Select answers from Keith Beutler, author of George Washington's Hair: How Early Americans Remembered the Founders

Q: Love your identification of the 1790s as a hinge moment in how memory takes physical embodiment. How were things remembered before the American Revolution?

A: Transatlantic memory culture in the century or so before 1790, where my book picks up the story, was not so self-consciously physicalist as it became in the half century that followed. Consider, the shocked, negative reaction that, Douwe Draaisma has noted, occurred in Britain’s Royal Society in 1682 when Sir Robert Hooke argued for a reductively physicalist theory of memory. The view was easily dismissed as a foolish “provocation” by “Hooke’s contemporaries.” The latter, Draaisma notes, “denied the physicality of memory by placing memory within the [immaterial] soul.” 

Q: I am reminded of the stuffing of Jeremy Bentham after his death in 1832. Is that an outgrowth of Peale’s impulse at all?

A: Yes!  Bentham’s stipulations in his will that parts of his corporeal form should be preserved as an “auto-didact” did partake of the transatlantic reductively-scientistic enthusiasms that also underwrote Peale’s unrealized ambition to posthumously stuff the U.S. Founders. 

Comment: This belief in hair as a way of knowing the man connects with Deborah Franklin collecting the hair of an African American youth while Benjamin Franklin was overseas.

Reply: I agree.   Certainly, this case can be seen as evidencing the same scientific, transatlantic ethos.

Q: How capacious was the definition of veteran? Did women who served in battle camps count? Or was this only open to men?

A:  As the late Alfred Young well-recounted a few years ago, the military service of Deborah Sampson, who, by, in contemporaneous terms, “passing” as a man fought as a Patriot soldier was celebrated, as was that of “camp follower” Margaret Corbin, to whom Congress awarded a partial pension in 1779, and in the 1850s, Elizabeth Ellet’s three volume Women in the American Revolution reflected and encouraged burgeoning cultural interest in remembering such women.  In George Washington’s Hair, I write extensively of Emma Willard, an influential educator in the early republic, whose intense efforts to inculcate patriotic memory in the rising generation of American youth was, in part, motivated by her acute awareness that her own mother, like many women of the generation dying of old age in the 1830s, even when they did not participate directly in military fighting during the American Revolution, had served crucially and intentionally to materially and morally sustain the families and economies that underwrote the Patriot war effort during the War for Independence.

Q: Do you know if there was a similar collecting of African American founders’ hair, such as Bishop Richard Allen or Rev Absalom Jones?

A: I’m not aware of such instances, but I’d love to know of any!

Q: Has anyone undertaken DNA analysis of supposed Washington family hair samples? I believe there are currently methods that would be minimally destructive at this point.  

A: Some DNA analyses were attempted in the 1990s by the FBI, essentially to test their forensic capabilities, but no DNA was recovered from the samples used.  Newer techniques appear to be on the cusp of being able to infer at least partial sequences from centuries-old samples, but have not yet (as of March of 2022) been tried on putative samples of Washington’s hair.

Q: Why did collecting locks of George Washington's hair eventually decline in popularity?  

A. Generally, from the latter half of the nineteenth century onward, the evidence suggests, photographs slowly began to replace hair locks as most-prized mementos of the loved and lost. 

Q: How large is the Peale self-portrait?

A:  103 3/4 x 79 7/8 in. (263.5 x 202.9 cm.)

Q: Is there any documentation of Washington providing locks to anyone during his lifetime?  

A.  Yes.  The earliest well-documented  example is of General Washington in 1778, apparently in good humor,  sending a lock of his hair from Valley Forge to Kitty Livingston, having heard (likely through Alexander Hamilton) that Livingston—the vivacious, famously-playful—daughter of William Livingston, the Revolutionary War governor of New Jersey,  had quipped that she hoped to one day acquire some of the iconic Washington’s tresses.

Select answers from Diane Ehrenpreis and Endrina Tay, authors of The Spirit of Inquiry in the Age of Jefferson

Q: Was it common for a collector to create such an order for their books as Jefferson did?  Or was he doing something unique?

A: No, Jefferson was not unique in adopting a subject-based classification system for his books. For example, William Byrd of Westover shelved his books by subject. However, it was typical and quite common at the time for collectors and lending libraries to shelve their library books not by subject, but by size and/or alphabetically by title or author.

Q: Does the Spirit of Inquiry ever mention Abbe Correia de Serra, Jefferson’s close friend and guest during his retirement? 

A: [Not in our essay. We did not encounter him as part of Thomas Jefferson’s plans for this library or correspondence.]

Q: Did Jefferson’s papers live only at Monticello? Or did he carry it around with him to Washington and other places he stated?

A: Thomas Jefferson kept his working papers with him wherever he was working. His public papers and correspondence during his tenure as Secretary of State were kept in a filing press in Philadelphia between 1790 and 1793. He would take certain documents with him if he needed to work on them while on a hiatus to Monticello, but the bulk would stay secured in his paper press in Philadelphia. This press was later transferred to Monticello once Jefferson left Philadelphia. This appears to be his pattern and practice during his public career. His private correspondence was kept at Monticello, and transferred there even if he received them elsewhere.

Q: Was the Book Room ever used as Martha Jefferson Randolph’s sitting room? If not, where did she conduct her business as de facto mistress of the plantation household?

A: Jefferson ceded the Book Room to Martha Jefferson Randolph only after he sold the bulk of his collection of books to Congress in 1815. This is confirmed in the family correspondence starting in 1816, where we see the first mentions of mother’s “setting” or sitting room. Prior to this date, Martha did not have a designated space on the first floor for her own use. She did have her bedchamber on the second floor, and this room probably doubled as sitting room and workspace for running the household. She could have also undertaken tasks in shared spaces and common areas such as the Parlor and the Tea Room.

Q: As you say, Jefferson used the Baconian system to organize his library – why was that his choice and were there any alternative systems he could have chosen instead?

A: As an individual shaped by the Enlightenment, Jefferson came into early contact with the ideas and treatises of Francis Bacon, who in his work, The Advancement of Learning, put forth a universal classification system of human knowledge as a means of making such knowledge accessible to the public and to the masses. With his polymathic interests and inclinations, Jefferson gravitated to Bacon’s ideas and named him amongst “the three greatest men that ever lived.” Jefferson adapted Bacon’s “faculties of the mind,” namely Memory, Reason and Imagination, along with D’Alembert’s classification published in Diderot’s Encyclopédie (1781) to create a subject-based classification system that fit his own needs and interests. There were earlier classification systems developed and utilized by Aristotle and Thomas Hobbes that Jefferson was familiar with, but these were not as expansive as Bacon’s and D’Alembert’s.

Q: What are some areas of Jefferson’s life and work that you think need more study?

A: One area for Diane is that of Jefferson’s connection to the architect Benjamin Latrobe. New evidence suggests that he influenced Jefferson’s furniture commissions for Monticello, and by extension the President’s House, ca. 1803-1809. More scrutiny of the family letters, and those of visitors to Monticello, will enrich our understanding of how life played out for these privileged individuals and for the enslaved who worked there. Remarkably, not much is known about the young gentlemen who lived at Monticello while studying under Jefferson and who enjoyed access to his extensive library and book collection. Endrina hopes to track down the many books (and novels) that Jefferson’s family at Monticello read and circulated among themselves that Jefferson did not consider part of his personal book collection and so were not recorded by him as having been at Monticello, especially ones read by his daughters and his grandchildren. Finally, we never give up hope of finding more surviving books from Jefferson’s library, like the cache we discovered at Washington University in St. Louis in 2011.

Q: Could you describe a bit more the nature of the “technical” books in Jefferson’s library? Would books at the time be anything like technical manuals we know today (with step-by-step breakdowns of items or processes) or were they different?

A: The books that Jefferson collected and classified under the category he termed, “Technical Arts,” encompassed books he would later call subjects related to the “Occupations of Man” or human activity. So these would include a whole range of topics from education, reading, writing, and printing to bookkeeping, beekeeping, dyeing, brewing and distilling, etc. So yes, some of these would be manuals with instructions and methods, or descriptions of various processes.

Q: Is there any indication in Jefferson’s correspondence with Dupont de Nemours that Jefferson was influenced by Dupont’s perspectives on education?

A: Jefferson and Dupont certainly exchanged ideas on education and corresponded frequently on this topic. We know Jefferson drew upon Dupont’s ideas, as well as those of Joseph Priestley, and models at the time such as the University of Edinburgh and the College of Geneva when he corresponded with Littleton Tazewell in 1805 on the subject of an endowment for a state college. 

Q: Where at Monticello did TJ conduct plantation business?

A: It’s unclear at this point. If Jefferson devised a specialized system for documenting and storing plantation records, it has not come to light. Many of his financial records were kept in press “A,” a large library bookcase that stood in the Book Room, and this would include plantation materials. It seems likely that he sat at his secretary bookcase in the Library to work on plantation accounts, write slave inventories, calculate tobacco yields, and draw up plans for his garden and for his farm operations.

Select answers from Kelly Wisecup, author of Assembled for Use Indigenous Compilation and the Archives of Early Native American Literatures

Q: I love the image on the cover of your book. Could you share who is the creator and what it means to you? More broadly are there ways in which textual assemblage relations to other modes of material culture assemblage?

A: Thanks for this question! The cover is a piece by the Seneca artist Marie Watt, entitled "Generous Ones (Blue Sky"). You can see the piece and more about Marie here: https://www.mariewattstudio.com/work/project/generous-ones-blue-sky-2014. I was so delighted when Marie agreed for the image to appear on the book cover, as back in 2016, when I was still in the midst of figuring the book out, Marie visited Northwestern's Block Museum to install an exhibition. As part of that, she and the Block hosted a community sewing circle--the idea was that people would participate in embroidering words onto pieces of felt that Marie would later stitch together into a piece. (She often works with community sewing circles to make her larger pieces.) Hundreds of people ended up sewing together in a campus gym, and that experience was one where I felt how stitching and sewing materials together could make relations. You can see more about the event and see a video with the final piece here: https://blockmuseum.northwestern.edu/projects/marie-watt.html.

Q: Can you please transcribe one of the recipe pages? Thank-you.

A: See the great work that Ivy Schweitzer and her team of collaborators have done with the Occom Circle, a database of Occom's writings held at Dartmouth. The recipe pages are transcribed here: https://collections.dartmouth.edu/occom/html/diplomatic/754900-2-diplomatic.html.

Q: Hi Kelly! I use Joseph Laurent’s Abenaki Dialogues in my research as well, can’t wait to read your book. I am wondering if Laurent saw his dialogues as part of a much older genre of Indian-settler language dictionaries, especially in New England, and how you see them in this older genre as a 19th century text. Also, have you found anything by Laurent or anyone from Odanak writing in French during this era? Why English do you think? Thank you! Julia

A: Julia, your work on Odanak was so helpful to my thinking about Laurent--thanks for your article on Native property in British Canada. And thanks for this question--in the chapter, I think about Laurent's Dialogues in relation to the Jesuit priest Sebastian Rasles' French-Abenaki dictionary, and Pierre Paul Wzokhilain's Wobanaki kimzowi awighigan--I think Laurent is certainly aware of these prior texts and building on them. A visit to the Musée des Abénakis at Odanak was also helpful--there are copies of dictionaries in the collections there (including Aubery's Abenaki-French dictionary) that had been in the possession of families for generations. So, why English? The Dialogues are published in 1884, the same year the camp at Pequaket is established, and I speculate in the book that part of Laurent's goal was for Abenaki children to learn English (along with their own language and French)--I think the transnational travel may have been one rationale for the choice to translate into English. Stephen carries on this work in the 1970-80s--he's working across French, English, and Abenaki to bring the various dictionaries together.

Q: I know you’ve done a lot of Native map work, and considering how maps have erased or speak over a lot of indigenous existences. Watching you constellate the movements and pathways of these texts and the pathways the text also traveled, I’m wondering if you can speak a little bit toward some of the subversive and private ways these texts were used by the Native persons and communities they were created from—and how those ways might be a new map for the ways we continue “making” texts and reorganizing the archive.

A: This is a fantastic question--thank you, Natalie! Your query about subversive and private uses makes me think about Charlotte Johnston's albums--her work in Anishinaabemowin with her family members other Ojibwe people is one example of this, I think. The books are facilitating acts of singing together, and these bind Charlotte to other people in ways that mean they ask for her help when they are ill or when they've experienced the loss of a family member. She is enmeshed in these relationships in ways that are both visible to ministers and others and very much private, in spaces of grief and illness. I also think about Octavie Laurent's copy of the Dialogues--the Abenaki woman, Rhonda Besaw, who sold it to Amherst College, told me that she wanted the book to go somewhere where it would be loved. I think about that a lot--about what it means to make texts and reorganize the archive through acts of love, and how Amherst College's collection of texts by Native writers means that Octavie's copy is among other books loved by their makers and users. And thinking about maps and love--talking with my students about your poem, "They Don't Love You Like I Love You" and its conception of maps is in this thinking --if readers want to find this poem, you can read it here: https://poets.org/poem/they-dont-love-you-i-love-you.

Q: This is a really wonderful project, thank you. As an historian I’m used to thinking about change over time—do you see strategies changing as fields like anthropology and history are professionalizing? Or are they staying the same? And I’m also curious if gender plays into the story - in some ways these kinds of literature (scrapbooks and recipes) reflects non-Indigenous forms that are coded female. I don’t know if these questions are clear, but your work is making me think.

A: Thanks for the question, Cathleen! I thought (worried) a lot :) ) about change over time as I wrote. I think it's both there and not there--I do see a centralization of archiving and collecting--the Bureau of American Ethnology is one example of this. In the 1870s-1880s, it's seeking to centralize the materials that Indian agents are collecting and increasingly to make it those agents who are doing the collecting, rather than amateur collectors. This is quite different from the situation in the late 18th century, when local historical societies are calling on citizens to send in stories and objects (though of course amateur collecting continues). But in chapter 5 on the Chicago World's Fair, I describe how the Fair was seen by its curators and by scholars today as a real shift in ethnographic practice--toward Franz Boas's contextual approach and toward the professionalization that the departments of anthropology (at Columbia for instance) that Boas led. But for many Indigenous people who were at the fair, the ethnographic squabbles over how to display Indigenous peoples and locate them in time and place looked quite familiar and quite similar effects to those Indigenous people were observing decades earlier. So I try to balance the "change over time" narrative of ethnography with its recurrent themes and familiar consequences for Indigenous peoples. In terms of Indigenous compilations, I do see a narrative that moves toward printed compilations (which means that more copies can circulate, both in colonial archives and among Indigenous communities)--so this is a narrative that moves toward proliferation. And, toward the end of the 19th century, I see a thematization of compilation--by this, I mean that writers start to use compilation as a narrative theme or perspective--we can think about Simon Pokagon imagining an account book kept by a supreme being who will judge settlers for their actions; or we can think about the scenes in Gertrude Bonnin's work where bureaucratic documents and books are sources of deceit and trauma for Indigenous people.

Q: Is there evidence that this process of Indigenous assembling, compiling, textual experimentation, and archival interventions also emerged in Western North America?

A: I think about Indigenous compilation as a textual relative to ledger art, which as I'm sure you know is an artistic practice that emerged on the western plains (and also in prisons in the southeast--thinking here of Richard Henry Pratt's work with Kiowa men incarcerated at Fort Marion in Florida). The ways that ledger art takes the page as a space for figurative illustration (rather than any lines on the page, or even its orientation within a ledger) is parallel to the ways that Indigenous compilers worked with textual materials --assembling materials into spatial proximity was just as (and sometimes more) important than the unit of the sentence or paragraph. And, my thinking about contemporary Indigenous interventions into museums was hugely influenced by the Kaw/Osage artist Chris Pappan's exhibition at the Field Museum in 2018-2019 (you can read about it here: https://wsimag.com/art/43537-drawing-on-tradition-kanza-artist-chris-pappan)--Pappan uses ledger art to change the relationship between Indigenous peoples and museum display cases.

by Patricia Anderson

Preaspiration in Tunica is marked with an \h\ before a consonant. We see it in words like lahpa (the verb for land a boat) and hihkut'E (rat) to name a few. The presence of a leading \h\ results in a breathy sound before the consonant.

Preaspiration is meaningful in Tunica. Consequently, tika and tihka mean different things ("big" and "to squeeze something until it bursts", respectively).  There are many minimal pairs in Tunica, such as sapani and sahpani ("a cooling off of the weather" and "elastic"), kɔta and kɔhta ("gray" and "to build a fence"), and lepi and lehpi ("to explain" and "to shut or close").

However, not every word in Tunica has an aspirated pair. In the Notebooks, we see frequent corrections to preaspiration, presumably during a subsequent editing phase given that these corrections generally happen in a different ink. 

Preaspiration is an important feature that the Tunica revitalization effort seeks to standardize and highlight when applicable; the variation found in the Haas notebooks informs these standardization decisions.

The 2022 recipient of the Karl Spencer Lashley Award is Nicholas Spitzer, Atkinson Family Chair, Distinguished Professor, and Vice Chair, University of California, San Diego, “in recognition of his discovery of neurotransmitter switching in single neurons of adult mammals, and his demonstration of causal links between neurotransmitter switching and behavioral state.”  The 2022 Lashley Award was presented at the Society's November 2022 Meeting.

Nick Spitzer discovered neurotransmitter switching in adult mammals in response to sustained environmental stimuli or sustained stress.  Switches typically replace an excitatory transmitter with an inhibitory one or vice versa, and postsynaptic receptors change to match the newly expressed transmitter.  In elegant experiments, Professor Spitzer showed that transmitter switches are linked to changes in behavioral state, playing a critical regulating role in behaviors as diverse as motor skill learning, behavioral responses to changes in day length, and behavioral expression of fear.  Neurotransmitter switching is a novel form of neuroplasticity that may lie at the root of numerous long-term behavioral changes.

The Karl Spencer Lashley Award was established in 1957 by a gift from Dr. Lashley, a member of the Society and a distinguished neuroscientist and neuropsychologist.  His entire scientific life was spent in the study of behavior and its neural basis.  Dr. Lashley’s famous experiments on the brain mechanisms of learning, memory and intelligence helped inaugurate the modern era of integrative neuroscience, and the Lashley Award recognizes innovative work that continues exploration in the field.

The members of the selection committee are William T. Newsome III (chair), Harman Family Provostial Professor, Vincent V. C. Woo Director of the Stanford Neurosciences Institute, Professor of Neurobiology and, by courtesy, of Psychology, Stanford University; John E. Dowling, Gordon and Llura Gund Research Professor of Neurosciences Emeritus, Harvard University; Catherine Dulac, Higgins Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Lee and Ezpeleta Professor of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University, and Investigator for Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Ann M. Graybiel, Institute Professor, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Investigator, McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; John G. Hildebrand, Regents Professor of Neuroscience, University of Arizona; Eric Knudsen, Sewell Professor of Neurobiology Emeritus, Stanford University School of Medicine; Edvard Moser, Professor of Neuroscience, Director, Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, Norwegian University of Science and Technology; and Larry R. Squire, Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry, Neurosciences, and Psychology, University of California, San Diego, Research Career Scientist, Veterans Affairs Medical Center, San Diego.

The 2022 Patrick Suppes Prize in the Philosophy of Science will be split between two equally deserving recipients, Craig Callender for What Makes Time Special and Sabina Leonelli for Data-Centric Biology. The 2022 Suppes Prize was presented at the Society's November 2022 Meeting.

Craig Callender: What Makes Time Special?

This book is an ambitious and original exploration of the question in the title, involving an in-depth account of the understanding of time in both contemporary physics and contemporary psychology. It addresses a fundamental challenge to physics’ claim to tell us what the physical universe is really like: physics does not seem able to accommodate time as we encounter it in everyday life, with its special sense of ‘now’, the asymmetry of past and future, and our sense of the flow of time. Yet it seems pure scientific hubris to dismiss our experience of time as chimerical on account of our favourite theories in physics.

The book provides a masterful survey of the role of time in Newtonian gravitation, relativity theory, quantum mechanics, and quantum gravity, concluding that none find an easy place for time as we know it, with relativity and quantum gravity positively inimical to it.

Then the book deploys insights from biology, cognitive science and psychology to construct a brilliant reconciliation. Our model of time as we experience it is forged by our minds to deal with the perceptual and evolutionary problems thrown at it. Time can be as physics portrays but we misrepresent if for very good reason. This way of saving both views at once is well grounded in the science and is compellingly argued. The Suppes Prize Committee congratulates  the book for opening serious new inroads on a classic problem that philosophy has long struggled with.

Sabina Leonelli: Data-Centric Biology

Sabina Leonelli recognizes the ways in which the abilities to accumulate, preserve, and distribute massive amounts of data are changing many scientific fields.  Her ground-breaking study attends to the philosophical issues raised by this important trend.  Focusing on biology, she shows how big data modifies orthodox ideas about experiment and theory, and she addresses the new philosophical questions it raises.  The Suppes Prize Committee sees Data-Centric Biology as a pioneering book that opens up a major new area of science for philosophical discussion.

The possibility of amassing and storing huge amounts of data invites researchers to perform exploratory experiments, and shifts emphasis from theory construction to practical goals.  When data become broadly shared, new norms arise: withholding data is sinful.  As Leonelli shows, the concept of data evolves.  Data are relative to goals, since they must be stored – “packaged” – to aid particular research questions.

This requires a new style of scientific work.  Databases require “curating” to enable investigators around the globe to find information potentially relevant to their projects.  Leonelli explores the challenges facing those who assume this novel role.

As she notes, one of the few previous philosophers to take an interest in the production of data was Patrick Suppes.  Her rich account may be seen as the flowering of a seed that he once planted.  The committee regards her book, not as the last word on its topic, but as one that will inspire and shape an important subfield in the philosophy of science.

The Patrick Suppes Prize honors accomplishments in three deeply significant scholarly fields, with the prize rotating each year between philosophy of science, psychology or neuroscience, and history of science. The Patrick Suppes Prize in the Philosophy of Science is awarded for an outstanding book in philosophy of science appearing within the preceding six years.

The committee members were Nancy Cartwright (chair), Distinguished Professor, University of California, San Diego, Professor of Philosophy and co-director of CHESS, Durham University; Lorraine Daston, Professor, Director, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Visiting Professor of Social Thought and History, Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago; Philip Kitcher, John Dewey Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University; and Stephen Stigler, Ernest DeWitt Burton Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago.