History Girl: Sunday Afternoon in the Little Flat

Well, its another Sunday afternoon in the Tiny Flat in Knoxville. The sun streams in from my sliding glass door, but it doesn't fool me. It's cold as the dickens outside. And Sunday is my day of rest. I'm wearing my lounging jammies (thanks, Yvette), got tunes blaring out from my Bose speaker (an Yvette recommendation), and I'm surrounded by secondary sources (having nothing to do with Yvette). The trouble with choosing a dissertation topic that's both been written on before and offers hundreds of written sources is the amount of secondary reading required. But, on the bright side, it's allowing me to put off writing my prospectus until the last minute. Yes, I'm that student, the one that waits until the hot breath of a deadline is tickling my neck before I tackle any hard writing.

Life moves swiftly these days here in my little corner of the world, but work at the museum has slowed way down. Unfortunately, my boss, the incomparable Lindsey Gaharvi, has left her position to pursue a career as mom and wife and to finish her dissertation. While the search goes on for a replacement, we're not doing much teaching. It's too bad.

Moon over Neyland

I say that life goes quickly for me because of everything but my job. It's been months since my comps, and I feel like I'm working like crazy but not really getting anywhere. I guess it's time to talk about my topic. I've chosen to write my dissertation on the amazing Jessie Benton Fremont. Now, I can already hear some of you wondering what happened to my former topic, the development of grade school curriculum for the new public schools that arose in the South after the Civil War. I guess Dr. F., my advisor, put it best when he asked me what I thought I'd find in such a study. I would find exactly what I thought I'd find. There's no mystery there, no new way of shedding light on the Lost Cause mythology and its spread through first the South and then the entire nation.

Last spring, I took my second research-writing seminar, this time with Dr. F. and the last of my course requirements. I chose as my topic Jessie Benton Fremont and the role she played in the 1856 presidential election. See, for those of you who don't know, Jessie was the wife of John C. Fremont, the "Pathfinder" of the West and the first Republican candidate for the presidency (yes, he came before Abraham Lincoln!). Jessie lived an extraordinary life. The daughter of Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton, Jessie was her father's pet, and he raised her the way he would have raised a son. But, at age fifteen, Jessie met handsome John C. Fremont, and that was that. In spite of parental efforts to stop the alliance, she eventually eloped with the explorer. Their life together would be full of both dizzying success and pretty abject failure. Through Jessie, I'll be able to explore several big themes that span the nineteenth century, including abolition, gender issues, the conquest of California, the Gold Rush, the Gilded Age, women writers, the rise of magazines, the establishment of patriotic and hereditary organizations, politics, the Civil War--you name it, Jessie played a part.

Jessie at San Francisco in the 1850s

So, that's the topic. There have been two major biographies published on Jessie since her death at the end of 1902. Both biographers rely heavily on the records that Jessie herself left behind for them. These records reflect the way Jessie wanted to be remembered. But there's so much more to her story. That's the part I want to uncover. Not just the life she lived, but how she fit into the bigger picture.

Usually, I'm much more enthusiastic about my subject, but that's not coming through in my blog writing today. Probably because I'm just deep in the weeds right now, just trying to get a handle on this project. And I worry about the project. I worry about how I'll pay for all the research, how I'll handle all the travel that's going to be required, even what I'm going to do with my cat while I'm spending my days at various archives around the country. I'm blue because I'm worried.