (aka not made in China and shipped to Wal-Mart at 5 for $5).

This has really become noticeable to me after living in Lansing where there's shadows of this past life in the form of paved, abandoned lots and shells of auto industry plants everywhere. These things just didn't exist in the past (or at least people neglected to capture them in photographs). This is such a common site in our city. I hate driving past sites like this just because it's so damn ugly, but I can't imagine what former employees and people that have lived in Lansing for decades must feel.
Below are two of my favorite images from the album

Historical Imagination

When I teach history classes here at MSU I try to emphasize the importance of historical imagination and how to detect it when you are reading a book or watching a film. Since I've started writing my dissertation this past year, I have sometimes grappled with my own use of historical imagination. What is my role as a historian? At what level do I intend to lay out facts and at what level do I consider myself a story teller? There seems to be a fine line and just the right mixture of both when I am writing, although this is something I have not mastered by any means.
What struck me as interesting today, however, was my own unconscious use of historical imagination. Mainly I'm thinking about my family here and how we have interpreted our past. As Sullivans, my family clearly embraces our Irish heritage. People have talked about my Great Grandfather Frank Sullivan's "Irish temper" or Papa's Irish nickname "Mick".
I've done quite a bit of extensive genealogy research to date, and I don't even have a single record of a family member residing in Ireland. Today I traced a line of our family back to Switzerland and even found the name of the boat my Great Great Great Grandfather rode into New York City - the William Tell. But not a single stinkin' connection to Ireland yet.
Of course, it easy enough to explain our interest in Irish heritage - Sullivan has been the name that's stuck with us, so of course we claim to be Irish. But I also think there's a bit of romance in all of this: The working class Irish that were all treated like dirt and still managed to drink their whiskey and do a jig at the end of the day - merry drunks, that's what they were.

How's that for historical imagination?

Here's some photographs from my past's past:

The Wirth Family - my mother's side of the family. My gram and pap are in the back row. Note my gram's saddle shoes. We are very similar in many ways.


Great uncle Jack Foster worked in the coal mines of Western PA


Frank "Irish temper" Sullivan (also a coal miner in Western PA)

A Trip to the UP

I've been out of touch for a while because it's been a very hectic week. Grant proposals, dissertation chapters and approximately 400 essays to grade....

This fall Zach and I took a trip up north to Michigan's Upper Peninsula. I label this under "nostalgia" because all along the UP there were these really fantastic old tourist traps - not new tourist traps like water parks, go-cart tracks, or miniature golf, but small little "mom and pop" stops that were created in the 1930s and 1940s when families began using the automobile as their newest vacation tool - thus began the road trip.

This phenomenon actually goes back much further, really it began almost immediately as the production of reliable cars did. One of my favorite stories in the whole wide world is about one of these early road trips and was published in Outdoor LifeMagazine in the nineteen-teens - although I don't have the article in front of me, so I don't remember the exact date. I do recall that the party of four toured the midwest in their Whiting Gasoline Tour Car.

Unfortunately, I was unable to locate a picture of the car, but these photographs give you an idea of what I'm referring to:





So mid-October Zach and I made the trip north and were lucky enough to stumble across some of these early roadside attractions that were largely in St. Ignace.

There was the Indian Village museum/trading post that once housed Father Marquette's (a Jesuit Priest) mission:
Now:

And then:


We also stopped by Castle Rock. I'm pretty sure that's the same structure that got people out to the rock in the 1920s.
Then:


And now:

On a safety scale of 1-10, I'm giving this one a 1.5
At the summit! We're such brave souls!

Zach is terrified of heights and could not be pried from the flag pole long enough for me to snap a photograph of him:


But it was well worth it. He got to visit Babe the Blue Ox and Paul Bunyon once again (he hadn't seen the two here since he was a young boy):