For Wednesday, February 17 Which is when Monday happens on the RWU Campus President's Day Weekend)
For Friday, February 19
Read, in Beecher and Stowe, The American Woman's Home
Introduction (pp. 13 - 16)
I. The Christian Family (pp. 17 - 22)
II. A Christian House (pp. 23 - 42)
III. A Healthful Home (pp. 43- 58)
I'm assuming that some of you have elected to use the American Digital Archive Version of this book, which does not contain the "new introduction," so I'm not requiring it. It is probably more important for us to have a sense of what these two women thought they were doing rather than what the author of the new material is writing about. However, for further background on these remarkable sisters, I urge you to read it if you have it.
Read, in Jackson, Kenneth T., Crabgrass Frontier,
Chapter 6. The Time of the Trolley
Chapter 7. Affordable Houses for the Common Man.
Regarding Chapter 6:
"If the generation after the Civil War was notable for its great fortunes and its conspicuous consumption, it was equally noted for the wave of invention that swept over the United States and transformed the ways in which middle-class Americans worked and played. Among the more important developments were the air brake (Westinghouse, 1868), the telephone (Bell, 1876), the phonograph (Edison, 1877), the electric light (Edison, 1879), the fountain pen (Waterman, 1884),... the small camera (Eastman, 1888), the pneumatic tire (Dunlop, 1888), and the zipper (Judson, 1891). Some insight into the nature of the momentous changes involved is suggested by contrasting the ages of steam and electronics: heat, sweat, and grime gave way to the cool glitter of the metropolis at night, to the glistening, mathematically perfect shapes of mass-produced alloys, to the button-pushing leverage of new sources of energy. No invention, however, had a greater impact on the American city between the Civil War and World War I than the visible and noisy streetcar and the tracks that snaked down the broad avenues into undeveloped land." I might add the Passenger Elevator, actually invented a few years before the Civil War.
After today, we'll turn our attention to The American Woman's Home--but we'll come back for a a little more Jackson, hopefully.
The laying out of subdivisions far out beyond the city limits makes cheap and desirable home sites obtainable for a multitude of working men, where they are able to build their bungalows or California houses. . . . The family unit, the desire of the sociologist, can be recovered, when, by rapid transit, giving a fare of from five to seven cents for a 30 minute ride, the working man can be induced to locate his family far from the noisy city. No work for civic betterment is worth more than this. Quoted from "The Better City". Click on the name to read a big more of this early sociological study by Dana W. Bartlett.
The great advantage that the trolley car had over the train was that it could stop and start more often. This doesn't mean that it wasn't also used for longer distances. But as time went by and houses were built between the early "stations" more and more stops were built, creating sort of a "streetcar corridor" Click and on the illustration to the left, below, and see what kind of transportation was available in New England, including the "great city Providence".
America is about more than the East Coast, and Jackson takes us way out west during this chapter. He also begins to introduce us to ways attempts were made to bring housing costs down to the level where at least the middle class and even the lower middle class could afford a house. Trolley cars could get him them there, but that was not much use unless designs and methods lowered the cost of building. I've suggested a couple of books in which you might find houses to your liking to have you probe a little deeper, and choose one read about it, and then copy it to a document and place the document in your resource folder(changing the document to .doc, .docx, or .pdf would be perfect). Below are three "cheap" houses from the third part of Houses for the People. Clicking on any one of them will bring you to the section of houses deal with "cheap" houses. I'd like to have you browse that section. Of course, if you want to be elite, go ahead and choose a house from one of the earlier sections on villas and and mansions. You'll see there are plans as well as illustrations of exteriors (and one or two interiors in some sections, together with discussions of the qualities of the plans shown.
Regarding Chapter 7:
I think you will find the old-fashioned table of contents handy. It gives not only a title, but the chief points to be covered in the chapter. Sometimes the titles are a bit misleading. Take Chapter II, A Christian House, for example: Considering the title alone, one might suspect that the entire chapter is about religion. But look at the points covered--such as "Kitchen and Stove-Room" "Water and Earth Closets," and the like, and one will quickly see that the Chapter focuses on something entirely different, including "Household Murder" of all things.
The book is heavily illustrated don't neglect to pay careful attention to the illustrations. Take the two above, for example, and see how much they can tell you about both "house" and "home". The one on the left, is full of social information and technological information.
February 12 is Abraham Lincoln's birthday. How many know that? I do because it was a school holiday when I was growing up So was George Washington's Birthday. The holidays were collapsed into "Presidents Day" which is Monday. Happy Three Day Weekend, everyone.
