Author: Sarah Weissman

Pat Williamsen is Executive Director of Ohio Humanities, one of 56 state-based partners of the National Endowment for the Humanities that also includes Maryland Humanities. We are sharing her message about the CARES Act, the stimulus funding in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, with permission. All photos were taken in Maryland and are courtesy of Library of Congress’ catalog: credit and details follow the post. 

On March 27, Congress passed the CARES Act, the stimulus relief program to shore up the US economy, which has ground to a halt in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. Tucked within that $2 trillion package is $75 million for the National Endowment for the Humanities designated to provide emergency support for historical societies, art museums, colleges, and other centers of cultural activity. A portion of that $75 million appropriation will be distributed to 56 state humanities councils to help local organizations preserve jobs and keep the lights on.

Long before the CARES Act was passed, as social distancing and stay-at-home orders began to close museums, colleges, businesses, I started thinking again about FDR’s New Deal and the mark it left on our national landscape. If I’m not mistaken, the CARES Act is the first time since the Great Depression that the federal government has appropriated crisis funds for the preservation of American culture. While the argument can be made that history, literature, and the arts are not priorities at a time when the death rate is rising and more than 16 million people are suddenly unemployed, a similar argument was once made about certain New Deal programs. Now, as then, among the ranks of the newly unemployed are artists, historians, writers, curators—the stewards of American culture.

Those employed with the task of keeping American culture safe and vibrant carry a great, yet unrecognized burden. And in a crisis such as we now face, it is the proper role of the federal government to preserve the cultural fabric of the nation.

Through programs like the WPA, Federal One, and the Federal Writers Project, thousands of humanists, writers, and artists were employed. And not just employed —they were charged with useful tasks to make sure America would still be America when and if the Great Depression abated. They made films and photographs that still inform us, sculptures and monuments that are part of our national identity. (The sculptor of Mount Rushmore spent a fair amount of time on the payroll of Federal One). Many of the great names of mid-century literature were on the “dole.” Historians were employed to archive courthouse records, record and write local histories—much of their work remains the most recent and accurate county histories in our various states.

In 2008–09, after the last economic crash, Ohio Humanities conducted a rephotographic survey of the Farm Security Administration photographs made in Ohio. In the aftermath of that recession, during visits to the places photographed between 1935 and 1939, our team of photographers met with people who wistfully remembered when the federal government cared enough to invest in their communities, in their culture, in their lives. In 2008, with the economy shredded and retirements ruined, Ohioans wanted a new New Deal.

In times like these, folks don’t think of culture as a priority. And yet, it is that very thing—marginalized on the priority list of need— to which people turn in troubled times, for solace and inspiration, for knowledge and wisdom, for what it means to be human and to be American. If a generation of humanists is swept away by the present calamity, if historical societies decay to red-brick rubble, if American culture is neglected now, what will be left on the other side of pandemic? A physically healthy population with no soul and no sense of itself? Americans emerged from the Great Depression with greater sense of themselves because of New Deal programs.

With CARES Act funding, we can emerge from this crisis with our national identity strong. Thanks to leadership in Congress, at the National Endowment, and from the Federation of State Humanities Councils, aid is on the way for cultural organizations across the country. This is our New Deal. This is the way to preserve what is best in America and make sure that as a nation, the memory of who we were and who we are will be intact for future generations.

Photo credits and information:

1. FSA (Farm Security Administration) borrower. Saint Mary’s County, Maryland by photographer John Vachon, 1940.

2. Woman making application for membership in Greenbelt medical association by photographer Marion Post Wolcott, 1939.

3. Bear Hill, Garrett County, Maryland. Cub Ryman, a ninety-four year-old native by photographer Arthur Rothstein, 1937.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed on our blog do not necessarily reflect the views or position of Maryland Humanities or our funders.

Dr. Angela Hooks edited a recently published anthology entitled Diary as Literature Through the Lens of Multiculturalism in America. Hooks writes about her passion for the diary and its value in literary scholarship, specifically as a way to expand scholarship about people who have been marginalized. Another one of her essays, entitled “Bringing the Diary into the Classroom,” was published in the peer-reviewed journal Currents in Teaching and Learning. 

My passion for diary writing transformed when I wanted to read the inner lives of diary writers who looked like me. During my research for African American diarists, I became fascinated with the genre of diary writing as a whole and in all forms: autobiography, memoir, letters, travel writing and novels, poems, and short stories. As a result, I was able to bring the concept into the classroom teaching both African American literature and multiculturalism in America through the lens of the diary.

Diaries may not seem to conform to literary expectations such as meandering plots, dead ends, and repetition; however, they manage to engage the reader, arouse empathy and elicit emotional responses that many may be more inclined to associate with works of fiction. Blurring the lines between literary genres, diary writing can be considered a quasi-literary genre that offers a unique insight into the lives of those we may have otherwise never discovered.

Therefore, curating and editing the recently published anthology, Diary as Literature Through the Lens of Multiculturalism in America (2020) expands the historically marginalized voice, illustrating how diary-keepers explore their identity and understand themselves, their relationships, and the world around them using the diary. Both creatives and scholars write about the lives they discovered in the pages of diaries.

Paige Mason, a doctoral student at Ohio University, writes about Lucius Clark Smith a nineteenth-century, teacher and farmer. Paige Mason looks at the historical conversation about labor, the Midwest, and vocation in Smith’s diary in her essay “A Lifetime of Sowing the Blues: Lucius Clark Smith: 1834-1915.” His diary entries reflect musings about the livelihood of soldiers with little interest in being a soldier. Instead, he chronicles his failures as a businessman and farmer along with his father’s travels.

Corey Greathouse, Associate Professor at Austin Community College, explores the emotional rollercoaster penned in William B. Gould’s diary in “Using Personal Diaries as a Site for Reconstructing African American History.” Greathouse notes that Gould’s diary has a “range of emotion that makes his writing an essential resource in reconstructing the lives of enslaved people.”

Not only does this collection of diary voices, side by side, document and demonstrate how social pressures and literary practices affect people despite race, culture, creed, or pedigree; it’s also an interdisciplinary dialogue on all aspects of writing: diaries, letters, autobiographies, and memoirs.

Through letters, Dr. Aisha Z. Cort, a lecturer at Howard University, pieces together “the fragments of her mother’s past with archival research and family interviews” in her personal narrative, “The Lost Girl of Havana: A Tale of Afro-Cuban Diasporic Memory.” Like the diary, the letter serves as an act of writing, and in that act, the letter writer like the diarist wishes “to rewrite themselves.”

This collection shows how the diary evolved and continues to evolve while remaining the same: space where one can reflect on the innermost part of themselves narrating ‘real fiction’ about their lives. Reading other people’s diaries can feel invasive and judgmental, but the contributors to this collection delicately peer through diary pages exploring and examining complications, aha moments and catastrophes of men and women, ordinary people and celebrities alike.

Twelve voices, both academic and creative, analyses diary writing in its many forms from oral diaries and memoirs to letters and travel writing in the multi-author anthology. Based on the diary, the contributors of Diary as Literature write about multiculturalism and intercultural relations during the Civil War experienced by African-Americans and Irish-Americans soldiers, through the lives of Afro-Cuban diaspora, within a New Englander’s cultural clash in the Appalachia, the hardships of a Bengali immigrant in New York City, and the “racial barriers as a false social construct to create multicultural identities.”

Because Diary as Literature Through the Lens of Multiculturalism in America blurs the genre line it  is divided into three sections: Diaries of the American Civil War, Diaries of Trips and Letters of Diaspora, and Diaries of Family, Prison Lyrics, and a Memoir. The contributors bring a range of expertise including comparative and transatlantic literature, composition and rhetoric, history, women, and gender studies.

When writing the introduction, I attempted to give a brief history of the diary and how it evolved over four centuries in America from spiritual matters of clergy to introspection of the ordinary person. Thomas Mallon, author of A Book of One’s Own People and Their Diaries, explains the diary began with the late sixteenth century reformed clergyman in East Anglican as a means of magnifying godliness, examining their conscience, and preparing for an encounter with God in prayer and communion.^[i] Evidence points to East Anglicans exchanging diaries with Puritan for edification of each other, a Christian principal throughout the Holy Writ. The exchange of diaries for edification shifted to a Protestant art form during the mid-seventeenth century. The Non-Conformist charted their spiritual progress in the diary as a space for self-discipline, self-judgement, and self-watching purposes.  Therefore, when the practice came to America the habit of diary keeping was no longer confined to the clergy but practiced by lay people, settlers, free, and enslaved Black Americans — people who wanted to discover who they really were, their inner lives. The diary evolved into what journal guru Ira Progoff described as a space to gain awareness about diverse areas of your life, connect to the real self, making possible our subjective experiences.

The idea to curate this book derived from a roundtable discussion at the 2019 NeMLA Conference and a course of the same name that I taught at Ramapo College of New Jersey. For more than three decades I have maintained a diary and since 2002 have led diary writing discussions and workshops in the community, college classrooms, and churches.

To read a sample chapter go to https://vernonpress.com/book/656.

Dr. Hooks is the recipient of the 2020 Princeton Theological Seminary Francis Grimke Scholarship Award where she will pursue a Masters in Divinity. She earned her doctoral degree in English Literature from St. John’s University, and her MFA from Manhattanville College in Purchase, NY.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed on our blog do not necessarily reflect the views or position of Maryland Humanities or our funders.

Eleven highway markers are being erected to highlight Maryland women, events, and landmarks involved in the suffrage movement. Jean Thompson is a volunteer writer with the Maryland Women’s Heritage Center: she works on the project documenting local suffragists. Thompson writes about the highway markers and highlights Black women suffragists in Baltimore who organized their own suffrage campaign due to racism within the suffrage movement led by white women.

 Thanks to detective work by a network of local historians, librarians, and volunteers, Maryland suffragists will be remembered when the nation commemorates the centennial of the passage of the 19^th Amendment.

Eleven highway markers are being erected to highlight Maryland women, events, and landmarks in the struggle to gain the right to vote. The markers expand Maryland’s footprint on the National Votes for Women Trail, a state-by-state effort organized by the National Collaborative for Women’s History Sites to recognize suffragists and their grassroots activism.

Baltimore’s first marker in the series honors Augusta T. Chissell and Margaret Gregory Hawkins, African-American leaders in women’s suffrage, civic improvement, and civil rights organizations. This Saturday, November 23, the marker will be unveiled at 1532 and 1534 Druid Hill Avenue, the former homes of Augusta Chissell and Margaret Gregory Hawkins.

With their West Baltimore neighbor Estelle Young, the women promoted voting rights through clubs they ran, including the Progressive Women’s Suffrage Club and the DuBois Circle. More than 100 years ago, the side-by-side homes of Chissell and Hawkins buzzed with political and social activism.

Baltimore was segregated and African-Americans were largely excluded from the predominantly white suffrage movement. Despite the movement’s “votes for all” rhetoric, many among the white leaders were willing to deny women of color the vote to curry support from Southern Democrats, who did not want African-American voter rolls to grow. Jim Crow laws were undermining suffrage won by African-American men with the passage of the 15^th Amendment in 1870. Recognizing that the vote was a tool of empowerment in the fight against discrimination and for better living conditions, the African-American women organized their own suffrage campaign.

Who Were They?

• Augusta T. Chissell (pictured right) was the secretary of the Progressive Women’s Suffrage Club, a devoted civic leader, and a member of the DuBois Circle. A networker, she used her connections on projects promoting social justice and the health and well-being of women and children. Following the passage of the 19^th Amendment, she wrote A Primer for Women Voters, a recurring column in the Baltimore Afro-American, “for the benefit of women who wish to inform themselves in regard to their newly acquired duties and privileges as voters and citizens.”

• In 1915, Estelle Hall Young founded the Progressive (or Colored) Women’s Suffrage Club, one of the earliest documented African-American suffrage clubs in the United States. She delivered speeches advocating equal rights for women at gatherings of African-American club women. During a 1916 meeting of the Women’s Co-operative Civic League with a reported attendance of 250 club representatives, Young presented on women’s suffrage, according to a news report in the Baltimore Afro-American. “The league went on record as supporting women’s suffrage,” the article continued. When the size of the Progressive Women’s Suffrage Club outgrew the leaders’ living rooms, meetings were held at the Colored Y.W.C.A. on Druid Hill Avenue. After the ratification of the 19^th Amendment in 1920, the Club then held voter education classes at the Y to inform new voters of how to access and effectively use their new right. The Young family’s home in the neighborhood no longer stands.

• Margaret Gregory Hawkins grew up in a family of distinguished African-American educators, whose activism spanned several generations. She was a founding member and first president of the DuBois Circle, which began as an auxiliary to the Baltimore branch of the Niagara Movement civil rights organization. The Circle’s members engaged in community and social improvement projects, welcomed prominent speakers to inform members about political issues, and devoted meetings to discussions about the significance of women’s suffrage. Hawkins, who became Vice President of the Progressive (or Colored) Women’s Suffrage Club, also opened her home for their meetings and for other civic organizations as well.

Restoring the faded tracks of trailblazers

There is a sense of urgency to the task of locating evidence of the work of Chissell, Hawkins, Young — and dozens of other Maryland suffragists. Whether these women were rural or urban, well-to-do or union wage-earners, mainstream or marginalized, gaps in their history are challenging. Diaries, letters, event programs, and other personal papers are elusive. Minutes of suffrage meetings, copies of speeches, and images of some participants have not been found.

“As we hurtle into the 21^st Century, the 20^th Century is becoming ‘ancient’ history,” said Ida Jones, Ph.D., university archivist at Morgan State University. Jones helped document the West Baltimore women’s roles in the suffrage movement. “In many cases, the buildings and the primary records that would be tangible evidence of Baltimore’s role in the local and national story of women’s suffrage may no longer exist,” she said. “If the records of the organizations were not preserved, or if there are no descendants to whom were passed documents, the voices of the activists are silenced when they pass on.”

Her concern was echoed by Kacy Rohn, whose 2017 research for the Maryland Historical Trust confirmed the Druid Hill Avenue site and others. She combed the writing of Maryland women’s historians Diane Weaver, Ph.D., and Jean Baker, Ph.D., plus census records, newspaper reports, city directories, and library resources. Rohn crisscrossed the state seeking potential landmarks. The dearth of prior documentation, she said, was stunning.

“What that told me was we as a society had completely forgotten about the local suffragists and their organizations,” Rohn said. “It really shocked me the extent to which it had been forgotten and not talked about.  I think we, as a society, have undervalued the contributions of women.”

Lessons from the struggle

In conjunction with the state’s 19th Amendment centennial celebration, six highway markers have been installed by the Maryland Historical Trust and Maryland Department of Transportation. Five additional markers have been sponsored by the Maryland Women’s Heritage Center (MWHC) and funded by the William G. Pomeroy Foundation. MWHC will place a marker at Goucher College in February 2020. Additional sites are being researched.

“Many people do not know that Baltimore was a major center of suffrage activism, host to national suffrage meetings and leaders, and the home of several suffrage clubs that sent representatives to the ends of the state, to the state legislature in Annapolis, and to Washington to organize support for the 19^th Amendment,“ said Diana M. Bailey, Executive Director of MWHC.  “With the Pomeroy Foundation’s support, we are preserving these stories of Marylanders and the lessons and legacy they left for us as voters today.”

The value of the companion research yielding previously untold stories cannot be measured.  For future generations, the suffragists’ stories are being preserved in local and national databases. The goal is a richer understanding of the political, social, racial, and economic struggle to achieve equal voting rights.

“Although some of us take our right to vote for granted, our history shows us that that right has not always been universal, and for many today it is still not easily available and is currently under major assault in several states,” said Pamela Young, Ph.D., a volunteer with the MWHC. “The history of universal suffrage in the U.S. has been a long-standing fight for equality that is not truly guaranteed to all. Thus, for those who may not know this history, we must continue the work of those foremothers on whose shoulders we stand, to ensure that this basic right be maintained and truly available to all. It seems that a “permanent” marker commemorating the work of two African-American suffragists is a fitting way to not only raise them up out of forgotten history but also to remind us that we should continue this work in their memory.”

Maryland Markers on the National Votes for Women Trail:

1. Westminster, Carroll County: Just Government League*
2. Still Pond, Kent County: Maryland’s First Women Voters*
3. Lexington Park, St. Mary’s County: Margaret Brent Pilgrimage*
4. Hyattsville, Prince George’s County: Suffrage Motorcade*
5. Overlea, Baltimore County: Women’s Suffrage*
6. Garrett County: The Garrett County Pilgrimage*
7. Baltimore: Augusta T. Chissell and Margaret Gregory Hawkins homes**
8.   Baltimore County: Goucher College (Dedication February 28, 2020) **
9. To be determined**
10. To be determined**
11. To be determined**

*Maryland State Highway Department, Maryland Historical Trust, Maryland’s Commission on the Commemoration of the 100th Anniversary of the Passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. **Maryland Women’s Heritage Center, William G. Pomeroy Foundation

IF YOU GO

Maryland Women’s Heritage Center welcomes the public to attend the dedication program for the Baltimore marker at 11 a.m. on Saturday, Nov. 23, 2019, at Union Baptist Church, 1219 Druid Hill Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21217. Participants will travel from the church to 1532 and 1534 Druid Hill Avenue for the unveiling of the marker. RSVP here.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed on our blog do not necessarily reflect the views or position of Maryland Humanities or our funders.

We recently spoke with Maryland author David Bruce Smith, who has just published Abigail & John, a children’s book about President John Adams and First Lady Abigail Adams. Smith’s mother, Clarice Smith, was the illustrator. David Bruce Smith also co-founded the Grateful American Book Prize with Bruce Cole, which recognizes excellence in non-fiction and historical fiction for seventh to ninth graders. He spoke with us about the importance of telling stories like John and Abigail’s and how to make those stories appealing to young readers.

Maryland Humanities: Why is it important to make a story like that of John and Abigail Adams accessible for young people?

David Bruce Smith: When I would visit Founding Father homes, regularly, I noticed over time that Mount Vernon was always referred to as “George Washington’s Mount Vernon,” and James Madison’s estate was called “James Madison’s Montpelier.” After a while, it bothered me, because little girls were being excluded; most likely, they thought of these historic homes only as places that once belonged to old men. It’s far better to be inclusive and recognize women’s contributions, because that gesture wraps more people into our history, and over time it might raise the country’s historical literacy.

The purpose of the Grateful American Book Series is to feature presidential/historical marriages that were partnerships. Abigail and John had a warm, intimate, loving relationship that was equal. She was also his most valued adviser and confidante.

MH: What impact do you hope your book will have on how young people take in the humanities?

DBS: The book contains many stories: Abigail’s raising the children alone, for very long periods, as John rose in politics; building a country together according to their principles and liking, and birthing John Quincy Adams who would become the sixth president.

MH: Why are personal relationships among historical figures— and not just political events—important?

DBS: If history is taught laden with dates and too many obscure events, you lose most of your audience. When I was in high school, I loved all my history classes, except one. The teacher sensed it, and one day, she called me to her desk, and said: “You have the wrong attitude. Remember: ‘history’ is ‘HIS—STORY;’ it’s just a gossip session.”

I never forgot that guidance, because it humanized everything that was to come.

Now, you hear two contradictory things about kids and history: the educators say kids don’t like history, or kids don’t know anything about it. I think if they don’t know something, it’s usually the fault of the system: there aren’t enough resources, there isn’t enough time spent on the material, or the teacher is inadequate.

The interesting thing is that many kids are naturally enticed by the subject. Think about the enormous popularity Ancestry.com and 23&Me. Millions have participated, gleefully. And that is history; it might be your history, but it’s a good place to start.

MH: What is the most important thing you learned while working on this book?

DBS: It is so important to understand how people from another time—like Abigail and John—lived and functioned, especially without any luxuries. Young people sometimes have to be taught to immerse themselves in a long-ago historical period.

When I was a little boy, I always imagined—I don’t know why—but I pictured the Paris airport filled with Phineas Fogg-like balloons, just like in Around The World In Eighty Days. All those years of “seeing” that in my mind was so much fun, even though the reality was nothing like it.

MH: What makes this book different and special? Why are books and stories like this important?

DBS: When my mother and I were researching our earlier children’s book about John Marshall, we noticed that great hunks of his life were skipped. The typical pattern of a biography for young people went something like this: subject is born; subject excels in school and gets into the best college or university; subject succeeds in his career, quickly; subject becomes famous/is adored; subject dies.

We didn’t want to construct either Marshall or Adams like that. Abigail & John is more realistic; their problems are included in the story, but in age-appropriate language.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed on our blog do not necessarily reflect the views or position of Maryland Humanities or our funders.

Stevenson University School of Design hosts Times of Perception, a multimedia exhibition that reflects on the experience of Japanese Internment, the Muslim Ban and the treatment of Muslims after the War on Terror. Curator Liz Faust discusses talks about the exhibition. 

The aphorism “Learn from the past or one is bound to repeat it” rings true to me while looking at the art on the walls at Stevenson for the Times of Perception exhibition. Artists and the works in the show illustrate their belief that even if the time itself has moved forward, our collective perceptions and treatment of those whom we view as different as us, as other, has not changed in essence.

A multi-media exhibition that is two years in the making, Times of Perception features eight artists who contemplate one of two historical events. Japanese and Japanese-American artists Nancy Chikaraishi, Kei Ito, and Wendy Marayuma reflect upon on the American government’s internment of Japanese and Japanese-Americans during World War II. Muslim artists Saks Afridi, Sobia Ahmad, Qinza Najm, Mary Tuma, and Azzah Sultan working through and commentating the Travel Ban, or more commonly known as the Muslim Ban, and the discrimination that many Muslims face in America post-9/11 and the War on Terror.

These two identities are not often linked for they have a smaller amount of contact with each than other groups. However, in the context of American-history the similarities are striking.

Since the beginning conception of Times of Perception, the topic has only become more relevant with time and often extends to even more groups and identities. All eight artists remind us that the term “Americans” oftentimes does not include all Americans.

It was important to me that this exhibition would be an art exhibition. What the artists are calling for is a call of empathy, compassion, and understanding of our fellow humans. Art can help us achieve this. Another important focus for me, was the connection between the past and present circumstances.

Kei Ito is a Japanese artist and a third generational victim of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. His piece, Only What We Can Carry, is a series of prints of Japanese Internment Camp (Civilian Exclusion Orders) posters exposed with various everyday objects, which represent what he would bring with him if he had one day to gather his belongings.

Chikaraishi and Marayuma’s parents were placed in internment camps. Chikaraishi’s piece contemplates and depicts daily scenes and sights from the internment camps. Marayuma’s The Tag Project consists of 120,000 replicas of the paper identification tags that internees were forced to wear when they were being relocated. Another piece, You’re a Sap, Mr. Jap, is covered in tarpaper, used in the construction of the camp barracks. A video monitor plays three WWII-era cartoons that depict stereotypes of Japanese people – similar to the ones that Marayuma remembers watching.

Mary Tuma’s work hangs a ghostly reminder of the missing bodies that would normally burkas, which we see in her piece. Homes for the disembodied speaks of the violence lobbied against Muslim and Muslim-American women and the many slenced voices.

Azzah Sultan’s two fiber-based artworks, Anak Mami and Home Sweet Home reflect upon the ideas of discrimination and identity. She explores her cultural identity in Anak Mami with photos of herself. The word Mamak is a term referring to the Indian Muslims who migrated from mostly South India to Malaysia, the first port of entry being Penang mostly around the twelfth to the eighteenth century. In Home Sweet Home, donated Hijabs of American-Muslim women that have been sewn together to form an American flag.

Qinza Najm is a Pakistani-Amerian artist and psychologist. Her interdisciplinary works explore the gendered violence as well as the social trauma of Muslim-American women. Najim created #BanNoMore in direct reaction to the Muslim Travel Ban. In other work of Najim’s in the show, she has painted over these two central rugs in order to obscure our view to convey a mindset that prevents us from seeing the beauty of the weaving beneath.

In We the People, Saks Afridi’s piece shows the phrase in calligraphy. In the negative space around the phrase, he places the calligraphy of the constitution translated into Urdu. “It serves as a reminder that it is immigrants who make up the ‘We’ in America. Most immigrants live in the negative spaces of society and yet it is they who make the fabric of this great nation,” he says. In Somewhere in America, an enlarged image of a book, he also wrote Arabic script and an English-to-Arabic transliteration of excerpts from Somewhere in America by Jay Z and refers to hip-hop as a “new gospel,” while mentioning the “new ideology” of white appropriation of hip hop.

Sobia Ahmad fled with her family from Pakistan to the United States when she was fourteen. Her piece Small Identities features ID photos transferred onto Islamic-shaped ‘Arabesque’ tiles, a popular interior decoration motif in American homes. Shortly after the Travel Ban, Ahmad began collecting passport-sized ID photos of her family, relatives, friends, and colleagues that are Muslim immigrants in the U.S. Soon, Ahmad learned that people were afraid to submit their photos, citing intense fear of violence and hatred. For every person who told her they were too afraid to submit their ID photo, she added a blank tile to the installation to represent them.

Times of Perception runs at Stevenson University’s Manning Academic Center on the Owings Mills Campus (11200 Gundry Lane) through October 26 and in Stevenson’s School of Design Gallery (11100 Ted Herget Way) through January 4.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed on our blog do not necessarily reflect the views or position of Maryland Humanities or our funders.

Natalie Elder is the Curator of Cultural Properties at the Chesney Medical Archives for Johns Hopkins Medicine, Nursing, and Public Health. Fitting with our water programming for 2019–2020, she shares her knowledge of health idioms that originated at sea.

There are a lot of phrases we use in conversation that to an outside observer would not make sense. Have you ever had a sudden cramp in your leg, often called a charley horse? Why on earth is it called that? Theories suggest it has an origin in baseball, but the jury is still out on how charley + horse came to stand in for a sudden, painful muscle cramp.

I keep a list of idioms regarding health, illness, and how we talk to each other about the way that we feel. I was looking over it and realized that quite a few of them relate to seafaring. Some of them seem obvious: a “clean bill of health” is an idiom that a non-native English speaker could probably figure out. But the story of this phrase has an interesting background. In previous centuries, the exact mechanism (bacteria and viruses) of the spread of contagious diseases was not understood. But ocean-going societies knew that disease spread quickly on a ship. If a ship called into port with sick passengers, soon people in the port city would also fall ill, even if they’d never been on that boat. To prevent this spread of disease, port officials required a clean bill of health from the ship. This bill, issued at the port of embarkation, attested that none of the passengers were ill when the ship began its journey. So if a doctor gives you a clean bill of health: it’s official; you’re healthy!

What about when you’re not feeling your best? A common phrase for when you’re a little ill is “under the weather.” Why should this mean feeling lousy? This phrase comes to us from sailors who are far from land. Rough weather at sea often causes sea-sickness. One of the ways to prevent this is to go below decks, removing yourself from the stormy weather that causes you to feel sick. Going below to get “under the weather” became shorthand for feeling unwell.

The next word is another for feeling not quite right. “I’m groggy” is something we say when we are a little tired and a little out of sorts. It sort of makes you think of being surrounded by fog. But its’ origins actually come from a sailor’s ration of watered rum, which sailors called “grog.” Seamen were entitled to a daily quantity of distilled spirits, which increased morale and served as a diversion from the regimented life on ship. Too much rum, whether imbibed on a ship or in a port of call, would produce a nasty hangover (a condition for which there are many funny idioms).  So it makes perfect sense that if you had too much grog, you’d be feeling tired and spacey—or groggy.

These are English words and phrases that communicate the state of the body and come to us from the things that people on ships felt and experienced. It’s not surprising that our language borrows so many idioms from sailing, as the British were a naval powerhouse over the last few centuries. The language of sailors is often colorful and efficient, which is what you would expect for close-quarters work under difficult conditions. Our every-day sayings have a rich history and these words and phrases tell us a lot about who we are and how our language is shaped.

Natalie was a recent guest on our Humanities Connection podcast. She talked about what items like a simple clothing accessory like these teach us about a person and organization’s past and how medical archives can help piece together someone’s story. Listen to her segment here. Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed on our blog do not necessarily reflect the views or position of Maryland Humanities or our funders.