Marchand Archive

Great Falls Manufacturing Company, Somersworth, NH, c. 1840

Image ID: 8323

Collection: Karen Halttunen

Topic(s): Nineteenth Century, Lowell, Architecture, Business 19th century, Early mills and factories, Early National Period, Emerging industrial city, Environmental History, Industrial Revolution, Invention, Labor, National Events, Success 19th century, Sweatshops, Technology, Urbanization, Work and Workers

Region(s): United States

CA Standard(s): 8.6 - The divergent paths of the American people from 1800 to the mid-1800s...with emphasis on the Northeast. , 5.8 - The colonization, immigration, and settlement patterns of the American people from 1789 to the mid-1800s..., 8.4 - The aspirations and ideals of the people of the new nation

National Standard(s): Revolution and the New Nation (1754-1820s) , Expansion and Reform (1801-1861), Civil War and Reconstruction (1850-1877)

Clock Shop Sign with Eagle, c. 1875

Image ID: 8302

Collection: Karen Halttunen

Topic(s): Nineteenth Century, Industrial Revolution, Americanization and Political Activity, Ancient History, Arts and Architecture, Business 19th century, Columbian Exchange, Corporate Image, Developing Nations, Early Images -- America, Early National Period, Environmental History, Individualism, Technology, Luxury, Market Economy, Middle-Class Culture, Mythology, Naive Art, National Politics, Nature and Civilization, Nineteenth Century Furniture, Politics & Government, Revolution to 1880, Roman, Statuary, Stores, Symbols, Trade, US Nationalism, Work and Workers

Region(s): United States

CA Standard(s): 8.6 - The divergent paths of the American people from 1800 to the mid-1800s...with emphasis on the Northeast. , 8.4 - The aspirations and ideals of the people of the new nation, 8.5 - U.S. foreign policy in the early Republic, 8.9 - The early and steady attempts to abolish slavery and to realize the ideals of the Declaration of Independence.

National Standard(s): Civil War and Reconstruction (1850-1877) , The Development of the Industrial United States (1870-1900)

Card Text: Clock shop sign, eagle with watch, c. 1875. Folk art. Nineteenth-century signboards usually combined symbols and texts but many, like this sign, lacked wording altogether. Strictly pictorial signage was quite effective. Inns, taverns, and other businesses depended heavily on word of mouth. Anyone who needed this proprietor's services or goods would have been directed readily to "the sign of the eagle." Business owners' names usually appeared in broadsides and newspaper notices but often ran last, in small typeface, almost as afterthoughts, with primary focus being given to the businesses' symbols. Wordless signage had a distinct advantage: when the business changed hands, costly re-lettering was unnecessary. Some eagles functioned as multi-purpose trade signs. Obviously, the owner of this eagle sign was a proud patriot, eager to attract a like-minded clientele. A spread eagle bearing a striped shield on its chest was the central motif of the Great Seal of the United States of America adopted in 1782; soon thereafter, the image gained recognition as a symbol of the new nation. In the early years of the American nation, the need for a national symbol was acutely felt. The new nation appropriated many existing symbolic forms, but none were to become as pervasive as the eagle. Before the eagle was officially sanctioned as the symbol for the United States, a partially clothed indigenous woman wearing a feather headdress had served that function. This representation soon gave way to goddess-like personifications of the social virtues upon which the United States was founded. In 1776, the Continental Congress appointed a committee to design an official seal for the country to accompany its newly minted flag. Finally, in 1782, a design was accepted. Its main feature was an eagle, the ancient symbol of Jupiter, king of the gods, and, therefore, a symbol of ultimate authority. The young nation was eager to model many of its institutions on the Roman Republic, so the eagle, proposed by Pennsylvania scholar William Barton, seemed a natural choice despite Benjamin Franklin’s preference for the turkey. Charles Thomson, secretary of the Continental Congress, modified the design by inserting an American bald eagle, blending the classical symbol with a species native to the New World. That eagle holds arrows in one claw and an olive branch in the other, symbolizing its birth in warfare but its hope for a prosperous, peaceful nation. In 1783, at the end of the American Revolution, the Treaty of Paris officially recognized the country as a sovereign, united whole. Symbols of unity proliferated as a result, and the eagle, with its majestic, visually simple form, served as the dominant emblem. The eagle, a predatory bird, was an appropriate symbol of American military and economic prowess. Most early depictions of the American eagle showed an immature, somewhat gawky animal with a small wingspan. As time progressed and the new nation matured into its place in the world, the eagle developed into a bold, imperial bird. This gilded wooden eagle exemplifies this new, majestic type of representation that also proliferated in domestic decorative arts. All over the new nation, the bald eagle was incorporated into designs for furniture, architecture, textiles, metalwork, and porcelain. Today, the eagle remains one of the most prevalent symbols of the nation. From its genesis as an inelegant bird with a small wingspan, it has evolved into the magnificent form that graces the Seal of the United States today.

Rail Truck, 19th c.

Image ID: 8231

Collection: Karen Halttunen

Topic(s): Nineteenth Century, Transportation, British Empire, Business 19th century, Class Separation, Coal, Developing Nations, Early mills and factories, Early National Period, Emerging industrial city, Environmental History, Expansion, Future Progress, Imperialism, Industrial Revolution, Invention, Labor, Luxury, Market Economy, Middle-Class Culture, National Events, Nationhood, Nature and Civilization, Popular recreation 1870-1920, Railroad and steamboat, Railroads, Social Disorder, Success 19th century, Symbols of mass society, Technology, Trade, Urbanization, Victorian Culture, Victorian Death, Working Conditions

Region(s): Europe, United States

CA Standard(s): 8.6 - The divergent paths of the American people from 1800 to the mid-1800s...with emphasis on the Northeast. , 5.8 - The colonization, immigration, and settlement patterns of the American people from 1789 to the mid-1800s..., 8.10 - The multiple causes, key events, and complex consequences of the Civil War, 8.11 - The character and lasting consequences of Reconstruction, 8.12 - The transformation of the American economy and the changing social and political conditions…in response to the Industrial Revolution, 10.10 - Nation-building in the contemporary world in the Middle East, Africa, Mexico and other parts of Latin America, and China, 10.11 - The integration of countries into the world economy and the information, technological, and communications revolutions , 10.3 - The effects of the Industrial Revolution in England, France, Germany, Japan, and the United States. , 10.4 - Global change in the era of New Imperialism in Africa, Southeast Asia, China, India, Latin America, and the Philippines, 10.5 - The causes and course of the First World War, 11.2 - The the relationship among the rise of industrialization, large-scale rural-to-urban migration, and massive immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, 11.4 - The rise of the United States to its role as a world power in the twentieth century

National Standard(s): Expansion and Reform (1801-1861), Civil War and Reconstruction (1850-1877) , The Development of the Industrial United States (1870-1900) , The Emergence of Modern America (1890-1930), An Age of Revolutions, 1750-1914

Card Text: Rail trucks are swiveling carriages with four or six wheels beneath the front part of a locomotive or one end of a railway car. They allow rail cars to turn tight curves. In 1864 more than 10,000 miles of railway track stretched across Britain, linking great cities, suburbs, and remote countryside towns. Trailing smoke and steam in its wake, the train had compressed the time it once took to journey in a horse-drawn coach from hours into minutes. It had broadened the horizons of every class of British citizen, redefining labor and the transport of goods, becoming vital to both business and recreation. Since the days of railway madness in the late 1830s and mid-1840s, a wave of speculation and construction had caused a vast network of steel to transform the landscape. Tracks ran over rivers, spanned busy streets and shady lanes, cut swaths through fertile pastures, curved through lonely moorland and even crossed wide stretches of water by means of floating jetties or the iron span bridges constructed by the age's great engineers. Steam power dazzled, and mid-Victorians wondered and enthused at its vigor, energy and spirit. Emblematic of technocratic success, of enterprise, endurance, adventure and civilization, trains delivered cotton to boats heading for China and India, they brought wool to Yorkshire and coal to the factories fueling the industrial revolution. They took the post, delivered the exotic goods arriving in British docks from all over the world to shops in towns and villages, and enabled businesses to find new markets for their products. They spread the news of national and international events to the very edges of the country and they allowed Victorians to pursue their lives more quickly than ever had been imagined possible, encouraging leisure excursions among people who had hitherto rarely left the safety of their county boundaries. Railroad timetables forced the standardization of time across the nation, enshrining speed as the new principle of public life; vast clocks adorned the facades of stations and it became commonplace to assert that train journeys had "annihilated time." To a society caught between conservatism and progress, the railways fostered ambiguous reactions. In the whistle and shriek of every approaching engine was evidence of rapid social and technological change. The stations, viaducts and embankments turned modest towns into sprawling cities and created startling new wealth. They were liberating, but they also devoured rural communities and displayed a perilous carelessness for human life - wheels ran off tracks, axles broke, boilers burst and there were countless collisions. Woven into the excitement of railway travel, a corresponding nervousness developed about the loss of individual control. The sense of being trapped in a box-like compartment, whirled along at speed and treated like just one in a stream of disposable, moveable goods was disorienting and even threatening. Deafening noise confounded the ears, speed taxed the eyes and vibrations had an adverse effect on both the brain and the skeleton. By the 1860s novelists had been exploring the public's deepening apprehensions about the relentlessness of progress, technology and modernity for two decades. Collapsing time with such ease, they questioned whether the railways might annihilate the human spirit with equal success.

Tumbledown Mansion - The House of Farmer Slack, 1840

Image ID: 8305

Collection: Karen Halttunen

Topic(s): Nineteenth Century, Industrial Revolution, Industrialization, Agriculture

Region(s): United States

CA Standard(s): 8.12 - The transformation of the American economy and the changing social and political conditions…in response to the Industrial Revolution, 8.4 - The aspirations and ideals of the people of the new nation

National Standard(s): Expansion and Reform (1801-1861)

Woodwork, S.S. Ticonderoga, Lake Champlain, 1906-53

Image ID: 8222

Collection: Karen Halttunen

Topic(s): Nineteenth Century, Transportation, Arts and Architecture, Business 20th century, Coal, Conservation, Environmental History, Fifties, Gilded Age, Industrial Revolution, Labor, Luxury, Middle-Class Culture, Nature and Civilization, Popular recreation 1870-1920, Popular recreation since 1920, Railroad and steamboat, Recreation - upper class, Symbols, Technology, Victorian Culture

Region(s): United States

CA Standard(s): 8.6 - The divergent paths of the American people from 1800 to the mid-1800s...with emphasis on the Northeast. , 8.12 - The transformation of the American economy and the changing social and political conditions…in response to the Industrial Revolution, 11.4 - The rise of the United States to its role as a world power in the twentieth century, 11.8 - The economic boom and social transformation of post-World War II America

National Standard(s): The Emergence of Modern America (1890-1930), The Great Depression and World War II (1929-1945), Postwar United States (1945 to early 1970s)

Card Text: Woodwork in S.S. Ticonderoga, side-paddle-wheeler, Lake Champlain, 1906-53. The Ticonderoga is one of two remaining side-paddle-wheel passenger steamers with a vertical beam engine of the type that provided freight and passenger service on America's bays, lakes and rivers from the early 19th to the mid-20th centuries. Ticonderoga was built in 1906 at the Shelburne Shipyard in Shelburne, Vermont on Lake Champlain. The ship is 220 feet in length and 59 feet in beam, with a displacement of 892 tons. Its steam engine, handmade by the Fletcher Engine Company of Hoboken, NJ, was powered by two coal-fired boilers and could reach a speed of 17 miles per hour (27 km/h) (14.77 knots). The ship's crew numbered 28, including the captain, pilots, mate, deckhands, engineers, and firemen. The purser, stewardess, freight clerk, bartender, hall boys, cook, waiters, and scullion and mess boys attended to passengers and freight arrangements. Initially, Ticonderoga served a north-south route on Lake Champlain, docking daily at Westport, NY, where it met the New York City evening train. The next morning it carried travelers and freight north to St. Albans, VT. In addition to passengers, Ticonderoga regularly transported local farm produce, livestock, and dry goods, and during both world wars ferried US troops between Plattsburgh, NY, and Burlington, VT. Over the years it also operated on the east-west run from Burlington to Port Kent, NY, and briefly served as a floating casino. When modern ferries made it obsolete, Ticonderoga persisted in operation for several years as an excursion boat, but by 1950 the decline in business threatened its future. Ralph Nading Hill saved Ticonderoga from the scrap heap when he persuaded Electra Havemeyer Webb to buy it for her growing museum in Shelburne. However, the steamboat era had passed, making it difficult to find qualified personnel to operate and maintain the aging vessel. In 1954 the Shelburne Museum moved Ticonderoga overland to the museum grounds. At the end of the summer season the boat paddled into a newly dug water-filled basin off Shelburne Bay and floated over a railroad carriage resting on specially laid tracks. The water was pumped out of the basin and Ticonderoga settled onto the railroad carriage. In 1955 Ticonderoga was hauled across highways, over a swamp, through woods and fields, and across the tracks of the Rutland Railway to reach its permanent mooring on the Shelburne Museum grounds. Much of its interior was restored to its original grandeur: The dining room and stateroom halls retain their butternut and cherry paneling, and ceilings their gold stenciling. The barbershop, captain's quarters, dining room, and promenade deck contain furniture and accessories used in Ticonderoga and other Lake Champlain steamboats. Today, Ticonderoga portrays life on board in 1923. The ship’s carved and varnished woodwork, gilded ceilings, staterooms, grand staircase, and dining room evoke the elegance of steamboat travel. The many visitors freely explore the ship’s four decks, massive engine, pilot house, galley, and crew’s quarters. Ticonderoga was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1964.

Portrait of a Woman, c. 1835

Image ID: 8383

Collection: Karen Halttunen

Topic(s): Nineteenth Century, Domesticity, Arts and Architecture, Class and Status, Early National Period, Family to 1920, Jacksonian Era, Luxury, Middle-Class Culture, Naive Art, Nineteenth Century Furniture, Nineteenth Century Interiors, Popular recreation to 1865, Victorian Culture, Whites, non planters ante bellum, Women's image

Region(s): United States

CA Standard(s): 8.1 - Major events preceding the founding of the nation and the development of American constitutional democracy, 5.8 - The colonization, immigration, and settlement patterns of the American people from 1789 to the mid-1800s..., 8.4 - The aspirations and ideals of the people of the new nation, 8.6 - The divergent paths of the American people from 1800 to the mid-1800s...with emphasis on the Northeast.

National Standard(s): Expansion and Reform (1801-1861)

The Household as Factory, England, 18th c.

Image ID: 8261

Collection: Karen Halttunen

Topic(s): 18th Century Cities, 18th Century Families, 18th Century Interiors, Arts and Architecture, British Empire, Business 19th century, Child labor, Class Separation, Colonial America, Domesticity, Early mills and factories, Early National Period, Emerging industrial city, Environmental History, Family to 1920, Individualism, Technology, Labor, Market Economy, Nineteenth Century Children, Parents, Children, Families, Pre-Industrial Work - Misc., Sweatshops, Technology, Urban poverty, Women's work, Working Class Culture

Region(s): Europe, North America, United States

CA Standard(s): 8.6 - The divergent paths of the American people from 1800 to the mid-1800s...with emphasis on the Northeast. , 5.8 - The colonization, immigration, and settlement patterns of the American people from 1789 to the mid-1800s...

National Standard(s): An Age of Revolutions, 1750-1914, Colonization and Settlement (1585-1763), Revolution and the New Nation (1754-1820s) , Expansion and Reform (1801-1861)

Card Text: "The Household as Factory," an 18th-century English family making textiles. Before the Industrial Revolution, many products were manufactured in homes or small workshops. All types of goods were hand-made by the piece, including nails, lace, stockings, shoes and textiles. Historians today commonly call this home-based labor process the "Domestic System." It was extremely popular in England, where woolen cloth was made. Merchant-employers “put out” materials like raw wool to rural producers, called "outworkers," to turn into cloth. Family members typically worked together side by side and their pets often stayed in the room with them. As shown above, the woman of the family spins the wool that her husband and children then weave into textiles. Most cloth was made from wool and cotton, but silk and flax were used as well. The three main stages of cloth-making were carding, spinning and weaving. Generally, the children of the family washed the wool and carded (combed) it for their mothers to spin into yarn. The women passed it on their husbands, who wove the yarn into cloth with a hand-powered loom. This work was usually combined with farming, as many families had access to a small plot of land for growing vegetables and raising hens, goats and cows. Working days under the domestic system were extremely long, and making money was difficult. However, some families could tailor their working hours to their needs, unlike workers in the first factories. This household-as-factory system was not as efficient as industrial factories, but it was less stressful for the workers and their quality of life was far superior. The system failed, however, due to growing populations and factory owners' demands for quantity rather than quality of goods. When the factory system was introduced, domestic textile production became too expensive. Factories could operate more cheaply and the business inevitably fell on the shoulders of the factory owners, who often made large profits. It is ironic that much 21st-century industry has now gone full circle with large corporations allowing flexible working hours and laborers to work from home. Some companies also allow work performed "virtually" from workers' homes, reducing overhead and often improving productivity. Woodcut.

Humphrey, Miss Muffet's Birthday Party, NY, 1894

Image ID: 8387

Collection: Karen Halttunen

Topic(s): Nineteenth Century, Domesticity, Arts and Architecture, Children, Chromes, Class and Status, Cooption of styles, Dolls, Games 19th century, Gilded Age, Luxury, Middle-Class Culture, Nationhood, Nineteenth Century Children, Nineteenth Century Furniture, Nineteenth Century Interiors, Overcivilization, Popular recreation 1870-1920, Pro feminist and suffrage, Recreation - upper class, Upper Class since 1865, Victorian Culture, Women's misc.

Region(s): United States

CA Standard(s): 8.6 - The divergent paths of the American people from 1800 to the mid-1800s...with emphasis on the Northeast. , 8.12 - The transformation of the American economy and the changing social and political conditions…in response to the Industrial Revolution, 11.2 - The the relationship among the rise of industrialization, large-scale rural-to-urban migration, and massive immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe

National Standard(s): The Development of the Industrial United States (1870-1900) , The Emergence of Modern America (1890-1930), An Age of Revolutions, 1750-1914

Carding Engine, English Spinning Mill, 1840

Image ID: 8330

Collection: Karen Halttunen

Topic(s): Nineteenth Century, Lowell, Architecture, British Empire, Business 19th century, Child labor, Class Structure, Cooption of styles, Early mills and factories, Early National Period, Emerging industrial city, Environmental History, Factory as symbol, Immigrants, Industrial Revolution, Invention, Labor, National Events, Nineteenth Century Interiors, Success 19th century, Sweatshops, Technology, Urbanization, Women's work, Working Conditions

Region(s): Europe, United States

CA Standard(s): 8.12 - The transformation of the American economy and the changing social and political conditions…in response to the Industrial Revolution, 5.8 - The colonization, immigration, and settlement patterns of the American people from 1789 to the mid-1800s..., 8.10 - The multiple causes, key events, and complex consequences of the Civil War, 8.4 - The aspirations and ideals of the people of the new nation, 8.6 - The divergent paths of the American people from 1800 to the mid-1800s...with emphasis on the Northeast.

National Standard(s): Revolution and the New Nation (1754-1820s) , Expansion and Reform (1801-1861), Civil War and Reconstruction (1850-1877)

Card Text: James R. Barfoot (British, 1794–1863). Women and children operating cotton-carding machines in a factory. This carding engine in an English spinning mill, 1840, was designed by Richard Arkwright and used at Cromford Mill, Derbyshire, around 1800. The machine’s wire teeth combed raw cotton fibers into long, smooth strands, ready for spinning. Carding machines were powered by big leather belts, stretching up to heavy drive-and-pulley systems mounted on the ceiling, which in turn were powered either by central waterwheels (before the 1870s) or steam engines (after the 1870s). In the 20th century, electric motors slowly replaced steam as the main source of power. Carding machines replaced hand cards – hand-held steel brushes with wooden handles once used to comb raw cotton or wool to get all the fibers aligned, a prerequisite for spinning. At one end of the machine, a combination of rollers and gears known as a “licker-in” feeds in a sheet of raw, uncombed cotton or wool called “lap.” At the other end, a steel roller called a “doffer” pulls out the finished product, a long strand of cotton or wool known as “sliver,” about as big around as a person’s finger. Carding machines were much faster than carding by hand, but they were also more dangerous. The center of the carding machine is a massive, rotating steel drum set with steel bristles, against which also rotated a belt of steel “flats,” which also had bristles. Frequently, carders – the workers who operated carding machines – got fingers, hands, or arms crushed by the heavy drums, or severed by the powerful gears. Carders were paid by the amount of sliver that they produced, so they often felt pressured to “speed up,” thereby increasing the chances of accidents. In Willimantic, Ct, until World War II, carders were all men, as the job was considered too dangerous for women. Beginning in World War II, though, women also became carders. Lithograph with color, 35 × 48.5 cm (13-3/4 × 19-1/8")

Rear Parlor, Harriet B. Stowe House, Hartford, CT, 1871

Image ID: 8385

Collection: Karen Halttunen

Topic(s): Nineteenth Century, Domesticity, Abolition, Antebellum Reform, Arts and Architecture, Business 19th century, Civil War, Class and Status, Early National Period, Environmental History, Exhibition, Family to 1920, Luxury, Media, Middle-Class Culture, Moral lessons, National Events, Nineteenth Century Furniture, Nineteenth Century Interiors, Nineteenth Century Slavery, Propaganda, Religion, Slavery and Abolition, Social Gospel and Missions, Success 19th century, Technology, Victorian Culture, Whites, non planters ante bellum, Women

Region(s): United States

CA Standard(s): 8.9 - The early and steady attempts to abolish slavery and to realize the ideals of the Declaration of Independence., 5.8 - The colonization, immigration, and settlement patterns of the American people from 1789 to the mid-1800s..., 8.3 - The foundation of the American political system and the ways in which citizens participate in it, 8.4 - The aspirations and ideals of the people of the new nation, 8.6 - The divergent paths of the American people from 1800 to the mid-1800s...with emphasis on the Northeast.

National Standard(s): Expansion and Reform (1801-1861), Civil War and Reconstruction (1850-1877)

Card Text: Rear parlor, Harriet B. Stowe House, Hartford, CT, 1871. Stowe's Victorian Gothic cottage is now a National Historic Landmark. When she settled into this new house on Forest Street, Stowe was a grand dame of belles lettres whose sentimental anti-slavery novel, ``Uncle Tom's Cabin,'' had influenced the course of US history. She spent the last 23 years of her long life in the cozy ``cottage'' across the lawn from the mansion of her Nook Farm neighbor, Mark Twain. In her 60s during the 1870s, Stowe was old enough to be Samuel Clemens' mother, and so established a literary figure as to be thought old-fashioned by younger readers. During her lifetime (1811-96), Stowe became a sensation, a prolific author whose most famous book made her a 19th-century superstar. ``Uncle Tom's Cabin,'' published in 1852, sold 350,000 copies in the US its first year, and that was just the beginning. Her novel about the cruelties of slavery was translated into many languages and adapted into a long-running hit play. ``Uncle Tom's Cabin'' was a marketer's dream: Spinoffs included wallpaper, toys, games, plates, statuettes and other ``Tomitudes.'' A Staffordshire figurine of Uncle Tom and Little Eva is on display in this room. Stowe made no money from this barrage of knickknacks. The Stowe House is furnished with characteristically ornate Victorian pieces, many of which belonged to her, but homier and far less ostentatious than in Twain's house. The parlor displays an elegant silver tea service, piano, paintings, and a small replica of the Venus de Milo. The tufted sofa was made by sewing buttons or stitches, typically in a diamond-shaped pattern, through a cushion or mattress. This technique is both elegant and functional, holding the stuffing in place to prevent its shifting or bunching up. The bay windows give onto a view of trees in a lush garden. Stowe was reform-minded on many frontiers, among them the domestic front. With her sister, Catharine Beecher, she co-wrote ``The American Woman's Home.'' The Stowe House kitchen has been re-created using the sisters' common-sense suggestions. Stowe was an enthusiastic gardener and an accomplished amateur painter whose works appear throughout the house. Her artistic skills are on view in her sitting room, which holds a bureau, bedside stand and a cane-seated chair she decorated. The Stowes lived comfortably. Harriet became the primary breadwinner in the family, ending their frequent financial worries with her publication of ``Uncle Tom's Cabin.'' Her husband, Calvin Stowe, was a poorly paid professor of Greek and sacred literature. The Forest Street house, built in 1871, was not the Stowes' first Hartford home. In 1864 she built Oakholm, her dream house, an eight-gabled Gothic villa at the edge of Nook Farm. But it became too expensive and burdensome to maintain, and her husband became ill, so the Stowes sold it. (Oakholm no longer stands.) In 1872, Stowe called the more modest Forest Street property a ``lovely beautiful house'' whose ``terms are quite within my means.'' Stowe's Connecticut connections ran deep. She was born in Litchfield, where her father, Lyman Beecher, was pastor of the Congregational Church. Harriet's brother, Henry Ward Beecher, also became an influential preacher. In 1824 she went to Hartford to study and then teach in her sister Catharine's school, the Hartford Female Seminary. Several years later Harriet moved to Cincinnati with her father, who was to head the Lane Theological Seminary. There she met Calvin Stowe, a widower whom she married in 1836. Her experiences in Ohio, a border state, were to have a profound influence on ``Uncle Tom's Cabin.'' The Stowes had seven children, four of whom predeceased Harriet. The family lived in Brunswick, Maine, and Andover, Mass., before settling in Hartford. The Beecher pull was strong. John Hooker and his wife, Isabella Beecher Hooker, Harriet's half-sister, lived at Nook Farm. Harriet (Hattie) and Eliza, the Stowes' unmarried, grown twin daughters, moved with their parents into the Forest Street house. The twins kept house for their mother, and in her final years Harriet remained a celebrity whose Hartford visitors included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson and William T. Sherman. In 1878, Stowe published ``Poganuc People,'' her ode to her New England childhood and the last act in a literary career that spanned 44 years and more than 30 books. Calvin died in 1886, and as Harriet aged she became senile and sometimes given to bizarre behavior. The restoration of Stowe's house (and the Mark Twain house) was largely the doing of Harriet's grandniece, Katharine Seymour Day. The current display documents Stowe's triumphant 1853 tour of Europe, the year after ``Uncle Tom's Cabin'' had awakened readers around the world to the horrors of slavery.

Testing McCormick's First Reaper Near Steele's Tavern, VA, 1831

Image ID: 8303

Collection: Karen Halttunen

Topic(s): Nineteenth Century, Industrial Revolution, Agriculture, Advertising, African Americans, Agrarian Reform, Arts and Architecture, Business 19th century, Class Separation, Corporate Image, Early mills and factories, Emerging industrial city, Environmental History, Exhibition, Future Progress, Individualism, Technology, Invention, Labor, Market Economy, Mills Factories Post Civil War, National Events, Nature and Civilization, Nineteenth Century Furniture, Nineteenth Century Slavery, Prejudice and Discrimination, Slaves Stereotypes, Southern Society, Strikes and Violence, Success 19th century, Technology

Region(s): United States

CA Standard(s): 5.8 - The colonization, immigration, and settlement patterns of the American people from 1789 to the mid-1800s..., 8.10 - The multiple causes, key events, and complex consequences of the Civil War, 8.12 - The transformation of the American economy and the changing social and political conditions…in response to the Industrial Revolution, 8.8 - The divergent paths of the American people in the West from 1800 to the mid-1800s , 11.2 - The the relationship among the rise of industrialization, large-scale rural-to-urban migration, and massive immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, 11.4 - The rise of the United States to its role as a world power in the twentieth century

National Standard(s): Expansion and Reform (1801-1861), Civil War and Reconstruction (1850-1877) , The Development of the Industrial United States (1870-1900)

Card Text: Cyrus McCormick's Reaper: "The Testing of The First Reaping Machine Near Steele's Tavern, VA. A.D.1831," c. 1890. Riding a horse, Cyrus Hall McCormick (1809-84) gives the first public demonstration of his mechanical reaper near his home in Rockbridge County, VA. It was the world's first successful mechanical reaper, patented in 1834. It was better suited to the wheat fields on the rolling prairies of the Midwest than the small farms of the East Coast. The scene includes racist depictions of enslaved African Americans in exaggerated and stereotypical postures, one even eating a watermelon. McCormick, a 22-year-old Virginia blacksmith, and Jo Anderson, an enslaved African-American on the McCormick plantation, developed this first practical mechanical reaper to harvest grain in 1831. The machine, at first a local curiosity, proved to be enormously important. In the decades following McCormick's first attempts to mechanize farm work, his invention would revolutionize agriculture in the US and around the world. McCormick's father had earlier tried to invent a mechanical device for harvesting but gave up on it. In 1831 the son took up the job and labored with Anderson for about six weeks in the family blacksmith shop. Confident they had worked out the tricky mechanics of the device, McCormick demonstrated it at a local gathering place, Steele's Tavern. Local farmers were at first puzzled by the contraption that looked like a sled with machinery on its top: a cutting blade and spinning parts held the grain heads while cutting the stalks. As McCormick began the demonstration, he pulled the machine through a wheat field behind a horse. The machinery began to move, and it was suddenly clear that the horse pulling the device was doing all the physical work. McCormick had only to walk beside the machine and rake the wheat stalks into piles to be bound as usual. The machine worked perfectly and McCormick was able to use it that year in the fall harvest. He produced more of the machines, and at first sold them only to local farmers. As word of the machine's amazing functionality spread, he began selling more, ultimately starting a factory in Chicago. The McCormick Reaper allowed farmers to harvest large areas of grain much faster than men wielding scythes. Because farmers could harvest more, they could plant more, so the reaper reduced the possibility of food shortages or even famine. Before McCormick's machinery changed farming forever, families had to struggle to cut enough grain during the fall to last them until the next harvest. One farmer, highly skilled at swinging at scythe, might be able to harvest two acres of grain in a day. With a reaper, one man with a horse could harvest large fields in a day, allowing for much larger farms, with hundreds or even thousands of acres. Later models of the reaper consistently added practical features, and McCormick's farm machinery business grew steadily. By the end of the 19th century, McCormick reapers did not just cut wheat; they could also thresh it and put it into sacks, ready for storage or shipment. In the 1850s McCormick's business grew as Chicago became the center of the railroads in the Midwest, and his machinery could be shipped to all parts of the country. His Chicago factory was cranking out more than 20,000 reapers a year, as revolutionary to the West as the cotton gin was to the South. The reapers made ambitious capitalists out of humble plowmen, who raced to buy more land on which to plant more fields of billowing wheat. Subsistence farming gave way to large-scale and corporate agriculture. McCormick's farm machines helped the Union win the Civil War. They were more common in the North, so that farmhands leaving northern farms for the war had less impact on grain production. In the South, where hand tools were more common, the loss of farm hands to the military caused smaller harvests. After the Civil War McCormick's company continued to grow. When its workers struck in 1886, events surrounding the strike led to the Haymarket Riot, a watershed event in American labor history. International Harvester lithograph. Printed by the Milwaukee Litho. and Engraving Company for the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, which became part of the International Harvester Company in 1902.

Humphrey, Parallel Between Intemperance and the Slave Trade, 1828

Image ID: 8379

Collection: Karen Halttunen

Topic(s): Nineteenth Century, Antebellum Reform, Slavery and Abolition, Anti Abolition, Class Separation, Early National Period, Emerging industrial city, Family to 1920, Founding Myths, Immigrants, Institutions and social disorder, Jacksonian Era, Liquor, Masculinity, Moral lessons, National Politics, Nativism, Nineteenth Century Slavery, Politics & Government, Prejudice and Discrimination, Prohibition 1890-1930, Propaganda, Religion, Slaves Stereotypes, Temperance and Prohibition, Upper Class to 1865, Urban poverty, Victorian Culture, Whites, non planters ante bellum

Region(s): United States

CA Standard(s): 5.8 - The colonization, immigration, and settlement patterns of the American people from 1789 to the mid-1800s..., 8.1 - Major events preceding the founding of the nation and the development of American constitutional democracy, 8.2 - The political principles underlying the U.S. Constitution and compare the enumerated and implied powers of the federal government, 8.3 - The foundation of the American political system and the ways in which citizens participate in it, 8.4 - The aspirations and ideals of the people of the new nation, 8.6 - The divergent paths of the American people from 1800 to the mid-1800s...with emphasis on the Northeast. , 11.2 - The the relationship among the rise of industrialization, large-scale rural-to-urban migration, and massive immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, 11.3 - The role of religion in the founding of America and its lasting moral, social, and political impacts, and issues regarding religious liberty.

National Standard(s): Expansion and Reform (1801-1861)

Card Text: Heman Humphrey, "Parallel Between Intemperance and the Slave Trade," 1828. "Drag me, bound and bleeding, if you will, from my blazing habitation - but - O bind me not to a rack, where I can neither live nor die under the torture." In 1826 the preacher Lyman Beecher published his "Six Sermons on the Nature, Occasions, Signs, Evils, and Remedy of Intemperance," repeatedly comparing intemperance (alcoholism) with the slave trade. A few years later, Amherst College President Heman Humphrey would expand upon this parallel. Humphrey and Beecher were well-known evangelical temperance activists in New England. They had served together as Congregational ministers in Connecticut and launched the "Connecticut Society for the Promotion of Morals” in 1813. Its members abstained from “ardent spirits,” sabbath-breaking, profane swearing, slander, and gambling. They were among the elite New England evangelicals who founded the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance in Boston in 1826. The group referred to the intemperate person as an “abject slave,” and claimed that physicians prescribing alcoholic “medicines” were producing “slaves to Intemperance.” The comparison between intemperance and slavery was becoming common. Humphrey laments to his students “the blood-freezing clank of a cruel bondage is still heard amid our loudest rejoicings....However cruel and debasing and portentous African servitude may be, beyond the Potomac, there exists, even in New-England, a far sorer bondage, from which the slaves of the South are happily free. This bondage...chains and scourges the soul, as well as the body. It is a servitude from which death itself has no power to release the captive.” African slavery is merely “physical,” not “intellectual” or “moral,” and this framing sets the stage for his entire argument. "The prevalent use of ardent spirits in the United States, is a worse evil at this moment, than the slave-trade ever was, in the height of its horrible prosperity." He means the trans-Atlantic slave trade, abolished in 1807. It was common to decry the evils of the trade while remaining lukewarm about the evils of slavery itself. Jonathan Edwards, for example, condemned the trade while holding several enslaved people. Humphrey states that “Congress has no hesitation in passing the severest laws against the one [the slave-trade], and why not do something to check the more dreadful ravages of the other [intemperance]?” Humphrey’s argument is that “the slave-trade was horrifically evil; and yet, even still, intemperance is worse”: “Intemperance is a more blighting and deadly scourge to humanity, than that traffic, all dripping with gore, which it makes every muscle shudder to think of.” He compares the “comparative aggregate of misery” in terms of both the “number of victims” and the “aggregate of human misery which it inflicts” and judges that intemperance outweighs the slave-trade on both counts. "Intemperance...fetters the immortal mind as well as the dying body.” How he could claim that enslavement did not afflict the minds of the enslaved is unclear. Could it have been a racist judgment, that African minds were inferior to white ones and thus less susceptible to injury? Humphrey piles on rhetorical questions: “Think of his [the intemperate man’s] thus dragging out months and years of torture, till the earth refuses any longer to bear such a wretch upon its surface, and then tell me, if any Barbadian slave was ever so miserable; was ever a kidnapped African more wretched in his Atlantic dungeon?" Humphrey even claims that given the choice, he would choose to be enslaved on a plantation than to practice intemperance: “Ah, give me, you say, the chains and stripes and toil and perpetual servitude of a West-India plantation, rather than the woe, the wounds, and the diseases of the dram-shop.” Intemperance is worse than the slave-trade in the shame it produces, and the guilt upon the conscience. His reason is white supremacy. He says it explicitly: Intemperance “inflicts more misery” than the slave-trade, partly because of “the keener sensibilities of a civilized [white] than of a savage state.” Because white civilized men have “keener sensibilities” than the African “savage,” white men would be more miserable in the bondage of drink than a Black person in actual enslavement. Humphrey’s comparison rests on the stereotype of Black people as more impervious to pain, more “hardy,” with duller “sensibilities.” The pain of a family ripped apart in Africa suffers not as badly as a family afflicted with intemperance: “Or when you have wept with that aged pair, on the slave-coast, whose only son has just been carried off by the ruthless man-stealer, come home to New-England, and see the only prop of once doting, and now aged parents, falling intoxicated and blaspheming over the threshold of their door; and tell me, whose breach is widest, whose sorrows spring from the deepest fountain? Much as I love my children, let them all grind in chains till they die, rather, infinitely, than become the slaves of strong drink.” Humphrey also compares the effect on religious faith, and makes several questionable claims regarding the two evils: “Intemperance is beyond all comparison more destructive to the souls of men than the slave-trade. Diabolical as this traffic is, it does not deprive its victims of the means of grace, for they never enjoyed them. It seals not up the bible, nor blots out the sabbath, nor removes men from the “house of God and the gate of heaven.” It hardens not their hearts. It sears not their consciences. They are not more likely to lose their souls in America, than they would have been in their native country.” The fact that many enslaved people and their descendants have struggled with Christianity as a “white slaveholding religion” seems utterly foreign to Humphrey. In fact, he pulls out the age-old providential apology for slavery at this point: “On the contrary, many are brought under the saving light of the gospel here, who, in all probability, would never have heard of a Saviour there [in Africa].” So slavery was good for Africans, saving them from the fires of hell. Humphrey’s dubious comparison causes him to extend his argument into another fallacy, condemning drinking even in moderation: “If intemperance is more afflictive and disgraceful to humanity than the slave-trade, who can justify himself even in the moderate use of strong drink?...Would they tell us, that much as they abhor a wholesale traffic in human flesh, they see no harm in trading a little; and that nobody can be comfortable without a few slaves?” If there is no such thing as “slaveholding in moderation,” then, according to Humphrey, neither can alcohol be consumed in moderation. Just as Humphrey followed Lyman Beecher in comparing intemperance with the slave-trade, he suppressed an anti-slavery society at Amherst College, just as Beecher did at Lane Seminary. A year after Beecher disbanded the anti-slavery society at Lane, Humphrey did the same in 1835 at Amherst. Like many “moderate” northerners, Humphrey seemed more concerned with anti-slavery advocacy than with slavery itself, and as he demonstrates clearly in his address, was far more concerned with other social ills, like intemperance, than he was with enslavement.

Haying-Time. The First Load, 1868

Image ID: 8304

Collection: Karen Halttunen

Topic(s): Nineteenth Century, Industrial Revolution, Agriculture, Agrarianism, Art Style, Business 19th century, Children, Civil War, Class Structure, Corporate Image, Domesticity, Eden Imagery, Environmental History, Family to 1920, Labor, Landscape, anti-urban, Middle-Class Culture, Naive Art, Nationhood, Nature and Civilization, Nineteenth Century Misc, Outdoor Life, Parents, Children, Families, Pre-Industrial Work - Misc., Reconstruction, Success 19th century, Symbols of mass society, Utopias, Victorian Culture, Women's image, Work and Workers

Region(s): United States

CA Standard(s): 8.12 - The transformation of the American economy and the changing social and political conditions…in response to the Industrial Revolution, 5.8 - The colonization, immigration, and settlement patterns of the American people from 1789 to the mid-1800s..., 8.10 - The multiple causes, key events, and complex consequences of the Civil War, 8.4 - The aspirations and ideals of the people of the new nation

National Standard(s): Expansion and Reform (1801-1861), An Age of Revolutions, 1750-1914

Card Text: Frances F. Palmer and John Cameron, "Haying-Time. The First Load," Currier and Ives, 1868. In this rural scene a young man leads an ox-drawn cart carrying a smiling family of a man, a woman and two cherubic children into a field where workers harvest hay. A dog leaps up towards the cart at left. In the background are trees and a hilly landscape. This quaint picture gives insight into how most 19th-century Americans perceived and idealized themselves. Currier & Ives prints painted an indelible cultural record of the latter part of the 19th century, with happy, glistening country scenes in an idealized rural America that even then was beginning to fade away. When "Fanny" Flora Bond Palmer (1812-76) moved to New York from England with her husband in 1844, she was 32 and an accomplished artist and printmaker. Nathaniel Currier recognized her talent and began to buy her drawings to use as print designs. After Currier & Ives was established in 1857 she became a staff artist. Palmer produced more than 200 prints for the firm and today is regarded as a leading lithographer of the period. She was the first woman in the United States to work as a professional artist and to make a living at it. She produced more Currier and Ives’ prints than any other artist, and the only female in a business dominated by men. Palmer’s work has appeared in millions of books, calendars and greeting cards, depicting idyllic scenes of American life, but she has been largely ignored by historians. During her lifetime painting was not considered a suitable occupation for a woman, and some of this prejudice may remain. Currier & Ives was a powerhouse of 19th-c. publishing and immeasurably influenced American visual culture. Founded in New York in 1834 by Nathaniel Currier, the company expanded to include a new partner, James Merritt Ives, after 1857. Currier & Ives produced millions of cheaply priced copies of over 7000 original lithographs, living up to its self-appointed title as “the Grand Central Depot for Cheap and Popular Prints.” The firm took advantage of New York City’s booming arts culture in the late 19th c., but its output was not seen as fine art by critics, nor was it intended as such. Its prints were first and foremost commodities, and the choice of subjects was often determined by popularity and sales figures. Currier & Ives perpetuated Victorian ideals in these depictions of family, history, politics, and urban and suburban life, yet these prints also serve as important records of a nation in the midst of an extraordinary transformation from a rural, agricultural landscape to an industrialized, urbanized global power. The company is best known today for its lush, hand-colored lithographs that nostalgically depicted an idyllic republic of pioneer homesteads, sporting camps, and bucolic pastimes, but these sentimental images comprised only one aspect of Currier & Ives’ production. The company’s inexpensive and popular prints just as frequently touched on pressing social and political issues. Addressing economic development, western expansion, the Civil War, and controversies of racial and class politics, Currier & Ives portrayed scenes of urbanization, nation building, naval battles, catastrophic disasters, and current events that were far from idyllic. They offer a complex and conflicted vision of America that embraced the possibilities of an emerging urban and industrial society while nostalgically celebrating the social stability of a rural ideal. Hand-colored lithograph with some gum arabic. 15-11/16 × 23-3/4" (39.8 × 60.3 cm).

Sargent, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, 1882

Image ID: 8386

Collection: Karen Halttunen

Topic(s): Nineteenth Century, Domesticity, Arts and Architecture, Business 19th century, Class and Status, Cooption of styles, Dolls, Family to 1920, Foreign Policy 19th Century, Games 19th century, Gilded Age, Impressionism, Individualism, Technology, Luxury, Middle-Class Culture, National Events, Nineteenth Century Children, Nineteenth Century Furniture, Nineteenth Century Interiors, Overcivilization, Parents, Children, Families, Recreation - upper class, Sargent, Success 19th century, Technique, Upper Class since 1865, Victorian Culture, Women's image

Region(s): United States

CA Standard(s): 8.12 - The transformation of the American economy and the changing social and political conditions…in response to the Industrial Revolution, 8.4 - The aspirations and ideals of the people of the new nation, 8.6 - The divergent paths of the American people from 1800 to the mid-1800s...with emphasis on the Northeast. , 11.2 - The the relationship among the rise of industrialization, large-scale rural-to-urban migration, and massive immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, 11.4 - The rise of the United States to its role as a world power in the twentieth century

National Standard(s): The Development of the Industrial United States (1870-1900) , The Emergence of Modern America (1890-1930)

Card Text: John Singer Sargent (American, 1856–1925), "The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit," 1882, detail. Painted in Paris, this portrait is one of several Sargent made of the American expatriate community in France. He was a friend of the girls’ parents, Edward Boit and Mary Louisa Cushing Boit. Ned Boit was from Boston, a Harvard-trained lawyer who left his profession to pursue painting. His wife Mary Louisa, called Isa, was a vivacious American who preferred Europe to the US. Her inheritance, a legacy of Boston’s China Trade, allowed the family to live elegantly on the avenue de Friedland in the Eighth Arrondissement, a luxurious neighborhood favored by wealthy Americans. Sargent’s portrait is set in the foyer of their apartment, a shadowy space in which he arranged the Boits’ four daughters: Mary Louisa (8 years old at the time), Florence (14), Jane (12), and Julia (4). The parents supported Sargent's departure from traditional portraiture to create a work half-portrait and half-interior scene. Each girl is presented separately but the features of two are obscured, belying conventional portraiture. This darkness, and the girls' spatial disconnection, baffled critics when the painting was first displayed. Its unusual format was inspired by both past and present art, an approach that Sargent used to make paintings simultaneously traditional and modern. The historical precedent for this portrait is Las Meninas (c. 1656) by 17th-c. Spanish master Diego Velázquez, an artist admired in 19th-c. France. Sargent had traveled to Madrid in 1879 to make copies after Velázquez at the Museo Nacional del Prado, and among the paintings he studied was this famous large portrait of the Spanish infanta with her maids in a great shadowed room. Sargent adapted Velázquez’s mysterious space, his dark subdued palette, and the commanding manner in which his self-possessed princess confronts the viewer. Sargent was influenced also by the unusual portraits and oddly asymmetrical compositions of his French contemporary Edgar Degas. His portrait shares Degas’s empty center, a disconnection between family members, and a feeling of modern life interrupted. Sargent placed the Boit girls in an indeterminate space—the entrance hall, neither entirely public nor private—brightly lit in the foreground but receding into a vaguely defined drawing room half-lit with mirrors and reflections. The two tall Japanese vases, made in Arita in the late 19th c. for export to the West, were prized family possessions. Their enormity, contrasted with the girls' small size, makes the interior seem strange and magical. The sisters are dressed almost alike in the sort of casual clothes they would have worn in the schoolroom or at play. Their white pinafores allowed Sargent to show his mastery at painting the color white in different conditions of light. Only the youngest girl, Julia, engages the viewer, while the older girls recede progressively into the shadows. Sargent titled the painting "Portraits of Children" and displayed it in an 1882 exhibition at the gallery of the French dealer Georges Petit, who specialized in works by an international group of artists more innovative than many Salon painters but less so than the Impressionists. The picture received good reviews. Sargent displayed it the following spring at the Salon, and while some critics praised Sargent’s technical abilities, most found its unconventional composition troubling; one described it as “four corners and a void.” While some have interpreted Sargent’s strategy as a poignant comment on the fickle nature of childhood and adolescence, the writer Henry James, a friend of both the Boits and Sargent, described the picture as a “happy play-world of a family of charming children.” With this painting, Sargent masterfully provided a meditation on openness and enigma, public and private, light and shadow. Oil on canvas. 221.93 x 222.57 cm (87-3/8 x 87-5/8").

Children In An Interior, 1840

Image ID: 8388

Collection: Karen Halttunen

Topic(s): Nineteenth Century, Domesticity, Arts and Architecture, Children, Class and Status, Early National Period, Family to 1920, Games 19th century, Middle-Class Culture, Nineteenth Century Children, Nineteenth Century Furniture, Nineteenth Century Interiors, Symbols, Victorian Death

Region(s): United States

CA Standard(s): 8.4 - The aspirations and ideals of the people of the new nation, 5.8 - The colonization, immigration, and settlement patterns of the American people from 1789 to the mid-1800s..., 8.6 - The divergent paths of the American people from 1800 to the mid-1800s...with emphasis on the Northeast.

National Standard(s): Expansion and Reform (1801-1861), An Age of Revolutions, 1750-1914

Card Text: Unidentified artist, "Children in An Interior," c. 1840. Three little girls and their brother are depicted in the foreground of a Victorian living room. The parlor's marble-topped table supports a glass dome over artificial flowers. The baby, sitting on the floor and looking at the viewer, has removed a shoe and sock. The boy wears a black suit, contrasting with his sisters' pastel dresses, and he holds the string to a model horse on wheels. This may be a posthumous portrait of the boy; he is turned away from the viewer and looks at his sisters, but the girls do not see him. Such a death portrait was a last opportunity to secure a shadow that would survive beyond individual memories. An intriguing motif in 19th-century portraits of children is “one shoe off.” Once believed to indicate that a subject was deceased, canvases have since been discovered whose sitters are known to have lived long past the date of the portrait. The trope may derive from the venerated 15th-c. Byzantine icon, "Our Lady of Perpetual Help," in which the Baby Jesus sits on his mother’s lap, one sandal dangling off his foot. The loose sandal may symbolize Christ’s divine nature, already loosening his hold on the world, while the sandal that remains on his other foot suggests his dual nature as man and as Son of God. In this painting, however, the child holds the shoe in one hand and a cut thread in the other, referring to Atropos, one of the three Fates who cuts the thread of life for each mortal. Therefore, this portrait of the baby may be posthumous as well. American gravestones testify to the changing social structure of death from the colonial period through the 19th century as portraits of the deceased slowly replaced stark memento mori of winged death heads, hourglasses, and angels, reminders of the inevitability of death. In painted portraiture, the transition from frank mortuary depictions to living images coincided with a cultural shift as the individual came to be more important - and as a redemptive view of death replaced an intractable belief in original sin. Posthumous portraits and the postmortem daguerreotypes that ultimately replaced them are memories fixed in colored pigments on canvas and vapors on silver. We cannot help but hear them whisper through the years, “Remember me,” because as photographer Mathew Brady warned in 1856, “You cannot tell how soon it may be too late.”

Benjamin West, Cupid and Psyche, 1808

Image ID: 8390

Collection: Karen Halttunen

Topic(s): Nineteenth Century, Domesticity, Ancient History, Arts and Architecture, Early National Period, Eden Imagery, Greece Ancient, Landscape, anti-urban, Mythology, Personalization, Recreation - upper class, Roman, Symbols, Technique, Victorian Culture, Women's image, Cooption of styles, Nationhood

Region(s): United States

CA Standard(s): 8.4 - The aspirations and ideals of the people of the new nation, 8.5 - U.S. foreign policy in the early Republic, 11.2 - The the relationship among the rise of industrialization, large-scale rural-to-urban migration, and massive immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe

National Standard(s): Revolution and the New Nation (1754-1820s) , Expansion and Reform (1801-1861)

Andrews, The Children of Nathan Starr, 1835

Image ID: 8389

Collection: Karen Halttunen

Topic(s): Nineteenth Century, Domesticity, Arts and Architecture, Business 19th century, Children, Class and Status, Early National Period, Family to 1920, Games 19th century, Industrial Revolution, Luxury, Middle-Class Culture, Nineteenth Century Children, Nineteenth Century Furniture, Nineteenth Century Interiors, Numinous, Popular recreation to 1865, Recreation - upper class, Sports and Recreation, Success 19th century, Symbols, Upper Class to 1865, Victorian Culture, Victorian Death

Region(s): United States

CA Standard(s): 5.8 - The colonization, immigration, and settlement patterns of the American people from 1789 to the mid-1800s..., 8.4 - The aspirations and ideals of the people of the new nation, 8.6 - The divergent paths of the American people from 1800 to the mid-1800s...with emphasis on the Northeast.

National Standard(s): Expansion and Reform (1801-1861), An Age of Revolutions, 1750-1914

Card Text: Ambrose Andrews (1801-c.77), "The Children of Nathan Starr," 1835, the year of the death of the youngest, three-year-old Edward. The subjects of this portrait as a "conversation piece" are the five youngest children of Nathan Starr (1784-1852) and Grace Townsend Starr (1789-1856) of Middletown, CT. From about 1813 to 1845, Starr worked with his father in manufacturing arms, mainly for the federal government. Besides the children portrayed here, the couple had three elder children - Elihu William Nathan (1812-91), Mary Elizabeth (1815-98), and Ebenezer Townsend (1816-99) - as well as three others who died in infancy. The children are posed in a Greek Revival parlor whose doors open onto a sweeping view of the Connecticut River. The children are bathed in a soft light and an inner glow. The door frame holds pots of calla lilies, the lilies of Easter, suggesting beauty, innocence and rebirth. Three of the five children play at “battledore and shuttlecock,” an early form of badminton. The game may have been symbolic of the children's mutual affection. Toddler Edward, at center, shows his full face and holds not a racquet but a hoop and stick. The circular hoop hints at eternity, and the stick, held heavenward, points to a flock of white birds in flight. Perhaps Edward's soul is about to follow. This painting is probably a posthumous portrait of this child. The lesser quality of his portrait compared with his siblings' could indicate that his likeness was not taken from life. Left to right, the children are: Henry Ward (1826-92), aged 9; Frederick Barnard (1829-65), aged 6; Edward Pomeroy (1832-35), aged 3; Emily Helen (1820-98), aged 15; and Grace Ann (1823-93), aged 12. Complex emotions informed the decision to commission a portrait of a loved one who had died. Such portraits reinforced a sense of grief, a visceral and ongoing acknowledgment of loss, but they also provided comfort to the bereaved family. Andrews was a Massachusetts itinerant portrait, miniature, and landscape painter. He attended the National Academy of Design in 1824 and had a geographically wide-ranging career in New York, Connecticut, Texas, Louisiana, St. Louis, Vermont, and Canada. Oil on canvas. 28-3/8 x 36-1/2" (72.1 x 92.7 cm).

Breed Shoe Factory Exteriors, 1885

Image ID: 8308

Collection: Karen Halttunen

Topic(s): Nineteenth Century, Industrial Revolution, Advertising, African Americans, Architecture, British Empire, Business 19th century, Class Separation, Cooption of styles, Corporate Image, Early mills and factories, Environmental History, Immigrants, Individualism, Technology, Invention, Labor, Mills Factories Post Civil War, National Events, Success 20th century, Trade, Work and Workers

Region(s): United States

CA Standard(s): 8.12 - The transformation of the American economy and the changing social and political conditions…in response to the Industrial Revolution, 5.8 - The colonization, immigration, and settlement patterns of the American people from 1789 to the mid-1800s..., 11.2 - The the relationship among the rise of industrialization, large-scale rural-to-urban migration, and massive immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe

National Standard(s): The Development of the Industrial United States (1870-1900) , An Age of Revolutions, 1750-1914

Card Text: Breed Shoe factory exteriors, Lynn, MA, and Rochester, NH, 1885. In the late 19th century an African immigrant transformed Lynn into the shoe capital of the world. During the colonial era, Lynn was dotted with 10- by 10-foot shacks where artisan shoemakers practiced their craft. "They're producing roughly – maybe if they’re lucky - five shoes a day. Five individual shoes." But as the Industrial Revolution swept through America in the early 19th century, shoemaking in Lynn moved from small shops to factory floors. Aided by new technology, production increased – from five shoes a day to 50 pairs. Abby Battis of the Lynn Historical Society says, "Cutting the leather, shaping the leather, getting the eyeholes cut, producing the sole, producing the heel; all of that was mechanized." But one crucial step was not: the lasting. Artisans still had to hand-stretch the leather upper over a last – a wooden mold in the shape of a foot – and nail the leather to the insole. It created a bottleneck on the assembly line and was considered too intricate a task for any machine. Jan Matzeliger was born in Suriname, in South America, to a Dutch engineer father and a Surinamese enslaved mother. When he arrived in Lynn in the 1870s, he didn’t know much English, but he did know how to make shoes. He’d spent countless hours watching lasters work, and had a notion that he could mechanize their movements. Battis says that Matzeliger had a preternatural talent for mechanics, but no formal training. "English isn’t his first language so he’s buying English books, and he’s not just learning how to build machines and the science and mechanics of machines, but he’s also learning English." Matzeliger toiled and tinkered endlessly in his small, bare, cold, dark room. Studying. Sketching. Building model after model. "He didn’t take care of himself, didn’t eat well, was just completely obsessed with getting this machine done." After five painstaking years, his obsession paid off. In 1883, Matzeliger finally obtained a patent for his lasting machine. "Here he is up against a language barrier, a literacy barrier and being an African American at the end of an abolitionist movement," said Battis. "If he had actually thought about creating this lasting machine, maybe 20 to 25 years earlier, he never would have been able to take a patent out on his own. He’d have to have a white man actually apply for it." In 1885, his invention was unveiled and demonstrated. Not only did it work, it changed everything. Factory production jumped from 50 pairs a day to 750 pairs a day. The cost of a pair of shoes made in Lynn dropped by half. Within a few years, Lynn was the undisputed shoe capital of the world with 234 factories churning out more than a million pairs of shoes a day. But Matzeliger would never fully enjoy the spoils of his success. By the end of the decade he was dead of tuberculosis – an all too common end for shoe factory workers of the era. He was just 36. Shoe production in Lynn would wane through the 20th century. The Great Depression hit the industry hard, and the last remaining shoe factory in the city burned down in 1981. Today, nearly all shoes sold in the US are made overseas, but Matzeliger’s stamp on Lynn is indelible. Scores of residents today live in former shoe factories. Even Lynn Common is shaped like the sole of a shoe. "From 1623-1981 is when shoe manufacturing is taking place in the city so that's a pretty strong history," Battis said. It's thanks, in large part, to Jan Matzeliger, whose lasting machine transformed Lynn into the shoe capital of the world 130 years ago.

Pre-Industrial Shoemaking Shop, Lynn, MA,1880

Image ID: 8306

Collection: Karen Halttunen

Topic(s): Nineteenth Century, Industrial Revolution, 18th Century Interiors, Agrarian Reform, Arts and Architecture, Black Education and Self Help, Business 19th century, Child labor, Class Separation, Domesticity, Early mills and factories, Early National Period, Emerging industrial city, Environmental History, Individualism, Technology, Invention, Labor, Market Economy, Masculinity, Mills Factories Post Civil War, Naive Art, Nineteenth Century Interiors, Parents, Children, Families, Pre-Industrial Work - Misc., Success 19th century, Sweatshops, Trade, Urban poverty, Whites, non planters ante bellum, Work and Workers

Region(s): United States

CA Standard(s): 8.4 - The aspirations and ideals of the people of the new nation, 5.8 - The colonization, immigration, and settlement patterns of the American people from 1789 to the mid-1800s..., 8.10 - The multiple causes, key events, and complex consequences of the Civil War

National Standard(s): Revolution and the New Nation (1754-1820s) , Expansion and Reform (1801-1861), The Development of the Industrial United States (1870-1900)

Card Text: Pre-industrial shoemaking shop: "Shoemakers in a 'ten-footer' shop," 1880. Like many other industries, shoe manufacturing changed in the early 19th century. Until then most shoemakers worked in their homes or small workshops (called “ten-footers”), where they performed every stage of production. With the turn of the century, spurred by the increasing demand for cheap shoes, entrepreneurs established factories based on a division of labor. Production was divided into a number of stages that could each be completed by less-skilled workers. Those who owned larger shops prospered, while many skilled workers suffered as they were forced to become wage workers. By the time this engraving was published in 1880 of a master and journeymen making shoes in a workshop attached to the master's home, the shoemaker's “ten-footer” was only a memory. Traditional craft production centered around an independent master artisan, his journeymen, and the apprentice helpers who worked together in small shops. Apprentices worked alongside masters and received training in the “mysteries of the craft” in exchange for their labor. Journeymen looked forward to becoming proprietors when they accumulated sufficient capital and skill. In his "Sketches of Lynn" (1880), David Johnson recalled the masculine work culture and small-scale shoe industry in early-19th century Lynn, Massachusetts. With transportation improvements and growing commercial activity, manufacturing moved from small shops engaged in custom work to large-scale production of ready-made goods. No town experienced greater dislocation than Lynn, where shops multiplied, the division of labor increased, and some masters opened larger central shops. Less skilled workers, including women and children, replaced journeymen, apprenticeship declined, and the world that Johnson described faded. Lasting is the part of the process that sets the final shape of a shoe and holds it in place so the outsole can be permanently attached. Designing a machine to perform the lasting was thought to have been impossible. It took a young Black immigrant from Surinam, Jan Ernst Matzeliger (1852–89), to automate this task. He revolutionized the industry of shoemaking with his lasting machine. It cut the cost of manufacturing shoes in half, thereby making shoes more affordable. He worked for 10 years developing the machine and in 1883 received a patent for it. The first public demonstration of the machine took place in 1885, when the machine broke a record by lasting 75 pairs of shoes. He later received several other patents for shoe-manufacturing machinery. Unfortunately, in pursuing his work, Matzeliger sacrificed his health by working long hours and not eating for long periods. He died of tuberculosis three weeks before his 37th birthday, never reaping the profit of his invention. Print.

Young Woman Textile Worker at Bobbins, England, Early 19th c.

Image ID: 8309

Collection: Karen Halttunen

Topic(s): Nineteenth Century, Arts and Architecture, British Empire, Business 19th century, Class Structure, Emerging industrial city, Environmental History, Factory as symbol, Industrial Revolution, Labor, Market Economy, Mills Factories Post Civil War, National Events, Sweatshops, Technology, Urbanization, Victorian Culture, Women in labor movement, Women's liberation, Women's work, Work and Workers

Region(s): Europe, United States

CA Standard(s): 7.9 - The historical developments of the Reformation, 10.11 - The integration of countries into the world economy and the information, technological, and communications revolutions , 10.3 - The effects of the Industrial Revolution in England, France, Germany, Japan, and the United States. , 10.5 - The causes and course of the First World War

National Standard(s): Revolution and the New Nation (1754-1820s) , Expansion and Reform (1801-1861), Civil War and Reconstruction (1850-1877)

Card Text: Young woman, an early textile worker, England, 19th c. Domestic work – cooking, cleaning, caring for children and the sick, fetching water, making and mending clothing – took up the bulk of women’s time during the Industrial Revolution. Most of this work was unpaid. Some families were wealthy enough to employ other women to do this work as live-in servants, as charring women, or as service providers. Live-in servants were fairly common; even middle-class families had maids to help with the domestic chores. Charring women did housework daily. In London women were paid 2s.6d. per day for washing clothes, more than three times the 8d. typically paid for agricultural labor in the country. However, a “day’s work” washing could last 20 hours, more than twice as long as a day’s farm work. Some women worked as laundresses, doing the washing in their own homes. Before factories appeared, most textile manufacture, including the main processes of spinning and weaving, was carried out under the “putting-out” system. Since raw materials were expensive, textile workers rarely had enough capital to be self-employed, but took raw materials from a merchant, spun or wove the materials in their homes, and returned the finished product to receive a piece-rate wage. This "domestic system" disappeared during the Industrial Revolution as new machinery requiring water or steam power appeared, and work moved from the home to the factory. Before the Industrial Revolution, hand spinning had been a widespread female employment. It could take as many as ten spinners to provide one hand-loom weaver with yarn, and men did not spin, so most of the workers in the textile industry were women. The new textile machines of the Industrial Revolution changed that. Wages for hand-spinning fell, and many rural women who had previously spun found themselves unemployed. In a few locations, new cottage industries such as straw-plaiting and lace-making grew and took the place of spinning, but in other locations women remained unemployed. A defining feature of the Industrial Revolution was the rise of factories, particularly textile factories. Work moved out of the home and into a factory, which used a central power source to run its machines. Water power was used in most of the early factories, but improvements in the steam engine made steam power possible as well. The most dramatic productivity growth occurred in the cotton industry. The invention of James Hargreaves’ spinning jenny (1764), Richard Arkwright’s “throstle” or “water frame” (1769), and Samuel Crompton’s spinning mule (1779) revolutionized spinning. Britain began to manufacture cotton cloth, and declining prices for the cloth encouraged both domestic consumption and export. Machines also appeared for other parts of the cloth-making process, the most important of which was Edmund Cartwright’s power loom, widely used by the 1830s. Cotton was the most important textile of the Industrial Revolution, but advances were made in machinery for silk, flax, and wool production as well. The advent of new machinery changed the gender division of labor in textile production. Before the Industrial Revolution, women spun yarn using a spinning wheel (or occasionally a distaff and spindle). Men didn’t spin, and this division of labor made sense because women were trained to have more dexterity than men, and men’s greater strength made them more valuable in other occupations. In contrast to spinning, handloom weaving was done by both sexes, but men outnumbered women. Men monopolized highly-skilled preparation and finishing processes such as wool combing and cloth-dressing. Women used the spinning jenny and water frame, but mule spinning was almost exclusively a male occupation; it required more strength, and male mule-spinners fought the employment of female mule-spinners. Women mule-spinners in Glasgow, and their employers, were the victims of violent attacks by male spinners trying to reduce the competition in their occupation. While they were pushed out of spinning, women increased their employment in weaving, both in handloom weaving and eventually in power loom factories. Both sexes were employed as power loom operators. While the highly-skilled and highly-paid task of mule-spinning was kept by men, many women and girls were engaged in other tasks in textile factories. The wet-spinning of flax, introduced in Leeds in 1825, employed mainly teenage girls. Girls often worked as assistants to male mule-spinners, piecing together broken threads. In fact, females formed most of the factory labor force. Women were widely employed in all the textile industries, and constituted the majority of workers in cotton, flax, and silk. Outside of textiles, women were employed in potteries and paper factories, but not in dye or glass manufacture. Of the women who worked in factories, 16% were under age 13, 51% were 13 to 20, and 33% were age 21 and over. On average, girls earned the same wages as boys. Children’s wages rose from about 1s.6d. per week at age 7 to about 5s. per week at age 15. At age 16, a large gap between male and female wages appeared. At age 30, women factory workers earned only one-third as much as men. Wage-earners in agriculture generally fit into one of two broad categories – servants who were hired annually and received part of their wage in room and board, and day-laborers who lived independently and were paid a daily or weekly wage. Before industrialization servants comprised between one-third and one-half of labor in agriculture. For servants the value of room and board was a substantial portion of their compensation, so the ratio of money wages is an under-estimate of the ratio of total wages. Most servants were young and unmarried. Because servants were paid part of their wage in kind, as board, the use of the servant contract tended to fall when food prices were high. During the Industrial Revolution the use of servants seems to have fallen in the South and East. The percentage of servants who were female also declined in the first half of the 19th century. While servants lived with the farmer and received food and lodging as part of their wage, laborers lived independently, received fewer in-kind payments, and were paid a daily or a weekly wage. Though the majority of laborers were male, some were female. Female employment was widespread, but varied considerably from one location to the next. Compared to men, female laborers generally worked fewer days during the year. The employment of female laborers was concentrated around the harvest, and women rarely worked during the winter. While men commonly worked six days per week, outside of harvest women generally averaged around four days per week. The wages of female day-laborers were fairly uniform; generally a farmer paid the same wage to all the adult women he hired. Women’s daily wages were between one-third and one-half of male wages. Women generally worked shorter days, though, so the gap in hourly wages was not quite this large. Various sources suggest that women’s employment in agriculture declined during the early 19th century. Enclosure increased farm size and changed the patterns of animal husbandry, both of which seem to have led to reductions in female employment. More women were employed during harvest than during other seasons, but women’s employment during harvest declined as the scythe replaced the sickle as the most popular harvest tool. While women frequently harvested with the sickle, they did not use the heavier scythe. Female employment fell the most in the East, where farms increasingly specialized in grain production. Women had more work in the West, which specialized more in livestock and dairy farming.16 During the 18th century there were many opportunities for women to be productively employed in farm work on their own account, whether they were wives of farmers on large holdings, or wives of landless laborers. In the early 19th century, however, many of these opportunities disappeared, and women’s participation in agricultural production fell. In a village that had a commons, even if the family merely rented a cottage the wife could be self-employed in agriculture because she could keep a cow, or other animals, on the commons. By careful management of her stock, a woman might earn as much during the year as her husband earned as a laborer. Women also gathered fuel from the commons, saving the family considerable expense. The enclosure of the commons, though, eliminated these opportunities. In an enclosure, land was re-assigned so as to eliminate the commons and consolidate holdings. Even when the poor had clear legal rights to use the commons, these rights were not always compensated in the enclosure agreement. While enclosure occurred at different times for different locations, the largest waves of enclosures occurred in the first two decades of the 19th century, meaning that, for many, opportunities for self-employment in agriculture declined as the same time as employment in cottage industry declined. Only a few opportunities for agricultural production remained for the landless laboring family. In some locations landlords permitted landless laborers to rent small allotments, on which they could still grow some of their own food. The right to glean on fields after harvest seems to have been maintained at least through the middle of the 19th century, by which time it had become one of the few agricultural activities available to women in some areas. Gleaning was a valuable right; the value of the grain gleaned was often between 5 and 10 percent of the family’s total annual income. In the 18th century it was common for farmers’ wives to be actively involved in farm work, particularly in managing the dairy, pigs, and poultry. The diary was an important source of income for many farms, and its success depended on the skill of the mistress, who usually ran the operation with no help from men. In the 19th century, however, farmer’s wives were more likely to withdraw from farm management, leaving the dairy to the management of dairymen who paid a fixed fee for the use of the cows. While poor women withdrew from self-employment in agriculture because of lost opportunities, farmer’s wives seem to have withdrawn because greater prosperity allowed them to enjoy more leisure. It was less common for women to manage their own farms, but not unknown. Commercial directories listed numerous women farmers. During the Industrial Revolution period, women were also active businesswomen in towns. Among business owners listed in commercial directories, about 10 percent were female. Single women, married women, and widows are included in these numbers. Sometimes these women were widows carrying on the businesses of their deceased husbands, often continuing their husband’s businesses because they had been active in management of the business while their husband was alive, and wished to continue. Sometimes married women were engaged in trade separately from their husbands. Women most commonly ran shops and taverns, and worked as dressmakers and milliners, but they were not confined to these areas, and appear in most of the trades listed in commercial directories. Manchester, for example, had six female blacksmiths and five female machine makers in 1846. Guilds often controlled access to trades, admitting only those who had served an apprenticeship and thus earned the “freedom” of the trade. Women could obtain “freedom” not only by apprenticeship, but also by widowhood. The widow of a tradesman was often considered knowledgeable enough in the trade that she was given the right to carry on the trade even without an apprenticeship. In the 18th century women were apprenticed to a wide variety of trades, including butchery, bookbinding, brush making, carpentry, ropemaking and silversmithing. Between the 18th and 19th centuries the number of females apprenticed to trades declined, but the power of the guilds and the importance of apprenticeship were also declining during this time, so the decline in female apprenticeships may not have been an important barrier to employment. Many women worked in the factories of the Industrial Revolution, and a few women actually owned factories. In Keighley, West Yorkshire, Ann Illingworth, Miss Rachael Leach, and Mrs. Betty Hudson built and operated textile mills. In 1833 Mrs. Doig owned a power loom factory in Scotland, which employed 60 workers. While many women did successfully enter trades, there were obstacles to women’s employment that kept their numbers low. Women generally received less education than men (though the education of the time was of limited practical use). Women may have found it more difficult than men to raise the necessary capital because English law did not consider a married woman to have any legal existence; she could not sue or be sued. A married woman was a feme covert and could not make any legally binding contracts, a fact which may have discouraged others from loaning money to or making other contracts with married women. (Upon marriage, a husband and wife were said to have become one person, and that person was the husband. He therefore had numerous rights over his wife and her property, and she had none as an independent person. However, a married woman engaged in trade on her own account was treated by the courts as independent and was responsible for her own debts. The professionalization of certain occupations resulted in the exclusion of women from work they had previously done. Women had provided medical care for centuries, but the professionalization of medicine in the early 19th century made it a male occupation. The Royal College of Physicians admitted only graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, schools to which women were not admitted until the 20th century. Women were even replaced by men in midwifery beginning in the late 18th century. In the 19th century the “man-midwife” disappeared, and women were replaced by physicians or surgeons for assisting childbirth. Professionalization of the clergy was also effective in excluding women. While the Church of England did not allow women ministers, the Methodist movement had many women preachers during its early years. However, even among the Methodists female preachers disappeared when lay preachers were replaced with a professional clergy in the early 19th century. In other occupations where professionalization was not as strong, women remained an important part of the workforce. Teaching, particularly in the lower grades, was a common profession for women. Some were governesses, who lived as household servants, but many opened their own schools and took in pupils. The writing profession seems to have been fairly open to women; the leading novelists of the period include Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Fanny Burney, George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans), Elizabeth Gaskell, and Frances Trollope. Female non-fiction writers of the period include Jane Marcet, Hannah More, and Mary Wollstonecraft. During the Industrial Revolution women also made buttons, nails, screws, and pins; worked in the tin plate, silver plate, pottery and Birmingham “toy” trades; and worked in the mines until The Mines Act of 1842 prohibited their working underground, but afterwards continued to pursue above-ground mining tasks. For the period 1787 to 1815, 66 percent of married women in working-class households had either a recorded occupation or positive earnings. For the period 1816-20 the rate fell to 49 percent, but in 1821-40 it recovered to 62 percent. While many wives worked, the amount of their earnings was small relative to their husband’s earnings. Annual earnings of married women who did work averaged only about 28 percent of their husband’s earnings. Because not all women worked, and because children usually contributed more to the family budget than their mothers, for the average family the wife contributed only around seven percent of total family income. Women workers used a variety of methods to care for their children. Sometimes childcare and work were compatible, and women took their children with them to the fields or shops where they worked. Some women working at home would give their infants opiates such as “Godfrey’s Cordial” in order to keep the children quiet while their mothers worked; children got so addicted to "Mother's Little Helper" that they would recognize the distinctive bottle of Godfrey's Cordial and doggedly chew the cork off. The movement of work into factories increased the difficulty of combining work and childcare. In most factory work the hours were rigidly set, and women who took the jobs had to accept the twelve- or thirteen-hour days. Work in the factories was very disciplined, so the women could not bring their children to the factory, and could not take breaks at will. However, these difficulties did not prevent women with small children from working. Mothers used older siblings, other relatives, neighbors, and dame schools to provide child care while they worked. Occasionally mothers would leave young children home alone, but this was so dangerous that only a few did so. Children as young as two might be sent to dame schools, in which women would take children into their home and provide child care, as well as some basic literacy instruction. Mothers might use a combination of types of childcare. Elizabeth Wells, who worked in a Leicester worsted factory, had five children, ages 10, 8, 6, 2, and four months. The eldest, a daughter, stayed home to tend the house and care for the infant. The second child worked, and the six-year-old and two-year-old were sent to “an infant school.” The cost of childcare was substantial. At the end of the 18th century the price of child-care was about 1s. a week, about a quarter of a woman’s weekly earnings in agriculture. In the 1840s mothers paid anywhere from 9d. to 2s.6d. per week for child care, out of a wage of around 7s. per week.

Region

Collection

Topic

California Standard

Great Falls Manufacturing Company, Somersworth, NH, c. 1840

Clock Shop Sign with Eagle, c. 1875

Rail Truck, 19th c.

Tumbledown Mansion - The House of Farmer Slack, 1840

Woodwork, S.S. Ticonderoga, Lake Champlain, 1906-53

Portrait of a Woman, c. 1835

The Household as Factory, England, 18th c.

Humphrey, Miss Muffet's Birthday Party, NY, 1894

Carding Engine, English Spinning Mill, 1840

Rear Parlor, Harriet B. Stowe House, Hartford, CT, 1871

Testing McCormick's First Reaper Near Steele's Tavern, VA, 1831

Humphrey, Parallel Between Intemperance and the Slave Trade, 1828

Haying-Time. The First Load, 1868

Sargent, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, 1882

Children In An Interior, 1840

Benjamin West, Cupid and Psyche, 1808

Andrews, The Children of Nathan Starr, 1835

Breed Shoe Factory Exteriors, 1885

Pre-Industrial Shoemaking Shop, Lynn, MA,1880

Young Woman Textile Worker at Bobbins, England, Early 19th c.

Great Falls Manufacturing Company, Somersworth, NH, c. 1840

Collection: Karen Halttunen

Region(s): United States

National Standard(s): Revolution and the New Nation (1754-1820s) , Expansion and Reform (1801-1861), Civil War and Reconstruction (1850-1877)

Clock Shop Sign with Eagle, c. 1875

Collection: Karen Halttunen

Region(s): United States

National Standard(s): Civil War and Reconstruction (1850-1877) , The Development of the Industrial United States (1870-1900)

Rail Truck, 19th c.

Collection: Karen Halttunen

Region(s): Europe, United States

National Standard(s): Expansion and Reform (1801-1861), Civil War and Reconstruction (1850-1877) , The Development of the Industrial United States (1870-1900) , The Emergence of Modern America (1890-1930), An Age of Revolutions, 1750-1914

Tumbledown Mansion - The House of Farmer Slack, 1840

Collection: Karen Halttunen

Topic(s): Nineteenth Century, Industrial Revolution, Industrialization, Agriculture

Region(s): United States

CA Standard(s): 8.12 - The transformation of the American economy and the changing social and political conditions…in response to the Industrial Revolution, 8.4 - The aspirations and ideals of the people of the new nation

National Standard(s): Expansion and Reform (1801-1861)

Citation: The Plow, April 1852. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC 20540

Woodwork, S.S. Ticonderoga, Lake Champlain, 1906-53

Collection: Karen Halttunen

Region(s): United States

National Standard(s): The Emergence of Modern America (1890-1930), The Great Depression and World War II (1929-1945), Postwar United States (1945 to early 1970s)

Citation: Image and text: "Steamboat Ticonderoga." Copyright Shelburne Museum, PO Box 10, Shelburne, VT 05482. https://shelburnemuseum.org/collection/ steamboat-ticonderoga/. All rights reserved. Aug 14, 2022.

Portrait of a Woman, c. 1835

Collection: Karen Halttunen

Region(s): United States

National Standard(s): Expansion and Reform (1801-1861)

Citation: Copyright Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, 600 Main St, Hartford, CT 06103. Object ID: 1926.285. The Wallace Nutting Collection, Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan. https://5058.sydneyplus.com/argus/final/Portal/Public.aspx?lang=en-US. All rights reserved. Feb 25, 2023.

The Household as Factory, England, 18th c.

Collection: Karen Halttunen

Region(s): Europe, North America, United States

CA Standard(s): 8.6 - The divergent paths of the American people from 1800 to the mid-1800s...with emphasis on the Northeast. , 5.8 - The colonization, immigration, and settlement patterns of the American people from 1789 to the mid-1800s...

National Standard(s): An Age of Revolutions, 1750-1914, Colonization and Settlement (1585-1763), Revolution and the New Nation (1754-1820s) , Expansion and Reform (1801-1861)

Citation: The New York Public Library, 188 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016. Text: "The Domestic System." https://industrialrevolution.org.uk/domestic-system/. Copyright © 2010 - 22 CB Media: Industrial Revolution. All rights reserved. Sept. 6, 2022.

Humphrey, Miss Muffet's Birthday Party, NY, 1894

Collection: Karen Halttunen

Region(s): United States

National Standard(s): The Development of the Industrial United States (1870-1900) , The Emergence of Modern America (1890-1930), An Age of Revolutions, 1750-1914

Carding Engine, English Spinning Mill, 1840

Collection: Karen Halttunen

Region(s): Europe, United States

National Standard(s): Revolution and the New Nation (1754-1820s) , Expansion and Reform (1801-1861), Civil War and Reconstruction (1850-1877)

Rear Parlor, Harriet B. Stowe House, Hartford, CT, 1871

Collection: Karen Halttunen

Region(s): United States

National Standard(s): Expansion and Reform (1801-1861), Civil War and Reconstruction (1850-1877)

Testing McCormick's First Reaper Near Steele's Tavern, VA, 1831

Collection: Karen Halttunen

Region(s): United States

National Standard(s): Expansion and Reform (1801-1861), Civil War and Reconstruction (1850-1877) , The Development of the Industrial United States (1870-1900)

Humphrey, Parallel Between Intemperance and the Slave Trade, 1828

Collection: Karen Halttunen

Region(s): United States

National Standard(s): Expansion and Reform (1801-1861)

Haying-Time. The First Load, 1868