Publication Type: Presentation Proposal

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Even though social deviance does not necessarily have to be criminal, some individuals deviate from the norms of the society. Actors who are known to have different thoughts, tendencies, and attitudes are likely to exhibit deviant behaviors. Factors that lead an individual to deviant behavior can be classified as internal and external factors. Personality, as contended by some, is an important factor in explaining social deviance. This study attempts to examine whether personality and personal traits are effective in explaining behaviors that conflict with social and legal norms. The British psychologist Cattel’s 16-factor personality test has been applied to ninety-seven inmates serving time for a variety of crimes ranging from petty offenses to separatist terrorism in what is called an E Type prison in an eastern city of Turkey. The findings presented in this study help to the relationship between personality and social deviance in a nonwestern setting of the world.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: I recently published an article on George Catlin’s seven-year project in the western territories to collect, classify, and represent its “vanishing” peoples in American Studies (summer 2005). I have now begun work that examines Catlin’s efforts to commodify and objectify his experiences in the West in the cultural markets of Europe, where the realities of fickle popular tastes and erratic profit margins would eventually lead Catlin to borrow from the sideshow model of display made so successful by his contemporary P.T. Barnum. My work fits nicely with this year’s focus on “Transhemispheric Visions and Community Connections,” in that my paper will focus exclusively on Catlin’s exhibition of fourteen Iowa Indians in his traveling museum in 1844—he toured Europe with the Iowas through the summer of 1845—particularly his efforts to market and commodify the Iowa as an exemplum of American identity destined to “vanish.”

As a collector and exhibitor of Native American culture, Catlin walked a fine line between aesthetic, ethical, and entrepreneurial values, and nowhere is this better illustrated than in his association with Iowas, who were originally imported by P.T. Barnum and then managed by Catlin. After an unsuccessful run with a somewhat unruly group of Ojibwa Indians the year before, with the Iowas Catlin was much more calculating in crafting an exhibition that catered to white spectators’ expectations and desires, and his use of advertisements, newspaper reports, and marketing techniques is a study in proto-“Wild West” showmanship.

This past summer I had a research grant to study Catlin’s advertising strategies in London at the British Library’s Periodical and Newspaper library, and I focused on approximately fifteen London dailies and weeklies published over a two month period in the summer of 1844. Catlin’s travelogue, Notes on Eight Years Travels and Residence in Europe, describes two particularly public exhibitions of the Iowas in London, the first at the Lord's Cricket Grounds for one week, and the second at Vauxhall Gardens for two weeks. However, he makes little mention of the hundreds of advertisements I discovered he placed during this period, nor does he discuss his complex relationship with the media (the fact that different “reporters” wrote nearly identical stories about the exhibitions suggests that Catlin was one of the first Americans to master the art of the “press release”). Although I am still in the process of analyzing the raw data I accumulated, I made some startling and original discoveries. For instance, P.T. Barnum's Tom Thumb, who was also making the London rounds that same summer, actually made an appearance with Catlin's Iowas at Vauxhall, in the debut of his miniature carriage, purported to be the smallest ever built. This fact about Catlin was until now unknown, and part of my paper will investigate Catlin's partnership with Barnum and his use of a tiny white male in tandem with his "wild" Indians, a classic pairing of the civil and the savage.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The emerging cultural field of museums of sex is ripe for feminist analysis. This paper argues that a critique of heteronormativity is crucial to that project. Drawing from a critical reading of Stags, Smokers & Blue Movies: The Origins of American Pornographic Film, at The Museum of Sex, NY, I propose museums of sex must recognize and destabilize heteronormative representations of sexuality. Future possibilities for a queer feminist engagement with museums of sex are imagined.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In the spring of 1775 Bristow, an enslaved African in Hartford’s West Division, paid Thomas Hart Hooker 60 lbs in exchange for his freedom. The transaction, noted in the Farmington Land Records, allowed Hooker to be remembered for stating that he wouldn’t go to war to fight for freedom while leaving a slave at home. Once free Bristow continued to work for and live close to the Hooker family and was a participant in several notable patriotic episodes during the war years. He remained in the Hartford region where his reputation for agricultural knowledge earned him a place in various accounts of West Hartford history. His grave, in the historic cemetery, is the only identified commemoration of an African American from the period.

Frank Mitchell’s paper will take up the ways in which in the past decade Bristow has reemerged as a cultural symbol in West Hartford. Last spring members of the town’s Board of Education named a new middle school for him and next month a new exhibition on Bristow’s life opens at the town historical society. Bristow is again becoming a cultural symbol representing contemporary ideals of freedom, truth, and identity. As a school namesake and potentially a mascot (?!), Bristow and his story may become significant historical data, but these new readings and his new celebrity also generate opportunities for more skilled interpretations of sentimentalized slavery and redemption through black suffering. While it is inspiring that a new middle school in West Hartford has been named for an enslaved African who purchased his freedom before the Revolutionary War, it does have complications. Mitchell will look at what is disclosed and what is contained in this process.

“Set at Full Liberty” will place the details of Bristow’s life and the history exhibition produced by the West Hartford Historical Society (Bristow: Putting the Pieces of an African American Life Together) into a context with other recent presentations of slavery in early American Connecticut and New York. Critical references for this discussion are the Smithsonian AMNH exhibitions After the Revolution and The Price of Freedom which both examine the Revolutionary War and its implications for various American resident populations.

Bristow’s story and continued research on slavery in New England compels answers to new questions about the idea of freedom along with the realities of the peculiar institution in the Yankee North. Popular audiences’ increasing interest in these topics, evident in the terrific response to the New York Historical Society’s exhibition Slavery in New York and other smaller programs, should encourage scholars and museum professionals to push along their dialogues on the ways of reading, understanding, and interpreting freedom for blacks in New England and the mid Atlantic during the Colonial period. Mitchell’s paper will do just this.