The Course of God's Providence: Religion, Health, and the Body in Early America

Abstract

Jacks: African American Seaman in the Age of Sail (1997), is the significance of African Americans as mariners. Were there any African American members of the society? Personally, I would love to see the PEM construct a permanent online exhibit around this book. The value lies in the project’s interdisciplinarity. The chronology of the collection itself tells a story about Salem’s seafaring populace and global ambitions—an “American identity tied to the sea” (45). But the materialist lens ties in epistemologies from the histories of museums, science, and ethnography as well. Exhibits ranged from Tahitian tattooing instruments to Fijian sailing needles, fishing implements used in the Pacific Northwest, Indian textiles and palanquins, Chinese utensils and footbindings alongside dioramas of Native Americans. Like society members, “some visitors gained an appreciation for other cultures or new perspectives on the world outside of the city, state, or country, while others reconfirmed preconceived notions of faraway lands and people.” As Schwartz argues, objects could lose historical and contextual meaning after passing through multiple hands, but this, too, tells a story. Other items were produced collaboratively for display. A model of the ship Friendship was made by both American and Indonesian craftsmen. A mannequin of Parsee merchant Nusserwanjee Maneckjee Wadia wore donated clothing rooted in “a conscious desire to represent Indian culture in this new American institution.” In 1832, Elias Boudinot attempted to similarly influence representations of Cherokee by donating translations of the book of Matthew and other writings in the Cherokee syllabary. These men, understanding the importance of representation to politics, aimed to negotiate the terms of that representation. In 1943, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt affirmed that the East India Marine Hall at PEM stood as a “memorial to the Golden Age of New England Shipping.” But Schwartz demonstrates far greater significance. Reading Collecting the Globe is a bit like observing a zoetrope story in motion—the story is compelling, but the mechanism of the story’s production is equally fascinating.