All right. Welcome to another evening lecture with francis Tavern Museum. Remember, if you are joining us virtually if you have any questions during the lecture, you can submit those to the chat or the q a. I know last month there were some issues with the chat, so the q a is always open and you can let me know about issues there. As a reminder, we will be recording this lecture so it will be sent to everyone who registered. If you want to share it with someone or watch it again. Now the views of the speaker are their own and do not represent the views of sons of the revolution in the state of new york, inc, or its Fraunces Tavern museum. And let me introduce tonights speaker to you, dr. Keith beuttler is a professor of history at Missouri Baptist university and his specialty, the United States, founding era. Hes a former High School Teacher whose professional awards include the 2003 deans award for teaching excellence from the graduate school of arts and sciences at Washington University and 2009 Missouri Baptist university. Distinguished professor. He has been awarded Resident Research fellowships from numerous historical organizations, including the Gilder Lehrman institute of American History and the Fred W Smith National Library for the study of George Washington at mount vernon. Tonight, he is going to be speaking about his book. George washingtons hair how early americans remembered the founders. So im now going to invite keith up to the lectern with us. I. All right. All right. All right. So lets get our screen share set up so everyone can see your presentation and. Technology. Here we go. All right. Thank you so much, sarah. I appreciate that. And it is a joy and a privilege to be here at Fraunces Tavern and to be speaking about memory of the American Revolution in the United States at a place that early americans themselves recognized as what they referred to as an american memory palace. And ill be talking more about their sense of that concept tonight. But this was, in fact, the very place where in december of 1783, in long room, George Washington took a very emotional leave from his officer corps after the peace of paris and after the last british troops had been evacuated from new york and so, again, its a its a thrill to be here. And francis tavern is doubly apropos for tonights talk in that as the title of my book is George Washingtons hair. And we will be getting into the evidence on that that inspires that this institution has tonight as it has long had in its collection, a very ample example of that genre of evidence. This lock of George Washingtons hair that you see here tonight has been part of the collection at Fraunces Tavern for decades. And i much appreciate sarah and the curators here bringing that out for our talk tonight. The first thing that i want to mention to you is one of the strange things that i discovered. It was not my intention to learn this when i spent it as i spent 20 years researching. The memory of the revolution in the early United States and that was that. Let me fix this here. That was that the wherever you are today in the United States, it turns out that you are never very far from a lock of George Washingtons hair and thats true. Even if you just take as i do with my map here, even if you just look at institutional holdings, putative locks of George Washingtons hair on this map, which you can see a live version of that. I mean that i maintain at George Washingtons hair icon is a sort of auxiliary to the book. You can navigate to the nearest institutionally held lock of George Washingtons hair. This may change your familys vacations. I dont know because you can always pull it up live on your phone and just click on any of these and navigate to it. Now, i always say you should call ahead to the institution and see if they currently have it on display, if theyd be willing for you to take a look, because, you know, those things vary with different museums, but you know, in manhattan there are currently several institutions, including this one, that have a lock of washingtons hair. Even where i live in saint louis, we have not far from where i teach. I teach at Missouri Baptist university and and a couple of miles away at the Missouri Historical society. There is what is actually a fairly well provenance lock of George Washingtons hair in that collection. And so it goes. And there are as well collectors, private collectors in the United States. And i dont put their holdings on my map because i dont want someone robbing their homes. But there are private collectors today who spend upwards of ten, 20, even as much as most recently last year. I think someone spent 45,000 buying a well provenance lock of George Washingtons hair. Now, can i attest for all of these . No, i cannot. But the real story here, the thing that still shocks me is that by normal standards, the provenance of many of these is surprising really good. And some of them are almost certainly the real thing because if you look at the washington family course ordinance, if you look at the even the incidentals in their writing, or theyll talk about holding some of this, you might say an escrow during his life and after and then parceling it out. You can see that you know, this happened to a profound extent. And people sometimes ask about dna, whether we can match this up with dna. And so far this has not been done, to my knowledge, success fully with washingtons hair. That sample there, a portion of it was actually used in the 1990s by the fbi in an early effort, in the early days of dna technology, they attempted cooperating with this museum in several other major american institutions, including mount vernon, for example. They tried to compare some samples. At that time. They were not able to get a sequence with the technology that they had a dna sequence, but they did say, i read the report that that this example will, you know, fit the pattern of other incidental qualities that some of the best provenance cases had. So things are looking good for. The sample that you have here at the Tavern Museum and in the future, perhaps, in fact maybe in the very near future, it may be possible to do that. My understanding im not a scientist. My understanding of the state of the right now is that unless you pull hair out from the follicle, you dont get enough to get the full. You dont get the information to get the entire genome to see. You cant sequence the genome, but in 2018, i did an interview with the New York Times for a story, and i mentioned a little bit of this. And then the next day i received an email from a gentleman at usc who works in forensics, and he said that they are developing a technology that he was working on such that they think they will eventually be able to infer an entire sequence from just the shaft of the day, the protein thats in there. And i believe thats actually been done recently with another historical figure, a native american figure. And in some of his hair from the 19th century. So stay tuned. America. We may know washingtons dna at some point in my understanding, as your museum has as well, a a an actual tooth from George Washington. So there be other ways of getting at this. I first began to to to realize that i wasnt just sort of seeing something trivial as i was finding references to washingtons hair. In my Larger Research about memory of the American Revolution, when i was working on the project at independence hall, National Historical park in philly and i was talking to one of the archivists there, and you know, in any such work, you kind of learn to do what the people in Business Schools call the elevator talk. You know, you try to explain in 60 seconds what youre doing so that archivists can help you. And i, i did that there with an archivist at indepeen hall, and theyre in their Archives Section in the building right there. And said, you know, im working on the memory of American Revolution. And and and my thesis is i had already a lot of evidence for this, is that americans in the early republic, in the late 18th century and going into the early 19th century, had their own proprietary view of how memory itself works. That something was going on in American Intellectual culture. And i dont just mean high intellectual culture, although it is going on there, but that it was also happening in Popular Culture as that ive called in the book, the physical this turn in american mnemonic. But its a, you know, my way of giving it a specific name. It is that americans were beginning to think of memory in much more material or indeed materialist terms. Much more about that tonight as we go along and that this new view of memory not entirely new, but but the view that was, you know, the way it was taking the direction it was going, this materialist direction, it was going, demanded physical material, anchors of memory. In other words, if you to remember things, the people who increasingly believed this, which was increasingly a majority of people believe this about memory, you have to have physical things to anchor the memory. You know, we would say today, relics and indeed they use the term and this gave sort of a science civic rationale for collecting relics. We all know that relics had been collected since time memorial and often on religus grounds. But now, you know, there were there was this other reason to do this. And so i was talking about that with with this archivist at independence hall, national park. And i said the most interesting example in finding an early america is people doing this with washingtons hair and justifying it, according to this this new materialist view of demand. X and when i said that the arc of his eyes just lit up and she said, well, if youre looking for George Washingtons hair, she said, first of all, we have a couple of locks here in our collection. But she said, the motherload is over at the academy of Natural Sciences in philadelphia, just a few blocks away. And she said theres there was this guy, peter, errol brown, who in the mid19th century collected all kinds of harry. She said he collected, you know, washingtons hair. He collected the hair of the first 15 president s of the United States. And he collected the hair of all kinds of other american celebrities and the hair of even animals. And she said he was doing Something Weird with that. He was, you know, trying to do some kind of scientific study. And she said he had some kind of president ial hair book where he arranged, you know, the hair of the president s. And she said, you should go look at that. So, you know, i got out of there and and as fast as i could go with public transportation, you can see the route here. I went a few blocks over to the academy of Natural Sciences and and at that time, the collections little bit better known now. But at that time, in 2003, the archivist that greeted me, you know, was was kind of surprised, actually, that anyone wanted to it. His name is robert. Robert peck. Hes wonderful. He actually saved this collection because 40 years ago, the people of the academy thought, this is weird and we should throw it out. You know . But he preserved it. Hes the man who saved washingtons hair, among other peoples hair. And robert peck, mr. Beck showed me this and i was floored because when he showed me, for example, the president ial hair above that, peter, errol brown in the mid19th century he put together, i was looking as i leaped through it, one page at a time. I was looking i would be looking at a lithograph of each of the first 15 president s with a locked of each president s hair and then he showed me the correspondence that brown kept. Brown had the receipts for this, if you know what im saying, kept the copies of the correspondence sent to the families and the incoming correspond prints where they agreed to send him the hair. And because i worked on the time period, especially for the early president s, i could recognize, you know, the handwriting and some of the people around washington and adams and jefferson. And it was clearly the real deal, you know. And then i could go back later as i did and and see incidentals in their family papers. And it was it was real, you know. And i was i was absolutely amazed. And so i thought, what is he up to really . Because he had tables his in his papers where he invented his own little device to test the tensile strength, for example, among other attributes of human hair. And he is going to he is going to look at this hair, you know, test scientifically, the tensile strength, all these things, and try to infer, if you can believe this, try to correlate the tensile of peoples hair, you know, the weight of their hair, the moisture content, even after all these years, things like that with their moral character, all right. And you can probably see where this is going. Theres a lot of circular reasoning involved. But he thought it was science being it as a member as he was of the academy of Natural Sciences and he ended up arguing, of course, the George Washington had amazing character that his science could now demonstrate this by looking at hair and then he created these tables that compared washingtons hair to the hair of other, you know, american celebrities, political celebrities and the story, unfortunately, takes a dark turn, a sad turn. He also compared washingtons hair and the hair of other early american president s to the hair, insane asylum inmates to the hair of animals, to the hair of people, of various races. And that, unfortunately for brown, the real for him race ist payoff. He was one of the founders of what historians refer to. And of course we put this in air quotes because it was not actually that properly, but socalled scientific racism that became all too influential among the american intelligence cia in the 1830s and Going Forward and browns Hair Research sadly contributed to that. And he actually used washingtons to norm. You know, white people for this study in an absurd way. I mean, you can look at it and tear it apart if you understand how science is supposed to work. But its its an incredibly sophisticated deceit. You know as pseudoscience. It was unfortunately persuasive to people in his era. And i shudder to tell you this, but ive been able to find some of that i cited, in american journals into the 1930s, which really tells us something i think about the sad, long half life of some of these things in American Culture, unfortunately. But when i saw that, i knew this as a point of entry. This washingtons hair, you know, this is not a fluke. This is this is an Excellent Way of getting at the memory of the American Revolution, both the use and at times the abuse of of these things. I want to say just a couple of things about, again, the socalled physical is turn, as ive identified it in american mnemonics, something that was important to me in this book, in my research was athat i not simply assume that we know how memory works. I meanmaybe we do, right . Maybe art, maybe today our neurology is the best that there will ever be. You know, maybe our understanding is, is always going to be state of the art. But but in any case, you know, as a historian, what i tend to look at is how what people think at a given time period about something influences them. And so i spent a lot of time i spent actually before i got into the hair and all that, i just spent a year or two reading essays on memory itself in the time period, which i tend to in the book on 1790, the 1840, the first 50 years after the revolution in the constitutional convention. And because i wondered, did they think about memory in their own way, you know, compared to us in a different way, perhaps, than do and if they did and it turns out they did, they had this materialist that they were aware of and that to them was new and exciting. And if they, as they did turns out, did it then affect the they went about remembering Something Like the American Revolution. Did it have perhaps unintended but actual political effects . Did it affect whose memories would be accredited . Because if you think memory works, you know this way and not that way, that might influence what you take to be valid memory, you know, memory that is that is properly to be accredited, to be accepted is true. In fact, i found first that they had their own view. This physical view, and that it did up having unintended but significant political effects in general. It tended over time to take things in a democratizing direction. I argue in the book that it was one of the factors that leads to the democratizing nations. I prefer to use the plural that that we probably all heard of, but historians have talked about for a long time in, so to speak, that the age of jackson. I dont personally love the term, especially were talking really about that. But but in 1820s and in the 1830s, and to give you just a sense of how early americans themselves thought about this, they one thing thats true of them was true of the culture was that even though they they had new ideas and put new twists on things, they liked to relate their ideas to to ancient received notions and if you look at the at visual that i gave you there on the left hand side of the screen what youre seeing, there is a depiction of simonides of ceos who was a greek poet that herodotus, you know the romans. Of course, for fans of Greek Culture that herodotus who the grecoroman culture and and they and then the members of the generaonthat immediately followed loved to read herodotus that herodotus told a story about and and according to herodotus as depicted here a similarity is of course this greek poet was at a banquet one time and and you can see the image when he was at this banquet, the roof caved innd it killed all these people. And in some entities, fortunately for him, was one of the survivors. And then goes the story he was able to monetize was able afterwards when the families wanted to try to identify the victims and bury them, somebody was able to use sort of a mental tactic. He thought to himself, okay, well, who is sitting next to me at that dinner . And he remembered who that was. And then he thought, well, wait a minute, who is sitting next to them . And he just visually went around the room, his mind, and recovered the location and thus identified the bodies and the the grieving families were able to identify and bury their dead from the story the lesson herodotus taught was this proves then the value of what the grecoroman called local memory that in other words, in order to remember something, you have to tie memory to place you have to locate it. Now in herodotus is telling and if the storys real in some countries telling, this could be abstract. You know in some in his case it was an actual physical event that he recalled. But the people who played off of this to teach mnemonics, to teach how you can remember things, would say you can imagine if youre studying something, you can imagine a you know, or a palace and, fill it in your mind with things. In fact, this still goes on. Youve probably heard some version of this at one time or another. Theres whole Cottage Industry and im in the teaching business and there are people who make their living trying to help students cram for tests right. And sometimes youll still hear versions of this. Theyll say, oh, if you want to, you know, pass a chemistry test, imagine a house. And then, you know, put these chemicals in this room in your mind. And these in this room. And, you know, ive looked at some of that stuff before personally. Maybe it works for other people. Id rather just memorize things, you know, i find it to be difficult, but but you know, to each their own the important point for our purposes is that in the early american republic, if you look at the literature, people were beginning to believe that it cant just be an abstraction, that if you want to make this that mnemonics and memory palaces that technique has to be physically as it was in some entities case. If you look at this, this tohe right here there youre seeing raphaels renaissance era painting the school of athens. Which depicts, you know, plato and and an aristotles school, socrates, plato, aristotle in ancient greece. And this is a detail from that famous painting that today is is in the vatican. But you ha plato pointing upward right actually like like this. And you have aristotle pointing out and theyre debatou know, if you had philosophy classes, the theory of the forms, like basically where is reality itlf and plato is saying, you know, hes the idealist if you remember the stuff hes saying, reality itself isnt really in this world. Itin the mind of god. Its out there and the world is simply more or less fulfilling. Gods blueprint. You know. So the ideas are the important thing. Gods plans and this world is, you know only more or less the shadow of that aristotle is, is, is saying, well, you maybe so, but all can actually talk about is all we know is the physical world out there and quite rightly aristotle thus has been credited with pushing things, pushing human thought and human epistemology. The question of how, what we can know, making it more hands on and practical and saying, lets look out there into the physical. In other words, moving toward science. Hes not necessarily saying that platos completely wrong, that theres no plan or theres no god. But hes saying, you know, all we can do is look out there in the physical world and alfred north whitehead, the famous british intellectual historian in the early 20th century, said that if you look at the history of philosophy, the western world, its a series of footnotes to this debate that that raphael beautifully depicts here. Its a series of footnotes to the debate. Is reality abstract . Is it material . And in early america on the issue of memory, their answer increasingly was its material and very selfconsciously what they were saying was its science. I mean, really important thing to understand culturally about early america is especially after about 1790, is that there is growing enthusiasm. Im certainly not criticizing it for science. All of the things that you can do with science, you know, i think although he starts earlier than this, but think about, you know, benjamin franklin, founder, he was so hands on. Also, when it comes to science and as early americans move toward that materialist view, theyre going to want to have things to physically anchor the memory of the American Revolution, which takes us to this gentleman that you see on the left hand side there. At is that is Charles Wilson peale. D ts his 1822 painting the artist in his museum depicting the first American History museum, which was actually in the long gallery. And you can still go there. Its e second floor of independence hall, still laid out mucth although you cant really see the cubbyhole that yose there and what peale did there in the long gallery was he created the very first again museum of American History, but with catches that are very revealing of early American Culture and early american memory culture, that because you see,ea wasnt just someone generically interested in history, nor was he here. I call him a taxidermist he was that he was a painter as well. And what he does here is he brings all of those interests together in a very suggestive way. And in of this museum, he taxidermy preserved specimens put into all of his cubbyholes and these animals that he is so carefully preserved are animals indigenous to the area that is is becoming the United States of america. And he is making a point with this collection he is trying to bring together Natural History and american emerging political and history. And so at the top, pointedly at the top ringing, the sealing area of the long gallery, this fit museum he has painted a very elaborately leading figures, founders of the United States and he is literally letting us on the secret of this taxonomy, such that as he the curtain if your iwerks upward, youre going in a linnaean classification. Its very selfconsciously scientific. Youre going from lesser animals, quote unquote, all the way up to sapiens, not just anhelp as sapiens, but the Founding Fathers of the United States. United, you kn, u know, we could have an echo track because hes saying basically theyre superho. And George Washington ishe ultimate action figure right up there in the corner. And you can see he has a bald eagle up there, too, as ll you know this is a patriotic apolog, patriotic defense. Scientifically peale believes of the United States of american patriotism. And hes not fooling around here. Peale is aware as American Intellectuals in the period generally are, that there is a scientific critique afoot in the world of the United States and by implication of the founders and of the future possibilities. The United States. Peale is very angry. The worlds leading scientists, as hes regarded at the time, man by the name of buffon in france, who is the fonz claim to fame essentially a naturalist is that he says that america has an inferior physical environment. I mean, everything is wrong. The air pressure, the weather, you know, everything. And that as a result of this inferior physical environment, according to buffon, theres no hope for this emerging United States biologically because of the inferior environment. America, according to buffon, will always diminutive, inferior biological specimens. And peale here is saying, no, we have living creatures in the United States moving all the way up the taxonomy and. The founders themselves, you know, are thriving examples of human greatness. And then if you look at the bottom there, you can see you can see these, you know, large specimens. And you can see here on the other side of the curtain, you see aery large creature, a skeleton. This is mastodon. D peale has uncovered actually and brought to his museum, amassed mastodon. This this, you know, ancient, huge creature in north america. And hes beginning to prepare that for inclusion and the message he sending is now this environment produces, you know, profound creatures of massive size. Hes not the only person by any means whos worried. This, again, you know, a lot of american elite is Thomas Jefferson was so about buffon on this score that he shipped an entire moose to france to literally say in your face, you know, at one point, ben franklin dining with buffon, you know, he was in paris and buffon started running his mouth about all this stuff and franklin said, stand up and fine, you know, didnt know what was about to happen. Buffon stood up and then franklin stood up. And franklin was a lot taller than buffon. And he said, essentially, whos the diminutive, you know, like, hes the tiny guy here. I mean, how does this work . You know . But they were they were really worked up about this. This, by the way, the other image that you see there is another view of Peales Museum and then you see, of course, a lot of washing his hair, right. With with a little portrait that peale made, a little this was commissioned by Martha Washington herself of you know, she had Charles Wilson peale make this for the very purpose that you see theyre putting a of washingtons hair in it so that she could treasure that so peale himself got involved in this whole type of enterprise, but theres more of a larger here. Peale became interested in the 18 teens in. The idea of physiognomy, which can traced to a swiss clergyman Johann Caspar lobster, who in the 18th century began to teach. He really basically quit worrying about theology and taught science as. He imagined it, at least instead, he began teaching this idea that he called physiognomy the essence, of which was that by syntactically, you reasoning from from parts to wholes, that you could look at little bits of a persons body reason, their moral character from it. And he developed his own rules about how you can do this. And one of those characteristics was human hair in, fact lavatory in his manual on physiognomy said from the alone we may know the and peale was into that you know and so when he made these which were probably the most critically acclaimed paintings their day they were of the of the framers of the United States. One of the things he was proud of was that he captured the hair. And by the way, a little tidbit, George Washington refused to wear a wig. He didnt have to. He had great hair. He powdered every day. But. Peale and his son, rembrandt, who kind of took over the Family Business of chronicling the founders when his dad died in the. Early 1820s, they were proud of the fact he and his son, rembrandt that they saw washington hair before he powdered it when. They were doing studies of his form basically for their because they got hair right. And with all this libertarian stuff, they really believed that would help scientists in the future to prove scientifically that it wasnt just a matter of opinion, that washington was all that that he and the founders were that great. And then you see this analogical analysis because while peale died in 1824, before really came the scene, it it enters the United States in the 1830s you may know about but its better known today. But was a fad that spread europe to the United States. The the disciples of which believe that scientifically you could analyze peoples character by looking at protuberances on their skull and you could map a persons skull. And that because qualities in the human brain in qualities that people have like theyre different aspects of intelligence and even morality according to the phrenology have different organs in the brain that are localized within the brain. And they said that if you have a quality in spades, like if youre really strong in Something Like courage that, youre going to have a correspondingly large organ of courage in your brain its going to be a large lump that therefore you can just map, you know, skulls and make inferences about peoples. They labeled people skulls. Actually an actual readingfs Charles Wilson peales grandson by the same name, Charles Wilson peale. The second. And they they started doing this appeals museum after he died. Rembrandt his his son who again takes over the effort to understand the founders with science, was really into this and heres an interesting detail about this one of the qualities that the fernald judges thought they could show one of the organs they discovered in the human brain is an organ of locality which the organ, they said that ties to that materialist view of memory. In other words, that you have to have a local a located physical anchor for memory. So that becomes, again, a proof that the human brain, according to them, is wired to require the relics. And it doesnt even have be religious anymore. So you you can they can justify collecting you know lots washing his hair and they dont even though most of these most americans at the time 1918 40 not all but many are protestants and they and they pride themselves on being protestant and therefore my my take but many of them saw themselves sort of militantly anticatholic and they and they would be against, you know, what they saw as as catholic interest in reliquary. They would do a similar thing now with with political relics. You can use the term relics, but they would say, well, were not venerating them in the religious sense. Were scientifically anchoring memory because the requirements of locality peale represented this a conservative view of memory when he had that museum that i showed you a moment ago at independence hall, its actually quite apropos that the people who wrote the constitution came and saw Peales Museum when they would take sometimes in working on the constitution. Now im a fan of the constitution. So many ways, as many of us are, but i do think its true to say, even though many of the same people are involved in writing the constitution, as were involved in approving the declaration of independence, and of course some of the drama happens in the same building, right . Independence hall in 1776 and then 1787, most historians would say, and i would i would certainly agree that there is a certain amount of movement for for reasons, not necessarily foolish reasons, but theres a movement from 1787 im sorry, from 76. Where in the declaration of independence the generation is throwing off government power and using natural law, you know, to rebel, to 87, where they say, well, wait a minute, we dont want to get completely crazy about this. And some people are shays rebellion in 1784, you know, some people think now were going to have its a no mean ism. Well, were not going to have any laws. And so they come back literally to the same place. And in the constitution say, were going tighten things up a little bit. Now, in other words, the constitution is kind of counter revolutionary. It is in a certain way. Consider it. And peale is sending a message in his museum that the founders are not just average folks. They are this elite and they know what theyre doing. And he brings average americans. He sets the prices really low at the museum. He brings them in and he writes in his notes. He wants them to see the elites up, their Founding Fathers and stuff. And awed by this. And he wants them to literally put themselves in their place and be humble and accept the new constitution and no more revolutions. That conservative view prevails a while you see the same thing in the 1790s with the beginning of the state Historical SocietyMovement Starting first in massachusetts with the first great state Historical Society in the United States. And this guy, jeremy belknap, he is a very concerned with shays rebellion, with what he sees as know too much democratization in American Culture. And he says, we have to get a handle on the memory of the past and and formalize it and make sure the great men are respected. We dont have just a sort of peoples gone crazy, you know. So he starts trying to tighten the reins and then you get people like this guy in philadelphia who is going to be one of the people whos involved there with collecting the lock of washingtons hair and starting. John fanning whats a film . The philadelphia im sorry, pennsylvania Historical Society and he becomes a corresponding member of a bunch of these. You can see this little memory box where everythings its place. Here he promotes this elitist view where they try to get things under control. To me, the high watermark of that is 1831, where in were in virginia, they start the virginia Historical Society and. Thats the year where you get the, you know, rebellion in virginia. That that that scares the slaveholding elite. Where nat turner picks july 4th. He has to change the date for logistical reasons. But pointedly on july 4th, he wants to lead a slave rebellion and overthrow the slave ocracy in virginia. And yet the thing falls apart. But virginia says, the elites, you know, George Tucker and others, we got to get a handle on their on the memory of the revolution. So they start the state Historical Society, by the way, love these history societies. Theyve saved a lot valuable things for historians. But the original roots of these things as they would tell you today, tended to be very conservative things start to change, though, which is really the theme of my book in in relatively short order in the 1820s and thirties. And i think they change largely for reasons demographic and an analogy i would draw is to when i was a little kid in the 1970s and eighties, like a lot of little boys, i guess growing up and certainly history minded ones, i would Read Everything i get my hands on about World War Two, but now i look back and a lot of those books i read when i was a kid and what i notice is in those books, one gets the impression that World War Two was fought, you know, of by for the great generals. I mean, it was as if in those books it was this as if the troops of the line barely existed. You know, they were just millions of people in the aggregate here that the great generals moved around chess pieces, you know, and it wasnt until i got to graduate school in the 1990s that you start to get things like tom brokaw, his book, the greatest generation in pop culture, at least. And and you got things like is the band of brothers where all of a sudden people were interested in having page soldiers stories. And why were we interested and culturally because so many World War Two veterans were dying and the officers had tended to be, of course, fewer in number. So in general, there were always less of them, but they also tended to be older. And by the 1990s there were very few officers. Any rank left to tell us about war two so all of a sudden, when we wanted to hear from someone, we talked to privates, you know, something very similar happens by the 1820s and thirties when it comes to the memory of the American Revolution. So that if you look at census records, the 1840 census as the best example, they actually asked people, did you serve in the revolution . And if you take things down to the sort of face to face community by that time, if you look at the people who are alive, its almost excuse 50 privates even drummer boys from the American Revolution and as George Bancroft living history at the time said all of a sudden these guys who nobody cared about in terms of their role in the revolution, they were a dime a dozen. You know, these low ranking guys all of a sudden now theyre icons of the revolution. And they actually were confused by know, as bancroft said, they obviously pulled out, you know, obscurity and carted to 4th of July Celebration was until he said their are ready to fall out and people want to know what they saw you know at the revolution and so you go from this is one of rembrandts paintings of george from from his pottery parterre you know from his patriotic father know painting of George Washington to this is e. B. Hilliard in 1862, during the beginning of the civil war, puts out a book of literally the last known survivors of the American Revolution, the last people getting a pension. And he out these photographs of them because actually have the technology then and one of them is this guy daniel waldo, just a private, you know, and waldo dies. Theyre also all that frankly, several of them die as theyre going to publication and he writes in the script you know, because everybody wants to know where are they . Can i go see these living relics . They call them, you know, the revolution that physically instantiate thing. Annie wilder, daniel waldo. You know, he says basically well, you know, if people want to ask, where is waldo, which has a whole different resonance today. He says hes dead, but there is a lock of his hair thats been preserved and that shows you the drift in and i think an exciting way where all of a sudden now average people matter, lots of people are going to step onto the stage now and in the 1820s and thirties, when the old guard is literally dying or dead, when the office stairs are gone, when washington and friends the elite are, you know, officers are gone, and when average people stories are now being heard for the first time, you know, in a privileged sort of fashion, and it creates an opening for new tellings of the American Revolution, including for women. This woman, emma willard, is a she was a masterer, an, just unbelievable. And ive read all of her textbook. She writes textbooks in the 1820s and thirties on American History. They were really well done. And her students revered her. And i just want to say, ive been in the teaching business for 30 years. My students are very kind to me, but i worry every time at this, because in the 1890s you can see what her students did here after she died. They made a statue of her all. Right. And its still there, you know, in new york. And in troy, new york. I just dont see that happening any time soon for me. But it was actually pointed that they made a statue because she believed in that material view of memory that you have to anchor memory material. She taught that to them and she taught them when lafayette visited the United States in 1823 and 24 and took this memory tour, she made her students where she got lafayette to come to her school in new york. She she made sure they shook his hand. She made sure they took souvenirs, you know, got his autograph. And she taught them to get little artifacts, their living relatives, because, again, the material stuff mattered. And she even wrote about locks of, washingtons hair, you know, in textbook. One of her students took message to heart. And this is lk of georges hair here. And Martha Washington ch above that, you can fd in a museum in chicago that of her students kept in a scrapbook that still exists. And this is an illustration in one of emma willards books that shows that memory palace idea, you know, where shes so focused on that this is my favorite maybe in American History. Just the other day, one of my students offhandedly said, if you could talk to anybody in American History, who would it be . You know, they were expecting washington or lincoln, but i got a lot of data on those people. And if i only get one picture, i want to meet this guy, the best image i ha of whom is this right here where hes sitting in this rocking chair that he drew himself and he drew it on a remittance for a pension check that he was owed because he was a pensioner from the American Revolution. And he was part of this wave of new attention to average people. He was a drummer, boy, you might say, just a drummer boy in the american. And he was africanamerican, which is actually an important part of the story. He was one of the we dont have exact numbers but between 4 to 6000 africanamericans who served in the patriots died in the revolution. And after the he went through all of the cultural social challenges that africanamericans did, he lived middletown, connecticut, and he he lived to see a greade of cultural, unfortunately, retrenchment in American Life involving things like the rise of scientific racism and the the harsh attitudes that that that were underwritten by it in American Culture, including right there where he lived in middletown, connecticut. You see that frontispiece of a book there that is a published address while he was living there in middletown, connecticut, was published by wilbur fiske, who was the president of a university. And i pointed to where took me years to find it. But im convinced i found exactly where it is and. I could show you on street view, where it is, where it was, but auschwitz cottage was this exact spot here and just a few hundred feet was first, a military institute for boys. This guy, captain partridge, ran this place, and then he sold the campus to what became wesleyan university. One of the first, you know, christian colleges in the United States today. It and even that was it was a good school in ways today a wonderful elite school in fact. But wilbur fisk was their first president. And fisk wrote this treatise, really gave a speech and then published it for colonization for and this a terrible thing to say, but its just the truth. Hes part of this movement to deport, to and and this fellow hammond ahmed, who served in the American Revolution, wasnt going anywhere. You know, he knew that he had the bona fides not only to live in the United States, but to be revered properly as an american hero. He says in his pension application, i this charge blood from a wound suffered at the battle of germantown. And he was very proud of his service for the patriot cause. And this lock of hair that you see here is a lock of hair that he said that washing curtains airs had at some point given to him and he claimed that after the war, at some point he had been a a servant was his term. But one would assume it must have been enslaved the servants of George Washington. That specific claim. I cant verify ive talked to many times to Mary Thompson. Hes recently retired as the inhouse historian mount vernon. She she cant find evidence of it. Shes shes worked on a lot, although, you know, marys very sophisticated. And she can tell you there are scenarios where maybe in situations maybe he did some temporary stuff for washington. But so i dont know you know he was in any sense employed by washington in such a way. But i will you i was able to find in late breaking way so that i didnt even include it in the book at military academy that later becomes the grounds for wesleyan university. The boys who took a a a subscription in to give money to harvard argument when his wife and one of those boys was a lineal heir. Washingtons adopted children and hit that boys dad. I was able to had locks of washingtons hair that he had received and it is strangely plausible that that boy would have given, you know, the hair. So i dont know. But its just remarkable how much of it made his way in the world saying, i have this connection to washington and i other africanamericans are patriots. And its just really i. A beautiful touching story about about the truth of the American Revolution. How people like him were able to increasingly make that truth. Army gave anothepael of that which i also discovered still exists. And thas a wild story. How i hunt it down. Buhe ge bit of that hair to a student at wesleyan when the university changed and thus it got caught up in the issue of religion. Wesleyan university was methodist and and wilberforce. That guy said, you got mad because he said, you know, you shouldnt be giving away washingtons hair. Its too precious of a relic. Funny thing is, wilbur fisk, when he went to europe, wrote a whole thing about how catholics have relics and we shouldnt be doing that kind of thing, you know . And yet you he was fine with relics of washington, in fact, protected of them. But its very revealing and i talk a lot in the book about something that i think still haunts. Its its the rise of, i think, mistaken. And i say this someone teaches a at an evangelical university and someone who myself and to borrow c. S. Lewis his phrase may convinced evangelical when it comes to his storied christianity to what lewis called mirror christianity. You know, back at the time of christ. But there is a genealogy that i talk about in the book where in the 1820s and thirties. I think mistake only and i think sincerely, but a lot of evangelicals in that after the great awakening became convinced falsely that that the Founding Fathers in the main believe what they believed and the evidence says they didnt. You know, i mean, jefferson said the resurrection was the delivery of crazy imaginations. Adams you know, said that he couldnt believe that god come to earth to be spit upon by people. They didnt believe in the incarnation. But that democratizes asian things, sort of cut in the evangelicals unintentionally. This guy, john gray, was an evangel local celebrity in the 19th century. And he and evangelical privates who converted after the war. There were a demographic, really, the kinds of people who became evangelicals. People read their story backwards, looked at these godly evangelical privates in their midst and said, this guy was in the revolution and hes an evangelical i bet all the people in the revolution were evangelicals must have been. They said it over and again and created a mythology that continued this. Lastly, see here this newspaper stories in the catholic telegraph in 1835 and they call the evangelicals out and sa this is unbelievable. You hate relics, but you love locks of washington here. And at this point, i would love to take this painting and talk about in the book. Ill skip it now. Stay in touch with me. If you want, you can go to George Washingtons terracom. Id like to take a couple of questions. If we may. Thank you so much. Thank you. With description, could you give us a description of how the hair was obtained . Was any of it obtained during life like when someone got a haircut yes . Were people deliberately saving . It was some of it obtained after death . Sure. So most of it was certainly obtained during his lifetime. One of his barbers, a guy his last name was pierre in philadelphia, took pride in. The fact that he collected a lot of it when he gave washington these haircuts, its not necessarily clear that washington knew he was keeping all of those afterwards, but he was the source of a lot of this kind of stuff. Watching his own did keep some of it back as washington did, too. And again, that was more common in the 18th century to some extent. People would give out locks of their hair a little bit like. We used to give out school pictures, you know, the 1970s, eighties. Today, i guess it would be selfies is sort of a signature item. Washingtons case, things just went bigger as they so often did with washington. Then any seemingly anyone, others, anyone elses case. There are alleged instances of washingtons hair taken. He was reinterred in 1831, but we argue about whether those are the real thing. People did. One account said that there was no hair when they took his body out and reinterred it and later some people claimed that there was and that they took some of it when he died. Tobias lear, his secretary, his diary quote unquote, i cut some of his hair. How much . I dont know. So yeah, thats what i can say. Go ahead. Our our piece of washingtons hair is reddish brown. Yes. For how long did he have . Reddish brown hair . You know, i would probably to somebody like Mary Thompson who really knows these things, you know, the now just retired historian from mount vernon, my my sense of it, ive never actually its a good question ive never worked out the chronology seems to me that he that he kept his natural color. Its hard for me now because he powdered it all the time. You know, pretty early in his life. And it ends up that way in most paintings. But my sense of like people who saw without the powder is that he kept it a long time, but he didnt didnt very aggressively. But i couldnt give you a year or anything like that. Yeah, i think i started growing earlier in life. He did. We have one question from the folks online by what process is the hair authenticated . Do. Sure. So again, the dna hasnt so far been used with much success, although well probably get there very soon if people are willing, you might have to destroy some to get there, which is one of the complications. But generally, its the best we can do today is to use standard provenance stuff. In other words, you look at letters, you know, things like that and you look at, you know, do we have letters where the washington family says, i gave some of this to someone and then do we have a custody over time thats well attested in in letters its not its not perfect know one of the best attested examples would be the in massachusetts the masons of massachusetts have a lock of washingtons hair that is in a an urn that paul revere himself purpose built when washington for that and they got it directly from martha i mean its well attested in in the evidence from the time in the book i do this whole section in afterword on cameo appearances of washingtons hair through history and its that little game people play on the internet where they actors six degrees of kevin bacon or something i play it with my students. I can connect almost any major american historical event to washingtons hair. You know, like robert e lee had a robert e lee had a lock of washingtons hair. He married into the custers family, abraham lincoln, at one point gave a lock of hair to someone who put it in with with you know, a ring with washingtons. Ulysses grant held that urn at one point in a ceremony with washingtons. So, you know, there you got the Major Players in the civil war. I could go and on strangely its always there the hair is there go ahead and okay you said something about no belief in the resurrection but he asking for his body to stay out for three days and three night just in case hes raised from dead. He doesnt want to get found stuffed the ground. Yeah. Now, mary. Mary thompson actually has the best book i would say on washingtons religious beliefs. But there are dueling schools of thought. Its fundamentally were not sure what he meant by that remark. One idea is that he was afraid that maybe he wasnt going to be completely dead because, you know, they didnt always get that right. And there were stories and actual instances where people were resuscitated in the grave. We dont know. He always any theological question. Yeah, but the book sacred fire has hundred and hundreds of biblical quotes from almost every book. Yes there i have read that one. Yeah. And its got a whole table of everything from like wanting to hang people on the higher hill hangman for stealing from the army i mean, he talks about moses, his hygiene in 1775 the american was Just Institute he had tremendous range in fact 50 times the fig tree you know where each man dwells in israel under and peace so it seems to me that he had a lot of hope for the resurrection because. People hoped that their hair would be enough for resurrection even. Yeah Mary Thompson does a beautiful job. Well, you did a beautiful job tonight. I to thank you as very special we used to do hair tests as doctors all the time for lead mercury thats how they claim that napoleon was another and lincoln was had lead in his hair. Thats been done with washington at uva a few years ago. Did he have anything . Well, what they found is the bullet point. I remember that he had an excellent diet they said he had a centrist diet, well balanced. Of course he did. Right. Washington always wins. Thank you all so much. I