For my final project, I will be elaborating upon the research Sam and I have done for our team teaching assignment, involving architecture as materials and culture.

As pictured above, I purchased a music box upon one of my many visits to Paris while I lived abroad. The music box plays “La Vie en Rose” by Edith Piaf and depicts the construction of the Eiffel Tower. I will be exploring how the Eiffel Tower has come to symbolize French culture despite the country’s official resistance to its creation for the World Fair. I will also be researching why specific monuments are so effective when used for memorabilia such as my music box, and ponder whether or not the reduction of a country to one symbol is a positive or negative manifestation of human materialism. I will also look into the same phenomena for other countries (although not in as much detail), and try to find connections between what we know of the country modernly and what their famous monuments tell us about their history. This will be particularly focused on countries that are still developing and the image they intend to create through their architecture compared with historical architecture.

I would love to hear what some of your questions are about this topic so that I could make sure to answer them in my project.

When Jennie C. Overton passed around her velveteen autograph book in June of 1889, she was creating a souvenir of her years at university that would last her a lifetime. Fellow classmates inscribed their names, inspiring quotes, and loving memories on each page, sometimes accompanied by photographs or hand-drawn illustrations. What the graduates of the New Paltz Normal School may not have realized at the time, however, was that their signatures, scrawled in perfect script, would document their experience for centuries to come. 

The book itself is moderately sized, approximately 8.25 inches in length, 7.25 inches in width, and .5 inches high. The cover, wrapped in plush, soft, blue-grey velvet and imprinted with the word “Autographs,” is starting to fray and become patchy with age. The pages, once crisp and firm, are yellowed around the edges and delicate, smooth but slowly turning to dust. A beautiful cover page, decorated in blues, creams, and browns, pictures a young lady reading, perched comfortably on the letter A for autograph.

And on the first page of the book, written in slanted, neat cursive, the name Jennie C. Overton. 

We might picture Jennie, perhaps sitting at her writing desk, perhaps in her bedroom, casually writing her name in her brand new autograph book, unaware of how this one single act would lead a future SUNY New Paltz undergraduate student to research her life and death, her impact on the world. Who was she? Where was she from? What was she studying? 

Jane C. Overton, nicknamed Jennie, was born on October 29^th, 1865 in New York. Her parents were Wallace and Anna Overton, and she had three siblings: William, ten years her senior; Edna, two years her junior, and Lillie, four years her junior. The family started in Islip, on the south shore of Long Island, NY, but eventually moved to Bayport, NY by the time Jennie was 14. Her father was a farmer and her mother a housewife. 

There is not much documentation of Jennie’s life in the years before her arrival at the New Paltz Normal School. Once there, however, Jennie studied English and obtained her degree in 1889. At her commencement ceremony, Jennie presented an essay called “The Universal Language,” in which she discussed the promise of the Volapük language. Volapük is a constructed language that was created in 1879-1880 by Johann Martin Schleyer, with the goal of creating one language that all people of different countries could learn and speak. In her speech, Jennie said, “The world needs a common and simple medium of expression. Many attempts have been made to supply this need, but Volapük is the first and only one that gives evidence of success.” 

Jennie returned to New Paltz Normal School a second time, graduating with a second degree in old elementary English in 1893. Her roommate of that year, Bessie Monsell, wrote lovingly in her book, “I shall always look back with the greatest pleasure to the happiest year of my life which was spent with you, and to that time when I found a friend, that was a friend indeed. Remember me ever, as your loving room-mate of 1892-93, Bessie R. Monsell, Greenport, NY.”

Jennie disappeared from records again until 1900, when she is documented living with her parents in Bayport and working as a teacher. At this point in time, aged 35, she was still unmarried.

Another page of her autograph book is signed by Clara T. Hawkins and reads:

“To Miss Jennie C. Overton,

‘Only do thou in thought
And heart, to Him hold fast;
Be patient; more than thou
Hast sought,
Will come to thee at last.’ 

Lovingly yours,
Clara T. Hawkins,
South Haven, L.I.” 

The inscription would prove to be prophetic in a way. Sometime between 1900 and her death twelve years later, Jennie C. Overton would marry Clara T. Hawkins’ brother, Irving Hawins. They never had children. 

In July of 1909, the Kingston Daily Freeman noted that a Jennie C. Overton of Bayport, NY, entered Sahler’s Sanitarium in Kingston, NY. It is likely, judging by her death a few years later, that this was the same Jennie.

Jennie’s husband died in 1911, followed shortly by Jennie herself on the 28^th of April, 1912. She shares a plot with her husband in the David Hawkins Cemetery in Suffolk County, New York.

CAPTION
These small, delicate objects don’t look like much from a distance, yet their role in the lives of the Esopus Indians was one of extreme beauty. These tiny pieces of shiny copper, rolled into cones called tinklers, attached to women’s dresses during ceremonial dances, tell as much about these Native American people as they do about their relationship with the settlers who entered the land in the 17^th century.

DESCRIPTION
The tinklers, once bright and shiny, are now growing speckled with age; mottled with various mossy greens, ranging in shades of dark forest, to emerald, to sandy beige, they seem as much a part of the earth from which they were uncovered as the grass itself. The copper is astoundingly well preserved, considering it’s around 400 years old, dating between 1609 and 1700 A.D. They are small, ranging between 1.5 and 3 centimeters long. Still, the tinklers have maintained the conical shape that made them jingle and gave them their memorable name. These delicate, decorative cones were part of the Late Woodland Period in the Northeastern United States and belonged to the Esopus Indians who roamed New Paltz and the surrounding region.

PROVENANCE
These tinkle cones were found in New Paltz, Ulster County, New York. They date from the Late Woodland Period and were part of the Esopus Indian culture that dominated the region. They are dated between 1609 and 1700 A.D. and are currently housed in the Historic Huguenot Street Visitor’s Center, located in New Paltz, NY.

NARRATIVE:
We approach the scene: on one side of the clearing, Dutch settlers arrange a wide assortment of brass and copper utilities, iron weapons, silver cutlery, blankets, cotton clothing, liquor, and guns. They seem confident, chatting amongst each other, knowing the sale will go well and they will profit, maybe more than they deserve. For them, these objects are commonplace, imported from Europe where the technology has long existed.

Still, there is a slight sense of fear in the air. Since their arrival in North America, the settlers’ relationship with the Native Americans has been unpredictable, largely because of the difference in cultures and a lack of efficient, or in some cases honest, communication. Quietly but purposefully, their trade partner signals his arrival with the snap of a twig: stepping out of the forest, an Esopus Indian. He is tall, strong, with long dark hair and across his sinewy shoulders stretches a dead deer, a peace offering to the Dutch.

Deals are made, objects exchanged, and a part of history is formed. Each side leaves with something new in their pocket: metal utilities that make survival exponentially easier, or a piece of paper that signs away hundreds of acres of land. One of the most important trade items of all, however, was shiny, malleable copper. This element, never before used by the Esopus Indians, provided a variety of new utensils, weapons, and decorative accessories that could be easily made or altered. While projectile points and pots were essential to the Esopus way of life, one surprising object of a different nature survived 400 years to be found in New Paltz, NY. This object was the tinkle cone.

Tinkle cones, or tinklers, are small pieces of copper rolled into the shape of a cone. When attached to dance and ceremonial clothing, these cones created a melodic jingle, the perfect accompaniment to the drums, rattles, and custom songs of the Esopus. The women, tinklers sewn into their dresses and dangling from their ears, swayed their bodies and reached down towards the ground, thanking the earth that sustained them.

While the Esopus culture was tragically maimed during the increasing settlement of the land, their delicate copper accessories, then a bright metallic orange, survived the test of time to inform later generations of the people that once lived in the area. Now, like the earth that played such a crucial role in the lives of their people, the tinkle cones are a beautiful, natural green.

Sources

Kraft, Herbert C. The Lenape-Delaware Indian Heritage; 10,000 BC to AD 2,000. N/A: Lenape Books, 2001. Print.

Kraft, Herbert C. The Lenape Archeology History and Ethnography. Newark, NJ: New Jersey Historical Society, 1986. Print.

The introduction to A History of the World in 1000 Objects got me thinking about a lot of different things: how much of history will never be discovered? How much of history have we wrongly interpreted? Does it matter that it was incorrectly interpreted?

One aspect of the introduction that caught my eye (and my brain) was the notion of whose story gets told. Now, I’ve certainly heard before the the victor writes history. Yet, when MacGregor writes, “Those who are on the losing side, those whose societies are conquered or destroyed, often have only their things to tell their stories,” he encouraged me to think about the destruction of the Native American culture in the United States and what objects of theirs we have left.

Certainly we’re aware of remnants of Native American culture. I remember learning about longhouses and teepees in sixth grade Global History; I’ve never forgotten the “papoose,” what certain Native American women used to carry around their babies, and I’ve seen photos of their pottery. I’m sure you can still purchase pottery, dream catchers, and moccasins made by descendants of the Native American tribes.

But you can also purchase them at chain stores such as Urban Outfitters or Forever 21. You can buy Native American print clothing at the mall, dream catchers as a kitchy souvenir from a cowboys and Indians ride, or a Native American costume to wear on Halloween. Our modern culture has not so much preserved their objects as appropriated them for modern use without a single nod in the direction of the culture from which they once hailed.

For those interested, you can read this article in Time Magazine about the current law suit between the Navajo Indians and Urban Outfitters: http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/10/12/urban-outfitters-taken-to-task-for-faux-navajo-products/

Being tasked with the preservation and the promotion of a historical object of New Paltz, I am determined to keep this in mind as I write my report: it is important that we treat each culture in which our objects were born as equally important as our own culture today. I think it is easy to look back on historical objects and observe them in comparison to our culture, and I believe very valid ideas can be drawn from this kind of reflection. But it is also necessary to put our culture aside to fully understand each object and its origins, to truly appreciate where, when, why, and how each object was created. We must always strive for a balance between preservation and promotion, and annihilation through appropriation.

Hi everyone! I’m going to do my first blog post about an object (rather, a set of objects) that I didn’t bring to our first class. Pictured above are my Positive/Negative rocks, which hold a lot of sentimental value to me although they were only given to me fairly recently.

Each rock is about an inch and a half long and very smooth. While they are chipped in a few places, the Mediterranean Ocean rid them of all of their rough patches, so even the places that are chipped have rounded edges. The white is my Positive rock and the black is my Negative rock. My Positive rock is slightly smaller and flatter than my Negative rock and curves inward on both sides, which makes it feel as if someone else had already been rubbing it between their fingers long before it came to me. My Negative rock is rounded on one side and flat on the bottom, generally larger than the other rock, and so feels heavier when you hold in it your hand. I regularly rub oil into both rocks, which keeps them smooth and makes them smell like jasmine. The smell is particularly important for me because it reminds me of my best friend Lauren, who gave me the rocks, because she was the first person to put jasmine oil on them while we were in France.

The first time I saw a pair of Positive/Negative rocks, I was in Lauren’s room in Montpellier, France. She has a pair that she found on the beach in Barcelona, Spain, a long time ago, and I asked her what they were for. She explained to me that she uses these rocks to meditate: whenever she’s feeling very negative, she meditates over the black rock, channeling all of her feelings into it so she can keep an open mind throughout the day. Contrastingly, whenever she’s feeling positive, she’s gives a little energy to the white rock to save for a rainy day; this way, when she’s feeling down, she can draw some good energy from her Positive rock after she channels her negativity into the black rock.

I was really interested in these rocks and spent a lot of time asking her if they really worked. I hunted for a pair a couple times at a beach near our city called Palavas les Flots, but I never found any good ones. All of mine were different shapes, sizes, were rough, or just didn’t seem to fit together well. A few months later, Lauren surprised me by giving me my very own set of rocks that she had collected on the beach in Nice, France. For these reasons, these rocks are very important to me: they were given to me by my best friend, they are from France (my favorite place in the world), and they help me balance my feelings when I start to lose control.

Another aspect of my set of rocks that I really like (compared to Lauren’s, which are pure black and white) is that both my Positive rock and my Negative rock have flecks of the contrasting color. My black rock has tiny dots of white, and my white rock has tiny dots of black. Whenever I meditate over my rocks, I try to remember that like them, life is never 100% positive or 100% negative; rather, it is whichever you choose to focus on the most.

As one last note, the other objects in the photo above are one of Lauren’s rings, a photo of the two of us, and a postcard she sent me from France when she visited over the summer.