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