Historical Image of the Day

This week's images will focus on the decade of the 1800s. Oddly, in all the years I've done these images, I've never had a single image from that decade. There are some obvious reasons for this--images in the photography age are much easier to come by. Also, I don't study the period and it's not a decade I think much about. However, since these images are really about a bank of cool images for teaching, I want to be more complete. How many more New Deal images can I show? A lot really of course. But anyway, the 1800s!

This week's images are inspired by Diane Wenger's A Country Storekeeper in Pennsylvania: Creating Economic Networks in Early America, 1790-1807, published by Penn St. in 2008. It was recommended as a possible book to teach for the first half of the U.S. history survey. Wenger has a good story, following a single shopkeeper during the transition to capitalism. However, there's no way to teach it. I don't know whether to blame the author or the press. Probably the latter. It's a huge problem with the academic publishing market. This story should have been written in a more popular and accessible manner--there's a lot to work with here. But that doesn't get you tenure unfortunately. There's also dissertation-level historiography in the text, which the press should have eliminated. Good book in many ways, but not for undergraduates.

Map of North America, 1806