Antarctic explorer Navy Rear Admiral Richard Byrd and transatlantic pilot Amelia Earhart made thousands for their journeys by selling postmarked souvenir envelopes and stamps that commemorated their travels. They were helped along by “Stamp-Collector-in-Chief” President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a devoted philatelist, who made supporting American exploration as easy as buying a stamp.

Stamp collecting began almost as soon as stamps began being printed in the 1840s. Great Britain first came up with the concept of stamps to solve a postal problem: Mail recipients generally paid postage upon delivery, but their correspondents were skirting the system by writing messages on the outside of mailed envelopes—“Arrived in London”—so that the recipients could then decline to pay the postage. Stamps flipped the script by forcing the sender to pre-pay for transporting a letter. In turn, the stamp-based system ushered in a revolution. Not only were postal authorities guaranteed payment, but the cost of sending letters fell.

With costs reduced, the number of letters circulating through the mail skyrocketed. Other nations began to adopt Britain’s postal model, too, printing stamps with unique images that represented their nation or empire. With the emergence of beautiful and innovative postage designs, increasing numbers of people naturally started collecting them. Enthusiasts purchased stamps, placed them into albums, and traded them with friends.

Thousands of stamp collectors emerged in the U.S., for instance, where early stamps featured portraits of the first president, George Washington, and the first postmaster general, Benjamin Franklin. The phenomenon of stamp collecting coincided and was bolstered by an emerging network of male-only collecting clubs in the late 1880s that were similar to fraternal orders and dinner clubs. Stamp enthusiasts who did not or could not belong to the collecting clubs could still take part by reading a growing number of stamp-collecting publications. There was no shortage in stamps to marvel over; between 1864 and 1906, collectors printed and circulated more than 900 stamp papers, as they were referred to at the time, in the U.S. alone.

By the 1930s, stamp collecting was so popular that radio stations across the U.S. dedicated broadcasts to newly issued stamps and provided tips for caring for collections. Teachers gave grade school students stamps from around the globe to teach geography. Articles appeared in magazines, such as Ladies’ Home Journal, and large daily newspapers, such as the Washington Post, extolling the virtues of stamp collecting (or, on the flip side, framed it more negatively, as a “mania”). Meanwhile, cultural institutions—libraries, museums and the like—hosted stamp exhibitions. Even businesses got in on the trend, using stamps to attract customers. Starting in the 1880s, the tobacco company W. Duke and Sons, which already handed out baseball cards in cigarette boxes to attract customers and increase sales, began giving away international postage stamps. The company even printed its own stamp album, which was designed to hold the entire set of stamps distributed in its packages.

Postal agencies took notice and stoked the hobby further. In 1892, Postmaster General John Wanamaker, founder of Wanamaker’s Department Store in Philadelphia, oversaw the issuing of the first commemorative stamp series, a collection of 16 intricately designed stamps depicting the life of Christopher Columbus to promote the World’s Columbian Exposition. Stamp sales increased by millions of dollars. Between 1893 and 1919, alone, the post office printed 47 more sets of commemorative stamps, most of which celebrated World’s Fairs held in the U.S. From 1920 to 1940, the post office more than tripled its output, printing 150 more, available for a limited time and designed to be collected. Because federal rules restricted American stamps from carrying the image of a living person, most of these designs looked backward to celebrate contemporary events.

It’s hard to say who came up with the idea of tapping into the stamp-collecting craze to raise money for expeditions, but Amelia Earhart was almost certainly one of the first to do so. The famed aviatrix made her name in the early days of flight in the 1920s as one of America’s first pilots, and by 1932 had become the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. Earhart’s trips were expensive, and despite her fame, she was always short on funding.

Earhart’s husband and publicist, George Palmer Putnam, had encouraged her to write an autobiography and go on speaking tours to promote her career, and he also appears to have come up with the idea of helping her make money from the stamp-collecting craze. In 1932, Earhart carried 50 letters she had postmarked and signed on her first solo transatlantic flight. Putnam sold these letters to collectors who sought materials from notable figures. The scheme was successful, and Earhart began carrying mail on all of her international flights.

Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd followed her lead. Byrd was a naval scientist who explored the North and South Poles, and he, too, had to raise money for his expeditions. Preparing for a second voyage to Antarctica in 1933, he got the CBS radio network to feature a weekly broadcast from the “Little America” military base in Antarctica, sponsored by General Foods, which also published and sold the “Authorized Map” of the expedition. Like Earhart, Byrd benefitted from a fundraising opportunity directed at philatelists. Unlike Earhart, Byrd got government help making it happen, from none other than President Roosevelt.

This three-cent stamp, created to fund Byrd’s expedition, was inspired by President Roosevelt’s initial sketch. Courtesy of the National Postal Museum.

As a child, Roosevelt learned philately from his mother. In adulthood, he returned to the hobby while traveling the world as assistant secretary of the Navy from 1913 to 1920, and found comfort in his collection after his polio diagnosis in 1921. Newspapers reported that Roosevelt sorted stamps in the White House during his famous first 100 days in office to help him relax while he waited for Congress to vote on legislation.

FDR used his position to encourage stamp collecting and influence stamp production. He submitted ideas for stamps that promoted federal programs, like the national parks, and New Deal initiatives, such as the National Recovery Act.

When Byrd visited Roosevelt in the White House in 1933 seeking financial assistance for his Antarctic expedition, Roosevelt had a brainstorm. Rather than offer government funds, he asked Byrd to send him a letter postmarked from “Little America”—and suggested that other collectors might want a unique souvenir cover canceled at Little America, too, or might be interested in supporting Byrd’s expedition by purchasing a limited-issue stamp. Roosevelt himself sketched out a quick design that was later adapted by artists at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing: a map of the globe with dotted lines pointing out Byrd’s major expeditions to the North and South Poles. Collectors could buy a three-cent stamp, or pay 53 cents for a stamped envelope at Gimbel’s Department Store or through the U.S. Post Office Department’s own stamp store, the Philatelic Agency.

The initiative was a success. Ultimately, more than 150,000 envelopes were sent down to the “most southerly post office” at Little America, where each piece of mail was canceled with a special seal. Because of the distance carried, the postal service imposed a 50-cent transportation fee, which helped finance the expedition’s expenses, raising approximately $75,000.

While Earhart never got to benefit from the presidential friendship and support that Byrd enjoyed, as her fame grew, so did her connections with American philatelists. She took to carrying hundreds of letters with her on each of her flights, which her husband sold on her behalf. She was also a collector herself and exhibited international stamps, postmarks and signed envelopes at an international philatelic exhibition in 1936.

Prior to Earhart’s 1937 attempt to circumnavigate the globe, stamp collectors and fans purchased more than 5,000 souvenir envelopes at Gimbel’s, for $5 each. Earhart carried this extra cargo with her, intending to postmark the envelopes at a few stops along her global adventure.

It would be her last. After flying 22,000 miles Earhart, her navigator Fred Noonan, and her plane disappeared in the South Pacific, carrying $25,000 worth of philatelic cargo. Roosevelt allocated federal resources to a large-scale search to find them, led by Navy and Coast Guard ships.

The plane and pilots, and the thousands of stamped envelopes they carried, were never recovered.

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But first, what was calamanco, this special item coveted by women of wealth and women of the middling sort? Calamanco (also spelled callimanco, calamanco, or calamink) is a worsted wool textile finished with a glossy, glazed surface, created by forcing the cloth through hot rollers. Historians trace the earliest usage of the term back to the late 16th century. Some scholars attribute the derivation of the word from a modification of Spanish “calamaco,” and from the Late Latin word “calamaucus,” referring to a felt cap or skullcap.

Early American consumers got most of their calamanco from Norfolk, England. They appreciated the fabric’s ability to take bright colors, such as the vibrant reds and yellows fancied in the early part of the 18th century, and the elegant greens that became the fashion by mid-century. But calamanco also worked for plain, damasked, or brocaded weaves.

A portrait of Magdalena Douw (Mrs. Harme Gansevoort), by John Heaton, oil on linen, 1740. Courtesy of Henry Francis du Pont/Winterthur Museum Collections.

Early Americans adopted calamanco for clothing, including petticoats, waistcoats, and shoes, and for an assortment of household uses, such as bed coverings. Calamanco remnants from a petticoat or waistcoat could be repurposed for many items, including quilts, or stays (similar to what today is known as a corset). Because it was so adaptable, historians routinely find calamanco wool in probate inventories. It was tremendously useful, and thus, even though it was common, considered an item of value.

Calamanco shoes—especially popular between the 1730s and the 1780s—were practical in New England, as they offered more warmth and durability than silk. Their glazed surface could withstand a bit of dirt and poor weather, and could be surface cleaned on a regular basis. The shoes were also an affordable choice, available in differing qualities. Dozens of references to the shoes can be found in the account books of merchants and country traders in places such as Deerfield, Williamsburg, Boston, Portsmouth, and Lynn. When shoe scholar Nicole Rudolph examined New England newspapers between 1775 and 1883, she found 408 ads mentioning ladies’ shoes; of those, a quarter were for calamancos.

Numerous sources—including orders placed by George Washington with London shoe and bootmaker, John Didsbury, for Martha Washington—indicate that black calamanco shoes were perhaps the 18th-century equivalent to today’s black pumps: a wardrobe staple for women that crossed divides, whether political, social, or economic. For example, while Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, and Dorothy Quincy, John Hancock’s wife, wore calamancos, so did Hancock’s serving girl, whose name was either Vilate or Vitale.

Other colors were available, too. There are frequent references in account books and advertisements to pink calamancos, for instance, for young girls. Red calamancos and red wool broadcloth shoes, meanwhile, were favorites for wedding shoes, showing up extensively in paintings and prints of the time.

But while modern museum collections generally showcase more luxurious footwear—damasks, or brocaded or embroidered silks, a visitor would be challenged to find even a single pair of calamancos. This raises a question: If the calamanco shoe was so ubiquitous, why isn’t it better remembered today? There are a number of reasons for this: Wool shoes face a particular threat common to historic garments—insect infestation. Woolen fabrics provide a satisfying meal for moths, insects, and other vermin alike. Because calamancos are nourishing and good for nesting, few examples have survived.

Late 18th-century brown-black wool shoes. Courtesy of Irma Bowen Textile Collection, University of New Hampshire Museum and Special Collections. Photo by Andrew Davis.

Another culprit may be the calamanco’s very ordinariness: it was the pedestrian nature of this footwear that accorded it so little notice. It may seem an odd practice to us in the age of fast fashion, but shoes of the era held their value, and both men and women frequently made gifts of footwear to their intimates. Calamanco shoes were frequently passed along to family members or trusted servants. As a workaday shoe, the calamanco was worn again and again until it wore out. Once its last owner was done with it, she simply tossed it into a privy (the early American trash dump) where it became compost.

In contrast, more elaborate, costly shoes such as those made from silk damask or silk brocade—special occasion footwear, such as a bride might wear to her wedding—became imbued with family history and preserved for safekeeping. These cherished pieces were passed down through the generations and treasured by families, and are housed in museums today. Until recent decades, calamancos were not prized highly by most collectors or institutions. When confronted with a well-worn or very simple shoe, utilitarian in appearance, museum curators with limited budgets might have previously erred on the side of “beauty” or the historic importance of the wearer. Only as interest in the history of everyday people grew in the 1960s and 1970s did museum begin acquiring calamanco shoes.

Calamanco shoes challenge the conventional wisdom that early Americans lived in an “age of homespun.” This mythology of self-sufficient households became firmly rooted during the colonial revival movement of the 1890s to 1920s and has continued uncontested until recent decades. Evidence from advertisements, inventories, and correspondence reveals a somewhat different story regarding the woolen shoe. It is a rich example of how a textile was transferred from Europe and adapted to a multitude of American uses.

Even shoes manufactured domestically largely relied on wool produced in Norwich; and when choosing between a domestic shoe and an English-made shoe, those with means frequently opted for British shoes, never mind the Revolution in the air. But in the 1760s and 1770s, American shoemakers and merchants aggressively stepped up their promotion of American manufactures—and as time went on, the selection of American calamanco shoes, manufactured in large numbers in Lynn, Massachusetts, and elsewhere, in a small way came to represent Colonial economic independence, versus being tethered to the yoke of trade dominance by Great Britain. Locally made calamanco shoes became synonymous with “appropriate” footwear for women embracing the patriot cause. A January 1765 advertisement from Boston boasted of “… women’s callimanco Shoes Lynn-made, as neat, and much stronger than any imported from England ….” That same year and month, Philadelphia shoemaker Alexander Rutherford alerted his customers “resolved to distinguish themselves by their patriotism and encouragement of American manufactures, that he makes and sells all sorts of worsted or wool shoes, of all sizes, as neat and cheap as any imported from England.” By 1770, Lynn-made shoes had such a good reputation in Boston that merchants proudly trumpeted their origin, pairing them in the same advertisement with calamancos from England (which some wealthier American women still wore).

Examining the calamanco shoe as a historical document brings us closer to understanding the lives of women in early America—the work they did, the ways in which they shopped, and how their purchases came to reflect emerging patriotic values.

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This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

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The anniversary always triggers much ado about Brown, whose failed raid is often described as the spark that ignited the Civil War. But lost in all the commemoration of Brown is the story of the five African Americans who went with him to Harpers Ferry. Over the years, they’ve been treated as footnotes, if mentioned at all, overshadowed by their martyred commander, whose soul, and legend, go marching on. But each of the five men of color came to Brown by a different route, and for different reasons.

Among them, none may have a more tragic and poignant story than Dangerfield Newby, who joined the raid to secure freedom for, and be reunited with, his enslaved wife and their children. Newby’s story echoes down through the generations, illuminating the complex mixing of races and society’s efforts to define humans by the color of their skin rather than by the content of their character, an affliction the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King famously decried in his 1963 “I have a dream” speech.

The oldest of Brown’s raiders, Newby was born around 1820 to a white father and an enslaved mother. It may seem incongruous, but Henry Newby and Elsey Pollard, of mixed Native American, African and European ancestry, lived together as husband and wife in Fauquier County, Virginia, now part of the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. Many years into their union, Henry Newby was determined to free his enslaved wife and their 11 children from their owner, a man named John Fox. Lacking the funds to purchase them, Newby obtained Fox’s permission to move the family to Ohio, where a state court had ruled that slaves setting foot “upon our shore” (of the Ohio River) would be free. So, in September 1858, the elder Newbys and their children moved to Bridgeport, in Belmont County, Ohio, across the river from Wheeling, West Virginia. There, most led prosaic lives, raising families and working as laborers, domestics, barbers, and miners. Dangerfield Newby, the eldest of the children, was a blacksmith and plied his trade throughout the state of Ohio.

When he was living in Virginia, Newby had maintained an enduring union with an enslaved woman named Harriet, who belonged to a Dr. Lewis Jennings, in Brentsville, then the seat of Prince William County, Virginia. The pair had as many as seven children. Even though Harriet remained enslaved, and thus unable to marry legally, she and Newby regarded themselves as husband and wife. But it was a union without rights—and when Jennings faced financial setbacks, he decided to sell Harriet and the children south to the cotton plantations in Louisiana. Life was much harsher for enslaved people on the labor-intensive plantations in the Deep South than it was in the Upper South, and demand was booming for enslaved workers there—Harriet and her children were seen as prime commodities who could fetch a handsome price.

Newby tried to head off the sale, offering to purchase his family from their owner. In 1858 and 1859, from his earnings as a blacksmith, he made three deposits to the Bank of Ohio totaling $742 (about $23,000 in today’s dollars). Jennings demanded more—$1,000, by one account—and the deal fell through. As Jennings prepared to sell the family to the highest bidder, Harriet wrote three increasingly desperate letters to Newby, who was then living in Ashtabula County in northeastern Ohio, an abolitionist stronghold.

The letters, addressed to “Dear Husband” and signed “Your affectionate wife,” were dated April 11, April 22 and August 16, 1859. Newby was, Harriet wrote repeatedly, her “one bright hope.” In the first letter, Harriet reported that “Mrs. gennings,” her master’s wife, had been sick after giving birth to a baby girl, and Harriet had stayed with her “day and night.” Their own children were all well, she wrote, adding, “I want to see you very much … Oh, Dear Dangerfield, come this fall without fail, money or no money. I want to see you so much. That is one bright hope I have before me.”

Harriett received a letter back on April 22 and responded the same day. “I wrote in my last letter that Miss Virginia had a baby—a little girl. I had to narse her day and night. Dear Dangerfield, you cannot imagine how much I want to see you. Com as soon as you can, for nothing would give more pleasure than to see you. It is the grates Comfort I have is thinking of the promist time when you will be here. Oh, that bless hour when I shall see you once more.”

Finally, on August 16, again just after hearing from Newby, Harriett wrote again: “It is said Master is in want of money. If so, I know not what time he may sell me, an then all my bright hops of the futer are blasted, for their has ben one bright hope to cheer me in all my troubles, that is to be with you, for if I thought I should never see you, this earth would have no charms for me. Do all you Can for me, witch I have no doubt you will. I want to see you so much.” And with added urgency, she wrote: “I want you to buy me as soon as possible, for if you do not get me some body else will … their has ben one bright hope to cheer me in all my troubles that is to be with you.”

Throughout this time, it was increasingly clear to Newby that negotiations with Jennings would not succeed. So in June Newby met with Captain John Brown, as the famous abolitionist came to be known, who sought to mobilize an army of escaped slaves to join him in a free republic that would be established in Appalachian Virginia and from where they would wage guerilla wars on valley plantations, liberate more slaves, and, ultimately, end slavery.

Brown was attempting to recruit African Americans for his planned raid, but when Newby approached him, he was skeptical, thinking Newby wanted money. But the blacksmith was motivated solely by his hope that by joining with Brown he could somehow liberate his enslaved family, and Brown took him on.

When Brown and his supporters assembled at a farmhouse five miles from Harpers Ferry to prepare for their assault, Newby brought Harriet’s letters with him. Plaintively, he would ask Brown when he could respond to Harriet’s letters. “Soon, Dangerfield, soon,” Brown would tell him, probably because the group was living clandestinely in the farmhouse. That time never came. Newby was quiet and sad, as Brown’s daughter, Annie, would recall years later. In his only known photo, Newby, in his thirties, appears well into middle age, with deep bags under his eyes, and his sad face speaks volumes.

A woodcut of the only known photo of Dangerfield Newby, who—though only in his thirties—appears well into middle age. Printed in John Brown and His Men by Richard J. Hinton, 1894. Courtesy of Internet Archive Book Images/ flickr.

On October 16, 1859, a damp and chilly Sunday evening, the raiders marched in double file down a dark country road leading to the ferry. Two men in front shouldered arms, while the rest followed a horse-drawn wagon carrying Brown. They marched in silence, as if in a funeral procession, Osborne Perry Anderson, the raid’s sole survivor and one of the five African Americans, later recalled. A funeral procession is, in fact, what it was.

Crossing the Potomac River bridge, the men quickly seized the arsenal and occupied Harper’s Ferry. Resistance came the following morning, as local militias and armed arsenal workers converged on the scene. By then, Brown, along with several of his men and hostages, had holed up inside the arsenal’s fire engine house, a small brick building that became known as John Brown’s Fort.

Newby was deployed to guard the fort’s entrance to the Shenandoah River bridge to keep open a potential escape route and fend off a potential counterattack. When two men encroached on the perimeter, he fatally shot them both. Newby then tried to retreat to the relative security of the fire engine house, crossing an open area, when a sniper firing from the second floor of a nearby building cut him down. Lacking bullets, the shooter had instead inserted a six-inch spike into his rifle barrel. This missile struck Newby in the neck and he fell, mortally wounded—the first of Brown’s men to die.

As he lay on the street, angry townspeople approached, poked sticks into his wounds and cut off his ears for souvenirs, along with his genitals. Then they left his mutilated body for the hogs. Animals rooted around in his remains, then scampered away. Dangerfield Newby’s mutilated body stayed in the open for more than a day and a half before his remains were buried with those of seven other raiders in a shallow grave half a mile up the Shenandoah River.

Brown’s rebellion ended after 36 hours, when a contingent of 90 marines, under the command of Col. Robert E. Lee, battered their way into the arsenal firehouse. Brown and four others—including two African Americans—would be captured, tried, convicted, and executed a few weeks later. Anderson, the sole survivor, fled from the arsenal gate with Albert Hazlett, who was later captured, crossing the Potomac into Maryland. Anderson escaped to Canada and died impoverished and in obscurity in the District of Columbia, in 1872.

Even though it failed, John Brown’s raid had a cataclysmic impact, further polarizing the nation over the issue of slavery and leading to the civil war that resulted in as many as 750,000 deaths—and in constitutional amendments that abolished slavery, established birthright citizenship, and promised formerly enslaved men due process and the right to vote.

These events did not immediately transform the lives of Harriet Newby and her children. Though no bill of sale has been found, other evidence, including census records, indicates that Harriet and the Newby children were indeed sold South in the early months of 1860. Most likely, they wound up in a camp for formerly enslaved people known as “contrabands,” after Union troops occupied much of southern Louisiana early in the war. The widowed Harriet married a man named William Robinson, from Berkeley County, West Virginia, who, records suggest, was serving in the Union army in Louisiana. Together, they would raise three of their own children, along with Dangerfield’s, and return to Virginia, where they settled near Mount Vernon. Harriet Newby died in 1884, and Dangerfield’s and her descendants still live in the D.C. area and beyond—some as far away as Cannonville, Utah. Their mixed-race heritage is a haunting reminder of the legacy of slavery, and some descendants struggle with society’s racial labels. In American’s lingering color caste system, who are they? What are they? Where do they fit?

Philip J. Schwarz, a professor emeritus of history at Virginia Commonwealth University, researched the Newby family saga and told their story as part of a 2001 book, Migrants from Slavery: Virginia and the Nation. “This is my Diary of Anne Frank,” he has said. “Whenever I feel I might be complacent or detached from my studies of slavery, I touch base with Dangerfield Newby. It is a sacred obligation for us to follow through on our study of human beings, especially if their history is hidden.” 

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At the time, the New York Tribune expressed disbelief that so many people could be killed or injured because “two actors quarreled!” But the conflict was about so much more than which actor was better: it was a watershed event, signaling the growing penetration of celebrity culture into the national zeitgeist—and into the individual identities of everyday Americans.

Even before the Civil War, celebrities—their appearances, behaviors, expressed attitudes, their biographies, their failings, their scandals—were becoming a structuring force whose influence would increase with each new medium and communications technology, leading to the ever-beaming, constantly beckoning celebrity-driven media engulfing us today. In this light, we can see that the infamous Astor Place Riot was a flashpoint in a larger battle about class identity, resentments over economic and cultural privilege, and manhood and national pride, expressed through two Shakespearean actors: the British performer William Charles Macready and the American Edwin Forrest.

While Macready had quickly met with professional acclaim for his controlled performances in London and Paris, Forrest had played small, rough theaters in the South and West as he honed his more melodramatic style and worked his way towards bigger theaters. By the time they met in New York, Forrest was hailed as the country’s first great tragic actor, an extravagant performer deemed to embody the “American” style of acting.

Today, we associate Shakespeare with “high art” and culture, but in the nineteenth century his plays were performed in venues from opulent theaters to saloons, and many audience members knew key lines so well they would recite them along with the actors. These theaters were rowdy places where the audiences (mostly men) were spatially segregated by income, line of work, class, and race. The expensive boxes above and to the side of the stage were reserved for the wealthy.

Below the boxes (what we would today call the orchestra) was “the pit,” where the emerging middle class of manual laborers, sailors, mechanics, tradesmen, and, in New York, the Bowery B’hoys sat. Known for their boisterous (and often drunken) behavior, bright clothes, and love of the theater, the b’hoys were single, working-class men, mostly firemen and mechanics.

Above and behind the pit were the cheap gallery seats (today’s mezzanine) occupied by newsboys, apprentices, and other lower wage workers; segregated from everyone in the upper third tier were African Americans (assigned the very worst seats), and prostitutes and their clients. Those in the gallery were known to pelt actors who displeased them with rotten fruit, eggs, peanuts (hence the peanut gallery), and pennies. Those in each sector of the theater resented the others. So the theater was both a producer of celebrity and a tinderbox of class resentment.

This segregation within theaters began to give way to segregation between theaters. When the new, luxurious Astor Place Opera House opened late in 1847, it was meant for the rich. In May 1849, Macready, known for his restrained, intellectual style, was slated to perform Macbeth there.

At the same time, Forrest was also to portray Macbeth at another theater just a few blocks away. A feud had begun between them, and Macready had already denounced Forrest’s “deficiency in taste and judgement” and especially “the facetious applause of his supporters, the ‘Bower lads.’” In retaliation, Forrest, still smarting from having been hissed when he performed in England, declared that Macready “should never be permitted to appear again upon the stage” in New York City. The “penny press,” tabloid-style papers that had risen to prominence along with the theaters, fanned the conflict to increase circulation and sales.

Hundreds of Forrest’s supporters, many of them the b’hoys, bought tickets to Macready’s first performance on May 8, stoked in part by broadsides—provocative posters—signed by “The American Committee” that asked, “Working Men, Shall Americans or English Rule in this City?” The handbills urged them to “express their opinions” at the “English Aristocratic Opera House,” which indeed they did. As Macready sought to perform, Forrest’s supporters shouted him down and threw rotten eggs, potatoes, and other vegetables.

Macready tried again to perform on May 10. The b’hoys were ready, and so were Macready’s supporters—and the police, all 250 of them. But in addition to those in the Astor Place Opera House, an estimated 10,000 fans of both actors had gathered outside the theater. By the fourth scene, Macready could not proceed given the hissing, booing, and the hurling of more rotten vegetables—including a bottle containing the Indian spice asafetida, which “diffused a most repulsive stench throughout the house.”

The police burst in to eject the culprits, and Macready rushed through the play to finish. But the b’hoys outside were not having it, and began hurling bricks and paving stones at the theater. The police called in the state militia, 350 of them. But they were unable to calm or break up the group, some of whom were throwing bricks and paving stones at the police.

So the militia fired a volley over the crowd, and then one into the crowd, and then more.

The next day, the Astor Place Opera House gained the monikers “Massacre Opera House” and the “Disaster Place.”

But of course, this was not really about Macready and Forrest; conflicts about celebrities are never only about the celebrities. This one was over national pride and identity, class position and resentments, and different versions of masculinity. Macready personified Britain’s sense of its cultural superiority. His fans were the growing elite in New York City who embodied upper-class snobbery. The b’hoys, through their identification with Forrest, were rebelling against such cultural hierarchies and the special privileges of elites. Through their jeers and their rotten fruit, they sought to project onto Macready—and then exorcise—a needling sense of cultural inferiority, of not having “class,” and of not being the “right” kind of “cultured” men.

The Astor Place Riot was an exemplar of how popular culture is rarely “just entertainment,” and that battles over which entertainments and stars are worthy of admiration are always battles about larger norms, values, attitudes, and the social order itself. And while the riots were an extreme example, they demonstrated that fans had become active and participatory meaning makers, key players in the production of celebrities and their significance.

WWE wrestlers Dolph Ziggler and Charlotte give high-fives to fans Danny and Manny Gomez, ages six and nine, at a New York mall. Image courtesy of Stuart Ramson/Associated Press.

This was a crucial precedent, but it was not the only instance of the transformation of how Americans related to entertainers in those times. Possibly the greatest maestro of celebrity production during this era, P. T. Barnum, saw a growing market among urban audiences with more leisure time for entertainment, especially sensational and eye-catching acts. In 1842, he opened his “museum” in downtown Manhattan and filled it with oddities like the infamous “Fiji mermaid,” which was in reality the torso and head of a small, mummified monkey sewn onto the bottom half of a fish.

Barnum was also one of the earliest and most wildly successful creators of celebrities. Dubbed “the Shakespeare of advertising,” he used newspaper advertisements, pamphlets, press releases, and provocative broadsides to publicize his shows.

Barnum “discovered” Jenny Lind, a successful and famous Swedish opera singer who was unknown in the United States. To promote her, Barnum launched an unprecedented press campaign extolling her virtues as a charitable and benevolent woman who spent most of her time engaged in philanthropy, tending to “the afflicted and distressed;” he believed that most Americans would be unfamiliar with opera music but would be charmed and attracted by her morality. Indeed, Barnum understood that for certain types of people to become admired stars, they had to be connected to certain values that resonated with the aspirations of their audiences. Thus he cast Lind as an unparalleled talent who regarded her “artistic powers as a gift from heaven” yet was so selfless that she gave benefit concerts for orphanages and hospitals.

Billing Lind as “the Swedish Nightingale,” Barnum auctioned off tickets to see her. By the time she got to the United States in 1850, tens of thousands turned out to greet her ship. She performed before sold-out crowds, her 95 concerts grossing $712,161, the equivalent of $21 million in 2016 dollars. “Lindomania” resulted, with a host of products named after her, from gloves to hats to paper dolls.

By midcentury, the penny press, Barnum, and theatrical producers had established the mechanisms by which individuals became famous, and promoted certain ideological visions that celebrities represented. Meanwhile, a distinctive sociological change was occurring in American life, especially in the cities and larger towns, as people learned to assume the role of a mass audience, witnessing spectacles with hundreds and even thousands of other people they did not necessarily know.

People began to feel that allegiances to certain stars, and animosity towards other ones, were tied into their own individual and group identities. They were appreciating that publicity would help them be an informed, with-it person by promoting certain experiences they really should not miss—such as a particular, well-hyped theatrical performance. And they were coming to expect that publicity would frame how they were meant to receive such a major event.

Americans were picking up the new, publicity-driven language of celebrity, acquiring a new vocabulary about who and what should be celebrated and why. Crucially, people were learning how to inhabit a new, mass mediated persona: that of the fan.

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Long before these characteristics were cool, however, the term was linked with American identities in a very different way, and in very different contexts. Tracing its history helps us understand how we have come to embrace a certain kind of contradictory character as a national hero.

If you were a regular theatergoer in the 19th century, you’d have been familiar with a character called the “cool Yankee”—though he looked almost nothing like what cool would come to be. Amoral, selfish, and bumbling, he was a stock character who nevertheless always managed to save the day.

Although this figure was more prevalent on stage than in print, Hank Morgan, the fast-talking engineer in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, is a great literary example: a cruel con man who readers are nevertheless expected to like. The cool Yankee is worth remembering, because the popular imagery of Americanness has never entirely managed to move past the weird faith it represents: the belief that our worst qualities might lead us in positive directions.

To grasp the true 19th-century meaning of cool, it helps to understand the meaning of another slang term of the time, “’cute.” In the popular parlance of the 1840s and ’50s, “’cute Yankees” (just as in ‘Merica, the apostrophe signals a missing “A”) were comic figures, who stood out for their ridiculous attempts at being acute, or clever.

Newspaper readers were very familiar with the ‘cute Yankee’s failings. In one 1846 article from a Connecticut paper, for instance, a man refuses to hand over his ticket to a boat operator, thinking that the worker is trying to steal it. “The old fellow being a regular and ‘cute Yankee, was not easily gulled,” the story concludes. An 1859 New York Times article recounted a “female ‘cute Yankee” who, called into court for selling bootleg whiskey, brought a borrowed baby to appeal to the judge’s sympathy. ‘Cute was anything but admirable: it stood for underhandedness, amorality, and, often, plain stupidity.

Despite the negative qualities of ‘cuteness, though, ‘cute Yankees were figures of pride—folk antiheroes of early America. As one article telling the story of a “‘cute Yankee quack” selling fraudulent medicine in England put it, for instance, “such assurance is almost sublime.” But at least one journalist, writing for The Knickerbocker in the 1840s, was led to question why, in the “land of steady habits,” Americans were so fond of celebrating hacks and swindlers. What, the article asked, is the “morality of ‘cuteness”?

Nowhere was this question more glaring than in the 19th-century theater’s treatment of slavery. Although Harriet Beecher Stowe didn’t mention ‘cuteness in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, playwrights who adapted the blockbuster novel for the stage almost invariably added a ‘cute Yankee character to the story. The three most famous of these—George Aiken’s “Gumption Cute” and “Lawyer Marks”, and Henry J. Conway’s “Penetrate Partyside”—are significantly different, but share key similarities. First, they are pathetic: Cute is a failed teacher, spiritualist, and plantation overseer; Partyside is a drunk who has lost his savings to bad investments; and Marks—whose hallmark is riding a sad-looking donkey—is simply sleazy. Second, they provide stark contrasts to Stowe’s strong antislavery stance: Cute is happy as an overseer, Partyside is more interested in booze than liberation, and Marks is a slave trader. Third—and here they resonate with other ‘cute Yankee antiheroes—they each have a prominent role in the play’s depiction of final justice. Some versions of Aiken’s play include a tableau in which Cute stands triumphantly over the evil slave driver Simon Legree, whom he has knocked out by accident; in others, Marks shoots and kills Legree; Partyside speaks the final words in Conway’s version, wishing Uncle Tom’s descendants happiness.

When historians have looked at these characters, they have described them as images of compromise, helping dramas appeal across sectional lines by tempering Stowe’s moral message, soothing Southern spectators who might feel targeted by the story. But when we see how these Yankee figures bridged a transition between ’cute and cool—a shift that put a new spin on what exempted them from traditional moral standards—it becomes clear that they also came to represent a special form of American exceptionalism.

By the turn of the 20th century, these characters were no longer being called ’cute. Gumption Cute, despite his name, came to be known as a “cool Yankee.” Another example is Salem Scudder, the overseer who accidentally saves the day in Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon, a hugely popular play about an enslaved, multiracial character, when his camera malfunctions. Scudder is nowhere called cool in the 1850s play, but soon critics were referring to him that way. As noted by one New York Times review, later reprinted in Charles Pascoe’s The Dramatic List, “the cool Yankee, Salem Scudder … appears to perfection” in The Octoroon. The change in vocabulary entailed a subtle shift in emphasis. Where ‘cute stressed calculation and cunning, or lack thereof, cool emphasized exemption from the rules.

This shift in the language of the theater was paralleled in lighthearted newspaper coverage of “Yankee” stories. Cool had long described the state of keeping one’s head in a tense situation, but increasingly over the course of the 19th century it came to mean holding on to one’s freedom in the face of oppressive authority. One article describes a “cool servant,” for example, who responds to a request for breakfast by saying no thanks, “I ain’t very hungry this morning.’” Another tells the story of a couple who elope in a “cool way” by inadvertently holding the ceremony in view of their parents. The bumbling and misunderstanding of the ‘cute Yankee is still here, but stories like this make it less about what you can potentially steal from others, and more about skirting rules that might otherwise hold sway.

Americans embraced the idea of coolness because it smoothed over many of the contradictions fundamental to their national culture. Imagining a core of goodness and positive impact under surfaces of vice and stupidity helped Americans channel the optimism that went along with being a new nation, even as they continued to observe clear failures of justice throughout the Gilded Age and the end of Reconstruction. Cool helped them turn cultural insecurity into a form of pride.

As articles like The Knickerbocker piece on the “morality of ‘cuteness” suggest, these Yankee figures had always seemed to be somehow exempt from conventional ethics—even to the chagrin of some American critics. But the emerging vocabulary of coolness brought this trait even further into the foreground. Before icons like Lester Young and Marlon Brando made American cool into a badge of stoic, poised individualism, in other words, characters like Lawyer Marks and Salem Scudder promoted the idea that a true American didn’t need to be a well-formed individual to make great things happen—the ultimate American exception.

Unaccountability will never have its own diner, or a monument in its name. But the idea that being American meant a special license to be callous, uninformed, and clumsy and still make a positive contribution to society has never entirely gone away. Wherever these traits become points of pride, we are in the presence of the original American cool.

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The residence hall in the United States has come to mark the threshold between childhood and adulthood, housing young people during a transformational time in their lives. When parents drop their kids off at college, do they pose in front of a classroom building or the library? Maybe. But it’s the unloading of clothes, computers, and comforters at the dorms that defines the break between childhood and adulthood.

This rite of passage is taken much more seriously by Americans than by people in other countries. In the United States, largely because of Americans’ romantic attitude toward the universities of Oxford and Cambridge—where young men once lived and studied together and forged lasting identities based on shared housing—students living together in one building has come to be seen as an essential part of the college experience. Students spend just 12 or 15 hours per week in class, plus a few hours of study; the rest of the time they are socializing, working out, gaming, managing clubs, politicking, making music, and relaxing with friends. In short, they are forging connections that will last a lifetime and establishing a network that will benefit their careers.

But living on campus—and the social benefit Americans place on it today—was never inevitable. American universities haven’t always intended for dorms to bring people together; campus housing was also organized, for many years, to keep groups of students apart. In fact, the very first purpose-built residence for college students in America was the Indian College at Harvard University, constructed by a British religious society in the mid-17th century to house Native American students and keep them separate from white boys.

And while today’s residence life experts tout diversity as the key reason for residing with fellow students, from the 17th century to the early 20th century, anti-diversity was the norm. Dormitories introduced young men to other men like themselves, and anchored young women in the domestic sphere they were expected to inhabit later on—and architects and university leaders came up with physical designs that furthered these social goals.

Over the decades, universities designed dorms to promote desired social norms, and in the postwar period, high-rises became popular. Here, two boys stand on a dorm balcony at Rutgers University on move-in day, 1955. Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.

In the colonial period, college buildings were often single, multipurpose structures that housed all the functions of a school, including the president’s home, faculty apartments, student bedrooms, chapel, library, dining hall, and classrooms. Harvard’s first governing board reported in 1671, “It is well known … what advantage to Learning accrues by the multitude of persons cohabiting for scholasticall communion, whereby to acuate the minds of one another, and other waies to promote the ends of a Colledge-Society.” Since the actual curriculum was limited, Christian morality was a large part of what boys absorbed at the colonial college. This character formation was gained by observing role models; professors and students sharing living space was good for moral development. This attitude was an essential intellectual and emotional precondition for the American dormitory.

A uniquely American sense of religious identity provided the ongoing impetus for sorting students into dorm-style housing during the 18th and 19th centuries. Great Britain had one official state religion, Anglicanism, which dominated life at both Oxford and Cambridge. But in the United States, religious freedom expressed itself in dozens of sects—each of which wanted its own college, with its own moral imprint on its members. Religious leaders often founded small schools in rural districts, away from the crime and vice of the city; assigning students to live together in a dormitory allowed young boys to bond with each other and their tutors, reinforcing their social connections. Ideally, a young man’s roommate had a marriageable younger sister, tightening the bond once more.

Although dorms were exclusionary, on balance, university-sponsored housing was still more democratic than the houses built by the private fraternities for white men in the late 19th century. As fraternities surged in popularity, they erected houses for dwelling, partying, and secret rites on many American campuses. They soon began to dominate college social life, and by the 1870s a non-Greek student (also called an “independent”) had little chance of becoming student body president or first trombone in the marching band. As historian Nicholas Syrett has explained, “Like any society that includes some people and excludes others, fraternities gain prestige precisely through that exclusion.”

In the service of solidifying their status, fraternity men also pushed the boundaries of acceptable student behavior. At Cornell University, the University of Michigan, and other colleges, fraternity brothers made it known that so-called coeds (female college students) were not allowed at their parties, and that local women were the preferred guests. The brothers saw lower-class women as sexually available and “ostracized those female classmates who threatened their hegemony on campus,” Syrett writes.

College deans maintained that the gulf separating fraternity men from other men on campus could be blamed on housing. In 1930, S. L. Rollins, a dean of men at Northwestern University, spoke plaintively, “[It is an] undesirable result when the fraternity men are well housed while the independents are not. This inequality in housing is the predominant cause for the feeling of inferiority [among non-Greeks] and for their animosity toward the fraternity men.” Today it might seem laughably naïve that anyone thought animosity arose from poor housing, rather than racial and religious discrimination, but Rollins and other administrators felt that the construction of good dormitories was a positive intervention that would smooth the torn fabric of college life. So, in the early decades of the 20th century, many university leaders lobbied strenuously for a new sort of residence hall to serve as a democratic alternative to the elitist fraternity.

Many of these pre-World War II dorms were arranged around a quadrangle, much like Cambridge and Oxford, to shut out the bustling city, create a private outdoor space, and hark back to vaunted English forebears. The University of Wisconsin’s Adams and Tripp Halls, built in 1924-26, are typical. They face away from Lake Mendota, making them cozy and self-contained, and they are laid out in the shape of a square donut, with four sides built to the same height and a central courtyard inaccessible to anyone other than a resident.

The University of Wisconsin’s Adams and Tripp Halls, pictured here on a 1926 postcard, were designed to level class distinctions. Courtesy of Carli Yanni.

College deans wanted to establish the same esprit-de-corps within houses as could be found in an exclusive fraternity, but that required engineering. Each man had a single bedroom, so to create community out of these single rooms, students were organized into houses, formed vertically off of a staircase in a porous arrangement sometimes called the staircase or entryway plan. A brochure directed at incoming Wisconsin students emphasized the possibility that dorm life in places like Adams or Tripp Halls could level class distinctions, noting that the son of a banker and a farmer’s boy could converse and relax in front of the crackling logs of the fireplace.

Unfortunately, for all these widespread claims of egalitarianism, the dormitory still perpetuated barriers. Black students, for instance, weren’t permitted to live in white dorms—at Wisconsin or nearly anywhere else in the U.S. When the enormously popular University of Wisconsin chef Carson Gulley, who was African-American, couldn’t find housing in Madison in pre-civil rights America (before the mid-1960s), university leaders assigned him an apartment in Adams Hall—but it was in the basement, and Gulley’s family had to enter through a separate entrance that was reminiscent of a servants’ door.

Chef Gulley’s apartment was shoehorned into an existing dormitory; in contrast, nearly every space at Howard University in Washington, D.C., was built by black architects for black students. At historically black colleges and universities like Howard, the social value placed on the dormitory was high. Black colleges represented in physical form the acquisition of land, the aspirations for education, and successful uplift of African-Americans—and a certain style of dorm life became part of the program. But that came with a private cost: The handbook for Howard students said, “Always remember that a Howard student is a marked student. Each represents more than himself or herself, because the University entrusts its honor and reputation to each student.”

In particular, the construction of Howard’s Women’s Dormitory (known today as Harriet Tubman Quadrangle), demonstrates how these spaces were expected to protect and prepare their residents. The building was overseen by Lucy Diggs Slowe—a nationally respected educator, tennis champion, writer, and founder of the first African-American sorority (Alpha Kappa Alpha) who was dean of women at Howard for 15 years. Built under her close direction in the 1930s, the Women’s Dormitory resembled Adams and Tripp Halls at Wisconsin in that it was a completely enclosed. Its courtyard was larger, however, and there were fewer points of entry to the inside of the dorm—it was closed off from the city for the protection of the young women. Howard’s administration assumed that female students needed greater protection and surveillance, so the dorm’s architect, Alfred Cassell, organized room entrances around long corridors instead of the entryway plan.

Lucy Diggs Slowe stands in front of the newly completed women’s dormitory (front row, fourth from the left) with members of the National Association of Deans of Women in 1932. Scurlock Studio Records, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

On the first floor of one side of the quadrangle, Cassell, at Slowe’s behest, supplied a panoply of social spaces, including parlors, a music room, and a social hall that could be used for special parties or for everyday dining. “A dormitory should be as much like a well-ordered home,” Slowe wrote, “as it is possible to make it”—in other words, a ladies’ dormitory was where the refinements of a carefully managed home would develop. Students entertained guests in order to learn to be good hostesses, and (later) good wives and mothers. The female students needed the extra living space, in part because they were not to go inside men’s dormitories; if a woman was meeting a date (chaperoned of course), he had to come to her dormitory. The female students at Howard were being trained in “thoughtfulness, courtesy, and hospitality,” Slowe said. Socializing was a goal of living in the dorm; the residence hall set a high standard for social behavior. The beautifully appointed parlors and music rooms were a stage set for enhancing students’ moral development.

Over the decades, American educators have cherished the residence hall as a transformational space in which adolescents turned into adult, morally conscious citizens. Of course, this may seem strange today, when living in a residence hall might just as well lead to a decline in moral character.

Either way, in the weeks around the start of the fall semester, students should stop and think more deeply about the physical space of their residence hall. What possibilities does it offer? Does it reinforce class and race divisions, or does it breakdown social expectations? Corridors make keeping tabs on students easy, but echo with noise; staircase plans prevent roughhousing but offer no communal space; lavish lounges in women’s halls were once intended to civilize male visitors, as were specially designed benches for courting couples. In spite of the fact that college housing policies often allowed for discrimination according to class, race, and gender, deans persisted in their vision of residence hall as a democratic alternative to the elitist fraternity. Against the backdrop of sweeping societal changes, communal living endured because it bolstered networking, if not studying. It’s no wonder families still pose next to the freshly made bunk bed.

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Under the leadership of Joseph Henry and his assistant secretary, Spencer F. Baird, by the mid-1850s the Smithsonian became the nexus for an exuberant and ever-changing gathering of brilliant, young naturalists. This group—part sober research collective, part Animal House shenanigans—called itself the Megatherium Club. Collectively its members were devoted to advancing the cause of American science in a time when American naturalists were fighting for respect from more established European science. Their goal was to find, describe, and classify every known animal and plant on Earth, and they were audacious enough to believe such a goal was within their grasp. Often risking their lives, they embarked on arduous collecting expeditions, facing the dangers and discomforts of nature to bring back creatures that had never been formally described by science.

The club’s ringleader was a Boston-born zoologist named William Stimpson. Only 24 when he arrived in Washington, D.C., in late 1856, Stimpson had already established himself as one of the leading naturalists of his generation—an expert in the study of marine invertebrates, especially crustaceans and mollusks. While still a teenager he had studied with Harvard’s Louis Agassiz, the most famous and flamboyant naturalist in the country. Subsequently, Stimpson was appointed zoologist on the U.S.’s North Pacific Exploring Expedition, which traveled from Australia to China and Japan, and finally to the North Pacific Ocean, between 1853 and 1856. The expedition sought to both explore the North Pacific Ocean and to reinforce America’s commitment to trade with Asia. Stimpson’s experiences as its explorer-naturalist shaped the rest of his career. He collected more than 10,000 specimens during the journey—everything from fish that walked up waterfalls to tiny crabs that exhibited all of the colors of the rainbow.

When the expedition returned, the specimens were housed at the Smithsonian. It would take Stimpson several years to describe and classify the marine invertebrates, so the gregarious naturalist, starved for scientific companionship after three years of isolation, rented a house near the institution and offered rooms to naturalists, artists, and other “conducive” personalities. Each evening he presided over raucous dinner parties, fueled by copious amounts of alcohol. One resident recalled, “We have the highest kind of times at dinner every evening … we six are all naturalists & Geologists, and after working all day spend an hour in eating, drinking, & laughing immensely … we had a very jolly dinner last P.M. and a grand inauguration of a barrel of Ale, each one solemnly assisting to drive the spigot to the sound of martial music … So you perceive we continue as dissipated as usual.”

The group soon dubbed the house the Stimpsonian Institution and began calling themselves the Megatherium Club. The name was probably inspired by paleontologist Joseph Leidy’s paper on the extinct sloths of North America, which had been published by the Smithsonian in 1855. Leidy’s reconstructions of Megatherium fossils, some of them quite fanciful, fostered the impression of an ungainly and almost comical looking American creature—a fitting mascot for Stimpson’s crew.

There were precedents for such a club of brash, young naturalists. As an admirer of the late English naturalist Edward Forbes, Stimpson had no doubt heard of the uproarious dinners of the Red Lion Club, a similarly irreverent group that had coalesced around Forbes, whose members, including Thomas Huxley and Richard Owen, became the leaders of the English natural history community by the 1850s.

Like their English counterparts, the members of the Megatherium Club were united by youth, ambition, intelligence, and a deep and abiding love of the natural world. Their days were spent in the bowels of the Smithsonian, hunched over jars of marine worms in alcohol or endless trays of fossils. Thanks to Baird, who was known as a “collector of collectors,” specimens arrived at the Smithsonian from all over the world. Stimpson and the other taxonomic zoologists sorted, described, and classified this avalanche of specimens. Their work provided a solid foundation for future biologists by updating and standardizing the classification of flora and fauna.

At night they were ready to cut loose—drinking until dawn. Then they’d recover from their revelries with long walks on Sunday mornings, “the true Church for sedentary men,” Stimpson said, when a friend wondered if perhaps they should attend church instead. Courting young ladies, especially with picnics along scenic Rock Creek, was another favorite leisure activity. “Spring is coming fast, glorious season which gives us new life while nature lures us to her arms,” Stimpson wrote, in a letter to the geologist Ferdinand Hayden. “I shall now have more time and take more out-door recreation especially in the form of picnics with the girls, the dear angels some of whom I should certainly try to marry were it not for the pain of leaving the others.”

The Megatherium Club functioned as a needed mutual support system for the young American naturalists, whose work was often regarded with suspicion. The situation was particularly precarious in early 1858, when members of Congress denounced federal expenditures for natural history publications, leading Robert Kennicott, Stimpson’s closest friend in the group, to write a sibling that “Naturalists are going up! We have even gotten to be abused in Congress and if that ain’t encouraging I don’t know what is.” Criticism flared again after the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859, when naturalists who accepted evolution were accused of denying God.

Stimpson’s brash, party-dude ways provided encouragement that he and his fellow naturalists sorely needed. In 1857, when Hayden was exploring in the Black Hills region of South Dakota, Stimpson wrote: “I think you are all right and making your way and mark in the world in a firm and manly manner. You have certainly as good a chance in sensible minds as the papilionaceous [relating to butterflies] squirts of fashionable life who buzz about this place. … Keep up a good heart and prove yourself a staunch Megatherium. Vid Megather By Laws XI.2.”

Stimpson knew better than most the importance of receiving encouraging letters from friends while in the field. While on the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, he had faced hostility from most of the crew, who resented a civilian naturalist in their midst, and he later likened his time aboard ship to being in a prison. His letters to Hayden provide further examples of his efforts to cheer up a fellow naturalist in the field—and the importance of the club as a motivator. “[D]epend upon it I will have a warm snug place for you a good fire in the grate and a barrel of beer in the cellar and a warm welcome on the lips,” he wrote Hayden, who was then in danger of possible attacks from Native Americans, “and then we will go somewhere and see some little bodies in the evening, whose smiles will melt the ice in our hearts which may have been engendered by the cold contact with the world.”

The Megatherium Club was short-lived. It had always been transitory. Its members usually came to Washington, D.C., for a few months to work up their specimens and confer with Baird before heading right back to the field, and Stimpson was the only constant, swinging from having a full house to enduring an empty one. “I am living a terribly lonely life,” he wrote despondently to one friend. On another occasion he told Hayden, “I shall miss you much this winter old fellow, in fact W.[ashington] seems lonely to me—all the club gone, the Meg.[atherium] broken up.”

When scientists were in town, the club’s loud antics annoyed its neighbors, who eventually complained to Henry and Baird at the Smithsonian. Not wanting to tarnish Baird’s or the Smithsonian’s reputation, Stimpson announced in 1858 that the Megatherium Club would disband. This particular “species” of Megatherium did not become extinct however, but instead evolved into a more formal (and hence respectable) beast, known as the Potomac-Side Naturalists’ Club. Stimpson invited older and more respected scholars in Washington, D.C., to join as its founders. In early 1863, at the height of the Civil War, the original Megatherium Club coalesced again around Stimpson and Kennicott. This time, though, they now all lived in the Smithsonian building and the partying was more subdued, given the terrible death toll of the war.

Ironically, Stimpson and Kennicott’s close friendship hastened the final demise of the Megatherium Club. In 1865 Kennicott asked Stimpson to take his place as curator of the Chicago Academy of Sciences while Kennicott served as naturalist on the Russian-American Telegraph Expedition, an ambitious plan to connect Europe and America via telegraph. When Kennicott died suddenly the next year, at the age of 30, while exploring what is now Alaska, Stimpson stayed on in Chicago. He helped build the Academy into one of the largest and most respected natural history museums in the country, only to see his life’s work destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

Without either man, the Megatherium Club ceased to exist. But the work of its members showed that American science had finally caught up with that of Europe and indeed in some areas had even surpassed it. Above all else, Stimpson saw the study of nature as the ideal way to spend one’s time in an often confusing and wicked world. He summed up his view of life in 1857, “What more noble pursuit for immortal souls? Riches? War and Butchery? Political chicanery? Superstition? Pleasure? What we seek is TRUTH!!”

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Such exchanges of young people were considered normal. As English expeditions began to venture into the continents across the Atlantic, the Chesapeake Algonquians who owned the land wanted to know as much as possible about the newcomers—and vice versa. The quest for knowledge was practical: In order to deal with the English arriving in Jamestown, who were impulsive and sometimes brutal, the Powhatans and their allies needed to understand English motives and capabilities. Venturers from across the Atlantic needed local knowledge just to survive, and they hoped to discover valuable products that they could send home to pay for their American bases.

The issue for both sides was how to get inside the other’s settlements to gain all this necessary knowledge. The answer? Send young people to live and learn in the other culture. Youths were flexible, able to adapt, and much better than adults at learning new languages. As Shakespeare’s character Lafeu said in All’s Well That Ends Well, boys are “unbaked and doughy.”

Namontack soon sailed to England on the return voyage of the ship that had brought Thomas Savage to Virginia. Powhatan said that he “purposely sent” Namontack to “King James his land, to see him and his country, and to returne me the true report thereof.” Everyone assumed the young emissaries would remain completely identified with their birth culture and just act as spies. But their immersion in a very different culture at such a young age complicated their identities. Their knowledge was absolutely crucial, but leaders on both sides increasingly wondered if the boys could be trusted.

Every English ship that crossed the Atlantic carried boys who were expected to perform whatever duties commanders chose for them. No one thought this was strange, because English children typically left home around the age of 13. As their childhood ended, they entered a stage called nonage, and they stayed in this phase of life until they reached adulthood, often well into their twenties. A fortunate few went to Oxford or Cambridge or studied law at the Inns of Court, and some, whose families could afford it, became apprentices. Most became servants in another family’s home or business, where they were supposed to learn the skills necessary for adult life.

The records tell us nothing about Thomas Savage’s origins or his family. He was listed as a laborer in the ship’s records, and Richard Savage also appeared on that list, so he may have traveled with his brother. In 1609 another boy, 14-year-old Henry Spelman, arrived and was given to Powhatan’s son. We know more about him, partly because his family was prominent enough to appear in the records, and because he wrote a memoir of his life with the Chesapeake Algonquians. The first sentence of his Relation of Virginia tells us why he was sent to America, “Beinge in displeasure of my frendes, and desiring to see other cuntryes.” The fleet in which he sailed confronted the huge hurricane that inspired the opening scene of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

It must have been a terrible shock for the boys as they were thrust out by the English commanders, but eyewitness accounts tell us that their hosts dealt with them kindly and the teens quickly adapted. The chiefs accepted them into their own households and treated them as sons. Powhatan called Thomas Savage “My childe.” And Patawomeck Chief Iopassus, with whom Henry Spelman had eventually gone to live on the Potomac, punished his wife for attacking Henry, “tellinge me he loved me, and none should hurt me.”

Chesapeake Algonquian boys and girls took on adult roles as they entered their teen years, so Thomas Savage and Henry Spelman entered a new American life. There, girls joined the women in planting and caring for the agricultural fields, and dealing with the tribe’s food supplies. Men, including the boys, engaged in hunting and fishing, which meant creating all the equipment for these pursuits and setting up the maze of nets to trap fish in the rivers. While the leaders back in Jamestown considered Savage and Spelman servants at their command, living with the Chesapeake Algonquians allowed them to be members of a society that valued them.

Being American involved getting used to a lot of shocking changes in everyday life. For one thing the boys had to bathe, something quite foreign to the English experience. William White, a runaway who had lived among the Powhatans, reported that at daybreak everyone older than 10 “runnes into the water” and “washes themselves a good while.” On top of that, they had to drink water. The water in England was so polluted that it was unsafe, so everyone drank beer or wine. Starting the day clean and with a clear head was part of what it meant to be American.

Namontack made a private report to Powhatan, so we do not know what he thought of the dirty, crowded, and noisy city of London. He did learn enough about English customs that he helped persuade Powhatan to wear the crown and robe sent to him by King James I of England. And as they acquired facility in Chesapeake Algonquian languages, Savage and Spelman and other boys like them also came to understand the American environment and how to navigate it. They learned about dangerous plants like Jimsonweed, a hallucinogen, as well as the plants they could consume on their travels. They also came to know how to read the landscape and find their way. Such knowledge was absolutely necessary to survival, especially given the extreme environmental conditions prevailing at the time. Tree-ring studies of cores taken from living, 1,000-year-old bald cypress trees show that the region was gripped by a disastrous seven-year drought, the driest period in the preceding 770 years, so food was short for everyone.

Meanwhile, the men back in Jamestown were unprepared to grow their own food. The soldiers they had led in Europe “lived off the land”—expecting the people they had invaded to feed them—so that is what they expected to do in America. Leaders constantly widened their search for food grown by Chesapeake Algonquians, sending ships as far as the Potomac, hoping for a cargo of corn. The land’s owners were forced, often at gunpoint, to hand over food they desperately needed for themselves. Increasingly, English dependence led to anger and conflict.

Thus it fell to the kids—English and Algonquian—to do the crucial work of making any kind of relationship possible. In the first year or so of the Jamestown settlement, 10-year-old Pocahontas had tried to help the Englishmen learn how to interact American-style. She accompanied her father’s emissaries to the colonists’ fort several times; Pocahontas’ presence indicated the embassy’s peaceful intentions. While the Powhatan men attempted to instruct colonial leaders in American diplomacy, Pocahontas’ playfulness offered a welcome respite from the grim reality of the colonists’ life. But, as relationships worsened, Powhatan moved his capital farther away from the English, and Pocahontas quit coming to Jamestown.

As the relationship between Jamestown and the Powhatans became increasingly fraught, Savage and Spelman were caught in the middle. Both Powhatan and the English leaders sometimes sent the boys with false messages, resulting in dire consequences. After Spelman had been living with Powhatan for three weeks, the chief sent him to Jamestown with a message saying that if the English sent a ship, he would fill it with corn. As soon as the ship arrived, the English eagerly started trading, but they thought the Powhatans were cheating them. When they objected, they heard noises coming from warriors hidden in the woods. All the English were killed except for two.

Spelman was so upset about this that he soon deserted Powhatan to live with Iopassus on the Potomac. At the same time Powhatan sent Savage back to Jamestown. This was a very early instance of the American conundrum of dealing with the other, as each side worried about the boys’ true loyalty. Could leaders trust their translations and their messages? Had their identities been compromised—or changed completely?

For a time, Pocahontas, the most famous of these kids, was out of harm’s way. She had married a man named Kocoum and taken up her role as a Powhatan woman. But in 1613, an English ship searching for food found her visiting on the Potomac and its captain forced Iopassus and his wife to assist in her capture. Pocahontas was brought to Jamestown where young Rev. Alexander Whitaker instructed her in Christianity, and John Rolfe fell in love with her. Ultimately, Pocahontas ceased to be an American, at least in English eyes. Whitaker wrote home that she had “renounced publickly her countrey Idolatry.” She and John Rolfe married, had a son, and the Virginia Company brought her to London to show her off as the ultimate English gentlewoman.

Pocahontas’ conversion signaled to English investors that the Virginia colony had made the first step toward bringing Americans to Christianity, one of the venture’s stated goals. But English Virginia still had to establish itself as a going enterprise. The venture had been a money drain from the beginning, and its fortunes turned around only when the English began to adopt a truly American understanding of the environment.

This engraving by Simon van de Passe is the only known portrait of Pocahontas drawn from life. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/National Portrait Gallery, London.

Though she died at the age of 20 in Gravesend, England, as the ship carrying the Rolfes back to Virginia moved down the Thames River, Pocahontas was key to the Americanization of the Virginia English because she taught John Rolfe how to grow tobacco—a crop whose planting and maintenance was very different from any the English had grown back home. Colonists, including Rolfe, had been trying for years to produce a marketable crop, but with no success, and so the English had to develop a new, American relationship with the land and its products. Once they learned how to grow tobacco successfully, colonists began to plant more and more, ultimately pushing the Powhatans off their most valuable land. Drinking tobacco, as contemporaries called it, quickly went from being a luxury for the elite to a commodity of mass consumption in England.

While Virginia was becoming a financial success, the question of how to deal with Savage and Spelman loomed. Now adults, they were no longer under leaders’ direct control and their knowledge and relationships made them potentially dangerous. Another boy who had lived with the Powhatans, Robert Poole, brought treason charges against Spelman at the first meeting of the Virginia Assembly in 1619. Poole testified that Spelman had told Opechancanough, the new paramount chief who had replaced the retiring Powhatan, that Gov. Sir George Yeardley would soon be replaced by a much greater man. Spelman was convicted of treason for endangering the colony by bringing the governor into “disesteem.” He was sentenced to serve the colony as an interpreter, which meant that he had been “degraded” back into servitude. Even though the English no longer trusted Spelman, his knowledge still mattered.

Thomas Savage escaped most of the turmoil by moving to the Eastern Shore across Chesapeake Bay. He formed close relationships with the Accomacs there, and the chief, known to the English as Esmy Shichans, gave him 9,000 acres of land. He continued to send information to Jamestown, and the leaders there decided what to do with it. Savage conveyed a warning about Opechancanough’s plans for a massive attack on all the colonists in 1622, but English leaders, skeptical about his intentions and his sources, decided to ignore it. Hundreds of colonists were killed in the great attack and Henry Spelman died the next year in the fighting that followed; he was only 28.

Thomas Savage lived on in peace. As a substantial landowner, he married a recent migrant from England and they had a son. Savage did not grow tobacco; instead he grew provisions, food for the colonies now being established all along North America’s Atlantic Coast. He continued to send information to Jamestown, and he maintained close relationships with the Accomacs. Of the kids involved in this early drama, he was the one who ended up living as a new-style American.

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Groves was born in 1859 and emancipated by the Civil War. Around 1880, when he was 19, Groves walked from Kentucky to Kansas City, Kansas, with other former slaves at his side. It was a 500-mile walk that became known as the Exodus, the first migration of blacks from the South after the war. He had only 90 cents with him.

Before the war, Kansas had been a dangerous place for black people. The 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, which nullified the Missouri Compromise of 1850, opened up Kansas to settlers, both pro- and anti-slavery, and the clashes between these new arrivals often proved violent. The legislature also enacted discriminatory laws, such as the laws allowing segregated schools that wouldn’t be declared unconstitutional until a century later, in the 1954 landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

But after the Civil War, Kansas had a new appeal, particularly for formerly enslaved people. The wide-open state became a place to form new communities, perhaps most famously Nicodemus, an African-American homesteader community launched during Reconstruction.

Junius Groves was among those drawn to Kansas, but he didn’t like Kansas City, where many blacks had settled in segregated neighborhoods. He preferred the rural life, and was inspired by the success of some black farmers, who found the state particularly welcoming. He was not alone: By one historian’s reckoning, there were over 4,000 black farmers in Kansas between 1888 and 1920.

Groves started out as a farmer raising potatoes on six acres of a rented farm. But his success at growing was such that he soon prospered. Landowners appreciated him, and the trust he’d cultivated with white farmers paid off when they allowed Groves to purchase some of his own farmland from them.

Potatoes grew well in this tough place. Groves managed to survive drought, heat, flood, cold, blizzards, and tornadoes. He met his wife, and they had 14 children, 12 of which survived. And he built a community around the family in hopes that the kids would stay close to him. Groves sent his sons to Kansas State Agricultural College and they helped him apply scientific methods to agriculture.

By 1902, he would be called the “Potato King of the World”—for growing more bushels per acre than anyone else. He grew so many potatoes that the Union Pacific Railroad built a rail spur to his farm so he could ship them as far as Canada and Mexico. By 1913, Groves owned over 500 acres in the Kaw Valley, producing 55,000 bushels of potatoes a year.

His own house was a 22-room mansion, with electricity, and hot and cold running water—and a ballroom. Keeping a close watch on his family and neighbors, Junius and his wife Matilda opened their home to others.

According to his great-granddaughter Joyce Holland Groves and great-grandniece Mary Kimbrough, whom I interviewed for my book on the politics of the Great Plains, the Groves constructed a roller rink on their farm in part because of their interest in assuring virtuous behavior. The rink no doubt was a source of recreation, but its location allowed the Groves to carefully nurture their children and the neighbor children.

Groves was devoted in other ways to creating community and opportunities for other people. He was instrumental in the 1886 founding of the Pleasant Hill Baptist Church in Edwardsville, Kansas, then a rural area but now an outer suburb of Kansas City, Kansas. The church served and continues to serve as a community connection, providing food and clothing for those in need. Groves also owned a general store, stock in mines and banks, and even a casket and embalming company. He co-founded the state’s National Negro Business League.

Next to the church, Groves built a golf course—one of the first in the United States established specifically to serve African-Americans. But Groves believed in an integrated world. He helped convince Kansas City to integrate a park. And when Kansas City’s golf courses were opened to African-Americans, Graves turned his golf course over to the community for residential lots.

He died in Edwardsville in 1925, leaving a rich legacy of commerce, family unity, and community building.

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