Category: Decade

The Spider’s Trap

By Gene Stratton-Porter

Annotations by Rene marzuk

Maria Sibylla Merian. *Spiders, Ants and Hummingbird on a Branch of a Guava*. Colored copper engraving from *Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium*, Plate XLIII, 1705, Wikimedia. Public Domain.

A big black spider, homed in my tulip bed,
So that her children might be comfortably fed.[1]
She wove her dainty web, with such cunning art,
Around every stamen in the tulip’s heart,
That never a bee, called by the colours gay,
Lived to hunt honey on another fair day.

STRATTON-PORTER, GENE. “THE SPIDER’S TRAP,” IN MORNING FACE, 29. NEW YORK: DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY, 1916.

[1] Although all spiders wrap their eggs with silk to keep them protected, only a few species like cellar spiders, crab spiders and wolf spiders, among others, actively guard these egg sacs from predators. Upon hatching, most spiderlings are left to survive on their own.

Contexts

In her introduction to the 1996 anthology Coming Through the Swamp: The Nature Writings of Gene Stratton Porter, Sydney Landon Plum reveals that, after the commercial success of Gene Stratton-Porter’s 1909 novel A Girl of the Limberlost, the author and conservationist talked Doubleday, Page & Company into publishing once nature work for each of her subsequent novels. Morning Face, a collection of prose and poems published by Doubleday in 1916, probably saw the light as a result of this agreement. Most of the book’s illustrations are photographs by the author herself, an accomplished self-taught photographer. In fact, according to Plum, Stratton Porter “ardently supported the use of photography for nature study as a substitute for the common practice of killing scores of the natural subjects in order to study them.” As evident in the quatrain that serves as the dedication of Morning Face, Stratton-Porter had a juvenile audience in mind for this book, although one can also make the case that, by identifying herself with the “little girl with a face of morning,” she is also extending her appeal to the inner children within readers of all ages:

One little girl with a face of morning,
a wondering smile her lips adorning,
wishes her pictures and stories to share,
so she sends them to children, everywhere.

Definitions from Oxford English Dictionary:

stamen: Botany. The male or fertilizing organ of a flowering plant, consisting of two parts, the anther, which is a double-celled sac containing the pollen, and the filament, a slender footstalk supporting the anther.

Resources for Further Study

A list of 26 common spiders found in the United States.

Kathryn Aalto’s “The Legend of Limberlost,” available through the Smithsonian Magazine‘s website, offers a portrait of Stratton-Porter that emphasizes her love of nature and her conservationist efforts.

Gene Stratton-Porter’s Cabin at Wildflower Woods is a museum open to the public in Rome City, Indiana. Stratton-Porter designed the cabin, which was completed in 1914 and sits on 148 acres of fields, woods, and gardens.

Contemporary Connections

Did you know that March 14 is National Save a Spider Day in the United States? Of about 50,000 different kinds of spiders in the world,

1920s Flowers Poem

The Dandelion

By Anonymous

Annotations by Rene Marzuk

L. Prang & Co. (publisher). *To my Valentine.* Color chromolithograph, 1882, Library of Congress. Public Domain.

O dandelion, yellow as gold,
    What do you do all day?
I just wait here in the tall green grass
    Till the children come to play.

O dandelion, yellow as gold,
    What do you do all night?
I wait and wait till the cool dews fall
    And my hear grows long and white.

And what do you do when your hair is white,
    And the children come to play?
They take me up in their dimpled hands,
    And blow my hair away.[1]

ANONYMOUS. “THE DANDELION,” IN STORIES FOR LITTLE CHILDREN, COMPILED BY SUSAN S. HARRIMAN, 10 [VOLUME ONE OF THE KINDERGARTEN CHILDREN’S HOUR, ED. BY LUCY WHEELOCK]. BOSTON, NEW YORK: HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY, 1920.

[1] A time lapse video shows a single dandelion’s cycle from yellow flower to puffy head of seeds. Also, did you know that each dandelion’s petal is, in fact, a flower?

Contexts

Lucy Wheelock (1857-1946), the main editor of the multivolume anthology The Kindergarten Children’s Hour, was at one point the president of the International Kindergarten Union. Through her pedagogical practice, she supported the kindergarten reform in the United States and helped bridge early disagreements about how to teach 5-year-olds. She believed that kindergarten education could help tackle the cycle of poverty, a concern that remains relevant today.

The Kindergarten Children’s Hour was comprised of five illustrated volumes. Susan S. Harriman was in charge of the first one, a collection of stories and rhymes for little children. In the second, Maude C. Nash suggests home activities, while in the third Winthrop Packard turns her interactions with her own children in a series of “Talks to Children.” Following a logical progression, the fourth volume consisted of “Talks to Mothers.” In the fifth and final book, Alice Wyman anthologized songs and music for children.

Resources for Further Study

Native to Asia and Europe, dandelions arrived in America in the seventeenth century. An article from the National Library of Medicine documents many of the uses of this perennial plant.
Dandelions fell out of favor among home gardeners in the twentieth century as lawns in the United States became popular as status symbols. Ketzel Levine, writing for NPR, asks us to reconsider the collective dislike of the wish-granting plant.
Check out dandelion recipes at the Old Farmer’s Almanac website!

1910s Birds Poem Wild animals

Horned Owl

By Gene Stratton-Porter

Annotations by Rene Marzuk

“When the moonlight floods the swampland, 
When the bittern’s wailing croak,[1]
   And the wildcat’s scream of anger
Clog the heart of forest folk,
   I search tall trees for frightened crows,[2]
Hunt ducks ’neath sedges, hares at play,
   Then I set late travelers trembling,
By demanding until break of day:

“‘Who, who, huh, whoo, who waugh?
   Don’t I make cold shivers run?
Who, huh, whoo? I’d question all day,
   If my eyes could bear the sun.’”[3]

STRATTON-PORTER, GENE. “HORNED OWL,” IN MORNING FACE, 63. NEW YORK: DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY, 1916.

John James Audubon. *The Birds of America, Plate #337: “American Bittern.”* Hand-colored engraving and aquatint on paper [from a drawing by Audubon’s son John Woodhouse], 1827-1838. Public Domain.

[1] The American Bittern, protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, is a medium-sized heron commonly found in wetlands and most active at dusk and through the night. The website All About Birds includes audio samples of the American Bittern’s distinctive calls and songs.

[2] The Great Horned Owl is the most common owl in North America. Its “horns” are actually tufts of feathers that have nothing to with hearing, although their ultimate purpose still baffles and divides researchers. The Great Horned Owl is a powerful predator that is also known as the “tiger of the woods.” Its penetrating hoots are quite diverse, constituting a lexicon all of their own.

[3] Contrary to popular belief, owls’ pupils can contract in response to brightness, so they can also see in daylight.

Contexts

One little girl with a face of morning,
a wondering smile her lips adorning,
wishes her pictures and stories to share,
so she sends them to children, everywhere.

Definitions from Oxford English Dictionary:

bittern: A genus of grallatorial birds ( Botaurus), nearly allied to the herons, but smaller. spec. The species B. stellaris, a native of Europe and the adjoining parts of the Old World, but now rare in Great Britain on account of the disappearance of the marshes which it frequents. It is noted for the ‘boom’ which it utters during the breeding season, whence its popular names mire-drum, and bull of the bog, and the scientific term botaurus (see above). With qualifying adj., as American bittern n. Botaurus lentiginosus of N. America. least bittern n. Ixobrychus exilis of N. America. little bittern n. any of several small bitterns of the genus Ixobrychus.

sedge: A name for various coarse grassy, rush-like or flag-like plants growing in wet places.

waugh: An exclamation indicating grief, indignation or the like. Chiefly as attributed to North American Indians, etc.

Resources for Further Study

1910s Poem

Things That Walk With Feet

By Annette Wynne

Annotations by Rene Marzuk

Giacomo Merculiano. *Actiniaria*. Chromolithograph, 1893 [in Richard Lydekker’s *The Royal Natural History*]. Public Domain.

Things that walk with feet or fly above the land
The creatures of the sea can hardly understand.

Wynne, AnNette. “Things That Walk With Feet,” in for Days and Days, 159. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1919.

Contexts

Annette Wynne was an American poet who mainly wrote for children. In addition to For Days and Days: A Year Round of Treasury of Child Verse (1919), she also published Treasure Things (1922).

1910s Flowers Poem

Dandelions in the Sun

By Annette Wynne

Annotations by Rene Marzuk

J. & J. G. Low Art Tile Works. *Tile* [Tile face decorated with stylized dandelions]. Molded glazed earthenware, 1877-83, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

Dandelions in the sun,
Golden dollars every one,
Let us pick them and go buy
All the sea and all the sky.

Dandelions in the sun,
Golden dollars every one–
Who can be as rich as we
Buying sky and hill and sea!

Wynne, AnNette. “Dandelions in the Sun,” in for Days and Days, 106. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1919.

Contexts

Annette Wynne was an American poet who mainly wrote for children. In addition to For Days and Days: A Year Round of Treasury of Child Verse (1919), she also published Treasure Things (1922).

Resources for Further Study

Native to Asia and Europe, dandelions arrived in America in the seventeenth century. An article from the National Library of Medicine documents many of the uses of this perennial plant.
Dandelions fell out of favor among home gardeners in the twentieth century as lawns in the United States became popular as status symbols. Ketzel Levine, writing for NPR, asks us to reconsider the collective dislike of the wish-granting plant.
Check out dandelion recipes at the Old Farmer’s Almanac website!

1910s Birds Poem

The Wires Are So Still and High

By Annette Wynne

Annotations by Rene Marzuk

Vocational training for S.A.T.C. in University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Class in Pole-Climbing in the course for telephone electricians, with some of their instructors. University of Michigan., ca. 1918. The U.S. National Archives. Public Domain.

The wires are so still and high
We never hear the words go by,
Yet messages fly far and near–
I wonder if the birds can hear.

And when they perch on wires and sing,
I wonder are they listening,
And telling out to earth and sky
A lovely word is going by![1]

Wynne, AnNette. “The Wires Are So Still and High,” in for Days and Days: A Year-Round Treasury of Child Verse, 14. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1919.

[1] Both telegraphs and telephones use electricity to transmit their signal through wires. Although Wynne’s image is very suggestive, sound is actually encoded—or translated—into electrical signals as it travels to its destination.

Contexts

Annette Wynne was an American poet who mainly wrote for children. In addition to For Days and Days: A Year Round of Treasury of Child Verse (1919), she also published Treasure Things (1922).

Resources for Further Study

This timeline gathers key moments from the development of telephone technology and infrastructure in the United States. Interestingly, many of the popular concerns and anxieties associated with the telephone in its early adoption stage are similar to those later inspired by internet.
A teacher’s guide from the Library of Congress on the Industrial Revolution in the United States helps contextualize the development of communication technologies beginning in the nineteenth century.
An informative video from the Natural Museum of American History shows how telegraphs and telephones work.
“A Natural History of the Wooden Utility Pole,” by the California Public Utilities Commission. The document begins with an excerpt from John Updike’s 1963 poem “Telephone Poles.”

Contemporary Connections

Caira Wynn Blackwell writes about “The Racist History of Telephone Poles.”

1900s African American Authorship Decade Ocean Poem Song

Sea Lyric

By William Stanley Braithwaite

Annotations by Rene Marzuk

Artist Unknown. *Portrait of a Black Sailor (Paul Cuffe?)*. Oil on canvas, c. 1880, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Public Domain.

Over the seas to-night, love,
  Over the darksome deeps,
Over the seas to-night, love,
  Slowly my vessel creeps.

Over the seas to-night, love,
  Walking the sleeping foam—
Sailing away from thee, love,
  Sailing from thee and home.

Over the seas to-night, love,
  Dreaming beneath the spars—
Till in my dreams you shine, love,
Bright as the listening stars.

Braithwaite, william stanley. “Sea Lyric,” IN THE UPWARD PATH: A READER FOR COLORED CHILDREN, ED. MYRON T. PRITCHARD AND MARY WHITE OVINGTON, 189. HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE, 1920.

Contexts

This poem appeared in The Upward Path: A Reader for Colored Children, published in 1920 and compiled by Myron T. Pritchard and Mary White Ovington. The volume’s foreword states that, “[t]o the present time, there has been no collection of stories and poems by Negro writers, which colored children could read with interest and pleasure and in which they could find a mirror of the traditions and aspirations of their race.”

“Sea Lyric” was initially included in Braithwaite’s 1904 poetry book Lyrics of Life and Love, wherein the poem was not segmented into stanzas.

1900s Birds Decade Poem

Pigeons out Walking

By Josephine Preston Peabody

Annotations by Rene Marzuk

[Feeding the Pigeons, Boston Common, Boston, Mass.] Photographic negative, bet. 1900 and 1920, Detroit Publishing Co., Library of Congress. Public Domain.

They never seem to hurry,—no,
  Even for the crowd.
They dip, and coo, and move as slow,[1]
  All so soft and proud!
You can see the wavy specks
Of bubble-color on their necks;
  —Little, little Cloud.

Cloud that goes, the very way
  All the Bubbles do:
Blue and green, and green and gray,
  Gold and rosy, too.
And they talk as Bubbles could
If they only ever would
  Talk and call and coo!

—Till you try to catch one so,
  Just to make it stay
While the colors turn. But Oh,
  Then they fly away!—
All at once, two, three, four, five—
Like a snowstorm all alive,—
  Gray and white, and gray!

Peabody, Josephine Preston. “Pigeons out Walking,” in The Book of the Little Past, 10. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1908.

[1] Male pigeons coo to attract their mates.

Contexts

Josephine Preston Peabody’s The Book of the Little Past (1908), illustrated by Elizabeth Shippen Green, gathered previously published and unpublished poems in which the author touched upon various subjects from a child’s perspective. A favorable 1908 review from The Bellman, a Minneapolis literary magazine, asserted that the volume would be “read and remembered and quoted as few poems of children are,” and referred to Peabody as “one of the first of American lyric poets.”

Resources for Further Study

“Pigeon Watch: Get to Know (and Love) Our Amazing City Birds.”
“Where Did Pigeons Come From?”, by Justine E. Hausheer.
In “Why Pigeons Feel at Home in the City,” Martha Foley talks to Dr. Curt Stager, Professor of Biology at Paul Smith’s College, about the adaptability of pigeons to urban environments.
In “The Origins of Our Misguided Hatred for Pigeons,” Matt Soniak engages with sociologist Colin Jerolmack’s research on how these birds came to be considered city pests in the United States. Starting in the late XIX century, the public opinion on pigeons shifted from “innocent bird, to mundane nuisance, to public enemy in just a few decades,” with a marked negative turn in the 1930s and 1940s. The term “rats with wings,” for instance, was coined as recently as 1966 by a New York City Parks Commissioner.
The American Pigeon Museum and Library in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, features permanent exhibits such as Pigeons in Wartime, The History of Pigeon Racing, A Shadow Over the Earth: The Life and Death of the Passenger Pigeon, and Project Sea Hunt: Pigeons and the Coast Guard.

1900s Cats Decade Genre Poem Themes

Concerning Love

By Josephine Preston Peabody

Annotations by Rene Marzuk

Lilla Cabot Perry. *Woman with a Cat.* Oil on canvas, 1901.
Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

I wish she would not ask me if I love the
    Kitten more than her.
Of Course I love her. But I love the Kitten,
    Too; and It has Fur.

Peabody, Josephine Preston. “Concerning love,” in The Book of the Little Past, 11. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1908.

Contexts

1900s Decade Genre Poem Wild animals

Market

By Josephine Preston Peabody

Annotations by Rene Marzuk

Detroit Publishing Co. *Lexington Market, Baltimore, Maryland.* Dry plate negative, bet. 1900 and 1910, Library of Congress. Public Domain.

I went to Market yesterday,
 And it is like a Fair
Of everything you'd like to see;
  But nothing live is there:
—The Pigeons, hanging up to eat;
And Rabbits, by their little feet!—
  And no one seemed to care.

And there were Fishes out in rows,
  Bright ones of every kind;
Some were pink, and silver too;
  But all of them were blind.
Yes, everything you'd like to touch.—
It would not make you happy much,
  But no one seemed to mind.

And loveliest of all, a Deer!—
  Only its eyes were blurred;
And hanging by it, very near,
  A beautiful great Bird.
So I could smooth his feathers through,
And kiss them, very softly, too:
  But Oh, he never stirred!

Frans Snyders. *Still Life with Dead Game, Fruits, and Vegetables in a Market.* Oil on canvas, 1614, Art Institute of Chicago. Public Domain.

Peabody, Josephine Preston. “Market,” in The Book of the Little Past, 19. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1908.

Contexts

Resources for Further Study

In his 1991 essay “The American Public Market” (password protected), James M. Mayo argues that the public market system in the United States, highly influenced by its European counterparts, reached its peak “when the American economic structure was highly local or regional.” According to Mayo, overshadowed by private enterprise and corporatism, public markets were eventually associated with “a form of social life worth saving” and became the focus of historic preservation efforts.
In her 1997 article “Feeding the Cities: Public Market and Municipal Reform in the Progressive Era,” Helen Tangires offers a brief historical survey of American public markets. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, discourses about the need to maintain, protect, and regulate public markets through municipal action found their way to contemporary newspaper columns and specialized journals. Public markets were considered indicators of “a city’s health and well-being” and many people fought “to protect them from private enterprise.”
Helen Tangires’s 2008 book Public Markets delivers a comprehensive illustrated account of public markets’ buildings and spaces throughout the years.

Contemporary Connections

Nancy B. Kurland and Linda Aleci. “From Civic Institution to Community Place: The Meaning of the Public Market in Modern America.”

The Greensboro Farmers Curb Market, founded by the City of Greensboro in 1874, remains committed to sell products either grown or made by the sellers.