I was familiar with much of the material because I have spent the last few years reading, writing, and now talking about the issues the exhibit covers. And yet, some of the details were new to me, and some that I was familiar with hit me hard all over again. Here are some of the things that caught my attention in particular:

• In November, 1938, American newspapers ran front page stories and banner headlines about the violence of what became known as Kristallnacht. In a Gallup public opinion poll conducted several weeks later, ninety-four percent of Americans disapproved of the Nazi treatment of Jews in Germany. In that same poll, seventy-one percent did not want the United States to admit more Jewish refugees, a position that was clearly reflected in our immigration policies at the time.

• In late 1943, officials in the Treasury Department learned that the State Department had been blocking reports about the mass murder of Jews.[1] Treasury Secretary Henry Morganthau went around the State Department and took the information directly to President Roosevelt in January, 1944. Roosevelt then signed an executive order establishing the War Refugee Board, which is credited with saving some 200,000 refugees.

• More than half of all Americans heard Edward R. Morrow’s broadcast from the Buchenwald concentration camp on April 16, 1945. Before that, reporters had told Americans over and over about the brutality of Nazi oppression, against Jews, communists, political dissenters, and others, but many Americans had found it all too easy to disbelieve. Now that was impossible. As Life magazine summed it up, “Last week Americans could no longer doubt stories of Nazi cruelty. For the first time there was irrefutable evidence.”

• A story I am very familiar with, but think it is important to emphasize whenever possible: After the liberation of Ohdruf, General Eisenhower visited the camp. The visual evidence and verbal testimony of the brutality of the camps made him ill. But he had no doubt of the importance of his visit. “I made the visit deliberately,” he wrote to Army Chief of Staff George Marshall three days later,” in order to be in a position to give first hand evidence of these things if ever in the future there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda’.”

Not an easy story to read. Too important to dismiss.

The exhibition is nearing the end of its second tour of libraries in smaller cities, but you still have six months to track it down. You can read more about the exhibit and see the tour schedule here.

[1] I have unsubstantiated thoughts about how the demographics of the State Department contributed to this.

Here in the United States, we’re heading into the July 4th weekend–a holiday that expands or contracts depending on where in the week it falls.

It’s also a holiday where the meaning of what we are celebrating is often lost in the celebration itself.

In the past I’ve used this post to remind all of us of this ideal which stands at the core of who we are:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

This year, I’d like to remind you of another quotation from our history, the words written on the Statue of Liberty:

“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door! “

Over the years, we’ve had trouble living up to both ideals. Over the years, some heroic figures have fought to keep them alive.

See footnote 1 below

In 1876, caught up in the patriotic excitement of the first centennial of the American Revolution, the people of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, raised a stone inscribed “Molly Pitcher” over the previously unmarked grave of a local resident, Mary Ludwig Hays McCauley (ca. 1754–1832). In the years before her death, Hays claimed to have served at the Battle of Monmouth, on June 28, 1778, carrying water to the artillerymen, including her husband, William Hays. When Hays was wounded and unable to continue, she stepped in as an impromptu member of the artillery team. A hundred years after the fact, she looked like a shoo-in for the legendary figure of Molly Pitcher.[1]

One resident of Carlisle, Jeremiah Zeamer, editor of the local newspaper, felt strongly that McCauley should not be so honored. He wrote to Congressman Marlin E. Olmsted that local townswomen remembered McCauley as “a vulgar, very profane, drunken old woman.”[2]

Despite Zeamer’s objections, there is no reason to think McCauley’s account wasn’t true. A similar story appears in the memoir of Joseph Plumb Martin, published in the 1830s under the name Private Yankee Doodle. Writing about the Battle of Monmouth, Martin mentions

one little incident [that] happened during the heat of the cannonade, which I was eyewitness to. . . . A woman whose husband belonged to the artillery and who was then attached to a piece in the engagement, attended with her husband at the piece the whole time. While in the act of reaching a cartridge and having one of her feet as far before the other as she could step, a cannon shot from the enemy passed directly between her legs without doing any other damage then [sic] carrying away all the lower part of her petticoat. Looking at it with apparent unconcern, she observed that it was lucky it did not pass a little higher, for in that case it might have carried away something else, and continued her occupation.

He does not name this irrepressible artillery woman, and there is no direct evidence linking her with McCauley. (On the other hand, there is no evidence that Martin’s unknown woman wasn’t McCauley, either.) But there is a bawdiness to the story that seems in keeping with Zeamer’s later complaints. Moreover, the fact that the Pennsylvania legislature granted her a pension for her services during the war, which may well have included carrying water to the cannon, lends credence to the story.

But McCauley isn’t the only serious candidate for the title.

Margaret Corbin (1752–1800) is known to have wo-manned an artillery piece on the field at least once.[3] Corbin followed her husband, John, from one military camp to another during the American Revolution. They were both on the field at the Battle of Fort Washington in New York City, on November 16, 1776: John as an artilleryman and Corbin as a water carrier.[4] When enemy gunfire killed her husband, Corbin took his place at the cannon. She didn’t stop until she was wounded by a blast of grapeshot that mangled her shoulder and left breast. After the battle, the British captured Corbin near her cannon; both the British and the Americans treated her as a combatant prisoner of war. Released on parole, she was assigned to the Continental Army’s invalid corps until mustered out of the army in 1783—raising the question of whether she enlisted alongside her husband.[5] After the war, Congress awarded Corbin a wounded soldier’s pension.[6] In 1926, Corbin’s remains were transferred from Highland Falls, New York, to the government cemetery at West Point.

That should have been the end of her story. But confusion about identity is a central part of the Molly Pitcher name and legend. In 2016, workmen disturbed the remains. Examination by a forensic anthropologist revealed the bones to be those of an unknown middle- aged man. Corbin’s bones are nowhere to be found.

In addition to Hays and Corbin, there are accounts of an unnamed woman who fired a cannon at the Battle of Fort Clinton in the Hudson River Valley in October 1777. There may be at least one more Molly Pitcher whose story remains untold.

Excerpted from Women Warriors: An Unexpected History

[1] The first known use of the name is a painting titled Molly Pitcher, the Heroine of Monmouth, by Nathaniel Currier, of Currier and Ives fame, dated 1848, seventy years after the battle.

[2] Not that vulgarity, profanity, and/or drunkenness preclude heroism. Zeamer believed those qualities did, however, preclude being honored with public monuments when so many “Revolutionary heroes who led useful and respected lives” remained obscure.

[3] Known in the camps as “Dirty Kate,” she was no more respectable than McCauley. With the (possible) exception of officers’ wives, the women who followed eighteenth-century armies were rough around the edges, if not all the way to the core.

[4] The nature of eighteenth-century artillery is important to understanding the Molly Pitcher story. In order to be sure no sparks or hot embers remained in the breech, gunners swabbed out muzzle-loading cannons with wet sponges after each round was fired before they loaded the next powder charge—adding fresh powder before extinguishing embers from the previous round was a short path to “kaboom!” A well-organized artillery battery had casks of water nearby for the purpose of wetting the sponges. But not every team was well organized. Armies were taken by surprise. And casks ran dry over the course of hours of battle. Women in the army’s camp often performed the hazardous job of carrying water to the artillery line—in buckets, not pitchers. Firing a cannon was not a one-woman job—it took at least three people. When a gun crew lost a man, it’s a fair assumption that the woman who brought the water knew enough to step into the breach as a rammer or a sponger. (Though she probably didn’t know enough to perform the mathematical calculations required to place a cannonball on target. A difficult skill to pick up on the fly.)

[5] It’s possible. Some women’s names appear on the rosters of local militia.

[6] And a complete set of new clothes! Not a standard benefit for veterans of the time.

I reviewed one of those projects on my previous post.  On to round two!

I first became aware of More Perfect, [2]  a bipartisan alliance of presidential centers, foundations and sites, and its  In Pursuit project several months ago when writing friend Heath Hardage Lee announced that she was contributing an essay on Pat Nixon to the project. She was rightly excited by the prospect.

The project’s director, Dr. Colleen J. Shogan, former archivist of the United States, describes In Pursuit as “the most ambitious history-based civics project in the United States for 2026.” The project begins with the idea that American democracy is an evolving experiment, in which each generation reinterprets the country’s founding principles in response to new challenges. Its goal is to consider the most important lessons of American’s last 250 years, looking through the lens of presidents and first ladies. Under Hogan’s direction, a cohort of historians, journalists, public servants, and former presidents and first ladies have contributed short essays about each of our presidents and selected first ladies. The first essay, on George Washington, written by George W. Bush, was released on February 16; the final essays, on the Obamas, will release on the week of December 7. The project includes a podcast, with Shogan in conversation with historians and journalists, talking about their subjects in more depth than a 1200 word essay allows.

Fascinating as the inhabitants of the White House are, I think some of the most important historical lessons could be drawn from less elevated perspectives. That said, several months ago, I realized just how little I know about most of the first ladies. This is an excellent chance to learn more. I’ve enjoyed the essays thus far– the most recent essay, on Julia Grant, was an eye-opener. I will continue to follow along as new essays and podcast episodes are released.

You can find more about In Pursuit here

[1] I would like to claim I can recite the entire thing, but in reality I peter out after “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another….” Then my brain skips down to “We hold these truths to be self evident.” What about you?

[2] Another quotable phrase, this time from the preamble to the Constitution—the Founding Fathers could really write.

The ten-episode series uses the specifics of Philadelphia’s story to explore the broader story of American history. The first five episodes, which begin with the indigenous population of the region and cover the formation and history of the United States through the Civil War will be available on July 4 in conjunction with America 250. The remaining episodes, which bring the story up to the present, will air in the fall and winter.

I was lucky enough to have early access to the first few episodes. And they are bangers: visually beautiful, historically smart, powerfully told. I loved the way they placed the nuggets of the story that we all know, or think we know, against the broader context of economic and social structures. I certainly knew nothing about the Lenape indigenous people of the mid-Atlantic, or their interactions with European settlers.[2] I found I knew less than I thought I did about the Quaker movement in England and William Penn’s place in it.

If you’re looking for a broader account of the formation of the United States, this is a good place to start. You can find more about the series here: https://www.inpursuit.tv/


[1] PSA: If I don’t know you and haven’t returned your email, it means it probably got captured in the “Later” file and then swept away by the several hundred emails that came in after yours. If it’s important, please re-send it with a polite nudge. Unless, of course, you are asking for a political donation, involved in one of the many efforts at scamming authors, asking to place an inappropriate guest post on this blog, or otherwise being annoying.
[2] And had not thought to ask, to my shame. This blind spot is one I struggle with.

    . .

It is not often that a book crosses my desk that causes me to look at the American Revolution through a new lens. Historian Karen Cook Bell’s Running From Bondage: Enslaved Women and Their Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America is such a book. Bell tells the compelling stories of enslaved women and the ways in which they fled or attempted to flee bondage during and after the Revolutionary War. By reconstructing fugitive women’s stories through newspaper advertisements, first-person accounts in trial records, antebellum memories, and interviews with former slaves, Bell is able to explore the individual and collective lives of these women and girls of diverse circumstances, while also providing details about what led them to escape. She demonstrates that there were in fact two wars being waged during the Revolutionary Era: a political revolution for independence from Great Britain and a social revolution for emancipation and equality in which Black women played an active role.

It is a fascinating perspective, that highlights the tension between freedom and slavery that was part of the United States from the beginning. A tension that is often nodded at in classrooms and popular accounts of history without being explored in a meaningful way.

I am delighted to Karen Cook Bell here on the Margins to answer some questions about Running from Bondage.

In Running from Bondage, you explore the experience of black women who attempted to escape from slavery during the American Revolution.  What inspired you to write about these women?

Researching my first book introduced me to women who fled slavery either alone or with their families during the late eighteenth century. This led me to question how widespread was the flight of enslaved women. My research led me to the American Revolution which according to historian Benjamin Quarles was the first large scale slave rebellion. I wanted to tell the stories of these women who fled or attempted to flee bondage during the Revolutionary Era.



How does adding these women back into history change our understanding of the American Revolution?
The American Revolution was based on the premise of freedom for the colonies from the control of the British monarchy. The ideals embodied in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal and have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness resonated with enslaved women who used the rhetoric of the Revolution to claim their right to freedom. Women heard about these ideals from listening to the conversations of their enslavers as well as through the slave grapevine which carried news from plantation to plantation and from city to city.

The American Revolution brought into sharp focus the paradox of slavery and freedom. African American women contributed mightily to the story of American Independence. They believed in the independence of the individual. They valued in the most fundamental way what Thomas Jefferson and others would identify as inalienable rights.

Moving forward, how does their re-inclusion change our understanding of the growth and development of the abolitionist movement?

Instead of viewing Black women at the margins of the American Revolution and abolitionism, it is important to see them as visible participants and self-determined figures who put their lives on the line for freedom. They protested with their feet by running away which underscores the vital role of Black women in seeking to move the nation toward a more perfect union.

My book dispels the idea that black women did not flee or attempt to flee bondage during the Revolutionary era. Black women were an essential part of the long war against slavery and an essential part of the early abolitionist movement.




What were your greatest challenges in researching the experience of these women?

I began this study five years ago and the research for the study brought me to the realization that there is so much that historians can uncover in the lives of enslaved women. Although the evidence is fragmented, the experiences of fugitive women are far from unknowable. I used runaway slave advertisements, trial records of fugitive slaves, as well as an interview with George Washington’s escaped slave Ona Judge. There is a great amount of literature on enslaved people who escaped during the 1800s, however, the accounts of runaways during the 1700s are limited to colonial newspaper advertisements for runaways.

Each fugitive advertisement is valuable because it reveals the agency of enslaved women who despite formidable obstacles risked everything including their lives for freedom. Each advertisement describes the story of a real person, not an abstraction. When further research is done in other sources, real human beings begin to emerge from the records. We do not know the ultimate fate of the majority of the individuals named in the advertisements. But given these limitations, the runaway advertisements offer a remarkable amount of information about women caught in a horrific system of bondage.

The silences within the runaway newspaper advertisements were my greatest challenge. I had to imagine the varied meanings and possibilities that were inherent in these silences. For example, I had to reconstruct the backstory of the women featured in my book, their lives during slavery, why they ran away at their historical moment, and the challenges they faced.

You use the word “fugitivity” to describe these women’s actions.  The word seems to be a term of art in writing about Black slave resistance.  Can you talk a little bit about what is packed into that word?

As articulated by historian Marisa Fuentes, fugitivity denotes the experience of enslaved women as fugitives – both hidden from view and in the state of absconding. It also signifies the fragile condition of runaways who came into visibility through runaway advertisements. It captures the agency and mobility of enslaved women who escaped or who attempted to escape bondage.

Is there an individual woman’s story that stands out for you?

Black women were not willing to leave their children behind and were willing to risk running away if it meant a chance for freedom. This was the case for Jenny an enslaved woman that is featured in Chapter 3 who was the mother of a two year old named Winney. Jenny escaped slavery from Virginia in 1776 while she was “big with child” according to the advertisement of her escape. Jenny and her child were on the run for seven months when her enslaver placed an advertisement for her escape.

Also, the story of Margaret Grant will surprise people. Margaret escaped slavery twice, first in 1770 then in 1773 both times from Baltimore, Maryland; and in her first escape she wore men’s clothing and sought to conceal her identity by dressing as a waiting boy to an escaped English convict servant, John Chambers. So Margaret sought to escape by passing as both white and male performing fugitivity in a way that Ellen Craft, another escaped slave, would do decades later.



My readers are always interested in the historian as well as the history.  What inspired your  interest in history?  Did you get hooked on history as a child or did your interest come later?

I was an Accounting major as an undergraduate and changed my major to history during my junior year. I have always had an interest in history growing up from reading the history books of my siblings to writing about historical events for my college newspaper. After viewing a project on African American spirituals, I wondered about the people who created these sorrow songs and wanted to know more about their experiences. I changed my major to history thereafter and have been researching and writing about people who have been marginalized from power and the archives ever since.

And just for fun:   If you could pick one woman from history to put in every high school history textbook, who would it be?

There were so many great women in history that it would be difficult to choose just one. However, I would choose Congresswoman Shirley Chisolm, the first Black woman elected to Congress in 1968 and the first Black woman to run for President of the United States in 1972. She was not a politician but found her political voice as a wife and educator. Her story represents an important part of Black women’s political history and adds to the discourse of how African American women organized in their communities, protested slavery and segregation, built institutions, and fought for equal access to the ballot. Black women have been in the forefront of movements to address iniquity, social oppression, and freedom for the Black community for centuries. This is a fight that began during the Revolutionary Era.

Karen Cook Bell is Associate Professor of History at Bowie State University. She is the author of Claiming Freedom: Race, Kinship, and Land in Nineteenth-Century Georgia, which won the Georgia Board of Regents Excellence in Research Award. She specializes in the studies of slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and women’s history.

Interested in learning more about Dr. Bell and her work? Check out her website:  https://karencookbell.com/

But I’m on it now. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to circle the idea of America 250.[2] A couple of posts from the archives. A couple of reports on some interesting new projects that have crossed my  path.. A story or two. I’ll maybe even read one of the books from the To-Be-Read Shelves. [3]

Starting off, a post that first ran in 2015

Those of you who’ve been hanging out in the Margins for a while now know there are some types of history books that can be counted on to make me say “I want to read this”:

• Books that tell a story we think we know from a radically different perspective
• Books that deal with people outside the mainstream of history
• Books that tell a story I didn’t even know existed
• Books–oh, well, you get the idea.

In Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution, historian Kathleen DuVal, author of The Native Ground, reminds us that the American Revolution was part of a larger global conflict involving France and Spain, and that Britain had 13 other colonies in North America and the Caribbean that were also affected by the war.

West Florida, which included much of what is now Florida, Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana, had only recently become a British colony–part of the redistribution of imperial territories at the end of the Seven Years War– when the Continental Congress declared war on Britain. Located on the border between the British and Spanish empires, and a distant frontier for both, it was home to former French and Spanish citizens, British loyalists fleeing the disruptions of the revolution and well-organized Indian nations with their own agendas. The possibility of a Spanish invasion was real, and at least some of the colonists thought Spain was a better choice than Britain or France if push came to colonial shove.

DuVal considers how eight very different colonists–a second-generation African slave, a young Cajun with a deep-seated hatred of the British, leaders of the Creek and Chickasaw tribes and two British couples who chose different sides in the conflict–responded to the dangers and opportunities that the revolution brought to their doorsteps and the impact of those choices. While each of these characters stands in for a larger population, the complicated calculus of self-identity, self-interest and personal history that they use to make decisions about the world around them makes it clear that revolution and politics were always personal.

[1] A few new books on related subjects that are on my radar for your consideration:

Obstinate Daughters: The Rebels, Writers and Renegade Women Who Ignited the American Revolution by Denise Kiernan  (Due out 6/23)

The Capitol: The Surprising Biography of an American Building by Brian Jay Jones

This Land is Your Land: A Road Trip Through American History by Beverly Gage

[2] It’s a slightly silly title, in my opinion. But Semiquincentennial does not roll off the tongue as easily as Bicentennial did.

[3] No promises

I just finished reading Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner by Natalie Dykstra. Here’s the short version—wow!

Here’s the slightly longer version: Beautiful prose.  Rich with insights.  Wonderful storytelling. Not necessarily in that order

I did not go into Chasing Beauty cold. Natalie and I became deadline buddies and fast friends in the months in which she finished Chasing Beauty and I finished The Dragon From Chicago. For many months, perhaps as much as a year, we spoke one or twice a week about our trials and our triumphs. We touched base via text and email more often than that.[1] I got to hear her thoughts on the craft of writing in general and aspects of Gardner’s life in particular. Moreover, I interviewed her twice for the Women’s History Month series here in the Margins, in 2021 and 2024. Those conversations gave me enormous respect for Natalie’s intelligence and wisdom,[2] as a writer and otherwise. But nothing could have prepared me just how good Chasing Beauty is.

The obvious approach would have been to simply write the story of the woman who created the Gardner museum. And Dykstra tells that story. But the museum is the crescendo to which she builds. In some ways, the book could just as readily be titled The Education of Isabella Stewart Gardner. Before Gardner could build the museum that now bears her name, she had to build what I think of as the museum in her head. With Dykstra as our guide, we watch Gardner work her way through grief and friendship. We travel with Gardner, both as she visits the larger world[3] and on her personal intellectual and aesthetic journeys through books and art, and music and art, and, philosophy (or perhaps more accurately, ideas) and art, and, well, art. We share what Dykstra describes as “Isabella’s on-going romance with objects” and her “greediness for experience.” We are swept along in the wake of a woman who was larger than life, and yet Dykstra also gives us moments in which to pause and enjoy a telling detail.

Over and over as I read I was stopped by sentences that were beautiful in its clarity, images that delighted me, or a telling piece of context that opened up Gardner’s story in time and space.

All the thumbs up!

[1] Did we grumble and bemoan our fates? Yes we did. Did we reminded each other how lucky we were to have these opportunities? Yes we did, though not as often as we grumbled.

[2] Not the same thing. in my opinion.

[3] Her time in Egypt and Japan caught my imagination in particular.

Fast-Talking Dames by Maria DiBattista is both a study of and homage to the fast-talking heroines of Hollywood comedies in the 1930s and 1940s. Like me, DiBattista discovered the women she writes about in her early teens, when she watched old movies after school and late at night. Like me, she saw them as a model to aspire to: classy, smart, smart-mouthed, witty (not quite the same thing as smart-mouthed, in my opinion), bold, and able to meet their male counterparts on equal terms, or even a bit ahead of them, in any given moment.

Some of the fun of Fast-Talking Dames, at least for this reader, is the skill with with DiBattista evokes the essence of movies I’ve watched many times, deepening my understanding of them with one-liner characterizations that any of her fast-talking dames would have been happy to deliver. For instance, discussing the rapid fire dialogue of His Girl Friday, arguably the fastest talking film in the genre, she describes Rosalind Russell as delivering her lines with “the assuredness of a large woman who knows she is taking up room and is enjoying the space allotted to her. “ Bingo![1]

DiBattista lays out common tropes on these comedies: madcap heiresses, spunky working girls[2] , blonde bombshells, and what she describes as “female Pygmalions” who educate and transform their male counterparts. She examines the careers of the queens of the genre—Katherine Hepburn,[3] Carole Lombard, Claudette Colbert, Jean Arthur, Barbara Stanwyck, Ginger Rogers—as well as some of their lesser-known sisters.[4] All of which make for an engaging read for those of us who are fans of movies of this period

But DiBattista does not stop there. She also follows some fascinating scholarly paths that place her fast-talking dames in a larger context. She looks at them in the context of the long-standing and misogynistic discourse against mulier loquax (the talkative woman), which has its roots in classical Greece and has never gone completely away. She considers their place in the lineage of clever women in stage plays, ranging from Shakespeare through Noel Coward. She contrasts them to the the laconic heroes of Westerns produced in much the same period.[5] And she ends with the gradual dissapearance of the fast-talking dame as movies returned to more traditional values in the post-war era.

I came away from Fast-Talking Dames with a deeper understanding of and respect for a genre I have long loved, and a substantial list of movies I want to watch.  If you’re an old movie buff or a fan of smart (or smart-mouthed) broads, this one’s for you.

[1] If you’ll allow me one more: Discussing the “jubilant partnership” of Myrna Loy and William Powell, she states “there is nothing more optically exquisite in movie comedy than watching Myrna Loy, arching her brows, take in Powell’s droll manner with the bemused and appreciative air of a connoisseur.” Indeed.

[2] The spiritual ancestors of Mary Rogers in the Mary Tyler Moore Show, who was a more attainable model for many of us.

[3] In the course of looking at Katherine Hepburn, she convinced me to give Bringing Up Baby another try, if only because of the layers of meaning inherent in the title. Over the years I’ve shifted from finding the movie hysterically funny to finding it irritating. Possibly another viewing will shift it back.

[4] I wanted a word that was the female equivalent of brethren here, but didn’t find one that was quite right. Sorority and sisterhood have overtones that didn’t fit. And the actual equivalent, sistren, while popular in the late medieval period, fell out of use several centuries ago. Oh well. It was a pleasant little rabbit hole to spend sometime in.

[5] A contrast that at least some of her dames are well aware of. As one of them puts it, “I know that type—ungrammatical but strong.”

Most recently I stumbled across him on HathiTrust. I had given into the temptation to search for the name of the person I am researching—which is fun and easy—instead of squeezing out a few more sentences on a book proposal about her—which on that particular day was neither fun nor easy. There on the search list was book titled The Well-Knowns as seen by James Montgomery Flagg. Published in 1914, it is a collection of caricatures drawn by Flagg of famous people, including She Who Will Not Be Named, in some cases with a sharp-penned caption.[1]

Since I was in HathiTrust anyway, I did a quick search on Flagg. Whereas before I had gone “ho-hum” each time I looked him up, this time I was hooked.

The piece James Montgomery Flagg is best known for is the World War I recruiting poster in which a stern Uncle Sam looks out at the viewer and proclaims “I Want You for U.S. Army.” But that poster was simply one moment in a successful and varied career.

“Monty,”as he was called,  started early. His first published work appeared when he was twelve: a page of comical drawings in the popular children’s magazine St. Nicholas.[2] By his teens he was already working as regular freelance contributor for well known weekly magazines.

Flagg studied at the Art Students League[3] in New York for several years and then went on to study in London and Paris. Once back in the United States, his career as an illustrator took off.[4] He was facile and hard-working, producing an illustration a day in his studio on West 67th Street. His work appeared most often in the comic magazine Life, but he was also published in many other magazines, including Colliers, Cosmopolitan, Judge (another popular comic magazine), McClure’s, Redbook, and The Saturday Evening Post. He drew cartoons, including a series with a tramp character named Nervy Nat that ran in Judge magazine.[5] He illustrated serialized novels and short stories, most notably P. .G. Wodehouse’s “ Jeeves” stories, which appeared in Colliers. He produced magazine covers. He also illustrated popular books, including an early satirical novel by Edna Ferber, and created a series of posters with the combined title Girls You Know, featuring leading actresses of the time, as a promotion for short, silent films produced by Thomas Edison’s film company.[6]

In addition to illustrating the works of others, Flagg was also a writer:

• He created a series of illustrated books, with titles like Tomfoolery, Why They Married, and, my personal favorite, If: A Guide to Bad Manners. These books combined satirical rhymes on social issues with closely observed caricatures.
• After illustrating a number of popular romantic novels, he wrote a romance story of his own, The Adventures of Kitty Cobb, which told the story of a young woman making a life for herself in the big city. (Personally, I would say it is a gentle parody of the more serious, more romantic novels he illustrated.) It was serialized over twenty-five weeks in major newspapers across the United States before being collected into what would now be described as a graphic novel.[7] The serial was so popular that advertisers used her name to promote their products.[8] He followed Kitty Cobb’s success two years later with another illustrated serial titled A Girl You Know.
• His experiences with the Edison Studios led him to write several dozen silent movie scripts, including one for a movie in 1914 based on the Adventures of Kitty Cobb, in which Flagg played a cameo role as himself in the opening scene.  A  contemporary reviewer in Motion Picture News described him  as sitting “at his drawing table executing a sketch of the heroine at his usual mile a minute clip.”

When the United States entered World War I, Flagg was one of the illustrators who joined Charles Dana Gibson in his unofficial propaganda agency, the Division of Pictorial Publicity. Over the course of the war, Flagg created forty-six war posters for the United States government, the best known of which is the famous image of Uncle Same declaring “I Want You.” The image first appeared on the cover of the popular illustrated news magazine Leslie’s Weekly in 1916 over the caption “What Are You Doing for Preparedness?” It was inspired by an earlier poster by Alfred Leete featuring the British general Lord Kitchener in a similar pose.  Flagg based Uncle Sam on his own face in this and other posters, reportedly because he didn’t want to bother with finding a model.  If you look at them side by side, the resemblance is pretty obvious.

After Pearl Harbor, Flagg once again devoted his talents to the war effort, creating posters aimed at recruiting soldiers and war workers and selling war bonds. The government also resurrected the Uncle Sam poster:  why mess with a good thing?

When the war was over, Flagg, like other illustrators, found there was less demand for his work as magazines began to replace pen and ink drawings with color photographs. He pivoted to painting portraits until his eyes failed him shortly before his death at 83.

[1] I only recognized the names of about half of them, and even fewer of their faces. Such is the fleeting nature of fame.

[2] This occurred at least ten years before the magazine established the St. Nicholas League, a department that published the best work submitted by its young readers. E.B. White would later claim that “The fierce desire to write and paint that burns in our land today, the incredible amount of writing and painting that still goes on in the face of heavy odds, are directly traceable to St Nicholas.” A number of well known writers, including Bennet Cerf , William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and E.B. White himself , were publsihed for the first time when they won a St. Nicholas League competition.

[3] If you think the Art Students League sounds familiar, that’s because it has shown up in several previous posts dealing with American illustrators. The school is hard to avoid if you are interested in 20th century American artists.

[4] He also received commissions for serious portraits, thanks to his wife, wealthy socialite Nellie McCormick, who happily pulled strings on his behalf until her untimely death in 1923, at the age of 56. She was eleven years older than Flagg and some of the sources snicker about the age and social differences between them. One claims “she appeared less wife than patron.” But Flagg seems to have been devastated by her death. This is what he had to say about her , and their relationship, in his autobiography: “Here was the beautiful woman who had turned down a number of rich suitors to marry a poor but promising artist who was madly in love with her…. Nellie was a St. Louis socialite and knew all the richest people in all the big cities; up to then a realm of society entirely beyond my knowledge.”

[5] The character was popular enough to appear in several Broadway revues, two live silent films, and an animated short in 1916.

[6] I only have my sources’ word for it that the women pictured were well-known actresses. I didn’t recognize any of them. See note one above.

[7] Available in HathiTrust if you want to take a peek.

[8] Whether they made arrangements with Flagg to use the Kitty Cobb brand is not clear.