Robert Chidester - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Robert Chidester
Society for Historical Archaeology, 2015
Society for Historical Archaeology, 2018
Hampden and Woodberry, two neighborhoods located in what is today central Baltimore, Maryland, ar... more Hampden and Woodberry, two neighborhoods located in what is today central Baltimore, Maryland, are in many ways typical of the American working-class experience. At the same time, however, they are unique products of a particular historical, dialectical interaction between local culture and the larger forces of a constantly evolving capitalist political economy. As the patterns of domestic and world trade evolved and Maryland’s economy became more industrial in nature during the 19th century, gristmills along the Jones Falls in Baltimore County were converted to the production of cotton duck, or sail cloth. By the 1840s the sister communities of Hampden and Woodberry began to emerge as a distinct community; in the 1870s Hampden-Woodberry became the world’s foremost center for the production of cotton duck. After World War I, however, the mill companies began the process of divesting themselves of their Baltimore operations. Following deindustrialization, residents of Hampden-Woodber...
Society for Historical Archaeology, 2018
ii Estate LLC. Without their generosity, the Hampden Community Archaeology Project (HCAP) would n... more ii Estate LLC. Without their generosity, the Hampden Community Archaeology Project (HCAP) would never have gotten off the ground. Equally important to the success of the project has been the tremendous support we have received from non-profit organizations and businesses alike in Hampden. Foremost among these is the Hampden Community Council, which has co-sponsored HCAP from the beginning. In particular, Allen Hicks and Genny Dill deserve utmost thanks for their work on our behalf. Also providing invaluable assistance and support were the Hampden Family Center, the Community Learning for Life high school program (now Independence School Local 1), Falkenhan's Hardware, and the Rev. Robin Johnson and the parishioners of Hampden United Methodist Church. Individuals in Hampden who have lent their support in various ways include Tom Ensor, Beverly Sciezska, and Bill Harvey.
Historical Archaeology, 2011
"ABSTRACT Baltimore’s historically working-class neighborhood of Hampden, like many urban ne... more "ABSTRACT Baltimore’s historically working-class neighborhood of Hampden, like many urban neighborhoods, is contested-heritage terrain. Traditional community members worry about encroaching real-estate development, middle-class hegemony, and economic transformation. Meanwhile, area merchants, developers, and planners (ab)use representations of working-class people’s history to market the area’s real estate, service, and retail economies. Problematic representations of other people’s pasts are often coupled with discourses on progress that simultaneously recall and dismiss workers, casting out “those people’s history” in favor of an empty history of old buildings and facades. The historical archaeology project in Hampden seeks, through community-based practice and aggressive public dissemination of information, to repopulate the neighborhood’s history and reassert the right of its traditional community to possess heritage. The material history of the place is used as a starting point for community engagement with the ultimate goal of countering damaging fantasy representations of the place’s past with realistic ones."
Archaeology in Society, 2011
Oxford Handbooks Online, 2012
International Labor and Working-class History, 2009
... The Hampden Community Archaeology Project (HCAP) is a public archaeology project in a former ... more ... The Hampden Community Archaeology Project (HCAP) is a public archaeology project in a former textile mill neighborhood in Baltimore, Maryland. ... Our research project, the Hampden CommunityArchaeology Project, begins and ends as a public, community-based project. ...
Researchers Gadsby, Chidester, and Shackel of the Center for Heritage Resource Studies at the Uni... more Researchers Gadsby, Chidester, and Shackel of the Center for Heritage Resource Studies at the University of Maryland direct an ongoing archaeological research program in the Baltimore community of Hampden. Rather than defining research questions on our own, we have adopted a participatory research strategy that seeks to do history from the "bottom up" that includes input from members of the Hampden community throughout all phases of the archaeological process. With this strategy, we hope to help members of the Hampden community recover a sense of their neighborhood's heritage, and to enhance their political voices in the discourse around the rapidly gentrifying Hampden. Using a series of community history workshops as a starting point for laying out research objectives, this document outlines program goals as well as research objectives for work to be conducted in the summer of 2005.
Hampden, a traditionally working-class neighborhood in Baltimore, Maryland, is experiencing a new... more Hampden, a traditionally working-class neighborhood in Baltimore, Maryland, is experiencing a new kind of class conflict endemic to late capitalism and the processes of gentrification that it has spawned in many American cities. Working-class residents of Hampden are struggling to hang on to what remains of their community as an influx of upper-middle-class entrepreneurs and professionals is refashioning public space, increasing property values, and altering the character of the neighborhood. Several parallel (but not necessarily co-terminous, or even compatible) strains of gentrification are occurring simultaneously in Hampden. What each form of gentrification has in common, however, is that each is a material manifestation in a particular local place of the global political economy of late capitalism. This paper examines the means by which these forms of gentrification accomplish the work of late capitalism in Hampden, as well as the material manifestations (and ramifications) of late capitalist redevelopment in urban centers.
The sister villages of Hampden and Woodberry came into existence during the mid-19th century as ... more The sister villages of Hampden and Woodberry came into existence during the mid-19th century as the coalescence of several smaller mill villages that dotted the Jones Falls Valley north of Baltimore, Maryland. While Hampden-Woodberry itself was never a company town in the strictest sense of the term, many of the smaller villages which grew together to form the new community were. Even after the larger entity of Hampden-Woodberry became a recognizable location on the map, it continued to share numerous similarities with both true company towns like Manchester, New Hampshire and other planned industrial cities like Lowell, Massachusetts. As in other company towns and industrial cities and villages across the country, Hampden-Woodberry was the site of nearly constant class struggle over labor, local citizenship and the values of community between the 1840s, when the local gristmills were first converted to the production of cotton duck, and the 1920s, when the mill corporations began the slow process of divestment from Baltimore.
This struggle was largely waged on the terrain (both literal and figurative) of industrial spatiality constructed by the mill owners and appropriated by mill operatives, and it evolved in tandem with the political economic shift from industrial to monopoly capitalism. In the early 1870s, a sudden and dramatic increase in textile production lead to a much larger population of mill workers in Hampden-Woodberry. In part because increased numbers meant increased power, but also due to the increasing influence of cooperative ideology and anti-corporatism generally in the United States, the 1870s and 1880s proved to be a period of intense political labor activism by workers in Hampden-Woodberry, as was the World War I era. The nature of this activism during these two periods, however, was very different. In the 1870s and 1880s local wage earners participated in rallies, demonstrations and petition drives in support of protective labor legislation, an indication of the value they placed upon their role as participants in a democratic society. Strikes were used sparingly, and only after other options had been exhausted; strategic alliances with middle-class reformers were common. By World War I, on the other hand, they had largely abandoned these approaches in favor of workplace-based organizing and militant strike actions. These patterns were repeated frequently in working-class communities across the nation.
David Montgomery has argued that this discontinuity between the two periods can be explained by the interaction of three factors: the emergence of monopoly capitalism out of industrial capitalism, the changing makeup of the working class, and the reform efforts of middle-class Progressives. Montgomery's explanation only partially accounts for the experiences of workers in Hampden-Woodberry, however. Certainly they faced the backlash of capitalist collectivism in the form of monopoly capitalism; at the same time, however, the demographic profile of Hampden-Woodberry workers remained largely the same throughout the period from 1840 to 1925, indicating that the splintering of the working-class did not play a large role in the strategic and tactical shift in class conflict by Hampden-Woodberry's workers. Progressive reform efforts were also largely absent from the community. In this paper, I argue that the new spatiality created by the political economy of monopoly capitalism, in which productive capital in one place could be directed by corporate board members in an entirely different place, had important consequences for the nature of working-class activism in Hampden-Woodberry (indeed, all across the country) during the period from 1915 to 1923 and, ultimately, for the social and economic future of the United States.
Society for Historical Archaeology, 2015
Society for Historical Archaeology, 2018
Hampden and Woodberry, two neighborhoods located in what is today central Baltimore, Maryland, ar... more Hampden and Woodberry, two neighborhoods located in what is today central Baltimore, Maryland, are in many ways typical of the American working-class experience. At the same time, however, they are unique products of a particular historical, dialectical interaction between local culture and the larger forces of a constantly evolving capitalist political economy. As the patterns of domestic and world trade evolved and Maryland’s economy became more industrial in nature during the 19th century, gristmills along the Jones Falls in Baltimore County were converted to the production of cotton duck, or sail cloth. By the 1840s the sister communities of Hampden and Woodberry began to emerge as a distinct community; in the 1870s Hampden-Woodberry became the world’s foremost center for the production of cotton duck. After World War I, however, the mill companies began the process of divesting themselves of their Baltimore operations. Following deindustrialization, residents of Hampden-Woodber...
Society for Historical Archaeology, 2018
ii Estate LLC. Without their generosity, the Hampden Community Archaeology Project (HCAP) would n... more ii Estate LLC. Without their generosity, the Hampden Community Archaeology Project (HCAP) would never have gotten off the ground. Equally important to the success of the project has been the tremendous support we have received from non-profit organizations and businesses alike in Hampden. Foremost among these is the Hampden Community Council, which has co-sponsored HCAP from the beginning. In particular, Allen Hicks and Genny Dill deserve utmost thanks for their work on our behalf. Also providing invaluable assistance and support were the Hampden Family Center, the Community Learning for Life high school program (now Independence School Local 1), Falkenhan's Hardware, and the Rev. Robin Johnson and the parishioners of Hampden United Methodist Church. Individuals in Hampden who have lent their support in various ways include Tom Ensor, Beverly Sciezska, and Bill Harvey.
Historical Archaeology, 2011
"ABSTRACT Baltimore’s historically working-class neighborhood of Hampden, like many urban ne... more "ABSTRACT Baltimore’s historically working-class neighborhood of Hampden, like many urban neighborhoods, is contested-heritage terrain. Traditional community members worry about encroaching real-estate development, middle-class hegemony, and economic transformation. Meanwhile, area merchants, developers, and planners (ab)use representations of working-class people’s history to market the area’s real estate, service, and retail economies. Problematic representations of other people’s pasts are often coupled with discourses on progress that simultaneously recall and dismiss workers, casting out “those people’s history” in favor of an empty history of old buildings and facades. The historical archaeology project in Hampden seeks, through community-based practice and aggressive public dissemination of information, to repopulate the neighborhood’s history and reassert the right of its traditional community to possess heritage. The material history of the place is used as a starting point for community engagement with the ultimate goal of countering damaging fantasy representations of the place’s past with realistic ones."
Archaeology in Society, 2011
Oxford Handbooks Online, 2012
International Labor and Working-class History, 2009
... The Hampden Community Archaeology Project (HCAP) is a public archaeology project in a former ... more ... The Hampden Community Archaeology Project (HCAP) is a public archaeology project in a former textile mill neighborhood in Baltimore, Maryland. ... Our research project, the Hampden CommunityArchaeology Project, begins and ends as a public, community-based project. ...
Researchers Gadsby, Chidester, and Shackel of the Center for Heritage Resource Studies at the Uni... more Researchers Gadsby, Chidester, and Shackel of the Center for Heritage Resource Studies at the University of Maryland direct an ongoing archaeological research program in the Baltimore community of Hampden. Rather than defining research questions on our own, we have adopted a participatory research strategy that seeks to do history from the "bottom up" that includes input from members of the Hampden community throughout all phases of the archaeological process. With this strategy, we hope to help members of the Hampden community recover a sense of their neighborhood's heritage, and to enhance their political voices in the discourse around the rapidly gentrifying Hampden. Using a series of community history workshops as a starting point for laying out research objectives, this document outlines program goals as well as research objectives for work to be conducted in the summer of 2005.
Hampden, a traditionally working-class neighborhood in Baltimore, Maryland, is experiencing a new... more Hampden, a traditionally working-class neighborhood in Baltimore, Maryland, is experiencing a new kind of class conflict endemic to late capitalism and the processes of gentrification that it has spawned in many American cities. Working-class residents of Hampden are struggling to hang on to what remains of their community as an influx of upper-middle-class entrepreneurs and professionals is refashioning public space, increasing property values, and altering the character of the neighborhood. Several parallel (but not necessarily co-terminous, or even compatible) strains of gentrification are occurring simultaneously in Hampden. What each form of gentrification has in common, however, is that each is a material manifestation in a particular local place of the global political economy of late capitalism. This paper examines the means by which these forms of gentrification accomplish the work of late capitalism in Hampden, as well as the material manifestations (and ramifications) of late capitalist redevelopment in urban centers.
The sister villages of Hampden and Woodberry came into existence during the mid-19th century as ... more The sister villages of Hampden and Woodberry came into existence during the mid-19th century as the coalescence of several smaller mill villages that dotted the Jones Falls Valley north of Baltimore, Maryland. While Hampden-Woodberry itself was never a company town in the strictest sense of the term, many of the smaller villages which grew together to form the new community were. Even after the larger entity of Hampden-Woodberry became a recognizable location on the map, it continued to share numerous similarities with both true company towns like Manchester, New Hampshire and other planned industrial cities like Lowell, Massachusetts. As in other company towns and industrial cities and villages across the country, Hampden-Woodberry was the site of nearly constant class struggle over labor, local citizenship and the values of community between the 1840s, when the local gristmills were first converted to the production of cotton duck, and the 1920s, when the mill corporations began the slow process of divestment from Baltimore.
This struggle was largely waged on the terrain (both literal and figurative) of industrial spatiality constructed by the mill owners and appropriated by mill operatives, and it evolved in tandem with the political economic shift from industrial to monopoly capitalism. In the early 1870s, a sudden and dramatic increase in textile production lead to a much larger population of mill workers in Hampden-Woodberry. In part because increased numbers meant increased power, but also due to the increasing influence of cooperative ideology and anti-corporatism generally in the United States, the 1870s and 1880s proved to be a period of intense political labor activism by workers in Hampden-Woodberry, as was the World War I era. The nature of this activism during these two periods, however, was very different. In the 1870s and 1880s local wage earners participated in rallies, demonstrations and petition drives in support of protective labor legislation, an indication of the value they placed upon their role as participants in a democratic society. Strikes were used sparingly, and only after other options had been exhausted; strategic alliances with middle-class reformers were common. By World War I, on the other hand, they had largely abandoned these approaches in favor of workplace-based organizing and militant strike actions. These patterns were repeated frequently in working-class communities across the nation.
David Montgomery has argued that this discontinuity between the two periods can be explained by the interaction of three factors: the emergence of monopoly capitalism out of industrial capitalism, the changing makeup of the working class, and the reform efforts of middle-class Progressives. Montgomery's explanation only partially accounts for the experiences of workers in Hampden-Woodberry, however. Certainly they faced the backlash of capitalist collectivism in the form of monopoly capitalism; at the same time, however, the demographic profile of Hampden-Woodberry workers remained largely the same throughout the period from 1840 to 1925, indicating that the splintering of the working-class did not play a large role in the strategic and tactical shift in class conflict by Hampden-Woodberry's workers. Progressive reform efforts were also largely absent from the community. In this paper, I argue that the new spatiality created by the political economy of monopoly capitalism, in which productive capital in one place could be directed by corporate board members in an entirely different place, had important consequences for the nature of working-class activism in Hampden-Woodberry (indeed, all across the country) during the period from 1915 to 1923 and, ultimately, for the social and economic future of the United States.
The Muskingum Improvement, a slackwater canal system constructed from 1837-1841, made use of the ... more The Muskingum Improvement, a slackwater canal system constructed from 1837-1841, made use of the natural topography of southeastern Ohio to transport agricultural and commercial products from the regional interior to the Ohio River. The first slackwater canal system built in the U.S., it included 11 dams, 12 locks and 5 bypass canals between the towns of Coshocton and Marietta. Built and paid for by the State of Ohio, and later maintained by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Muskingum Improvement is one example of the ways in which the developing American version of economic liberalism (characterized in part by the use of public resources to stimulate private markets) imprinted itself on the American landscape during the 19th century. A cultural resources survey of part of the canal system has helped to situate our understanding of the Muskingum Improvement within the larger economic landscape of southeastern Ohio.
Powerpoint presentation to accompany conference paper.
Yard signs proclaiming, "Family Farms Not Factory Farms!" are a common site along rural highways ... more Yard signs proclaiming, "Family Farms Not Factory Farms!" are a common site along rural highways in the Midwest. These signs are a direct response to the tremendous growth of corporate agriculture during the second half of the 20 th century and the concomitant decline of the traditional farming model in which a single family owns and operates a productive, commercial farm. While most lay people likely assume that "factory farms" are a fairly recent economic phenomenon, in reality land consolidation and corporate approaches to agricultural production have a long history that stretches back to the late 19th century in the Midwest. A recent cultural resources survey of the Howard Farms property in Lucas County, Ohio documented an early example of corporate agriculture in this region. This survey provides a starting point for the development of a research design focused on the transition from family-owned farms to corporate agricultural enterprises.
In 2012 the Detroit Housing Commission received funding from the Department of Housing and Urban ... more In 2012 the Detroit Housing Commission received funding from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to demolish the long-neglected public housing development known as the Douglass Homes, a collection of townhouses and mid- and high-rise apartment buildings in mid-town Detroit. The Douglass Homes had been built on top of an earlier residential neighborhood on the edge of Paradise Valley, a once-flourishing center of African American commerce and social life in the city. Pursuant to environmental compliance regulations, archaeological investigations were conducted during the demolition of the Douglass Homes in 2013-2014. These investigations uncovered several intact remnants of Paradise Valley and demonstrated that, contrary to the arguments of some archaeologists, 20th-century archaeological sites in Detroit do have the ability to yield important data. This presentation will consider the impacts of structural racism on both the archaeological record of Detroit and archaeologists’ understanding of African-American heritage in the Motor City.
Powerpoint presentation to the Toledo Area Aboriginal Research Society, March 2017.
In 2014, the Neighborhood Health Association (NHA) received a grant from the Health Resources and... more In 2014, the Neighborhood Health Association (NHA) received a grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) to consolidate several of its non-profit health clinics around the Toledo into a new facility in the city’s UpTown neighborhood. Due to the use of federal funds, the project was required to complete an Environmental Assessment of the project site, including a review of potential impacts to cultural resources (including archaeological sites). NHS retained MSG to complete the Environmental Assessment, and as part of this process, MSG’s archaeologists recognized the potential for the project site to hold intact archaeological resources dating to the 19th and 20th centuries underneath its 60-year old parking lots. The archaeological investigation included ground-penetrating radar survey, mechanical trench excavation, and archival research. The project yielded valuable information about urban utilities, consumer behavior, and quality of life in Toledo during the 20th century.
In August 2015, The Mannik & Smith Group, Inc. (MSG) conducted a Phase I archaeological and histo... more In August 2015, The Mannik & Smith Group, Inc. (MSG) conducted a Phase I archaeological and historical resources survey of the Ludington Pumped Storage Plant (LPSP) in Mason County, Michigan. At the time of its completion, the LPSP was the largest pumped storage hydroelectric facility in the world. It now ranks as the third largest such facility in the world, but remains the only such facility in Michigan and is the state’s largest hydroelectric generating plant.
The archaeological portion of the survey encompassed approximately 854 acres surrounding the reservoir and including areas of plant operations as well as recreational sites. A total of 15 previously unrecorded archaeological sites were identified, including one prehistoric lithic scatter, four prehistoric lithic isolates, nine farmstead / rural homestead sites dating to the early to mid-20th century, and one archaeological site associated with the construction of the LPSP in the early 1970s. One site, 20MN324, yielded a surprisingly wide array Roman Cleanser-brand bleach bottles.
During the fall of 2012, the Detroit Housing Commission contracted MSG to conduct a Phase I cultu... more During the fall of 2012, the Detroit Housing Commission contracted MSG to conduct a Phase I cultural resources survey of the proposed Douglass Homes demolition site in mid-town Detroit. The Douglass Homes were a collection of mid-20th-century public housing units that were among the first in the nation to be built by the federal government specifically for African-American tenants. Unfortunately, the ravages of time and urban decline had left the remaining buildings (12 rowhouse units, 2 mid-rise apartment buildings, and 4 high-rise apartment buildings) in decrepit physical condition. While the buildings were historically significant, they no longer retained the physical integrity required for listing on the NRHP. However, a review of historic maps and other documents revealed that the Douglass Homes had been built on the outskirts of Paradise Valley, the economic and cultural heart of African-American Detroit from ca. 1910-1960. If archaeological resources dating to this time period were still present, MSG recommended that these resources would be eligible for the NRHP.