Historically Thinking

Incredibly enough on precisely the second occasion that humans ever flew, they went up drinking. It was December 1, 1783, and as a crowd containing King Louis XVI of France and Benjamin Franklin watched, the physicist Jacques Charles handed his fellow aeronaut Nicholas-Louis Robert a glass just a moment before liftoff. As the ropes were let go and […]

Incredibly enough on precisely the second occasion that humans ever flew, they went up drinking. It was December 1, 1783, and as a crowd containing King Louis XVI of France and Benjamin Franklin watched, the physicist Jacques Charles handed his fellow aeronaut Nicholas-Louis Robert a glass just a moment before liftoff. As the ropes were let go and the balloon began to rise, Charles popped the cork on a bottle of Champagne, filled their glasses, and together they toasted the crowd and the miracle of flight.

That had a certain quality of...savoir faire. Style. Panache. And in fact the food eaten aloft after that second flight abounded with style, panache, savoir faire, and oftentimes savor as well. It was often–no, typically–eaten in tremendous quantities. Nice groceries, and lots of them: that could have been the motto of eating in the air.

Needless to say, when most of us travel this summer, that won't be the motto of our airline's dining service. We feel very fortunate to get peanuts and a soda. So what exactly happened?

My guest, Richard Foss, has written the first-ever book devoted to the history of eating in the air and space (appropriately enough titled Food in the Air and Space: The Surprising History of Food and Drink in the Skies.) He's eminently qualified to do so, having authored many articles on culinary history. Additionally he's the California Curator of the Museum of the American Cocktail, and the author of Rum: A Global History. (He's also curated and introduced the links below.)

Bon voyage!

For Further Investigation

• The Foss Files, Richard Foss' website

• Richard Foss's website devoted to "food in air and space".

• "The Pan Am Historical Foundation has online archives"

• "The world’s most obsessive archive about airline meals, with over 38,000 pictures of airline food": 

• "Everything about zeppelins and dirigibles."

• "The best archive about flying boats is the Foynes Flying Boat Museum in Ireland."

And now, some explanations. This podcast emanates from Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. Rock Island is one of what the locals call the “Quad Cities”, four towns or small cities–Rock Island and Moline in Illinois, Davenport and Bettendorf in Iowa–that stretch along the Mississippi River at what used to be the largest rapids on the […]

This podcast emanates from Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. Rock Island is one of what the locals call the "Quad Cities", four towns or small cities–Rock Island and Moline in Illinois, Davenport and Bettendorf in Iowa–that stretch along the Mississippi River at what used to be the largest rapids on the Upper Mississippi, just above where the Rock River flows into the Father of Waters. These rapids are centered on Arsenal Island, which has been occupied by the United States Army since 1830 when it was Fort Armstrong.

If there's a genius of this curious place, it's Black Hawk, the war chief of the Sauk tribe that once had its  town near the junction of the Rock and Mississippi, and which summered on what's now Arsenal Island. Around here, Black Hawk is the name of a college, a hotel, and a chain of banks. Farther afield there's the Chicago Black Hawks, and the Army's workhorse helicopter that owe their name to his inspiration. As my guest today, my colleague Jane Simonsen has said in a recent article, Black Hawk is now "an 'Indian' figure tinted by a vague sense of history and burnished by settler-colonist nostalgia."

Today Jane and I discuss Black Hawk, but more than that. We discuss what Black Hawk wore. This turns out to be very important, because what he wore provoked white Americans to comment, and sometimes provoked them to irritation or pity. Fashion and how it's appropriated say not just something about the wearer, but the beholder. In this case, it says a lot about how we want Indians to be–and in a strange way, very hip, with-it, post modernly conscious people turn out to have a sensibility remarkably similar to people in the 1830's.

Jane Simonsen is Associate Professor of History here at Augustana College, and our Department's Chair. She is the author of the well-reviewed Making Home Work: Domesticity and Native American Assimilation in the American West, 1860-1919, published by the University of North Carolina Press.

For Further Investigation

Life of Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-Sha-Kia-Kak, or Black Hawk...Dictated by Himself, edited by J.B. Patterson (Boston, 1834)

Marshall Joseph Becker, “Matchcoats: Cultural Conservatism and Change in One Aspect of Native American Clothing,” Ethnohistory 52:4 (Fall 2005), 727-787

Nick Brown and Sarah E. Kanouse, Re-Collecting Black Hawk: Landscape, Memory, and Power in the American Midwest (Pittsburgh, 2015)

George Catlin, Wi-jún-jon, Pigeon's Egg Head (The Light) Going To and Returning from Washington, 1837-1839

George Catlin's Indian Gallery–A Virtual Exhibition 

Robert Duplessis, The Material Atlantic: Clothing, Commerce, and Colonization in the Atlantic World, 1650-1800 (Cambridge, 2016)

Elizabeth Hutchinson, “The Dress of His Nation: Romney’s Portrait of Joseph Brant,” Winterthur Portfolio 45:2/3 (Summer/Autumn 2011), 209-227

Patrick J. Jung, The Black Hawk War of 1832 (Norman, OK, 2008)

Ann M. Little, “’Shoot that Rogue, for He Hath an Englishman’s Coat On!’: Cultural Cross-Dressing on the New England Frontier, 1620-1760, The New England Quarterly 74:2 (June 2001), 238-273

Kerry Trask, The Black Hawk War: Battle for the Heart of America (New York, 2006)

I don’t have much to add: to what I said when we last “aired” this conversation, except to express some apologies that we’ve reached again into the Archive. It’s End of Year at Augustana College, which for both students and faculty is like being pressed headfirst through a funnel at Mach 2.3: its painful, but […]

I don't have much to add: to what I said when we last "aired" this conversation, except to express some apologies that we've reached again into the Archive. It's End of Year at Augustana College, which for both students and faculty is like being pressed headfirst through a funnel at Mach 2.3: its painful, but kind of exhilarating at the same time. It also doesn't allow much time for anything else.

But I should also add a warm welcome to the many new listeners who are causing the silver spinning platters in Historically Thinking's quaint Amish-built server farm to work full-time. We thank you particularly because your downloads tell us that we're doing something good, and make us want to keep doing more of it. Many thanks.

I like this podcast a lot, for three reasons. First, it's with a conversation with a friend, a man I admire for being an academic who does his own thing, in his own unique way. Second, it's about barbecue. Third, it is really a conversation about place, and place is something of a secondary preoccupation at Historically Thinking, right after historical thinking (and historical feeling, but that's another podcast series). Pig is pig, even in Memphis; but Memphis is not North Carolina, and it would be foolish for it to try to be.

Here on the Upper Mississippi it's May, which means winter is just about over; people are creeping outside and beginning to put things on the grill; and the redolent smoke is floating through the late evening, a sign and seal of the approach of summer. Sometimes these nice Midwestern folk call what they're doing barbecue; and while they're good people, that "just ain't right." Barbecue is ... well, What Barbecue Is, and particularly what North Carolina Barbecue Is, happens to be the subject of this podcast.

Once again, the eminence grease of Southern Sociology and Self-Understanding, John Shelton Reed, joins Al Zambone, this time to talk about North Carolina barbecue, the subject of a book he recently coauthored with Dale Volberg Reed and William McKinney. Holy Smoke: The Big Book of North Carolina Barbecue is not only a history and sociology of North Carolina barbecue; it's not only a set of interviews with some of the foremost practitioners of the art; it's also got recipes. It even has instructions on how to build your own barbecue pit so that you can cook a whole hog. Isn't that something?

We don't want to brag, but, we have to say it: this is our most delicious podcast yet. And since Reed will soon be coming out with a book surveying the rest of the Southern barbecue scene, he's sure to be on Historically Thinking again.

For Further Reading and Eating

John Shelton Reed and Dale Volberg Reed, with William McKinney, Holy Smoke: The Big Book of North Carolina Barbecue 

Reed thinks this review of his book by Bill Kauffman got what the book is all about.

Allen & Son Bar-B-Q–they don't have a website, but they have a Yelp page full of happy customers. Don't even bother to read it. Just go eat there, OK?

Sometimes it seems that while everyone talks about college, no one really knows how it works. Certainly not parents, or professors; not administrators and not undergraduates. In fact, one would not be wrong if they thought that most of the “things we actually know about college” are things that we’ve been told, but haven’t really found out; […]

Sometimes it seems that while everyone talks about college, no one really knows how it works. Certainly not parents, or professors; not administrators and not undergraduates. In fact, one would not be wrong if they thought that most of the “things we actually know about college” are things that we've been told, but haven't really found out; things we assume to be the case, but have never actually questioned. Much of what we believe about college turns out to be a collection of (to use a term popular here at Historically Thinking) engravings– things that we believe to be true, but just aren't so.

In their book How College Works, Daniel F. Chambliss and Christopher Takacs subject their own school—Hamilton College in upstate New York—to a thorough sociological evaluation to find out what is actually so. What they found sometimes confirms prejudice and yet baffles it; approves of common sense observations but also undermines them. All in all, How College Works is a fascinating read for anyone who works at a college, wants to go to college, or wants their child to go to college. Daniel F. Chambliss is the Eugene M. Tobin Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, and he's my guest today on Historically Thinking.

Today is another conversation that fits into our recurring series titled “A User’s Guide to Higher Education.” It’s true that this has nothing to do with history, or higher education. But it’s a topic in which we’re more than a little (self) interested, and in which myth always seems to outnumber fact.  So, until another […]

Today is another conversation that fits into our recurring series titled "A User's Guide to Higher Education." It's true that this has nothing to do with history, or higher education. But it's a topic in which we're more than a little (self) interested, and in which myth always seems to outnumber fact.  So, until another podcast comes along and tells you how US News and World Report's polls tell you nothing of use, we'll keep on having these conversations on higher ed.

This time we're joined by our friend and Augustana colleague Mike Edmondson, Vice-President and Director of Careers–Opportunities–Research–Exploration...CORE, as we call it here. It's what other less advanced institutions of higher learning call a Career Office, which at this college is like saying in the 1970's that Arnold Schwarzenegger is a guy who lifts weights. (It's true, see, but is a very limited truth.)

Mike has a PhD in History (so he's obviously a classy guy) from Temple University. He's been on Historically Thinking before, in Episode 8 talking about his book Marketing Your Value: 9 Steps to Navigate Your Career. Now he returns to discuss a new and related title that's just been published, Major in Happiness: Debunking the College Major Fallacies. There are a lot of those fallacies, but we don't talk about many of them. Instead, we discuss the expectations of parents, and, quite frankly, take them to the woodshed. In a gentle, helpful, yet challenging way. We hope.

Thanks for listening! Apologies for the long delay; we'll be back next week. Promise.