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“This Suspence is painfull. I know not what to do with them. It lengthens out the Time which I can but ill afford, and if they can have it, I know not how to quit till I can get them through. Youth youth is the time, they have no pains but bodily, no anxiety of mind, no fears for themselves or others, and then the Disease is much lighter. The poor Doctor is as anxious as we are, but begs us to make it certain if repeated innoculations will do it. There are now several patients who were innoculated last winter and thought they passd through the Distemper, but have now taken it in the natural way.”
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“Diagrams Illustrating the Principal Means Used in Transporting the Sick and Wounded and Medical Supplies During the War of the Rebellion 1861–5”
The number of military fatalities during the Civil War of the United States was approximately 620,000, many more than any other war in which the U.S. has participated. That number does not take into account the wounded or sick, of which there were also a high number. The detail of a page of diagrams shown here, printed by Julius Bien and Co. Lith, NY, and created for the book Atlas to Accompany the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 1861–1865, shows several views of a train car and how it would be used to carry wounded and sick people from the front lines to places they could be treated.
In most of the images in this detail, the print shows how beds were arranged in the train car. What is not immediately clear, but is written in the top left corner, is that the mode of suspension for each cot is a rubber ring. For someone ill or wounded, jostling on the train suspended by a rubber ring was most likely intolerable.
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The Object of History, MHS Podcast
The Object of History podcast unravels the stories behind historical objects held at the MHS.
Episode 2, “The Lost Sword of the MA 54th,” explores a set of items related to the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, the first African American regiment raised in the North during the American Civil War. Learn about the once lost sword of Robert Gould Shaw—the young white colonel who died leading the 54th into battle. This episode also looks beyond this famous artifact at the ordinary men who served in the 54th. In remarkable numbers, they answered the nation’s call to service. Despite unequal pay, discrimination, and the threat of enslavement and death, they fought for the hope of building a better, freer, and more just republic.
Listen to this episode now on the website or wherever you regularly listen to your podcasts.
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MHS’s online programs are held on the video conference platform Zoom. Registrants will receive an e-mail with a link to join the program. Some programs will be hybrid with in-person and virtual registration available. Please be sure to register how you will attend.
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Conversion in Confinement
On Tuesday, 9 November, at 5:15 PM, Justin Clark, Nanyang Technological University; Daniel Bottino, Rutgers University; and Hannah Pearson, Independent Scholar, present Conversion in Confinement, with Douglas Winiarski, University of Richmond, a Pauline Maier Early American History Seminar.
This panel will consider two papers exploring the world of early American religious culture through the lens of carceral conversions. Daniel Bottino’s essay will explore the 38-page conversion narrative of Patience Boston, a Native American woman hanged for murder in York, Maine, in 1735. The document offers an extraordinary opportunity for an exploration of religious culture in New England on the verge of the Whitefieldian awakenings of the 1740s. When examined in its proper historical context, the narrative reveals the spiritual power capable of being wielded even by the most socially marginal people in the intensely religious atmosphere of early eighteenth-century New England. Justin Clark’s essay will show that as Congregationalist New England’s eighteenth-century revivalists offered a brief window of spiritual hope for thousands of sinners, civil authorities began to extend additional periods of time to the region’s condemned convicts. This paper examines the emergence of these extended capital reprieves and their relationship to the accelerated spiritual conversions outside gaol walls. What role did the revivals play in encouraging New Englanders before the penitentiary to re-conceive of carceral time as transformative in itself?
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Wilson and Lodge: One World, Two Visions, Unending Reverberations
President Woodrow Wilson came home from the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 with the Versailles Treaty, which ended World War I and created the League of Nations, the first global body committed to preserving world peace. Americans favored ratification of the treaty, but the Senate Majority Leader, Henry Cabot Lodge, was determined to block it unless Wilson agreed to modifications. The battle that followed was one of the most consequential in American diplomatic history. O’Toole will look at that struggle and how it has played out in U.S. foreign policy and American memory.
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On Thursday, 18 November, at 6:00 PM, Afia Atakora, Novelist; Brianna Nofil, College of William & Mary; and Christopher Tomlins, Berkeley Law, present Literary Distinction in Historical Writing 2021: An Evening with the Society of American Historians Prize Winners, moderated by Megan Marshall, Emerson College, SAH past president.
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Interested in Viewing Past Programs? |
If you missed a program or would like to revisit the material presented, please visit www.masshist.org/video or our YouTube channel. A selection of past programs is just a click away.
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