Author Archives: woodjm

The History of Insurrections and Shay’s Rebellion

by Josh Wood

For Blog Post 2 I decided that I wanted to learn more about Shay’s Rebellion. It was never touched on much when I was receiving my primary or secondary education which makes me feel as if I’m missing a key piece of information. I initially struggled with using the databases as I have never used them before (oops). After I finally figured it out, I came across a scanned copy of the book above Provided by the Digital Public Library of America and preserved by the University of Pennsylvania. The first thing that I noticed was that the book was published in 1788 one year after the end of Shays rebellion meaning this was a retrospective with a fresh point of view. However, unsurprisingly, the appearance of this book is anything but fresh. The pages, every single one of them, have yellowed considerably, and every single one of those yellowed pages has a unique set of stains as well.

As well as a plethora of unknown stains, the book’s pages are also dotted with droplets of ink. This small detail, while seeming innocuous, is incredibly cool in my opinion. This is because assumably each set of dots is unique to each individual book as they were all hand-pressed by a highly trained team of printers. Finally, the last thing that I found to be interesting on an aesthetic level was the use of the “long s” which is something that I never had any idea existed. Before doing some background research, I found myself incredibly confused as to why the printers would have used the letter f instead of an s as it kept causing me to misread words.

As it pertains to the content, I was disappointed to find out that Shay’s rebellion was only mentioned briefly. This unfortunately means I’m going to have to find information on It elsewhere. The information that was presented in the book while not being what I was looking for was however still interesting. It stated that the reason for its publication was to look back on the issues that caused upheaval within our new nation so that we can learn from them and keep it from happening again.

An Afternoon at the Gibbes

For my visit to a Charleston museum, I decided to go to the Gibbes for the first time. At the advice of the wonderful women upfront I headed up the stairs to the third floor. Upon entering I was immediately greeted by the work of William Johnson, primarily his Fighters for Freedom series. This series from the mid 1940’s is a tribute to African American scientists, activists, teachers and the like who were working to bring peace to the world. It acknowledges their accomplishments as well as the struggles of racism and violence they faced and overcame on their journey to make our country a better place for everyone regardless of race.

Personally, I found this collection to be overwhelming as it puts illustrations to all of the events and people I have been learning about since I was a child. This resulted in the images being more powerful and me having to sit down and reflect. Not only was the imagery potent, I also found myself learning something about revolutionary America that I had never heard about before which very much surprised me. The aforementioned something new being the story of Crispus Attucks who was a freeman killed during the Boston Massacre.

I also learned that for some reason “the martyrdom of this Black man was largely erased” until his story was published in a book nearly seventy years later. After the stories publication Attuck’s name became a rallying cry during the civil war and his sacrifice & courage were revered. This story honestly left me with more questions that there may not be an answer to. Specifically why was his story forgotten for so long?  And as a follow up, Would his death have been forgotten the same way if he had not been African American or would have been deified like one of our founding fathers?

Overall, I am elated to have been able to experience and illustrated version of the history that I have only ever read about in books. Seeing a visual representation of these figures and events removes them from this almost mythological space in my mind and makes them seem more tangible in a way that isn’t offputtingly brutal. It probably helps that Johnson’s work is more abstract and therefore more appealing to the eye. In other words he is able to present images of horrible things in a manner that does not seem to look particularly horrible without removing the impact.