Transcripts For CSPAN3 American History TV 20240622

Announcer my talk will have two parts. Professor mcneur i am always happy to talk trash with new yorkers. Even happier that there is a large series on trash in new york. First, i will talk about my book project and the research i have done an environmental history. Then i will go into specifics about my research focusing on the intersection of food, politics, and the urban environment and 1850s new york. The book i have written is an environmental history of new york city. Many people believe that new york is the opinion me of a concrete jungle. After coming across a reference to the hog riots, i thought the idea of hogs roaming the streets of new york was amusing. The fact that they were people passionate enough to ride over them was even more so. Hidden beneath my reaction is the notion that cities are surely artificial spaces where nature does not exist. The early part of the 19th century is a moment where the meaning and relationship between city and country is being transformed and defined. Between the war of 1812 and the civil war, new york urban eyes remarkably experiencing massive changes. New york was a magnet for americans and immigrants alike. The riches part was down by chambers street. By 1855, it is all the way up to the base of central park, 59th street. Despite signs of prosperity and growth, new york faced serious problems. It had a small beans poll government that had a hard time keeping control over services. It had a hodgepodge infrastructure that failed to meet the needs of residents. Garbage filled the streets. Sewage contaminated drinking water. Epidemics, fires, and conveniences inconveniences made the city practically in livable. Unlivable. Im interested in why new yorkers were so passionate about fighting over public space and how people used it. These places were sites of class tension. The cities lack of control provoked a lot of bourgeois anxiety. As became increasingly uncontrollable people use the environment as a way to take control over issues. The streets and parks had benefits for the poor. Who used piles of trash to forage their animals and take around for materials that could be resold, kind of a parallel to today of people looking for bottles to recycle. As reformists pushed for improvements like sanitation and public parks, the poor lost the ability to use the spaces. The power of elite new yorkers was not absolute and you can see that in the way that are from places were actively used throughout the 19th century. There was power play between different classes of new yorkers. What we understand today as perl land usage rural land usage was a contested part of city life. My book is as much about the battle to maintain or even race urban agriculture as it is about the development of our understanding of what it means to be a city. Not only can the city not only could you not understand the city without the country the country was also a part of the city. In contrast to the growing popularity to be chickens from your backyard or rooftop or to keep bees or goats i live in portland, oregon, and there are a lot of goats, it was completely unfashionable in the 19th century for people to do that. Nowadays, you have people keeping them Martha Stewart heritage chicken or whatever. Urban agriculture was embraced by the poor. He was a means for survival. That is still used today. In the 19th century it was almost exclusively the poor. Wealthy new yorkers who saw to improve sanitation saw the livestock and their shanties as antiquated, inappropriate, and dangerous to Public Health. They pushed laws few new yorkers when asked romantic about waxed romantic about landuse within city limits. This was a clear moment where many middleclass and upperclass new yorkers were looking for more separation from their food. This was the antivocal food movement. They were looking to push it further from the city. They didnt like local food. The decisions that city leaders made were decisions were the laws that were written are the ones that are being overturned now as people fight to keep chickens in bees and goats. The development of parks and infrastructure, the beautification movements, the recycling of food waste and manure, and the growth of shantytowns shows the contested path that urbanization took. Theit wasnt without complications. Private organizations and reformers till then where authority lacked. Another complication i will talk about extensively if the inefficiency involved with political corruption. Both limited government power in increased environmental injustices in these injustices were amplified because the government dealt with environmental problems on a casebycase basis. They did not have an overarching policy to deal with urban animals. I will talk to you about two campaigns to control corrupt foods. This will milk crisis pig the swill milk crisis and the piggery crisis. The effect of these campaigns had as much to do with the prejudice against immigrants, the desirability of land, and the corrupted ability of the politicians. Swill milk dairies and pigger ies took advantage of the situation. Processed corn, barley it and write milk leftover from distilling whiskey by feeding slop to cows distilleries turned remnants of an adult beverage into what was seen as the purest of food, milk. The purity of this milk wasnt exactl was exactly what was troubling. This map is kind of turned on its side but 15th street is up. This is the hudson river. The crisis came to a head in 1858, and new york has been struggling with cow milk issues for decades. In the 1830s, several distillery owners began to dabble in the business. They built cow stables. Here is the distillery and there is pipes that go under the street. There are cisterns holding extra swill and more cows. The cows are all within these buildings that are windowless. You could easily walk by 15th or 16th street and not be any the wiser that there were cows inside. Dairy production for large cities was complicated. This is prerefrigeration. This is prepasteurize asian. Prepasteurizezation. Prices for land are going up. You need cows close enough to the city to get milk to customers before it sours. You needed far enough that the real estate is cheap enough to have them be in the pastors pastors. Pastures. This solved all of that. You could have it all in the city. On top of that, you are using waste that was otherwise going to be dumped in the river to feed these cows. It seemed too good to be true and it was. Swill is hardly a nutritious meal for cows. What introduced to boiling liquid cows typically refuse to eat until desperation drove them to the trough. I died exclusively of swill made the cows sick. Led to their tails falling off. They got this nickname of stump tail cows. Living conditions were similar to factory farms today. Articles written in this area are similar to exposes you read about factory farms. They lived in crampeds stalls, the animals were sick, they didnt have time for exercise outdoors. The milk these cows produced was watery with the blue tint. The way to get over that was to add tag, plaster of paris, or powder to make it look thicker and hide the taste. This was hardly an attractive beverage. Swill milk satisfied a growing market for cheap milk. In a city whose population is growing astronomically. Prior to this, not many people drank liquid milk. Cows and through the mid19th century were mostly use for butter or buttermilk that people were rarely drinking milk. This is the point where people are starting to drink it. The poorest new yorkers could only afford the cheapest. At the same time, a lot of swill milk vendors would hide the origins. This is before the fda or any labeling laws. P and say, this is a new jersey milk, when it actually came from 16th street. A corresponds with a time where breastfeeding was going out of fashion so people were feeding this milk to their babies and this is preformula. People thought cows is a good supplement and started giving this milk most milk was dispensed on street corners to their children unknowing of the dangers. Doctors, reformers, and journalists have been calling for a reform of milk since the 18th century. There was always an uproar about the issue but i quickly withered away. City politicians ignored requests and continued until 1858 when frank leslie took up the subject. The newspaper was only three years old. It came to make a name for itself with the swill milk crisis. He advertised in a lot of competing newspapers and had these advertisements like, do you buy your milk on 15th street . Do you buy your milk on chambers street . He went through and if you did you are buying swill milk. His circulation rates went crazy. This is a big news item in new york. Unlike previous exposes leslies articles were filled with images that ignited the public and pressured previously reluctant politicians to address the issue. The owners of the distilleries recognize the power that these images played. The irish dairy hands physically attacked leslies artist. One irish milkmaid they really played on gender there all of the irish milk hands were men but the newspapers like to call them milkmaids and one irish milkmaid even mistook an average citizen who happened to see this article who went off to look at the stables for an artist and attacked him. The court from the newspaper was that, he dealt the unsuspecting man a severe blow between his peepers. They recognize the threat they posed to their livelihood. This public disdain growing for their work and milk in it simply was not good for business. Leslie presented these images to the public that open the eyes of readers to the sickly appearance of the cows but also emphasized the otherness of the men working in this industry. The owners of the distilleries were not irish. They were comparatively wealthy new yorkers. Leslies images focused on the laborers. Social class and ethnicity are evident in a list every woodcut. In this image, on the right side is one of the artists, and on the left, the irish milkmaid. The facial features are quite different. On the right, the artist has sharp features. The irish look kind of apeish or swineish even. They are wearing rough clothing and throwing sticks. You can see the threat that they are posing. The message that he sends with these faces is that the people who had control of the milk were brutish, untrustworthy, and violent outsiders and they had control over the cities food and the health of the children. Something had to be done. When leslies expose inspired an investigation, one might have thought that swill milk was numbered. The public was enraged, bad press was inescapable, and the pressure to close down businesses seem to to come from all constituents. Experts insisted that turning swill milk into meat and milk was not good for Public Health in the lives of the citys most vulnerable residents were at stake. This is the perfect opportunity for the municipal government to exercise power for the sake of Public Health. A committee of five aldermen, three of whom were republican two of whom were democrats toward the cow sheds at 16th and 30 night. After a staged tour where they took a couple sips and saw a cow being slaughtered, the committee felt that they were confident to make a decision. They were not unanimous, but the majority came out strongly in favor of swill milk. They argued that swill milk and be for safe and the distilleries only violation was the was there wasnt enough ventilation. With that, the swill milk industry was saved. You might assume that this is all political, and it was. The committee didnt divide along typical partisan lines. This will milk supporters included a democrat into republicans of the opposition was a democrat. If there was any tie joining the disparate group, it might have been social class or the majority of those in favor were two butchers and a mason who had all gone into politics. The butchers may be had some kind of allegiance to the milk industry. The minority report was written by somebody who considered himself an engineer. Regardless of how they formed their coalition, frank leslie was livid. He published in illustration alluding to the corruption of the three you had voted in favor. The aldermen are whitewashing a stable, but also the cows and the milk hands. Sorry . We also see the distillery owner in the corner clipping bags of money into the pockets of the aldermen. Leslie obviously thought there was corruption involved. That is what tied these three together. It wasnt necessarily social class but their willingness to profit at the expense of the public good. Despite the expose, distilleries continue to produce swill milk for several decades. Although the stables and products were legitimate nuisances, the power of the proprietors to sway politicians helps to keep them in business. Leslies expose effectively directed the attention to the political entitlements of food regulation and changed the way that new yorkers viewed food within city limits. With all the attention that was given to the conversion of waste into food, it seems like only a matter of time before reformers eyes turned further north in the city to look at the piggeries. Establishments for fattening pigs, boiling and grinding bones , and belting fat, scanning and rendering dead animals had existed all over the city but they were mostly centered around uptown. This image is around where Carnegie Hall is today if you can picture that. You can see a streetcar line going this way. The block has been graded yet, it is still raised. While it was so expensive to grade the land, a lot of people would squat there or informally have leases with the landowners until the point where the real estate pressure had gotten far enough north that the landowners would level the block and build rowhouses. You can see some rowhouses being developed in the background. The pressure is getting there. Until then, you have these squatter communities and hopeful boiling factories. These largescale piggeries recycled waste things that most people considered waste carcasses, offal bones, and blood. Slaughterhouse waste coming from the hotels and restaurants i apologize if i am ruining anybodys appetite. These entrepreneurs were mainly irish and german immigrants. There were a couple africanamericans. With food waste plentiful in the city and the infrastructure lacking to get rid of it in an effective way, the piggeries turned a lot of its waste into protein and a served a particular purpose and transforming access waste that people couldnt get out of town or that they would otherwise dump in the river into something else. Complaints about the op tempe greece mounted as the cities footprint extended north. Wealthy downtown neighbors referred it to the area centered in the 50s between sixth and seventh avenues as hog town, paid town, or stink town. Their disdain for the nuisance extended to the irish proprietors. And New York Times writer described the neighborhood as a group of shanties in which the takes lie down together while once of celtic and swine origin german immigrants were not immune to similar criticism. The type between the proprietors ethnicities and the piggeries is cemented the threat that the population and hogs post for consumers and also their inappropriateness the inappropriateness of their place in the city. When politicians debated the future of hog town, real estate values came up. The two wards that had the majority of the piggeries were between 19th and 20 22nd. The councilmen representing the 19th ward criticized those recalling for the removal of piggeries as being aristocrats who had once felt lucky to live next to a pagan or event that they had gotten some kind of wealth were churning their noses up against it. On the other side of the argument where the councilmen from the 22nd ward who considered the pic size nuisances. He argued that the 22nd board was improving rapidly. One saw the takes as being a useful endeavor for those living there, the other saudi something that needed to be changed so that the neighborhood could gentrify. As uptown neighbors and neighborhoods around the developing central park rose in value, the piggeries were not only becoming more visible but also more of a liability. Concerted efforts to remove the piggeries began in 1859. When a mayor appointed a city inspector who began his term by pressing the Health Commissioner to pass an ordinance banning piggeries and awful boiling offal boiling. The piggery war began. Members of the newly ford metropolitan police visited each piggery to give owners noticed to get rid of hogs and remove associated structures such as cauldrons and sheds before they returned to tear everything up and drive the hogs to the pound. The owners had to act quickly to sell or find a new place to keep pace. Pigs. Many owners successfully moved piggeries. Many went into new jersey, some to brooklyn. Brooklyn then had its own piggery war after. Reporters followed behind and just as they did with the dairy business. Reporters followed behind the troops when they returned it three days later to tear down properties. They toured the properties along us and government officials and recount to the events dramatically in their articles. As you can imagine when you have a piggery were, there is a lot of joking about pagans. Pigs. Leslie also included woodcuts. You can see owners leaving the neighborhood enclosing things down and they not only had pigs but also dogs. While residents did what they could to hide hogs, sometimes concealing them under their beds and linens, the police where persistent and successful. The newspapers reveled in stories of the irish hiding plump porkers in their drawers. This was during a time when womanhood was tied to domesticity. This was the age of parlors and refinement. The idea that there were women in the city who were willing to keep pigs so close to their home, inside their bedroom, that just showed you that the irish and the germans were far from anything that the women downtown. So while owners often threaten the police, little violence occurred. When play the most violent role in these moments. Perhaps because the officers were less likely to reciprocate violence towards the women or the piggery or whatever the case was that wives took up clubs and other weapons to defend their property. One of my favorite stories from these articles there was a large german woman who had a large club who whacked an officer over the head with a pot and a way that made him see stars. Besides these occasional female assaults, the city seemed to have the upper hand. Rioting was a common practice in the middle of the 19th century. Most people were surprised that there was no major riot associated with the piggery were. War. There was a moment where a bunch of men found the pound weighted taser being kept and released them all pound where the pigs were kept and released them all. Police power was new to this era. The metropolitan police were two years old. There might have been there might have been some intimidation from police that was unusual and allowed for this to go so smoothly. Despite the polices power are perhaps because of it newspapers reveled in moments were they seemed to lose control over the hogs. As you can see the journalist highlighted scenes where the hogs ran between officers legs or a tale slip through their fingers. There was a lot of noise and chaos. Regardless of the chaos, this was much more controlled than the police or the city had really had over animals in the city or Public Health until this point. The newspapers per trade the piggery war as a war for the protection of the citys health and prosperity. Journalist described immigrant proprietors as outsiders threatening the Cities Health and civility. How could you have a city that wants to be the nations metropolis but also have no control over its Public Health, food animals . The way that people are using the land. Almost every article authors painted the war and triumphant terms. They equated the police with war heroes while describing the piggery owner is as ridiculous, backwards, defiant. Unlike the swill milk crisis were corrupt politician stood in the way, reformers found success with the closing of the piggeries carried a must of shocked new yorkers to see their government acting efficiently. Maybe still today. By september, the piggery war was mainly over. The inspector proudly reported that they had removed 9000 hogs, demolished 3000 tenants and confiscated 100 boilers paired as one is to put it, the city had done a fearful amount of lawful depredation. The recycling of a purpose in a food waste was an enormous industry. Because of its vitality and prosperity, the Waste Industries were politically contentious. Exposes highlighted the difficulties and dangers of urban Food Production while also striking fear among the middle and upper classes about the immigrant outsiders who all the food was entrusted to. As new york grew, the amount of waste it produced outpaced the creation of Public Services necessary to handle its removal. You get these haphazard solutions that established entrepreneurs recycled waste and turned it into something marketable and edible even a fully marginal. After the introduction of infrastructure, Technological Innovations such as refrigeration these industries would be supplanted before the time being they held a specific niche. The big question here is why the government effectively eliminated piggeries but not the distilleries. Swill milk was honestly a bigger threat given the wide spread use of cheap poor quality milk by all new yorkers. The poor were maybe buying milk because of its cheapness but the rich were also buying and up charged version of swill milk that was poorly labeled. Babies didnt rely on pork. They relied on milk. The reasons swill milk state involved real estate pressure and political corruption and stereotypes. While anger over swill milk was more about unregulated food that threatened to sicken consumers most complaints against the piggeries focused less on the pork that they produced and focused more on the inappropriate use of land so close to central park. The piggeries and shantytowns that surrounded them had become a visible sore. Reflecting back on the piggery wars success, the New York Herald wrote that it was hardly possible to conceive that so much abomination could have existed in a city like that found in the neighborhood of the beautiful central part of. It is hardly credible. The piggeries did not fit in with the changing of uptown. The city was the process of transforming and the movement of wealthier residents uptown meant the piggeries and proprietors had to go. The smells, the health threats, the unsightly minutes and the fact that proprietors were something less than respectable in the eyes of bourgeois new yorkers left piggeries vulnerable to attack. The swill milk staples did not have that same kind of presence. They were scattered in less desirable areas. The cows were hidden within the staples. There wasnt the same kind of developmental pressures is what was found near central park. Leslie had to publish maps to tell people where stables were. People didnt know. It wasnt as obvious. You didnt have the smells of cauldrons that were boiling a offal. Ethnic stereotypes played an important role. We saw similar ethnic stereotyping with the milkmaids and irish and german piggeries. Artists to reverend edition of their features, authors dwelled on their accents and broken english. They were cast as outsiders threatening the city and consumers. They split the ties between immigrants and food reflected in reinforced ethnic divisions in the city get while immigrants were working in both industries, the owners of the industries were significantly different word while the piggeries were owned by the irish and german immigrants, nativeborn new yorkers owned the distilleries and they had the power and connections and money to influence at the politicians. Who were willing to overlook Public Health threats for the sake of personal profit. The tribune so accustomed to corruption was shocked that the piggery owners didnt have any influence. Frank leslie fuming about swill milk a year after his expose wrote that despite swill milk being more dangerous, the owners of the piggeries are punished while the wealthy owners of the stables escape with impunity. If they had been more wealthy like the distillery owners, the piggeries would have remained. Ultimately, this is not only a story about poor food regulation, it is also a story about environmental injustices and people being targeted over others. Zooming out, this is a period in which new york embraces zoning. The industries in land use that seemed incompatible with residential neighborhoods were being pushed further from the city. The rural wards where the piggeries relocated were transforming and with the concurrent development of central park and new housing surrounding it, the squatters and the servers would have to be pushed out. New york was starting a new chapter which would involve redefining the neighborhoods and what land uses were appropriate. Throughout the selective targeting of certain nuisances you can see the inequalities inherent in this drive to segregate different types of land uses in the city. Zooming back in, you can see the lived experiences of what the zoning did and what it meant to be the people whose lives were uprooted when the police told them they had to get rid of pigs. This is part of the regulation of space and food within the city. The modernization of any city can come across as a series of positive events and improvements , addressing a number of serious Public Health issues transportation problems, increasing city livability yet the process of taking control over a city, it was incomplete. It was messy. It was noticeably uneven. It was tangled and corrupt politics traded in affected people in dramatically different ways. Reinforcing social inequities. Progress had a price. Thank you. [applause] i am happy to take questions. I think there will be microphones for you. Is this working . Thank you. My question is did swill milk consumption go down after 1842 once new york was getting clean water . Professor mcneur no. This is actually the uptick milk was less seen as an adult beverage but more for children. This is the birth of milk being used as a beverage. It wasnt used that much before 1842. Before the aqueduct. It wasnt like beer. Beer was used because of bad water all the time. Milk wasnt really affected by that. This is like the beginning of milkss life. Thank you. I was fascinated by the idea of food being recycled. What would one find on a menu of recycled food . Professor mcneur there was recently a popup restaurant that was recycling food waste. It all comes back, everything becomes fashionable again. What would you see . On the menu, what would the recycled food be . How would it be described . Professor mcneur it wasnt being served and restaurants, it was being fed to pigs and in the pigs would then be butchered. You wouldnt know if youre paid was from midtown you are pagan was your pig was from midtown. The bones were being collected and people who had boiling facilities would boil it down so you just have the bones. The bones would be sold to toothbrush manufacturers. Order would be sold to but manufacturers or he would be ground down and use as fertilizer. You would have the fats being boiled down to sell to soap manufacturers or candle makers. It was being used in a broad selection of ways. It would only come back as food as swill milk or pork. Thank you. I had a question about the generators of the waste that is speeding these two sources of food. He went into the owners of the distilleries. I wonder what did the generators of the waste that was going to feed the takes what ultimate sources do they see when the piggeries were shut down . Professor mcneur they had to dump it in the river. Once they were shut down, the amount of waste that was produced right the people who were shutting the stuff down didnt realize what a big role pig reorders were playing in processing piggeries were playing in processing this stuff. There was an incident in the 1850s where they also shut down piggeries temporarily and it was right around the time when the worlds fair was coming to new york and it dumped stuff in the rivers and his horses were bobbing in the water all the carcasses and all the waste in the city was really nervous about what kind of image they were putting forward with all of these tourists coming to new york so they actually hired men to go into the hudson river and tie weights to the horse carcasses and pulled them down to keep them from bobbing in the water. So there was an issue with Waste Management after the piggeries were shut down. Down the road, you have there an island, which has become dead or space Dead Horse Bay near coney island, that becomes the place with the stuff gets processed. The city starts to formalize the relationship and they have to have contracts with people running the rendering facilities down there kind of further from where most of the new yorkers were living at the time. With all due respect, what is new . [laughter] no really. What is new . Professor mcneur there is a lot of parallels. We have bad smells and all of that in real estate pressures and everything kind of comes around again. It is all different with zoning laws but you are right. Let me make sure you get a microphone. I think we should bring the pigs back. There was an article in the times over the weekend saying how efficient pigs are of converting garbage into protein. With the amount we spend to move garbage to virginia, we should bring the pigs back. Professor mcneur and if new york starts composting in earnest the question is about who was to buy the pork that is fed on garbage. Its true. Oftentimes, if you knew that they were being fed garbage maybe you wouldnt, i dont know, who knows . It is not a bad idea. It is very easy to romanticize this moment in new york as being this really sustainable, hyper recycling kind of city but it also has colorado epidemics and major sanitation issues tied into it. It is possible cholera epidemics and major sanitation issues tied into it. I wondered if this time period overlapped with Eminent Domain laws in central park . Professor mcneur central parks eviction of people was right in 1857 and they were piggeries in central park as well. It wasnt just limited to the outskirts. Amidst all of the irish shanties and the base of the park. They were evicted a few years earlier and moved out to the outskirts or moved to new jersey or brooklyn. A kind of added more pressure to could you please clarify what the medical effects were of the swill milk on the infants . Because the country milk was unpasteurized, so when what way with the former worse . Professor mcneur no milk was healthy during this era. Milk from the country was still also contaminated and often would spoil on route to the city. People were actually adding things to that milk to disguise it flour that kind of stuff was added in to disguise the nature of the milk. That wasnt very safe. Swill milk no milk no cows milk is ok for a baby even today i mean, they give you formulas so its not cows milk is not fed to babies today it is insufficient. The swill milk was watered down this was coming from unhealthy animals and it was poor quality milk but all milk across the board was not healthy. Milk quality was just poor. Thanks for your talk. I was curious about transportation and storage when it came to things like milk because particularly prerefrigeration, what did they do with this stuff before it made went to market . This swill milk was obviously getting more curdled. Professor mcneur it often came by train. Lets say it was country milk coming from westchester or new jersey, coming by train or cart or boat. The milk distributors would sell it doortodoor immediately after getting it or would sell it on the street corners are also sometimes and corner groceries. It oftentimes came spoiled. It was coming from a range of different transportation times. How did you get interested in the field . Are there a lot of others doing this research . Professor mcneur i got interested when i came across a story about the hog riots. Just thinking about new york and this messy. Y period. I found it to be a strange history of new york that i hadnt read about. The field of urban environmental history is taking off. Environmental history is a relatively new field from the last 30 years. People focused primarily on wilderness, National Parks farms, typical environments. The field of urban environmental history is really just taking off. You have seen a couple books from the 1990s but it is taking off at this point. It is interesting when newspapers complain about the smell because new york smells awful everywhere. Im not sure they would even notice this. In a city that before the automobile had horseman all over the place, no flashed toilets so we have not just the latrines and tenements latrines and backyards of the mansions. Human menu or, horseman who are human maneuure, horse maneure it is striking that they are complaining about the smell or maybe it is not a major part of the complain. Do you understand me . Professor mcneur a lot of it has to do with the class involved in creating that smell who is involved with making the smells . You are right. Their threshold for organic smells was much higher than ours is today. It said something when the smell is particularly noteworthy. I believe that i heard that in the five points, people kept pigs in homes. Is that true . Professor mcneur up to a point. You see pigs in and around the homes in five points, tivoli once laws are passed when pigs are off the streets, you dont see as many takes downtown because most would come out and wander the streets during the day most of them get put into piggeries there are hidden pigs and 10 basements, there also geese kept and tenements downtown it continues, it is not over at this point by any stretch of the imagination, it goes on through the later part of the 19th century and maybe even today. There are often hidden animals. We have time for one more question. Everybody be reminded that she will be signing books outside. Bianca conversation but lets have our final question. This may be a reach, they were writers like walt whitman interactions occurring in the streets never seen before and pigs just didnt fit into that kind of ambience. Professor mcneur right. Charles dickens has his american notes on new york, and he talks explicitly about pigs wandering the streets. A lot of the artwork of the era looks past the garbage or cleans the streets for new york and looks past the pigs and the smells and all of that. There is a cleansing that happens that sometimes overlooks that. Walt whitman by the time he is writing, it is a little more a lot of his writing happens after that so he would be seeing that part. He might past by a piggery on a streetcar. Charles dickens if youre looking for call language about pigs, that is the place to go. Will you please join me in thanking catherine mcneur. Engine is for a cocktail out in the lobby. Thank you. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2015] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] announcer you are watching American History tv on cspan3. To join the conversation, like us on facebook. Each week, american histories bring you archival films to tell the story of the 20th century. It is the annual pony roundup on chincoteague off the virginia coast. They run wild and great herds at the National Wildlife read refuge. Once a year, the numbers are thinned by the event. They will be driven ashore and be auctioned. First, youngsters get a chance. Rumor has it that if a fellow stays on he can keep the pony. But it is not put to the test this time. Crowds line the shore for the stampede as the herd is driven across the shallowness of water to the corral. Wild descendents of noble and ancient lineage, they are prized reading stock. Buyers traveling hundreds of miles for the wild horses. X next, the university of michigan professor and author pamela brad one describes the legal landscape after the civil war and explains some of the federal court cases. Her talk was sponsored by the Supreme Court Historical Society and is about one hour and 15 minutes. Justice ginsberg tonights lecturer is professor pamela brandwein