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GRAPHICS EDITOR'S NOTE
THIS ISSUE'S GALLERY is a first in that it includes essays by two different historians who both examine the same image. One of the authors, environmental historian Mark Fiege, will be familiar to many readers of Environmental History. It was Mark who came to me with the idea of writing a Gallery essay on the image-rich southern currency notes that circulated before and after the Civil War. That's when I thought of Stephen Mihm, an economic and cultural historian who has just published a fascinating book on counterfeiting in the Untied States during the nineteenth century. Why not have both of these historians write dueling essays on the historic meaning of one bank note? To ensure each author's intellectual independence, after choosing a particularly colorful note from South Carolina printed in 1873, Mark and Stephen had no contact with one another as they wrote. The result is a pair of essays that not only complicate the historic meaning of this image, but also complement one another by illustrating the important connections between environmental, economic, and cultural history.
WE PRESENT THESE ESSAYS in a slightly different format than usual. Rather than running them one followed by the other, the essays appear side-by-side throughout the Gallery. This parallel format, we hope, will emphasize the constructive dialogue implicit in these two wonderfully insightful essays.
NEIL M. MAHER
Mark Fiege and Stephen Mihm On Bank Notes
LOOK AWAY
MARK FIEGE
| WHEN I FIRST SCRUTINIZED THIS $1 certificate of deposit (pp. 352–353), it brought to mind the famous song of the white South, the informal Confederate national anthem, that voices a deep yearning for a lost world of warmth and happiness: "I wish I was in the land of cotton / Old times there / Are not forgotten / Look away / Look away /Look away / Dixie Land."1 Like the song, each of the people depicted on the note invite us to extend our gaze toward an imagined landscape of emotion and myth. On the right, a blacksmith stands in quiet contemplation, his eyes—or his mind's eye—carrying him to a place about which we can only speculate, possibly a sunny dreamland now tinged with nostalgia and regret. On the left side of the note are two cherubic girls. One girl, her face shadowed by the sheaf of grain on her head, stares ahead; the other glances over her right shoulder, perhaps looking to the past as she and her sister proceed into the future. In the centerpiece of the bank note, a man strides forward, his hand grasping a fat cotton boll. Yet he, too, looks away, and we follow his line of sight to the little house in the distance and the chimney from which pours the smoke of a hearth fire. Look away, the figures seem to tell us; look away to a world that once was, might have been, or yet might be. |
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The apparent compatibility between the song and the engravings on the $1 note is not just the product of my own imagination. Attributed to Daniel Decatur Emmett, an Ohioan born of Virginia parents, Dixie (1859) in fact has a connection to paper currency. Before 1860, the Citizens' Bank of New Orleans issued $10 notes imprinted with dix, the French word for ten; "hence the land of Dixies, or Dixie Land, which applied to Louisiana and eventually the whole South."2 Although the certificate of deposit carries a $1 value, not $10, it still manifests, in keeping with the song, powerful strains of southern culture and identity. Look away, say the pictures and the lyrics; look away. |
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