19th Century Mail Order Companies: Furnishing A Home

This was how my partner and I decided to furnish out 19th Century bedroom. The total price of this would have been $43.49. This one room would have taken the average worker, earning about $1 for a days labor, a little over a month to buy. 

Assignment #5

           Before attending Sweet Briar College I was entirely unaware that there was a slave cabin located behind the president’s house. I had always been awed by Sweet Briar House and had been fascinated by the history surrounding the school. So it was interesting to discover that there was a slave cabin on campus.

            The more I learn about the cabin the more important it seems to me that the history of the cabin should be preserved. It is important to remember the multiple uses that the cabin has served since the foundation of the plantation and later the college because it reflects the different values of society throughout time. The cabin wasn’t simply used as a slave cabin but at an Alumnae Office, coffee shop, classroom, chapel and a place for students to spend their free time. The repurposing of the cabin is part of its history and part of the history of the College itself and should not simply be pushed under the rug or forgotten. The cabin could teach present and future students more about the history of Sweet Briar College, how it came to be how it is today, and the transitions it went through along the way. It allows us to see how native cultural values changed as well.

It would be interesting to learn more about the families who originally lived in the cabin and what their original position within the plantation may have been. Could the house have served a purpose other than as a residence for slaves and later employees on the plantation? What could the house have been if not a slave cabin?

            To encourage student visitation to the site the school could offer more social events near the site or possibly offer tours of the cabin. Currently there is little known about the cabin among the student population so just getting the information out there could spark more interest in it. Once the student body knew about the existence of the cabin I don’t think there would be any difficulty in finding ways to get it involved in activities surrounding the building. Once word was out about the cabin I feel as though more students would have and interest in visiting it and learning more about the structure.

            I know there have been discussions of taking the cabin back to what may have originally been there when the cabin was used as a residence for the enslaved peoples living on the plantation but I feel that would be detrimental to the history of the structure. Although originally a slave cabin, the building has served as a number of other buildings on campus. Destroying or removing any vestiges of what the building was used for later on would be paramount to destroying local and campus history. The other uses of the cabin are just as important as its use as a slave cabin. It’s important to commemorate these other uses of the cabin because they illustrate how times changed from the antebellum era in the south to the 20^th Century to today. It’s not as though the cabin was used strictly as a slave cabin in the 19^th century then completely forgotten until the 21^st century, it was building that grew and changed with the campus itself. The slave cabin has been a living building on campus and is representative of the unique circumstances to be available to students at Sweet Briar College.  

Assignment 4: Clyde Kluckhohm

Clyde Kluckhohn was born in 1905 and is most known for his work among the Navajo in New Mexico and his work in the field of Navajo ethnography.  Kluckhohn studied at Princeton and University of Wisconsin for his undergraduate education and later studied at the University of Vienna and Oxford. He received his Ph.D. in anthropology from Harvard University in 1936. Between 1936 and 1948 Kluckhohn headed the Rimrock study, which examined how different groups defined “value”. This study looked at the Navajo, Zuni, Mormon, Texan, and Mexican-American residents of Rimrock County. Kluckhohn’s experiment was the result of an illness during his teenage years, during which he was sent to New Mexico. There he fell in love with the Navajo culture, sparking his later experiments in the area.  

Kluckhohn wished to define what constituted “conceptions of the desirable” in each group of people in the Rimrock area and his research focused primarily on the “systematic comparison of values.” The study did conclude that “…the Navajo community places a high value on something called ‘harmony,’ or the Texan, on something it calls ‘success.’” However, Kluckhohn and his fieldworkers had difficulty in creating one set standard with which to evaluate those ideals held by the five different cultures living in Rimrock. Eventually leading most professionals to declare the project a failure. 

            

Assignment 3

Jacqueline Burke

19^th Century American Economies

Assignment 3: Establishing and Valuing an SBC

            Humans have always sought to make their various currencies appear appealing to the masses. This has been done throughout time by striking coins that bear symbols with important meaning to individual cultures and more often than not these symbols are usually animals. The ancient Greeks often used coins with lions or bulls, while modern American and Canadian coins display native birds such as the eagle or the loon. With this in mind, it would not be a stretch for those at Sweet Briar College to adopt a form of currency that utilizes this basic theme in the creation of currency. Therefore I propose that Sweet Briar use Emtec animal flash drives as a form of currency on campus.

            The animal flash drive trend is a fairly recent one in which the portable electronic drive is encased in durable rubber shaped like a specific animal. The appeal of this form of portable drive is apparent to all who see them. All the drives are more visually appealing and stimulating that than the standard flash drives, which are usually drab and do not garner attention like those from Emtec. Emtec has created over 30 different bodies for their flash drives, ranging from snakes and crocodiles to turtles and clownfish to monkeys and elephants. This wide range provides ample options for the basis of a currency and cannot easily be reproduced by the common person because they missing both the resources for the flash drive and the outer body.

This would not be a cheap combination for counterfeiters, and would hopefully dissuade them from the task. Additionally Emtec animal drives have a very unique appearance that combines the realistic features of the animal with an artistic interpretation of the creature, creates a cartoonish version of the animal. This increases the difficulty for counterfeiters who may wish to create duplicates of the drives.

The animal body covering the actual drive would be the factor that determines the value of the flash drive as a whole. This means that the amount of data a flash drive may be able to contain plays no role in deciding the relative value of the currency; although, the two parts must be together for the drive to function as a form of legal tender on campus. The ability of the drives to store data and information is merely an additional use for the flash drives, similar to the use of bead or cocoa in ancient civilizations. 

In the Sweet Briar Currency the currency would be divided up in a manner similar to that of the current United States system, the one difference would be that all prices would be whole numbers. This would remove the hassle of dealing with unnecessary spare change.  The highest denomination in this currency would be a flash drive in the shape of the Sweet Briar Vixen. The Vixen would be roughly equivalent to fifty American dollars; this would be the highest amount because college students do not like to carry around extensive amounts of money. The Vixen is granted this highest honor because of her proud history as the college mascot and for being historically viewed as a symbol for a proud, intelligent, strong, independent and cunning woman.

The turtle would represent the next highest denomination because in Native American cultures it was viewed as a symbol of the power of female energies. Turtles are also believed to represent keeping oneself grounded in reality, all of which are important qualities in everyday life. For this reason the turtle would be worth 20 American dollars.

After the turtle would come the lion, worth 10 American dollars and would symbolize strength and pride in ones accomplishments. The penguin, chosen because it symbolizes order and organization, would follow the lion and would be valued at 5 American dollars. Finally, the lowest value in this system would be the mouse, valued at 1 American dollar. The mouse would be used instead of various other animals because the mouse is symbolic of paying attention to slight details, and those small details can play a huge role in various aspects of one’s life. All of the flash drives would be emblazoned with the Sweet Briar College crest as a way of ensuring that the currency is legal tender.

These figurines would be valued for their visual appeal as well as their ability to store information. However, value would be primarily attributed to their physical features because they have the ability to make one smile or cheer someone up. The drives would be more highly valued by students that the average flash drive because it is a unique creation and is simply all around more appealing than the typical flash drive. Furthermore, students would be less likely to lose the animal drives than the standard one because they would feel as though the animal drive were special. It is reminiscent of childhood toys and memories, and this association with pleasant events would act as a safeguard against loss or damage.

The use of this new currency would create a system in which wealth is more visible to the rest of Sweet Briar society. As of right now it is fairly difficult to tell who may or may not come from wealth but if this system was implemented students and faculty would easily be able to distinguish the wealthy from the impecunious. This would possibly lead to more perceptible economic divisions, meaning that the wealthy would segregate themselves from those less endowed and create an elitist group. This group would command greater economic pull on the campus economy and therefore have more power in other areas of campus life. The poor on the other hand would similarly cut themselves off from those with means and create a society among themselves that operated on different standards than those on the rest of campus. Those in financial straits would be more likely to use a semi-barter system to obtain goods and services than the wealthy would be.

Death Art: The original Headstone of Daisy Williams

This was Daisy Williams' original headstone. The headstone was replaced after an unknown person or persons vandalized the monument causing Daisy's family to replace it with the current structure on Monument Hill. This headstone was a work of art because of the attention to detail that was paid while designing the monument. The lilly's on the left hand side are beautiful recreations of the living flower and originally there would have been an angel or cherub toping the marker. Since the angel is now missing we can only assume that the creature was a beautiful rendition of an angel by the attention the stone carver paid while creating the shawl that falls across the top of the stone. Daisy's marker is an example of how humans value art even when commemorating the deaths of loved ones. Daisy's original headstone now rests behind the Sweet Briar Museum at Sweet Briar College.

Cochran Library Cornerstone

The date on the cornerstone is especially important. The laying of the foundation occurred the same year as the stock market crash. It was one of the few buildings to continue construction after the crash and during the Great Depression.