newly published book on Blanche Ames Ames

Above I’ve been writing about the Ames family for more than 50 years. I myself don’t know of a family that is more colorful or complex. I refer to those descended from the marriage of Union General Adelbert Ames (Reconstruction governor of Mississippi) and Blanche Butler, who was the daughter of the notorious General Benjamin F. Butler.

One of their sons was Adelbert (Del) Ames, Jr., an artist and optical scientist who devised the well-known Ames Demonstrations in psychology (such as his Distorted Room). One of their daughters was an artist and equal rights proponent named Blanche Ames Ames. She has that double name because she married Harvard orchid expert Oakes Ames, whose ancestors had made their fortune providing shovels to those who went west to pan for gold or who worked on the Transcontinental Railroad.

Ames, Iowa, is named for a prominent family member. George Plimpton’s mother was an Ames, and it appears there is also a link to Aldrich Ames, the famous spy. My main interest has usually been the artist and scientist Del Ames, about whom I have published various essays over the years and, more recently, have produced a series of three short online videos.

But I’ve also always been intrigued by Del’s sister, Blanche, in part because he and she worked in tandem on art and science research in the years before the outbreak of World War I. In recent years, there have been various efforts to unearth and celebrate the achievements of Blanche Ames Ames, whose magnificent self-designed mansion is now Borderland State Park in Massachusetts, just south of Boston, a site that is well-worth the visit.

Last year, a 55-minute film was produced, titled Borderland: The Life and Times of Blanche Ames Ames. And now, most recently, a new book has just been published about the shared lives of Blanche Ames and her husband. Titled Blanche Ames Ames (1878-1969) and Oakes Ames (1874-1950): Cultivating That Mutual Ground (Eugene OR: Resource Publications), it was written by Elizabeth F. Fideler, a Harvard scholar who has published earlier books about aging, retirement and related concerns. Especially for those who are interested in the Ames family, women’s studies, and the chemistry of married life, it is a praiseworthy overview of the accomplishments of an amazing American woman. 

life is an ever-shifting network of categories

Poster (© 2019) Roy R. Behrens

Morse Peckham, Man's Rage for Chaos: Biology, Behavior and the Arts. New York: Chilton Books, 1965—

Our lives are bathed in a continuous flow of signs which we interpret to catch the world in an ever-shifting network of categories. The condition of human life is continuous categorical metamorphosis. We are forever engaged in constructing around us an architecture of categories as fluid and yielding to our interests as the air. There is nothing man has not sacrificed, including millions of his fellow human beings, in the vain effort to fix that architecture, to stabilize his categories. But all knowledge, all science, all learning, all history, all thought are unstable, cannot be made static, even by the majesty of the law armed with the power of brute force.

Morse Peckham, Man's Rage for Chaos

Clara Barton | Kenneth Meisner

Portrait of Clara Barton (2012) © Kenneth Meisner

Above In a class about designing digital images, I asked my students to invent "interpretive portraits" of extraordinary men or women from the past, sung or unsung. Kenneth Meisner chose to celebrate the achievements of teacher, nurse and humanitarian Clara Barton (1821-1912).

***

Clara Barton, The Story of My Childhood—

I have an almost complete disregard of precedent, and a faith in the possibility of something better. It irritates me to be told how things have always been done. I defy the tyranny of precedent. I go for anything new that might improve the past.

Susan B. Anthony | Morgan Johnson

Portrait of Susan B. Anthony (2012) © Morgan Johnson

Above In a class about designing digital images, I asked my students to invent "interpretive portraits" of extraordinary men or women from the past, sung or unsung. A number of the students chose historic civil rights leaders, as in this portrayal of suffragette Susan B. Anthony by Morgan Johnson.

***

Anon, in Ida Husted Harper, Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (originally published in the Denver News)—

The press sneers at Miss Anthony, men tell her she is out of her proper sphere, people call her a scold, good women call her masculine, a monstrosity in petticoats; but if one half of her sex possessed one half of her acquirements, her intellectual culture, her self-reliance and independence of character, the world would be better for it.

Victoria Woodhull | Megan Vande Lune

Portrait of Victoria Woodhull (2012) © Megan Vande Lune

Above In a class about designing digital images, I asked my students to invent "interpretive portraits" of extraordinary men or women from the past, sung or unsung. I thought I knew quite a bit about the struggle for American women's civil rights, but I had never heard of Victoria Woodhull (1938-1927), an important leader of the suffrage movement, and the first woman to run for US President. This is a provocative portrait of her by Megan Vande Lune.