{"id":645,"date":"2018-03-27T20:53:16","date_gmt":"2018-03-27T20:53:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-prohibition\/?page_id=645"},"modified":"2018-05-05T20:33:51","modified_gmt":"2018-05-05T20:33:51","slug":"19-march-21-march-28","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-prohibition\/research-journal\/spring-semester\/19-march-21-march-28\/","title":{"rendered":"19. March 21 &#8211; March 28"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As I work towards my first full manuscript, I have been thinking a lot about how I can center the key documents of my research within my chapter structure. To that end, I&#8217;ve spend some of this week more closely examined five primary source documents that are well-distributed throughout my narrative. Below, I&#8217;ve included some of my reading notes as insight into my research process:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-prohibition\/sources\/documents\/black-women-reformers-georgia\/ridgely-torrence-papers\/\"><strong>Hope Interview from Princeton<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><em>When did the \u201crequired to prove\u201d speech take place? It seems as if King was in the audience\u2026 was this the same as the Spelman speech? Seems unlikely because Hope seems to go out of his way not to mention her by name in the Spelman speech whereas he clearly names her here.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>Curious about relationship between white superintendent and black teachers and outside reformers like Rev. WJ White who founded public school districts for black communities \u2013 what is the power dynamic here? He had the power to promote her, but there&#8217;s a certain amount of social distance evident in his position outside the room<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>Placing King\u2019s birthdate back to 1854 actually makes a lot of sense \u2013 because then she\u2019s 20 when she graduates from the Normal School in 1874. She left Athens when she was only 12 to live in the Atlanta bubble for very formative years \u2013 this must have left quite an impact. She probably would have thought of herself as Atlantan, especially after Felice Swift moved there.\u00a0<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>Clues as to King\u2019s status in Athens: her mother was &#8216;fashionable&#8217;, but still worked \u2013 at the very least, this seems to indicate that she was free. If her father was a white man and still involved in her life, was this one of the tacit mixed marriages of the period frequently mentioned by Ridgely in Augusta?<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>It is also interesting that Ridgely says her father was \u201capparently\u201d a white man, and notes her comment on Hope\u2019s color \u2013 King\u2019s own skin tone seems to be implied. How might colorism have impacted her rise, and her mindset\/vision of what respectability and success looked like? <\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>King\u2019s experiences in Augusta are interesting \u2013 they speak to the rough transition to freedom during late Reconstruction in the \u201cslum district\u201d and the already rising elite \u201crusticrats\u201d (I think this is \u201caristocrat\u201d in dialect). <\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>King\u2019s insight into her marriage is particularly helpful for understanding why she might have left the public sphere later on \u2013 \u201cMy husband was a mean man\u201d who \u201cdisliked her activities and tried to stop her.\u201d He evidently failed, at least at first &#8211; why would she have married him, and how common was this kind of tension within marriages of the period? I would love to read a cultural history that looks into the nature of romantic relationships in this sphere &#8211; maybe this is an aspect of gendered norms beyond the maternal\u00a0role that I should explore further\u00a0<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/books.google.com\/books?id=wT42AQAAMAAJ&amp;pg=RA2-PA94&amp;dq=%22Georgia+Swift+King%22&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwi4pLGm44vXAhVGVyYKHY20Ag04ChDoAQgyMAI#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false\"><strong>King\u2019s Reflections on the WCTU Convention <\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><em>She begins by outlining a truly ambitious plan \u2013 more ambitious than I had previously realized. Within the state, she wanted to visit every Congressional district, set up a Union (with a president that would serve as district organizer, and county organizers reporting to that individual within the district) &#8211; this is a complex institution\u00a0<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>More than that, however, once she becomes a national organizer, her reception at the Exposition convinces her that she could go to the \u201cAdjoining states\u201d \u2013 not just Georgia! She was on her way to becoming a national figure in temperance, a la Thurman, when her health stopped these plans in their tracks <\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>King then lists her considerable work within the state \u2013 including an impressive number of speeches and organizing visits throughout the state \u2013 she mentions establishing Youth and Loyal Temperance Legion groups and introducing Scientific Temperance \u2013 this is interesting because she is circumventing the legislation\u2019s failure to mandate this kind of education\u00a0<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-prohibition\/sources\/documents\/black-women-reformers-georgia\/1896-intemperance-as-a-cause-of-mortality\/\"><strong>Intemperance As a Cause of Mortality<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><em>\u201cFacts versus Figures\u201d \u2013 what disciplinary tensions underlie this statement?<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>Quotes Doctors \u2013 is this to lend authority? Are these doctors on the list of the Committee of 50?\u00a0<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>When she claims that any drink habit \u2013 excessive or moderate \u2013 could lead to \u2018sudden death\u2019 \u2013 this is classic STI scare tactics. Basically, she\u2019s saying even if you think you\u2019re healthy despite the occasional beer, you could just drop dead from \u201cpoison\u201d<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>Her discussion of the physical effect of parental drinking on the child\u2019s temperament is interesting because it gives her authority as a mother &#8211; I&#8217;m a bit unsure where to put the connection to the rise of eugenic thought in the thesis, but this seems like an obvious connection\u00a0<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>Her discussion of alcoholism and disease struggles because her conflation of correlation and causation \u2013 she knows she cannot prove that it is the alcohol itself that is resulting in these awful diseases \u2013 yet it does not stop her from insinuating that it is so<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>When she talks about alcoholism as a city problem, she\u2019s drawing a line between the Atlanta and Tuskegee Conferences \u2013 this is her territory\u00a0<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>Interesting to unpack further her discussion of the \u201cignorant, drunken class of Negroes\u201d because her treatment of their deaths doesn\u2019t really come out sympathetically \u2013 she says their death rate wouldn\u2019t bother her EXCEPT for their young age \u2013 what? Also it\u2019s very clear that she does not see herself in this class in the slightest \u2013 she is talking about something distinctly outside of her circle<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>Her discussion of a reformatory is useful in the way it shows her moving beyond the logic of individual responsibility into a broader understanding of societal forces beyond personal control\u00a0<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>Her discussion of \u201cthe responsibility of the teacher, the preacher, and the physician\u201d provides an index of the kinds of people she sees as responsible for this work \u2013 reinforcing STI: \u201cThe preacher or teacher who suffers himself or those whom he serves to be uninformed on this vital question is recreant to his highest trust.\u201d<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>It is interesting that although she sees intemperance as the ultimate cause, she asks only for a reformatory \u2013 which would only offset the damage caused by liquor in the first place <\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-prohibition\/sources\/documents\/black-women-reformers-georgia\/1897-mothers-meetings\/\"><strong>Mothers\u2019 Meetings<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><em>She begins by taking some pretty traditional ideas \u2013 that the home, school, and church influence an individual\u2019s \u201cmake up,\u201d that the home is the most effecting, and that the mother is the most influential within the home \u2013 to conclude something kind of radical: \u201cthe destiny of the Negro race is largely in the hands of its mothers&#8221;<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>She continues with reference to unspecific statistics \u2013 perhaps this felt like a necessity given the setting \u2013 but she doesn\u2019t really seem comfortable with using them <\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>She talks about the plight of \u201claboring mothers\u201d without demonizing them \u2013 it\u2019s ignorance, not immorality. When she asks \u201cDoes this excessive deah rate indicate a corresponding mental and moral decay?\u201d her solution of Mothers\u2019 Meetings seems to suggest no \u2013 it\u2019s a lack of opportunity, not a lack of capacity <\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>I wonder what the academic establishment would have thought about simplifying their conclusions into palatable chunks for a mother\u2019s meeting?<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>I need to better understand the role of Mother\u2019s meetings beyond this particular context: what other causes would have adopted this tactic?<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/credo.library.umass.edu\/view\/full\/mums312-b012-i034\"><strong>Du Bois Letter<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><em>She is clearly still very much in the world of race leadership, as she distributes copies of the Feb 1918 Crisis, collecting subscribers and commenting on its contents\u00a0<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>She also mentions that she is getting it to white people \u2013 so she\u2019s maybe more integrated racially in Atlanta \u2013 if she\u2019s seeing Felton regularly<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>The Felton incident deserves to be mentioned somewhere in the conclusion or end of Chapter 3: what their relationship must have been like! How could King not feel bitterness to the white supremacists who hijacked her movement\u00a0<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>Clearly King and DuBois had maintained a personal relationship even after the Sociological Club speech, there is a palpable familiarity and even egalitarian nature to the correspondence <\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>The Herndons are the icons of Black Atlanta during the 1870s-turn of the century \u2013 thus the death of Adrienne and her family feels like the end of an era <\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>Why does King put her \u201cMrs.\u201d in parenthesis? <\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As I work towards my first full manuscript, I have been thinking a lot about how I can center the key documents of my research within my chapter structure. To that end, I&#8217;ve spend some of this week more closely &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-prohibition\/research-journal\/spring-semester\/19-march-21-march-28\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2705,"featured_media":0,"parent":668,"menu_order":19,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-645","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-prohibition\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-prohibition\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-prohibition\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-prohibition\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2705"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-prohibition\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=645"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-prohibition\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/645\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-prohibition\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/668"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-prohibition\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}