Happy Bicentennial to Me!

I don't like to talk about it much, but my standard bio claims that I was born in 1823, which was some time ago. The exact date is Jan 27, 1823, so that's coming up in a few short weeks. I'm not planning on having tall ships sail around New York Harbor or set off any fireworks or sing that great tune by Henry Gibson, but I may treat myself to something appropriate for a man of my age. 

You're probably curious about what I remember from the old days. My extreme youth is pretty much lost as it is to many, and diaries my mother was keeping were lost in the Great Fire of 1845 along with much other property down in the warehouse. I was working over on Rector street and it was a constant sequence of blasts and falling debris. I was up in the country for the earlier fire in 1835, but definitely remember buildings that were burned down then too. Sic transit gloria mundi. Yes, lots of people dropped Latin phrases all the time.

All through the first half of the 19th century, even having decisively beaten British forces and established something of an economic presence in the world, the USA still had a cultural inferiority complex. It was up to us to prove we were as good as those governed with the divine endorsement of sovereignty. It was not enough that we started losing our accents. We needed music and art,  poetry and dance that were unmistakably American. This turned out to be the Hudson River School of painting.

The lower class American accent was not really significantly divergent from northern Irish at the time. People would take up idioms slowly, and imitate idiolects until nobody knew who they were imitating. This is the kind of stuff you can notice over a period of 80-110 years. Audio mass communication did a lot to stop accent development.

And really, the times changed rapidly with the steamboat and rail roads. The world moved at two speeds then: walking and riding horses, and the new miraculously faster and reliable engine driven transports. Running a rail line through undeveloped land shrank the distances between city centers, and junctions created centers where there were none before. Communities did not have to be self supporting anymore and could rely on imported food, clothing and building materials.  

There's a whole other thing, which has to do with memory. Once you pass 140 or so, if you don't have good documentation, memory is pretty unreliable, and tends to merge with things you've read. Things I think I know about Lewis Carroll, since I actually knew Alice Liddell and her sister Lorina, just seem unreliable and dream like, or picked up from his letters collections, which of course have an unreliable narrator. The past turns into a kind of pudding. 

Memories have their own timbres, and the older ones are quiet, thin or missing partials and more important, memories to modulate to and harmonize with. But some things are still very strong. There was a lot more sawdust around, sawdust and hay, and whale oil, and those smells are still very sharply recalled. 

Early audio recording technology was VERY impressive in its day, just as early photography was. The first impression of photography was that it had an unbiasedness which still shows up in the phrase "The camera never lies". Of course it lies, but it's very seductive. Phonograph and dictaphone recordings, though, always had a scrim of artifacts that you had to pass through to understand the sounds. It was like listening to someone in another room in a rainstorm - nothing your ears couldn't handle. The music and speeches of home recordings showed how speaking loudly forced a kind of rhetorical dialect, which might be dropped accidentally from time to time during the recording after recovering from a cough or sneeze. 

Things broke all the time. They were mostly hand made, though, which meant someone could fix it. We would marvel at modern materials science, though. Things were heavy. Processes needed manual and animal labor. Food was unregulated and sometimes more poisonous. Housing was drafty and sooty.