History on Display: The Vikings Begin
Photo credit: Joe Michael/Mystic Seaport Museum
While we were at Mystic Seaport, we were lucky enough to see an exhibit titled The Vikings Begin: Treasures from Uppsala University, Sweden. Curated by the Gustavianum Museum at Uppsala University, the exhibit is based on a ten-year research project that began in 2016. Known as "The Viking Phenomenon", the project is designed to study the emergence of Viking society by looking at Iron Age culture in Scandinavia prior to the Viking era. The resulting exhibit tells a slightly different story than the version of Vikings with which most of us are familiar.* Among other things, they do a nice job of changing ideas about women in Viking society, with a special emphasis on the upset surrounding the "Birka Man".**
At first I sputtered a bit: The first Viking raid took place in Estonia in 750? Really?"*** Then I told myself to shut up and learn. Once I calmed down, I was particularly fascinated by the suggested relationship between Viking culture and that in other Baltic countries.**** Subsequent poking around revealed that archaeologists have been studying the connection between Estonia and the Vikings since 2008, when utility workers discovered Viking remains in the course of laying cables. In some ways the real lesson I learned here is that the popular understanding of history often lags behind what scholars are working on. Not a new lesson, but one I have to learn over and over.
The Vikings Begin is visually spectacular. Most of the artifacts on display have never traveled outside of Sweden before. The exhibit will be at Mystic Seaport through September 30. The exhibit will then travel to the Nordic Museum in Seattle and the American Swedish Museum in Minneapolis. Well worth the effort if it comes to a museum near you.
*Raids on the British Isles. Explorers landing in North America. Dragon boats. Etc.
** Who turned out to be the Birka Woman.
***As opposed to the raid on Lindisfarne in 793, which is generally considered the start of the Viking era.
****It makes sense if you look at a map. Suddenly the idea that the Vikings made their way to Russia doesn't look so surprising.
Road Trip Through History: Mystic Seaport
My Own True Love is not my only co-conspirator when it comes to road trips through history. I met fellow historian Karin Wetmore my first day in graduate school while we were standing next to each other in the part of the registration line dedicated to people with names beginning with letters at the end of the alphabet.* Shortly thereafter we headed downtown to the Field Museum to see an exhibit of the terra cotta warriors from the tomb of the first Chinese emperor, which had been discovered several years before and were making their first guest appearance in the United States.
We’ve been taking each other on historical adventures ever since, though not as often as either of us would like. When I recently visited her in Boston, we hit the road for a day trip to Mystic Seaport in Connecticut.**
Mystic Seaport is a living history museum devoted to the the Yankee whaling ships of the nineteenth century. Like other living history museums I have visited over the years, it includes a row of small period shops devoted to the crafts and businesses that would have played a role in the port during the days of the whaling industry. Some of them, like the printing shop, the barrel maker, and the apothecary, were familiar from inland living history programs. Others, like the sailmakers, the rope walk, and the chandlery, were not. I came away with a greater appreciation of rope making and the role of a printing shop in small town America in the nineteenth century.***
Much as I enjoyed the “village”, the real focus of Mystic Seaport is the whaling industry—just as it would have been in the late eighteenth century. We began our visit with a tour of the Charles W. Morgan, a restored whaling ship that first launched in 1841 and made 37 voyages over an eighty-year career. In its day, the Morgan was known as a lucky, or “greasy”, ship—that is one that regularly got its whale. I suppose you could say it's still a lucky ship since it is the last of its kind that is still afloat. I was fascinated by a close-up look at the ship’s fittings, all of which looked cozy enough until you thought about sharing quarters with thirty-five of your (unwashed) fellow sailors and a hold full of rendered whale blubber. Presumably the nose grows numb with time.
Once we had seen what a (seriously cleaned-up) whaling ship looked like, we moved on to the whaling museum, which provided context. The museum tells the stories of Yankee whaling, aboriginal whaling, and the "save the whale" movement. It looks at how the popular image of whales changed over time, and how nineteenth century naturalists created a body of data about whale movements that remains the foundation for the work of modern marine biologists. It displays the range of products that depended on whalebone, baleen, and whale oil. (I was fascinated by a video demonstrating scrimshaw carving.) It considers the role of whale oil in the second wave of the Industrial Revolution. (The short version: machinery needs to be oiled and whale oil was cheap.)
Here are some of the bits that caught my imagination:
- The use of whale oil lamps on city streets changed urban life. Streets were safer (at least in "good" neighborhoods) so more people moved around after dark.
- In the American Civil War, the Union sunk old whaling ships to block southern harbors.
- As late as 1972, Dexron transmission fluid contained whale oil.
- The term "whale on" comes from the use of a buggy whip made from baleen.
If we'd come later in the year, we might have chosen to participate in the annual Moby-Dick Marathon: a twenty-four hour public reading of Hermann Melville's long-winded classic in honor of Melville's birthday. It's a communal event, in which visitors are encouraged to read a chapter or two. Then again, maybe not. Reading Moby-Dick in high school was enough of a marathon.
*Alphabetization has always been my friend.
**As those of you who follow me on Facebook or Twitter may have seen, I also took the opportunity to meet with the publishing team at Beacon Press, which is publishing Women Warriors. It’s starting to feel real, people.
***Just because I’m familiar with the mechanics of the printing press (at least in theory), it doesn’t mean there wasn’t stuff to learn. The printer at Mystic Seaport was willing to talk at length about the types of documents that would have been printed in a shop like his in addition to the local newspaper: bank notes issued by the local bank, job announcements, theater bills, election ballots, wedding announcements, menu cards, etc. There was a *headsmack* element to the experience. Sometimes the obvious is surprising.
1958–A Year in Review
I turn 60 this week. Which doesn't seem possible. I finished my PhD fifteen years ago. I got married nine years ago. I'm just now reaching my stride in a career I love. By any reasonable accounting of a life that would make me about forty. And yet the year is clearly printed on my birth certificate: 1958.
In 1958, the Cold War was at its height, or perhaps its depths.
- Elvis Presley entered the army on March 24. He had received his draft notice on December 20, 1957. When the story hit the news, tens of thousands of fans sent letters to the army begging them not to send Presley into service. The American military offered him a variety of cushy jobs, including entertaining the troops.* Presley chose instead to serve as a regular soldier, to the extent that was possible. (Most soldiers didn't get fourteen bags of fan mail a day.) After a brief deferment, while he finished filming King Creole, Presley received a more-or-less standard military haircut** and began his two years of service. He worked first as a truck driver in an armored division in Frankfort, was transferred to a scout platoon, and was eventually promoted to sergeant. (He also partied hard when he was off-duty and was introduced to the drugs that would ultimately end his life.) His decision not to use his fame to avoid the draft or to cherrypick an assignment was widely praised.
Elvis Presley and a roomful of other young men being sworn into the US Army at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas
Only a few years later, in 1965, the draft became a headline story again when President Johnson announced that monthly draft inductions would increase from 17,000 to 35,000 men.
- Nikita Khrushchev became Premier of the Soviet Union--also in March. He pursued a policy of de-Stalinization within Russia. Khrushchev's relationship with the west was complicated: an official policy of "peaceful coexistence" and "peaceful competition" undermined by gestures of aggression. (The construction of the Berlin Wall, in August, 1961, for example. )
- A month after Khrushchev took power, American pianist Van Cliburn won first-place at the first International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow --an international music competition designed to demonstrate Russia's cultural preeminence. Time magazine dubbed him the "Texan who conquered Russia." (The temptation to look at Van Cliburn and Presley as bookends of American music in 1958 is almost irresistible. Both were young international phenoms with passionate fans and distinctive pompadours.)
Van Cliburn, 1966
- President Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act on July 29; NASA opened shop on October 1. The creation of NASA was inspired by the launch of Sputnik in October, 1957, but its objectives, as laid out in the Space Act , were broader than Cold War politics:
1. The expansion of human knowledge of phenomena in the atmosphere and space;
2. The improvement of the usefulness, performance, speed, safety, and efficiency of aeronautical and space vehicles;
3. The development and operation of vehicles capable of carrying instruments, equipment, supplies, and living organisms through space;
4. The establishment of long-range studies of the potential benefits to be gained from, the opportunities for, and the problems involved in the utilization of aeronautical and space activities for peaceful and scientific purposes;
5. The preservation of the role of the United States as a leader in aeronautical and space science and technology and in the application thereof to the conduct of peaceful activities within and outside the atmosphere;
6. The making available to agencies directly concerned with national defense of discoveries that have military value or significance, and the furnishing by such agencies, to the civilian agency established to direct and control nonmilitary aeronautical and space activities, of information as to discoveries which have value or significance to that agency;
7. Cooperation by the United States with other nations and groups of nations in work done pursuant to this Act and in the peaceful application of the results thereof;
8. The most effective utilization of the scientific and engineering resources of the United States, with close cooperation among all interested agencies of the United States in order to avoid unnecessary duplication of effort, facilities and equipment
Those objectives have remained fundamentally unchanged. Politicians sometimes manage to create something bigger than their immediate squabbles, whether they mean to or not. Anyone ready to give it a try?
*Asked whether the Army could use Presley to help with recruiting, a military spokesman replied "Our studies indicate that his basic appeal is to young girls. Our interest in that field is somewhat limited." Limited is an understatement. At the time the number of women in the American military was capped at two percent of the whole and women were legally barred from having command authority over men. But I digress.
**Despite the efforts of Senator Clifford P. Case of New Jersey to intervene on behalf of the famous pompadour. Case obviously understood that young girls grow up to vote.