Rhode Island Begins

Roger Williams's Compass-Sundial

In the beginning, there were Wampanoag and Narragansett people, among others. There were villages and crops, the ocean and the Bay. The Native Americans who lived in what is now Rhode Island had long-standing “customes, manners, and worships,” as Roger Williams called them in his 1643 “A Key into the Language of America.”

This is the point of departure for the joint exhibit, Customes, Manners and Worships: Rhode Island Begins  organized by the Rhode Island Historical Society and the Haffenreffer Museum at Brown University, currently on display in the museum at Manning Hall on Brown’s campus. Among the objects displayed are the compass and sundial shown here, owned by Roger Williams, but not (so far as we know) used by him to find his way to what is now Providence. The background is a waistcoat owned by Daniel Updike, who took up residence at Cocumcossuc in South County, on the site of what had been Roger Williams’s South County outpost. Updike’s waistcoat, though not displayed at the Haffenreffer, dates to about 1740; a very similar example is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Like the waistcoat, Mr. Updike’s wife Anstis Updike’s portrait (seen below) represents the later end of the show’s scope.

Anstis Updike, by Nehemiah Partridge

The Haffenreffer’s collections include finely-wrought examples of Native American artifacts, including a stone bear effigy pipe and a large wooden bowl. Seen together, the Native American and English artifacts give visitors a better sense of the equality of sophistication of the cultures who met in New England, and the ways in which they changed each other in the decades before King Philip’s War.

Admission to the Haffenreffer Museum is free. Museum hours are Tuesday through Sunday, from 10 to 4. The Museum is closed Mondays and Brown University holidays. Please call 401-863-2065 for more information.  Customes, Manners, and Worships closes Sunday, April 15, 2012. ~KNH

Who’s the Mann?

People are most familiar with Horace Mann (1796-1859) for his dedicated work for public education. But he applied the same fire to his orations against the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and the debate on extending slavery into the newly acquired territories of what would become California and New Mexico.

RIHS Printed Collection

Speech of Mr. Horace Mann, on the right of Congress to legislate for the territories of the United States, and its duty to exclude slavery therefrom. Delivered in the House of Representatives, in Committee of the whole, June 30, 1848. (Boston: William B. Fowle, 1848.)

Raised a strict Calvinist on a farm in Franklin, MA, he educated himself at his town library and with a tutor. “The Father of American Education” then attended Brown University in Providence and was valedictorian of the Class of 1819. Biographer George Allen Hubbell even credits Brown with helping to solidify his beliefs in universal rights: “Those who made the charter of Brown University had decided that it should be a liberal institution, in which no religious test were to be required; but for all members there was free, full, absolute and uninterrupted liberty of conscience.” He left Brown a committed Unitarian.

This Rhode Island connection can probably account for the trove of newly “re-discovered” Mann imprints at the RIHS Library. Most notably rare copy of the Speech of Honorable Horace Mann, delivered at Lancaster, Mass., May 19, 1851, on the Fugitive Slave Law. (Boston: Office of the Commonwealth [Charles List & Co.], 1851.)

RIHS Printed Collection

Mann resigned as Secretary of the Mass. Board of Education in order to fill John Quincy Adam’s seat in Congress. In Washington from 1848 to 1852, he devoted himself to opposing slavery and was known as the “Whig and Free Soil Congressman from Massachusetts”. The Mann Imprints at RIHS range from 1823 to 1854, encompassing his vibrant education reports, these explosive, taunting abolitionist speeches as well his inaugural address as the first president of Antioch College. In Mann’s words to the graduating class three weeks before his death:

“Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”

Horace Mann, between 1844 and 1859 (Library of Congress)

[PSB]

Further Reading

“Oratory and Learning: Horace Mann at Brown,” by Kathleen Edgerton Kendall. Rhode Island History, Vol. 30(Winter):(1971). The Rhode Island Historical Society.

“Horace Mann at Brown,” by Jonathan C. Messerli. Harvard Educational Review, 33(3):285–311 (1963)

Horace Mann. By Jonathan Messerli (New York: Knopf, 1972)

Horace Mann, educator, patriot and reformer: a study in leadership.               By George Allen Hubbell.  Philadelphia: 1910)

Horace Mann, 1796–1859: A Bibliography. By Clyde S. King.                         (Oceana Publications, 1966)

Chronicles of Brunonia

A fascinating collection of student-produced historical narratives (a number of them using materials from the Rhode Island Historical Society’s collections) are available at Brown University’s Chronicles of Brunonia website. The narratives are the final product of work done by students in Beth Taylor’s creative nonfiction writing workshops, and they draw their inspiration from primary-source materials at institutions like the Historical Society and Brown’s John Hay Library. The following is a list of stories that make use of RIHS materials (with précis provided by the authors):

• “Charlotte Perkins Gilman; letters to Martha” (Abigail Rabinowitz)
  Starting in 1878, teenage friends on the East Side of Providence
  become inseparable, then go their separate ways when Martha weds. But even as Charlotte gains fame as the writer of The Yellow Wallpaper and as an activist for women’s rights, she never forgets Martha.
• “Little Caesar(historical narrative)” (Austin Kennedy)
  The Diary of Giuseppe Zambarano offers a glimpse into the life of a
  young immigrant from Italy in the late 1800s, who builds a business
  and family on Federal Hill in Providence.
• “Lucy and the Chinese bandits” (Meryl Rothstein)
  Lucy Truman Aldrich, born in 1869 to a prominent Rhode Island family, travels to China in 1923 and is kidnapped by bandits.
• “Miss Edna Krouner at Vassar in 1908″ (Elizabeth Loeb)
  Miss Edna Krouner, of Wakefield, Rhode Island, embarks on her first
  year at Vassar College and learns about everything from crushes to
  Marxism and the Vote for Women.
• “Mutiny! A high seas misadventure” (John Sheehy)
  A tale of piracy aboard the Vineyard, a brig, that set sail from New
  Orleans to Philadelphia on November 9, 1830.
• “Providence’s Black Chinese; a love story” (Luke Tsai)
  In 1901, Chung Yik, one of the city’s “best-known Chinese
  restauranteurs” and his wife, Cynthia Monki, survived the burning of
  their Charles Street apartment.
• “Searching for home; accounts of a sea captain’s wife” (Stephanie Bernhard)
  Cynthia Sprague Congdon’s tales of being aboard ship then recording
  her life in East Greenwich, R.I. when she received word that her
  husband was lost at sea during a storm
• “States of mind; the founding of Rhode Island’s first hospital“
  (Alex Eichler)
  The story of the founding of Butler Hospital in Providence, R.I. or,
  as it was originally called, Butler Hospital for the Insane.
• “Stories from the Good Doctor’s farm; colonial southern Rhode Island“
  (Alison Klayman)
  For a short period in the mid-18th century, the MacSparren farm
  flourished at the hands of an assortment of free, enslaved and
  indentured workers. In such a small-scale plantation, typical of
  colonial southern Rhode Island, the social hierarchy was constantly
  repositioning itself to accommodate emerging colonial ideas about
  race, sex, and religion. This story, based on the diary of Reverend
  MacSparren and other historical documents, imagines the personal
  relationships between those who worked and lived in such close quarters.
• “The things they planted” (Molly Jacobson)
  Almost four hundred years ago, Roger Williams and his companions
  paddled down the Seekonk River and landed on the Rhode Island shore. Surrounded by wilderness, with no outside aid and scarce resources, these first settlers slowly raised their farms and homesteads, scavenged for food, and drafted laws for their community.
• “The vampire disease” (Victoria Chao)
  At the turn of the century, a deadly disease swept Europe and the
  Eastern United States. In the span of four years, George Brown, a
  farmer in rural Rhode Island, lost his wife and two daughters to the
  disease. Faced with the prospect of losing his only son, George is
  convinced to seek and destroy the alleged vampire responsible for
  these deaths…
• “Waiting, 1938″ (Alice Lovejoy)
  The story of the famous hurricane of 1938 as revealed by the
  meticulous notes of David Patten, managing editor of the Providence
  Evening Bulletin at the time.
• “The wreck of the Bark Montgomery; an East Greenwich family at home and at sea” (Margo Irvin)
  The story of a storm at sea from both the point of view of the
  captain, John Congdon, and his wife on shore, Cynthia.