Practices Encroaching on Modern Day

[Ian McWherter]

Re: Practices Encroaching on Modern Day

In the 1860s, nothing went to waste...

I wouldn't go so far as to say that. Those floor sweepings today are still re-used in many commercial products, so is sawdust, scrap metal, plastic, etc. Certainly material goods for members of the mid-19th century working class were recycled or repaired and things weren't necessarily as disposable as they are today, but there was an enormous amount of waste. I mean, we are talking about a capitalistic society right? Just talk to any Archaeologist who's dug period camp sites or privies, people threw away all sorts of things, including many items in perfectly good condition. Can you believe they just threw away those incredible cathedral pickle bottles once they were empty?:confused_

Mid-19th century Americans lived in a materialistic consumer society and waste was as much of a problem then as it is now, the big difference today is there's far more human beings on the planet contributing to the problem.

I think many of us get nostalgic about the past and like to think somehow that the world our mid-19th century ancestors lived in was free from many of the "sins" of our present world. Truth is, the more you study the past the more you realize that there's really nothing new under the sun. They struggled with many (most) of the same problems we do today.

[ElizabethClark]

Re: Practices Encroaching on Modern Day

I need to "ditto" Mr McWherter... good thoughts, well-stated. Thanks!

We've used 19th century skills in modern life a lot, from seed-saving, to home clothing production. (I don't darn cotton socks. Wool ones, it's likely, but I'm just as likely to bribe my Mom to take out the feet and re-knit the heels.) We re-sole shoes, too.

One storm, when we lived in the Coast Range in Oregon, we lost power for several days in winter. Our neighbors below came up on the second day, and invited us down to share their wood heat and a meal. We did... and took along fresh-baked bread and a pie, baked in Dutch ovens used as ovens, rather than stew-pots. Some old skills come in handy!

[Hank Trent]

Re: Practices Encroaching on Modern Day

but there was an enormous amount of waste. I mean, we are talking about a capitalistic society right? Just talk to any Archaeologist who's dug period camp sites or privies, people threw away all sorts of things, including many items in perfectly good condition. Can you believe they just threw away those incredible cathedral pickle bottles once they were empty?:confused_

And I'd say something else they wasted--more than we do--was human labor, because it was so cheap. Some of it was because there wasn't any choice (a laundress instead of a washing machine, for example, or hand-labor on a farm before more machinery came along).

But some of it was just plain waste because "that's the way things are done."

Consider buying something at a big city store then. You go into the store, and a doorman opens the door. You want to shop, but you can't look for yourself. A clerk brings you the things to see. Then you pay, and a cash boy or girl runs the cash. You can't carry your package home--oh no. A boy delivers it to your address.

Compare that to shopping in a mall today. Today, the only person who has to do any work for you is the clerk at the register, unless you use a self-checkout or specifically need help. The Walmart greeter is the last vestige of that army of people who used to seem necessary for a simple transaction.

Older people even today can probably recall other examples of that mindset which lingered well into the 20th century. Elevator attendants? Doormen? Bathroom attendants?? Since when can't a person push a button, or open a door, or... whatever it was that bathroom attendants did? Just plain ostentatious waste of human labor.

Hank Trent
hanktrent@gmail.com

[Craig L Barry]

Re: Practices Encroaching on Modern Day

I get your point, but these activities are only wasted labor from a modern perspective. Certainly there is no arguing with the efficiency of the modern model. That wasted labor used to be called "service" and the people who provided it had "jobs."

[Hank Trent]

Re: Practices Encroaching on Modern Day

I get your point, but these activities are only wasted labor from a modern perspective. Certainly there is no arguing with the efficiency of the modern model. That wasted labor used to be called "service" and the people who provided it had "jobs."

That's certainly true--it's a modern perspective. As a modern person, I don't want to pay somebody to do something I could do myself, just as an amenity or for show. (Productive work that I can't do myself due to lack of skill or time, sure, no problem.)

Or maybe it's not a modern perspective. Maybe it's just the Jacksonian anti-class common-man attitude finally taken to extremes, that I don't want doors held and things brought to me, because I don't want to live in a society split into people who work as servants vs. people who pay to be served just for the sake of being served.

So can I pick the Jacksonian era's ideal as my period practice encroaching on the modern day? :)

Hank Trent
hanktrent@gmail.com

[CJDaley]

Re: Practices Encroaching on Modern Day

We living a in a disposable society.

People don't fix t-shirts, they wash the car with them, then toss them away.

People don't fix computers or TVs they just toss them away and buy a new one from Wallymart.

People think an 8 year old car is an antique.

I don't believe this BS that 'they don't make things like they used to', they always have made crappy products, but we're just taking the path of least resistance by replacing instead of repairing.


As to the comments about reenactor survivor skills. Yup, I think we can certainly get by with short term (up to 2 weeks) disasters. I know people who were homeless after Katrina who did well with "A" tents and wool blankets.

Long term survivor skills? Most of us would be dead within a month.
Few reenactors can start a fire without a match.
Few of us know when/where/how to plant a crop for food.
Few of us know how to kill/skin/preserve meat.
Few of us can keep our houses warm without a fire place.
Few of us can travel 100 miles from our home without gasoline.

These are all skills our 19th century counter parts would have had, but we fail to see beyond the narrow scope of a 3-4 day event.

[gschult3]

Re: Practices Encroaching on Modern Day

All – an interesting thread. My main modern practical cross-over is hand-hemming all my suit trousers for work, an easy project and can get the perfect length without paying someone to do it. Regarding lifestyle I like to occasionally employ my reprint period cook books and the results are great, a very different set of flavors in many cases. Also my surroundings at home are resplendent with Victorian antique & repro furniture, carpets, wall art, decorative items and such. This helps to create a relaxing and familiar historical vibe on a daily basis in some measure. Funny how my historical interests in many ways do, in fact, become a lifestyle of sorts.

[Becky Morgan]

Re: Practices Encroaching on Modern Day

I have the fire starting, crop planting, meat preservation (especially if you let me can it), and travel. The "no fireplace" has me stumped. I can fire a wood or coal stove, and used to every winter until we got propane two years ago. Does that count?

[Motown]

Re: Practices Encroaching on Modern Day

I've greatley enjoyed this thread. Working in the museum field, I can say that despite my best efforts not to, I more often than not find myself thinking with period methods, techniques, etc. The Living History field has given me valuable lessons and I answered yes to most of Mr Daley's list of questions.

I can't sew, knit, cook, can, or most other domestic hosehold things of the period. About the only thing I can do is wax eggs. I have an idea and with the proper research and practice I'm sure I can learn. But I don't really want to.

I can harness a team of draft horses (I prefer percherons). I can plow a field if I have to. I know how to operate antiquated farm equipment. I can till soil and raise a crop if I had to. Do I want to? In a way, yes. It's fun. I have a great interest in nearly all forms of matierial and social culture from nearly any time period in American(!) history. I find it interesting and for the most part fun. I'm lucky (some would say) to have a job where I'm able to do many period things on a daily basis. Outside of a work setting my interest continues. But only to an certain extent. I like going "home" to the comforts of the 21st century.

I would like to ask those reading thier reasons for practicing techniques, methods, etc from the period in Modern Life. Tradition? Habbit? Like me and just for fun? The belief that the 19th century was somehow better? I mean no offense by this, I'm just curious and interested in picking at the minds of others.

And I've never understood those who wear greatcoats and slouch hats out in public, but I have my own reasons for that

Thanks,

[Hank Trent]

Re: Practices Encroaching on Modern Day

Just to look at this from a slightly different angle... We tend to picture 19th century people as all country people who lived off the land, so "period skills" are skills that most resemble that. Maybe it's because those skills are easier to practice in isolation, while other period skills are just, well, not possible to apply anymore. Or maybe it's because one can feel that those kinds of period skills might still be practical today, while others are useless. Or maybe it's because old fashioned people tend to be country people, so we picture the most old fashioned people we know and think of them as having the last vestiges of period skills.

But how many of us could do the following as if it was second nature...?

--Get on an omnibus, pay correctly, and make the right changes if necessary get from one destination to another in your home city.

--Find a telegraph office and send a telegram to someone, knowing what to tell the clerk about the address, how to handle the reply if any, expect what it would cost, etc.

--Enroll in a college in 1861, following the proper procedures, and arrange for living quarters, lecture schedule, payment, etc.

--Avoid common scams and swindles: the wallet drop, pickpockets, counterfeit money, way overpriced second-hand goods, etc.

--Walk into a public library to find a book and know how to do it and what to expect.

--Pay by cash or check or account, know what bills might be discounted, present a store passbook for recording, open a bank account, and in general do large and small everyday financial transactions.

For somebody living in a city then or now, using a scythe or keeping a garden would mean little, but the things above would be basic survival skills for Young America. :)

Hank Trent
hanktrent@gmail.com

[Motown]

Re: Practices Encroaching on Modern Day

No one lived in cities back then...

A very good point made. I've often wondered why it is engrained in the American psyche that in the until World War I, everyone lived like the Laura Ingills Wilder wrote about. I think I may have just answered my own question.

I believe that it is nothing more than a popular myth that the majority of Americans carved thier own existence out of the wilderness and that somehow the industrial-based, consumer driven economy is somehow a modern encroachment on a better, more simpler time. The exampled that Mr. Trent has given are not disimilar to everyday problems and issues that effect us today.

Where did the idea that the past was drastically differant and somehow better originate and why has it been propogated?

[Becky Morgan]

Re: Practices Encroaching on Modern Day

It all depends on where you are and exactly when. What we're seeing in 1861 is the westward motion of the American frontier. What services would we have chosen to buy, and which would we have done for ourselves? That would depend on where and WHEN we were. After all, there wouldn't be a whole lot of need to skin a beef if you were living in Manhattan and had a trade other than the butchering business. On the other hand, if you were in one of the remote edges of white settlement--or if you were Native and not confined to a res--you would NEED to know that. The same goes with raising a large crop. In Boston, odds are you weren't going to plow up forty acres and put in wheat. If you were on an Iowa farm, you'd better have taken care of that and a good deal more. Many parts of this country, including where I live, were one generation removed from the frontier, while others had no living memory of a time before the city and still others were inhabited by roaming tribes who still made a living from bison. There wasn't a single American reality, any more than there is today despite Hollywood's best efforts.

Local custom does seem to have been much more prevalent than it is now, so knowing how to negotiate the New York omnibus might not serve for the same task in Philadelphia. I might be in more dubious circumstances because of my gender. In some places, it might have been be acceptable for me to be out on the street alone at midday. In others, people might have looked askance at an unaccompanied middle-aged woman getting on a public conveyance. Depending on where I was, I might expect to go to the market myself or to have things delivered without venturing out (or, in the local case, to send my, or someone else's, otherwise unoccupied boy to the corner store.) Never mind clothing or time-specific slang; knowing the local expectations and performing in an unobtrusive way would be the greatest challenge for a time-traveler who wished to remain undiscovered.

Next we have the issues that ultimately caused the unpleasantness: industrial versus plantation society, huge farms versus small ones, immigrants versus "native Americans" (in the old sense of those whose families had settled here more than a generation back). It's even a mistake to refer to "New Yorkers" as a great homogenous mass. The Irish who had been here a while were not pleased to be lumped in with the new immigrants; the Germans were a separate affair; the New York Jews were not united, but divided into the long-established Sephardim and the newly immigrating Ashkenazi refugees, and the latter might be fleeing a half-dozen countries with a half-dozen languages and dialects of Yiddish. Even in rural areas, kinds and classes of people might cross paths with varying frequency; part of Mom's family were farmers here as they had been in Switzerland, mining coal as the opportunity arose to make some hard cash, and they really did need the skill set we've discussed. Dad's people were mechanics. They worked on everything from mining equipment to steamboats. They generally lived in or near small towns and would have had a hard time learning to farm without help. Both families visited large cities, but were never comfortable there. By the same token, some of the founders of our small settlement came from Westchester County and kept ties to larger cities, where most of their descendants moved as time and money allowed because they preferred city and suburban life.

When the call to arms came, most companies, and even regiments, formed in relatively small and cohesive areas. It took the devastating losses of the early war and the subsequent regrouping of broken bits to mix Americans from varying areas. Notice how often a diarist expresses surprise at the customs of some newly arrived unit or batch of recruits. (By the way, regionalism was still alive and well eighty years later; look at the cliche World War II novel in which the sensitive young writer from the city is thrown together with a profane millworker, a lumberjack, a farm boy...) All of the new citizen-soldiers had to learn a new skill set. Those who knew how to butcher a hog had to find out how to cook one reduced to a square of fat bacon. Judging by diarists, experiments in home heating carried off more than a few winter huts. The discomfort of women at home faced with taking care of business--especially in areas where that was Not Done--the disquieting need to have young women do war work, and having to figure out what made that acceptable and how it could be made to look decent according to the custom of the place, and the need, at least in the South, to work around shortages and utter unavailability of accustomed goods and services, all shaped the coutry that was to come.

[Hank Trent]

Re: Practices Encroaching on Modern Day

But how many of us could do the following as if it was second nature...?

And in the spirit of the this thread, here's a period practice I apply: traveling by public transportation overland for long distances.

Most events I go to are too close (and too expensive) to fly to, but far enough that I don't want to leave my wife without a car for four or five days if she stays home. I hate driving long distances by myself anyway.

So for example, I went to Louisiana last year, two days and a night on the train each way, then the local bus to get across town, walked four miles from one hotel to another when I had to stay an extra day because the event ended early.

More recently, I took the bus to Georgia, with a six-hour layover in Atlanta. Walked around downtown Atlanta wearing my Federal sack coat to see the sights and kill time. The bad news was that it was the bad part of town. Somebody tried to sell me a stolen necklace and somebody else tried to sell me drugs. The good news was that it was the black part of town, so if some neo-Confederate recognized my coat and tried to give me a hard time, he would have been outnumbered. :D

Traveling long distances overland isn't really period, of course, but it's not all that common either. People either fly fairly quickly or drive. It's a different experience to spend days and nights traveling among strangers. I enjoy being among different people, seeing new things, and the adventure of it all, despite the annoyances, but a lot of people tell me they couldn't stand it, or they'd be afraid of the people or the downtown city stations. If you read some period accounts of drunks, pickpockets, swindlers and beggars at stations in the period, though, it hasn't changed much.

Hank Trent
hanktrent@gmail.com

[VMurphy]

Re: Practices Encroaching on Modern Day

At the risk of dating myself, I will say yes, yes, and yes.. I was raised by parents and grandparents that went through the Great Depression! Need I say more!? :( My lifestyle, although very modern definitely has the conservative traits of my 19c. ancestors.
I sleep in my wool socks,and have one of my wool comforters on my bed! I love it. There are several darning eggs in my sewing basket and many of my socks have darning on the heels. My chemises have so many patches on them, I'm embarresed for others to see them. (you know the adege"the seamstress is so busy, she has no time to sew for herself",lol

I don't have patches on any modern clothing, but wouldn't hesitate to patch my favorite pair of jeans when they spring a hole.


Being an overly wealthy throw away society has gotten us in a lot of trouble. I know instilled some of the old ways to my children and they both have the benefits of both attitudes.

Cooking from scratch is another 19c. tool that is very helpful in todays world. How many of us carry that over into our modern lives?

Vivian Murphy

http://www.themantuamaker.net

[Emily Burns]

Re: Practices Encroaching on Modern Day

Faded living room curtains went into the washing machine last night with some rit dye, I prefer to recycle and re-use whatever I can. I keep a couple of small gourds in my sewing basket to do my darning. Seems foolish not to make our 18th and 19th century garments last as long as we can. Chemises and dresses are patched. Sometimes in really horrific ways. Don't look too close. But, then, I've noticed some really horrific repair jobs in originals, too.

It's the small things like these that really make me appreciate the way life might have been.