New Eden: A Journey through the Early Republic

Category: Uncategorized

  • Whose Spirit Moves?

    The Constable brothers had an interesting relationship with organized religion. As a family they were dissenters—in short, they did not prescribe the idea of a state mandated religion. For them this was the Anglican Church. The separation of church and state enshrined in the United States constitution was an important…

  • Gentlemen Adventurers

    The brothers often found mischief, though they always acted the part of gentlemen even in the wilderness. They might turn burglar but paid for anything taken. 10 Wed. [Wednesday, 12 September 1806] …6 ½ miles further we came to a tavern where we procured a luncheon of tea and toast…

  • Falling for Niagara Falls

    The Constable brothers saw many locales on their long journey—they lingered only briefly or simply passed through many, but waterfalls consistently were something that appealed to William’s romantic sensibilities especially. He describes sketching them repeatedly along their journey, but when he came to Niagara Falls, he was smitten. He describes…

  • Resurrecting the Dead

    The site has had extensive updates on the About page. This is primarily to provide contextual flesh to the bones of the New Eden project description.

  • Young Artists

    The Museum was pleased to welcome hundreds of children—from toddlers to high school students to our annual spring break programs. The library and archives hosted a sketching from the collection activity for four straight days, drawing upon our artists archives and extensive art collection. The theme was artists’ depictions of…

  • Communities

    In the span of a single month, between 15 August and 14 September 1806—on the first leg of their epic 7,073¼ mile journey through the interior of the continent, the Constable brothers encountered a remarkable range of communities living side-by-side. This was part of the reason they had come. They…

  • Past Forward

    The Constable brothers were keenly aware of the uniqueness of what they had encountered on their journey through the United States. William outlived his older brother by twenty-eight years and returned to the United States in 1838, revisiting some of the sites they had seen thirty years before. Between what…

  • Chaos Chronology

    I am particularly fond of the literary technique of inverted narrative. Simply, this is to tell a story by starting at the end. The story of the paper’s arrival in Fort Worth, Texas—what is referred to as provenance (the chain of ownership from the creation of the object to the…

  • The Great and Small

    Historians are interested in the past and make the claim that as specialists they are uniquely situated to be able to parse and decipher this past and by doing so project how that past has affected the present and possible futures. Historians of the French Annales school took this broad…

  • Other Geographies

    I am enamored of the idea of maps. It is a delight to encounter older examples of maps from the time before everything has been logged in minute detail. A favorite, and a good precursor description of the North America that the Constable brothers would encounter, is the pithily titled,…