[This coming
weekend will mark the 250th
birthday of Robert Fulton, on whose influential invention today’s post
focuses. All week I’ve AmericanStudied some of our most complex and significant
inventors—and I’d love for you to share your thoughts on them and other
inventors (and inventions) for an innovative crowd-sourced weekend post!]
Five cultural
texts that make good use of the vital
transportation innovation that the
birthday boy helped develop.
1)
The Confidence-Man
(1857): I focused in
this post, later re-posted by the great Humor
in America blog, on Melville’s satirical, ambiguous novella. The key element
of Melville’s book is the diverse, layered, evolving community of characters it
features—and those characters would never have been brought together, nor have had
the time for their community to interact and change as it does in the course of
the novella, without the unique social space of a Mississippi
River steamboat journey.
2)
Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn (1885): Although the Mississippi journey at the heart
of Twain’s novel takes place on a much
smaller vehicle, Huck and Jim’s raft does encounter multiple steamboats,
leading to some of their most
striking adventures. But my point here is a different one: Twain’s novel (like
his career) owes its existence at least as much to the 19th century
literary genre known as Southwestern
Humor as it does to any single influence; and many of that genre’s
best-known works, such as T.B. Thorpe’s short story “The Big Bear
of Arkansas” (1854), were set on Mississippi River steamboats.
3)
Show Boat (1927): Show Boat originated as a 1926 novel by Edna
Ferber, but has lived
on for nearly 100 years thanks to the novel’s 1927 Broadway musical
adaptation. Even if that musical had left behind only Paul Robeson’s 1936 version
of the song “Old Man River,” it would have made an indelible mark on American
culture. But Robeson’s song also reflects the novel and musical’s most unique
contribution to steamboat culture: the focus
on the multi-racial communities of steamboats, and the role that this
American innovation played for each of those cultures as well as for their
cross-cultural encounters.
4)
Steamboat Willie (1928):
Walt Disney’s animated short is famous not so much for its own merits (it’s
funny enough, but slight and forgettable) as for introducing its iconic mouse leading man
to the world, as well as for being the first cartoon with synchronized sound
(and, it seems, saving
Walt Disney from bankruptcy). But it’s also worth recognizing the vital
role in that process played by nostalgia for the age of steam—in an era when
the automobile was becoming
dominant and the airplane was
capturing the headlines, Disney’s cartoon tapped into and capitalized on the
enduring role of the steamboat in the American imagination.
5)
Fevre Dream (1982):
By the 20th century the imagination was about the only place where
the steamboat was still dominant, however—and no cultural work captures both
the steamboat’s heyday and the end of its era with more power than George R.R.
Martin’s novel. Martin’s book is a gothic
vampire novel in the tradition of Anne Rice and others, but like so many of
his works it’s also about the shift from one era to another, and the losses as
well as progresses that come with such transitions. And in his creation of a
floating vampire community aboard a Mississippi steamboat, Martin brought
Melville’s work into a new genre and frame, and helped ensure that steamboat
culture will live on into the 21st century.
Crowd-sourced
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. So one more
time: what do you think? Other inventors or inventions you’d highlight?
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