Carla's Wedding Ring- Post 4

During the commercial break of your sitcom, a commercial comes on showing a young couple strolling in the park by an older couple. After seeing the glistening diamond on her wedding band, DeBeers Jewelers reminds you that "a diamond lasts forever". You change the channel and witness Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly attempting to solve a supposed murder. A wedding band is separated from a woman and becomes the damning evidence in Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 film, Rear Window. When you turn off the television and put on the radio, you could possibly hear any one of the seventy-four recorded versions of a song named "Wedding Ring".

In contemporary American society, you'd be hard pressed to find an object imbued with as much moral heft, omnipresence and gravitas as a wedding band. Whether it be in song, theater, film, commercials, advertisements or literature, the wedding ring and its associations recur time and time again in our culture.

The ring worn on the finger has no clear origin and took on a variety of different forms and functions over centuries. It could be form of intellectual or religious rank, currency, a weapon, part of a magic or healing ritual, as a memorial and as a sign of love. Despite all of these uses over time, the engagement or wedding ring is the most popular form in our culture.

In "Rings For the Finger", George Frederick Kunz places the use of rings as part of a wedding ceremony or to signify love in a tradition closest to our contemporary usage in England around the time of the Reformation. Over time there has been a lot a variance in which finger or customs surrounded the ring according to region, time period and religion. It's now exchanged at a wedding ceremony and worn on the base of what's come to be known as the "ring finger" on right hand. Where it once was worn primary by females, the 1920's through 1940's gave rise to the double ring ceremonies for males and females. It was spurred in a large part by marketing of jewelers. It's covered ectensively by Vicki Howard in "A 'Real Man's Ring': Gender and the Invention of the Tradition" and is the practice Carla's ring is a product of.

Some people have come to choose not to wear it for utilitarian or ideological reasons whereas some share in Grace Kelly's characters stance that "the only way anybody could get that ring would be to chop off my finger." The meanings and customs of the ring and more specifically wedding rings are not at any sort of endpoint and part of a continuum, sure to evolve over time. As I typed, a friend posted this link to Facebook indicating a future where a ring may do so much more.

"Carla's Wedding Band"- Object History

Although the original provenance of Carla's wedding band is unknown, according to Carla it was purchased in "a popular jewelry store" in the Cherry Hill Mall in the summer of 2005. As of September of 2010, there were seventeen businesses classified by the "Jewelry" category on the Cherry Hill Mall's website. It was part of a pair where one went to Carla and the other to her husband.

The function and meaning of the object evolved over time paralleling the failed marriage that it signified. Originally it was purchased as a sign of commitment--a common use for the band. Carla added that part of its function was "to prove to herself that she was serious about the marriage". As their engagement progressed, Carla became hesitant about the marriage and tried to return the band but was told it was too late by the jeweler. She decided to go on with the marriage and the band was part of the contract she had entered into. It went through the process many bands went through when it "became blessed, exchanged, and placed on the appropriate fingers", a somewhat rote characterization of the tradition by Carla. After three years, Carla's reservations about the marriage became fully realized with Carla moving into a new house during the dissolution of the marriage. Along with the move to a new house, she described removing the band as "the final symbol of the failing marriage".

Having been in a friends wedding about two months ago, the disparity in meaning between the band I held at that wedding and the one I held at the Art Sanctuary was striking. The wedding band I held in the wedding in Lancaster was an object with a future ahead of it. The traditional symbolic value of commitment between two people and function as a centerpiece of the marital ceremony were ascribed to it. The only exceptions I've been around otherwise have memorialized a significant other or relative who is deceased. Carla's wedding band was the first ring I've been around where it's been presented to me in this particular context with Carla describing the box it's in as a "coffin".

Where she once tried to sell it to at least recoup its monetary value before the marriage, she hasn't sold it after. Although any guess I'd have as to what it could mean now would be purely speculative, it clearly has some value to Carla outside of the ways that I've traditionally encountered. The band itself is simple without any ornamentation, but it clearly carries complex meaning to Carla.

Object Description- "Carla's Wedding Band"

The object that I have is "Carla's Wedding Band." So far I have only seen a picture of it from one angle so am reduced to making inferences from the photo and comparing them to generalizations offered by other sources. Wedding bands (also known as rings) are circular pieces of metal varying widely in size, make, production and price worn to celebrate or identify the marriage of the wearer. They are produced to fit around the base of the ring finger of a human hand and sold in a variety of sizes that correspond to the circumference of the ring. National jewelry retailer Zales sells rings from 3 to 13.5 in size, which are equal to 14 to 22.6mm in circumference. Without a to scale photo, it is impossible to tell what the size is of this particular ring.

Wedding bands can be made from a variety of metals that partially determine the range in prices they are sold for. A survey of bands available on online auctioneer eBay includes bands made of gold, platinum, tungsten, stainless steel and titanium. Carla's band appears to be gold or gold plated.

Wedding bands are often produced or sold as matching sets. Carla indicated that this ring was one of a pair she characterized as "inexpensive and generic," meaning it may have been mass produced--as opposed to handcrafted--and may be identical to at least one other ring.

A variety of stones can be affixed to wedding rings. They can also be engraved with patterns or names. From the angle and small description provided by the owner, there doesn't appear to be any stone or engraving on this particular band. From the side photograph it appears uniform and absent of any ornamentation or stones, although a view from another angle could reveal otherwise.

The ring sits in a hinged container Carla calls its "coffin." It would appear to be somewhere between two to four inches in its height, width and depth and made of plastic or cardboard. The ring is nested in what appears to be velvet or a black fabric similar in appearance. There is a gold accent on the container.

Web Review: Railroads and the Making of Modern America

Railroads and the Making of Modern America
http://railroads.unl.edu/
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Reviewed November 21-22, 2009

Railroads and the Making of Modern America is a site dedicated to exploring the railroad system and it's effects on a variety of facets of American society between 1850-1900. The project is directed by William G. Thomas, III, Professor in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where the project is based. It is intended to be a research tool for academic courses on 19th-century American History.

Content is presented a number of different ways on the front page. An 'Index of Topics' breaks into nine themes tackling railroads and their role in slavery, the Civil War, William Jennings Bryan's 1896 Presidential Campaign, migration and immigration and tourism. Depictions of railroads by artists, construction of the railroad system and the 1877 Railroad Strike are also among the themes covered.

Themes often have small written summaries supported by primary source material and augmented accompanying media of some variety. Each topic has a Geographic Information System (GIS) map, podcast, animated graph or movie to build on the scholarship provided. The site is at it's most dynamic in use of the media. There are animated maps of railroad expansion where visitors can watch the railroad lines snake accross the northeast and midwest of the country over decades in condensed time and podcasts featuring scholars discussing a given subject.

The 'Views' tab provides visitors with the option of browsing the subject matter by media type rather than topically. 'Documents' provides a database where the user can select the type of source material used they would like to access (ex. Annual Reports, Speeches, Pamphlets, etc.) It can be narrowed by topic, full-text search or date. The three other tabs provided on the front page relate to further exploration of the topics ouitside of the site itself. Resources provides a somewhat modest list of the technological or intellectual material drawn on for the project. There is also a link to a few graduate student web projects that cover some aspect of the social history of the railroad and a teaching materials tab for history teachers to integrate the site into lessons at the college, secondary and even elementary levels.

Although the consistency in formatting of themes leads to ease of use, it at times feels a little too much like a template that information was plugged into. The overall aesthetics of the site are simple but at times feel a little too bland. Even though the site is only a few years old (2006) for these reasons it feels like a bit of a relic. The maps created for the project certainly could be more dynamic and interactive.

It seems as though there was a lot of thought and work put into generating topics for presentation along with production of original charts and maps to great ends. They were also succesful in gathering material from a wide range of sources (National Archives and Records Administration, the Library of Congress, the Newberry Library, the University of Nebraksa, the Nebraska State Historical Society, the Library of Virginia, Yale University, and other institutions and personal private collections) to create an original work. Unfortunately the site only sometimes takes advantage of some of the dynamic multi-media capacities of the web to make the subject matter truly come alive.

11/23 Readings

'Haunted Mouses' is about the din of noise that inhabits the internet. Forgotten sites, the paranormal and the horrific. It was brief and seemed primarily a vehicle to showcase a few of the sites listed at the end, but was fun in it's characterization of the web and its electronic visual phenomena.

'Hyperlinking Reality'- The concept of a QR seemed to have a lot of potential. Although it was something I was previously unaware of, it seems to have a lot of implications for the field of public history. The ability for people to disseminate and consume stories linked to a specific place definitely seems like a viable way to bridge the gap between the web and the physical world. Although they can be done well, it sometimes seems as though web-based history projects can be too detached from the places or people they are trying to represent with this article providing a great counter-example.

'What is Digital History? A Look at Some Exemplar Projects' tackles the definition of Digital History in a broad, general level offering up a few positive examples. The projects listed were ambitious, varied and well-executed. There seems to be a large gap between institutions tackling content in this way, and those concentrating on just digitizing content and presenting it in a neutral fashion as part as a digital collection. I think this is often this is due in a large part to staffing issues. My immediate thoughts of course turned to work being done in Temple's Library. Right now the impetus is to simply get content up in our catalog, although we've just started pursuing grants to present material interactively in a more curated fashion. My hope is that soon we will be embarking on a project similar to the examples given in the article.

'The Digital Durham Project: Creating Community through History, Technology and Service Learning' is the anatomy of a digital project at Duke. What was unique about the project was the integration of both students at Duke and at local middle schools. Students at Duke use the site along with primary source material as the foundation for papers for a seminar class. Duke students then engage in a service learning project where they then mentor middle school students in conducting research. This type of direct engagement of the audience is a positive model for digital history, particularly when based on a college campus with available students.

Another model of students, archivists, librarians and historians is covered in the article 'Creating Community with the History Engine Connecting Teachers, Librarians, Students and Scholars.' Students create entries in a Wikipedia type forum with assistance by teachers and information professionals to help provide well vetted entries. The interface breaks down entries by region and decade. Where scholars shun Wikipedia entirely, this stands as a good example of how the model can be adopted but tweaked to compensate for its shortcomings.

The Fairmount Miracle

In Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture, Alison Landsberg presents a different perspective with which to view the relationship between experiential history, mass media and collective memory. Landsberg lumps together a diverse array of novels, museums, television dramas and movies for their ability to create 'prosthetic memories,' which provide an audience with some understanding or experience of a history that they are not connected to. From the outset, Landberg's background in film and literature rather than traditional academic historiography is apparent. Nevertheless, it's a useful text to expand the boundaries of ideas we can incorporate into discussions of public history and media.

Landsberg opens the text up with two creative cinematic examples that deal with memory, Blade Runner and Total Recall. The central characters in both works grapple with 'inorganic' memories of experience that are either stripped from them or artificially added to their archive of experience. The implication it sets is that the modern consumer of new media can be affected with additive or subtractive memory much like the main characters in the films. This analysis is applied to three major historical issues, immigration and assimilation, slavery and the African-American experience and the Holocaust. 'Prosthetic memory' is used to different ends and distinct affects with regard to each. In the case of immigration it was used to create a new distinctly American identity but with slavery to try and mend the severed familial ties to pass down history. With regard to the Holocaust, it is used to create an understanding for an audience which shares no connection.

More so than any other reading, there were a variety of implications for a video project I've been working with. The Philadelphia-based Termite TV Collective (of which I'm a member) has been creating site-specific video pieces that are to be viewed on a hand-held device like an iPod or mobile phone with video capabilities. Although it's not specifically the type of experiential media Landsberg writes about, it's a logical extension of those ideas. The Termite TV pieces are open ended in their aim with some being more performance based or rooted solely in artistic expression but some occasionally confronting historic narratives or recording memory.

One of the pieces I collaborated on a year and a half ago somewhat playfully attempted to explore an event that had happened in Fairmount Park a few decades prior. The participant has to walk through the space with primary source material bridging the temporal gap. Although I wouldn't expect you to watch the whole thing (it's slow when not walked!) you can view parts of it here:



The video gradually leads the participant to a bush in Fairmount Park where in 1953 a vision of the Virgin Mary had reportedly appeared to two neighborhood children sending thousands flocking to the bush. Although Fairmount Miracle doesn't address a historic trauma or engage the history of a specific demographic or ethnicity, there are strains of Landberg's work or those covered in the book that intersect with the piece. Most notably it creates a 'transferential space -in which people are invited to enter into experiential relationships in which they did not live.' (p. 113) Much of how it unravels we hope encourages participatory engagement with the surroundings. It's shot from the point of view of the participant (you and the device) and tries to incorporate other senses (such as touch) that extend past the traditional cinematic experience. Although, there are three competing temporal spaces (the present, the time it was shot and the time presented by the primary source material) it pits the black and white photos against the color of the present to contrast the two time periods, another device Landsberg alludes to with Schindler's List.

Although this is brief and perhaps an oversimplified comparison, I'm sure I will create similar work in the future where I'll have to consider how to frame an issue in this format. Fairmount Miracle isn't confronting an issue with the moral heft that any of the issues covered in the text but leads me to question what types of challenges I'd be presented with in trying to do so.

Old and Failed

This week I read an article about the demolition of an art deco smokestack and Pullman dormitory in the Amtrak yard by 30th Street Station. As I waded through the often acerbic comments section, one comment in particular from kelprod1 jumped out at me:

"It is called progress. Tear it down and build anew. The free market works
flawlessly, if it is allowed to let the old and failed disappear- and
let the new supply fill the needed demand"

Keeping that quote in mind, the Mirabal article almost read as a direct refutation of that philosophy. The gentrification in the Mission District of San Francisco characterized by Mirabal was not simply an instance of 'the old and failed [disappearing]' but instead was a free-market assault on the past and present. The 'whitewashing' of the Lilli Ann mural
by a real estate developer to be replace it with an ad for the new dot-com tenet as a textbook example.

Again, this is where I could reiterate what exactly the activism a (public) historian engages in could look like. In a neighborhood where there's an active erasure of the character and history of a place, sometimes just being there to tell or document a story is good enough. I was disappointed that the piece wasn't a little more of an anatomy of the the oral history project itself. It was a fascinating read on the community and great demonstration of the types of forces historians can be pitted against. Excerpts from the oral history project were used to color the narrative about gentrification but didn't go quite as deep into the politics of constructing the community history as I had hoped.

I assume the Eric O'Keefe, New York Times article is grouped in the 'community engagement' portion for its blatant lack thereof. Harrisburg mayor Stephen Reed spent a staggering $7.8 million for 3,800 artifacts for the museum seemingly unbeknownst to his constituency. Ultimately one persons vision alone cannot suffice, at least with the use of taxpayer money. More voices and checks and balances in the process could have possibly prevented a fiscal loss.