Myth # 90: Popcorn was the first breakfast cereal.

June 29, 2012

Park Ranger Kevin Hanley wrote: “Outside of the 9 to 5 job, I’m a trustee for a historic Dutch house in Brooklyn. As part of my research into Dutch stuff, I’ve come repeatedly upon a reference to the Dutch use of popcorn. According to the texts, the Dutch didn’t know what to make or do with popcorn. Dutch wives apparently improvised and, supposedly, placed the popcorn in a bowl and added milk. Viola! The first cereal – or so it is claimed. Can you verify or bust this myth?”
     
     This is a tough nut to crack. First, it’s terribly illogical. Pour milk on popcorn and it instantly becomes a soggy glop. (I’ve tried.) Searching for historical underpinnings to this myth yields nothing in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, but see Myth #70–popcorn doesn’t become significant until the latter part of the nineteenth century.

     There is at least one historical mention of eating popcorn with milk, and it comes in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Farmer Boy, page 32-33, a book set in the late 1850s. She mentions that young Almonzo (who would become her husband) liked popcorn and milk. “You can fill a glass to the brim with milk and fill another glass of the same size brim full of popcorn, and then you can put all the popcorn kernel by kernel into the milk and the milk will not run over. You cannot do this with bread. Popcorn and milk are the only two things that will go into the same place. Then, too, they are good to eat.” Of course, she also repeats the myth about Indians and Pilgrims and popcorn at Thanksgiving, so she is not wholly reliable. Even if we take her words at face value, she isn’t talking about breakfast cereal; she talking about a science experiment that tastes good.

     The first packaged, ready-to-eat breakfast cereals were invented in the 1870s and made of oats and wheat. Cereal took a turn for the better in the early years of the twentieth century when the Kellogg brothers accidentally invented wheat flakes and corn flakes. None of these cereal pioneers used popcorn, presumably because it doesn’t work well.

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Posted by marymiley

Myth # 90: Unmarried girls wore their pockets on the outside of their clothing to show off their needlework skills to prospective suitors.

June 17, 2012

See her pocket, far left of left-hand print?

Thanks to Rose Linden for submitting this myth–and yes, it is a myth.

I found an MA thesis written in 1994 by Yolanda VandeKrol of the University of Delaware entitled “The Cultural Context of Women’s Pockets” that treats this topic thoroughly. According to Ms. VandeKrol, pockets were common from the end of the 17th century until around 1800, when the neoclassical dress styles (high waists and clingy lines) made wearing interior pockets impossible. Dresses with hoops or bustles more easily accommodated pockets. By the early 1800s, pockets had been replaced by drawstring bags called reticules.

Pockets were defined in 1688 as “little bags set on the inside with a hole or slit on the outside, by which any small thing may be carried about.” They were “not visible for reasons of orderliness, privacy, and crime,” says VandeKrol. “Women did not deliberately display their pockets,” but sometimes they were briefly visible, as these prints show. Interestingly, these prints also show that women of all socio-economic levels wore pockets–even servants and slaves.

Wearing the pocket inside the clothing gave the woman’s outfit a neater appearance. It also allowed women to keep certain private items, like letters, away from prying eyes. But the biggest reason was probably fear of thieves. The cut-purse, like the pickpocket, was aptly named.

Most women made their own pockets and many were decorated with embroidery (usually floral designs) or pieced or sewn from preprinted fabric. Needlework and decorative sewing was an acceptable occupation for women and because “idleness is inexcusable in a woman, and renders her contemptible,” so young girls of all social classes were encouraged to do lots of needlework from the time they were children. Some gave decorated pockets as gifts.

To summarize, unmarried young women did not wear their pockets outside their skirts to show off their needlework or to try to catch a man. (Honestly, can you imagine a young man vetting prospective wives by examining their pockets? I don’t think young men have changed that much in three hundred years . . .  I think her face and figure would rank a bit higher than her needlework display.)

Check out these prints that show women wearing pockets. You’ll have to look closely on some. 

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Posted by marymiley

DEATH has arrived!

June 11, 2012

As of this week, DEATH BY PETTICOAT: AMERICAN HISTORY MYTHS DEBUNKED is available at bookstores across the country. The book contains 63 myths, most of which are shortened forms of some of the myths I’ve posted on this blog over the past couple years, with a color illustration for each one. Published by Colonial Williamsburg with Andrews-McMeel Press, it retails for $12.99. That’s a great price for an impulse item like this, and it’s also a good gift idea. At my lecture and book signing last week, several people bought two and one woman bought six!

A request, please. This book is a natural for gift shops at museums, national parks, historic houses, or battlefield parks, so if you have any connection to these, I’d appreciate it if you would point them to this blog and this book. It’s available to shops from all the major wholesale book distributors. And the next time you visit your local public library, in person or online, please request that they purchase DEATH BY PETTICOAT so lots of people can have access to it. Most libraries have a request process whereby card holders can ask the library to consider purchasing a particular book. Then you can read it for free!

Meanwhile, I’m collecting myths for Book Two, so keep those suggestions coming. I don’t have enough yet, but I’m getting close.   

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Myth # 89: Women’s buttons are on their left because women were dressed by maids, who found it easier when the buttons were on their right.

June 2, 2012

. . . and men’s buttons are on their right because they preferred to dress themselves.

Well, not exactly.

First of all, buttons are seldom found on women’s clothing before the nineteenth century. Mens’ clothing, yes, but women used ties, hooks, and other fasteners more than they used buttons. With most clothing made by the women of the house or, in the case of the wealthy few, by dressmakers and tailors, individual preference prevailed in positioning buttons. There was no standardization until the Civil War era when the manufacture of uniforms began on an industrialized scale. That is probably when buttons became more or less standard on the right for men.

Curators who deal with nineteenth-century women’s clothing report that they have seen buttons on both sides. No one is willing to go out on a limb on this topic, but it seems that the button-on-the-left for women’s clothing probably got started in the early twentieth century with the rise of women’s ready-made garments. And since women buying ready-made blouses would not have been among the wealthy few (who continued to use dressmakers), the argument about maids is illogical.

Besides, who says wealthy men preferred to dress themselves and wealthy women didn’t? That idea is totally unsupported by fact. What were all those valets, houseslaves, and manservants doing, anyway? 

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Myth # 88: John Hanson was the real first president of the United States.

May 18, 2012

John Hanson

This resilient myth has been around for more than one hundred years, as his descendants have sought to plump up his reputation. In 1959, the director of research at Colonial Williamsburg tried to stamp it out–obviously, he was unsuccessful–by writing about whether Peyton Randolph or John Hanson was the first president of the Continental Congress. “The apparent confusion on this point arises form the fact that the Continental Congress existed first as a revolutionary body and then after the formal ratification of the Articles of Confederation on March 1, 1781 as the congress of the Confederation Government. Most historians, however, refer to this body as the Continental Congress during the entire period of its existence from 1774 until 1788.” He concludes that Hanson was not the first president of the Continental Congress, although he was one of several presidents, none of whom were “president” of the United States. “[Hanson] has sometimes been called the first president of the nation. However, he was in no sense a true executive officer, as were the presidents elected under the Federal Constitution.”

But let’s let Deborah Brower of Maryland, this week’s guest blogger, share her research and set the story straight. Hang on . . . it’s complicated! Or skip to the summary at the bottom.

Most people have never heard of John Hanson. If you know him at all, you probably live in Maryland and are familiar with the highway that bears his name.  It’s also possible you may have read about the recent effort to replace his statue in the U. S. Capitol with one of Harriet Tubman.  (Not a bad idea, interjects Mary) You might have encountered him as a featured article in one of those pocket books on the Constitution.  It is amazing that someone so obscure has such a wealth of misinformation attached to him. Of course maybe that’s why, the more obscure the subject more likely it is to be taken at face value.

We do know John Hanson was born in April of 1721 near Port Tobacco, Maryland.  His family origins are obscure, but by the time of his birth they were established members of the planter class. By the 1770s he’d moved to Frederick, Maryland and was serving as the chief officer of the County’s Committee of Safety, a Revolutionary Era alternative to the British Colonial government of Frederick County.  He kept the County and it’s resources firmly in the control of Maryland’s revolutionaries; he was a master at putting them to the best use.  Hanson is an excellent example of the sort of men who worked to fulfill the obligations of their colonies to the Continental Congress and the army.  These men don’t often get credit because they are in the shadows behind the new state government, Congress and the Military.  Although important, their roles just don’t get much attention.  John Hanson’s obligations kept him in mostly in Frederick until 1779 when he was elected as one of Maryland’s delegates to the Continental Congress.  In late 1780 he was elected to preside over Congress under the ratified Articles of Confederation.

Contrary to the general impression, not everyone thought the Revolution would result in a single nation.  Most thought when the war was over the colonies would go on as separate sovereign nations.  All that was needed was a “league of friendship” to deal with a limited number of common interests. The Articles of Confederation were a statement of how the Continental Congress had been operating thus far.   They enumerated the very minimal powers relinquished by the states.  Any power granted by the document was placed solely in the control of Congress.  There was no executive branch, judicial branch or senate only a single body, the Congress.  The difference between the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution are best stated by the documents themselves: The Articles of Confederation, “…, we the undersigned Delegates of the States…”; and the Constitution, “We the People of the United States”.

By June of 1780 when John Hanson finally took his seat in Congress, Maryland was the only colony left who had not agreed to the Articles of Confederation. The competing claims of the Colonies and various land speculation companies to the western territories was at issue.  Some colonies had their boundaries set by charters; others had no set boundaries and claimed they extended all the way to the Pacific Coast. Maryland was the only landless state still holding out.  On the surface Maryland argued all that undeveloped territory would make the landed states too powerful.  In reality Maryland’s motivation was the self interests of some of its leading citizens who were among the investors in land companies that purchased directly from the Indians.  The land in question was within the projected boundaries of landed colonies (mostly Virginia and New York). It was not so much Maryland trying to get the landed states to agree to a set border as it was to get the claims of the land companies recognized.  To make it even more complicated there were some Marylanders that had invested in Virginia based companies.  It is fascinating to follow the dance of Maryland legislators over their competing land claims.   George Mason’s letters referring to Maryland and her “twisted sister” Delaware make it clear that people were aware of what was going on behind the scenes.  The way things played out in Virginia, Maryland and Congress rival any back room dealings going on today.

While the other delegates were back in Maryland intriguing, John Hanson sat in Philadelphia, often the only Marylander there.  To break this impasse,  elements in Congress suggested the land claims might have more success in a ratified Congress.  Meanwhile British ships were manacling the Chesapeake and Maryland appealed to the French for protection. The French minister insinuated they were reluctant to place ships in the Chesapeake to shield Maryland because the Articles were not ratified.  If Maryland could see her way to finally sign, the French would be in a better position to help. So Maryland relented, still holding a faint hope for the land claims in a Confederation Congress; which was better than the possibility of being turned into a cinder by the British. We may never know for sure, but it would come as no surprise that John Hanson’s election as president was part of the deal.  On March 1, 1781, the signatures of Maryland’s delegates were added to the Articles of Confederation.  Now the Articles were ratified and took effect with great celebration.

On to the Myths

Beginning the last quarter of the 19th century a series of John Hanson descendants and some others began to slowly reinvent him.  One slight exaggeration was piled on top of another with the result of burying the real John Hanson.

1. John Hanson is NOT Swedish.

Since the publication of an article by genealogist George Ely Russell titled “John Hanson of Maryland, a Swedish Heritage Disproven”, It has been accepted that John Hanson is not Swedish or from the royal Vasa line.  The work of Russell was so compelling that a John Hanson memorial bust and plaque were removed from Gloria Dei (Old Swedes) Church in Philadelphia. The myth was started in the 19th century by George Adolphus Hanson who was trying link his family line to John Hanson.

2. John Hanson is NOT Black. 

3. John Hanson is NOT the first Black President of the United States.

George Russell discovered an indentured servant who came to Maryland by way of Barbados named John Henson/Hanson.  This Hanson might have been the grandfather of John Hanson. For some reason in the 1990s, comedian Dick Gregory took this to mean John Hanson was black.  His proof was a daguerrotype of a John Hanson!  Put aside the fact that photography was invented a long time after Hanson died. The man in the photograph named John Hanson was a senator in Liberia, Africa, during the mid 19th century. On the back of the two dollar is an engraving of the signing of the Declaration of Independence purportedly showing a Black John Hanson. Hanson did not sign the Declaration and was not even in Congress until 1780.

4. John Hanson was NOT a mentor or longtime friend of George Washington.

In spite of claims to the contrary, according to researchers at Mount Vernon there is no evidence of a relationship between George Washington and John Hanson before 1781. There is only one reference in Washington’s journal of a “Mr. Hanson” visiting Mount Vernon in 1772, but it is not John Hanson, according to the editors.

5. John Hanson did NOT solve the Western Land question.

According to Ralph Levering who wrote the most extensive analysis of John Hanson’s political career in his “John Hanson: Public Servant”, there is no record of John Hanson’s stand on the Western land question, let alone documentation that he was responsible for the solution. There is no evidence that anything called “the Hanson Plan” ever existed.

6. John Hanson was NOT elected unanimously.

All the entry for Nov 4th in the Journals of the Confederation Congress records about the election of a presiding officer is that it occurred and John Hanson was elected. Nothing about a vote count.  Representatives for two states, New York and Delaware were not even present that day.

7. Hanson was NOT elected over Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton or Hancock.

The Nov. 4th entry does not say who (or if) anyone ran against Hanson. Recently it has been asserted that John Hanson was elected over Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams and Hancock.  None of them were eligible to be president of Congress Assembled.  According to the Articles (#9) you had to be a member of Congress to be president and none of them were.  In fact Hanson only accepted on the condition that Maryland guarantee his return to Congress following state elections in a few weeks.  If he had not been returned he would not have been eligible to serve.  The entry for the day in the Journal does not say who (or if) anyone ran against Hanson.

8.  John Hanson is NOT the first president of the United States of America or the first president of the Confederation Congress.

When the articles of Confederation were ratified on March 4th things did not change, Samuel Huntington continued as president, making him the first Confederation president of Congress.  In July he resigned; there was an election and the next man elected refused to serve.  Another election was held and Thomas McKeon was chosen to finish Huntington’s term.  McKeon is the second president of the Confederation Congress and the first elected, but did not serve a one year term.  On November 4, 1781, John Hanson was elected president of Congress.  This made him the third president of Congress and the second elected, but the first to serve a one year term. 

9. John Hanson did NOT establish the first Thanksgiving or set a precedent for future days of thanksgiving and prayer to be held on the last Thursday of November.

Congress issued proclamations for a day of Thanksgiving every year since 1777.  Most often they chose a day in December. During the first Confederation Congress  a committee (not including Hanson) chose a day in November. In the draft the words “ the last”  written before Thursday are crossed.  They were not trying to establish a precedent for future days of thanksgiving.  They were following a practice already in place. The next year they went back to a date in December. It was not the holiday we think of as “Thanksgiving”.  The day was meant to be spent in church in prayer.

Summary:

While John Hanson was president, he voted in Congress as a delegate of Maryland just like every other  delegate in Congress..  This is an indicator that his real role was closer to the modern Speaker of the House. It is telling that even though he died shortly after he left Congress there is no mention of his being the president of anything but Congress and nothing about “first.”  When John Hanson died in 1783, his obituary in the Maryland Gazette stated, “This gentleman has long been a servant to his country, in a variety of employments, the last of which was that of president of Congress.”  By the time John Hanson’s wife died about thirty years later she was remembered only as the widow of a delegate to the “…old Revolutionary Congress”, not the wife of a President.

John Hanson should be remembered for his contributions to Maryland’s Revolutionary War efforts which took place primarily in Frederick County.  His service in Congress was a post script to his career.  He outlined his misgivings in letters to his family.  He told them it was his duty to stay because if he left there would not be enough attending delegates to do business.  There weren’t even enough to hold another election.  The fact that he was willing continue when he had good reasons to excuse himself, is to his credit.

The continuing efforts to turn John Hanson into something he is not does him a great disservice and corrupts the public perception of history.  I would urge anyone whose curiosity has been peaked to do some searches, you will be appalled.

Sources

Jensen, Merrill, “The Articles of Confederation”, University of Wisconsin Press, 1970

Jensen, Merrill, “The New Nation”, Vintage Books, 1951

Levering, Ralph B. “John Hanson, Public Servant”. Maryland Historical Magazine 71             (Summer 1976): 113–33.

Russel, George Ely. “John Hanson of Maryland: A Swedish Heritage Disproved”. The             American Genealogist 63, no. 4 (October 1988)

John Hanson (1721-1783), Archives of Maryland (Biographical Series)

            http://www.msa.md.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc3500/sc3520/000500/000587/html/587sources.html

Journals of the Continental Congress 1774-1779

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lwjc.html

Hoffman, Ronald, “A Spirit of Dissension: Economics, Politics, and the Revolution in Maryland”, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973

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Myth # 87: People bought their tea in bricks, not loose leaves.

May 5, 2012

Well, that depends upon which people you’re talking about. Tibetan people, yes. American people, no.

Bricks of tea date from as early as 733 AD, according to a Victoria & Albert publication, Tea: East and West. But that was in China, where bricks of tea were particularly popular in central Asia (Mongolia and Tibet) because they could be carried by porters across the mountains into that region. There, tea bricks were used as a form of currency. “Tea could be bartered against practically anything, and workmen and servants were routinely paid in it.” (p. 60-62) Perhaps this myth got started when people assumed that what they’d heard about the Far East was equally true in the West. 

Americans, however, used tea in its loose-leaf form. They stored it in tea chests or canisters at home, sometimes under lock and key, because it was so costly. At stores, it was sometimes sold from canisters like the ones above. It was shipped from China in large chests that were often lead-lined and held about 360 pounds of tightly packed tea. (Rumor had it that Chinese peasants packed the tea with their bare feet, but this may well be another myth!) Half-chests and quarter-chests were also shipped.   

A corollary to this myth is the one about the Boston Tea Party, a myth you will read in history texts and hear in many historic houses, that the tea thrown into Boston Harbor was brick tea. Not true, say several historians. The tea that was thrown overboard in Boston was loose-leaf, mostly Bohea tea, crated, from China.  According to Benjamin Woods Labaree’s The Boston Tea Party, the men who tossed the tea took care that no one made off with any of it. “One fellow had surreptitiously filled the lining of his coat with loose tea, but he was spotted by the others, stripped of his clothing, and given a severe beating.” According to historians at the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum, the three ships that were raided that night contained 240 chests of Bohea, 15 of Congou, 10 of Souchong (all black teas), 60 of Singlo, and 15 of Hyson (both green teas)–all in loose-leaf form. 

And by the way, it was stale! The Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum historians say: “Certainly, all the teas tossed overboard would disappoint a modern tea drinker because they were way past their prime. The Boston teas were plucked [in China] in 1770 and 1771, transported by ship to London warehouses where they sat for a couple of years, and finally placed aboard ships bound for the colonies in October 1773.”

This myth about tea bricks keeps surfacing at historic sites and in textbooks. Would someone please kill it?

Thanks to Sara Rivers Cofield for submitting this myth, which she has heard on more than one historic house tours.

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Posted by marymiley

Myth # 86: Paul Revere rode through the countryside shouting, “The British Are Coming!”

April 21, 2012

Thanks to guest blogger Ceci Flinn for busting this week’s myth. Ceci recently received her PhD in history and has been giving tours of Boston for twenty years, so if anyone knows the truth about Paul Revere, she will! And how appropriate–this week is the 237th anniversary of that famous ride.

Standing at a library counter at a university in Canada, I explained what I had been looking for when the e-catalog failed. I gave the person working the front desk increasingly specific information – U.S. History, Early American History, Revolutionary War/War of Independence – until I reached my final description: Paul Revere’s ride. “Oh!” he said, “The British are coming!” When I told the retired history professor I was visiting about this, she said: “That’s all we know about it.” (“We” referring to ordinary Canadians, of course, not herself.) Americans are often the same. It is an amazing example of the strength of historic myth, that this simple phrase could be so prevalent and so . . . wrong. 
 
When Paul Revere, William Dawes, Dr. Samuel Prescott, and others, rode to warn rebel leaders in Lexington and Concord that soldiers were heading their way, looking mainly for the stores of ammunition that were being stockpiled by rebel colonists and an excuse to arrest the leaders, they would never have shouted “The British are coming!” because, simply put, they were all still British. Imagine someone running down a road in Concord, MA today shouting “The Americans are coming!” and you’ve got the idea. 
 
In April of 1775, there was plenty of agitation, and many historians argue that the first shots of the revolution had already been fired in New Hampshire the previous December. But one thing had not yet changed: the colonies were still British. They were still overseen by a faraway king and his parliament, and the composition of the “Declaration of Independence” was over a year in the future. So, what did Revere and his compatriots actually say? In their depositions they stated that they had warned residents “the Regulars are out.” British soldiers, such as those stationed in Boston under General Gage, were referred to as “Regulars,” or colloquially as “Redcoats” or “the King’s men”, or even derogatorily as “Lobsterbacks.” But they were certainly not called “the British.” Nor were colonists yet referred to generally as “Americans,” more often terms like “Yankees” or “provincials” were used.
 
It is easy to see why the myth came about since in hindsight, we refer to the parties involved in the Revolution that created a new country as “British” and “American” to identify the two sides. The expression was apparently used as early as the 1820s. For example, a man called Elias Phinney published a book in 1825 about the events of April 1775, and in his descriptive text he used the term “British.” Yet looking further to his appendices, where he reprints the depositions of colonists, the text quite clearly says “Regulars.” These depositions are available today on the Massachusetts Historical Society’s website. Still, the myth is persistent,and not even the respected historian David McCullough did enough to prevent further perpetuation: in the HBO mini-series dramatizing his book John Adams, a messenger rides up to Adams, working outdoors at his farm, and shouts “The British are marching on Lexington!” Another history “fail”, though admittedly, for clarification’s sake, perhaps an understandable failure.
 
 
References:
David Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride, 1994 (p 56, 109)
Elias Phinney, History of the Battle of Lexington, 1825 (p 15, 33)
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=gZch0tpbLtMC&redir_esc=y
Massachusetts Historic Society:  http://www.masshist.org/revolution/lexington.php
Revere’s deposition:
http://www.masshist.org/revolution/image-viewer.php?item_id=98&img_step=1&tpc=&mode=transcript&tpc=#page1

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