Bancroft Fellows Research Women and Space, Tobacco and Chocolate
Each year, Bancroft selects two UC graduate students to receive Bancroft Fellowships, with funding provided by the Graduate Division and the Kenneth and Dorothy Hill Endowment Fund.
Each fellow receives $10,000 plus fees and health insurance to pursue research at Bancroft crucial to completing their dissertations.
This year’s fellows, both from Berkeley, are Marcy Norton (History) and Jessica Sewell (Architecture).
Bancroft Fellows Jessica Sewell, left, and Marcy Norton with a bust of Hubert Howe Bancroft. |
Marcy Norton’s dissertation topic is “New World of Goods: Tobacco, Chocolate, and the Integration of the Atlantic World, 1492-1700.”
Using 16th-century European medical treatises on tobacco and early New World chronicles at Bancroft, she is tracing the spread of tobacco and chocolate from its original home in the New World to Spain and the rest of Europe.
Crew members on Columbus’ expedition were the first Europeans to actually observe tobacco. Used by natives all over the Americas in religious ceremonies, it was initially considered a barbaric substance. But by the end of the 17th century, tobacco was the largest source of revenue for the Spanish crown, says Norton. Until recently, tobacco was still a government monopoly in Spain.
Norton is not a newcomer to Bancroft. As a senior at Berkeley in 1991, she wrote both a senior thesis and an honors thesis using Bancroft sources — one on the Hetch Hetchy reservoir, the other on emigrant encounters with Native Americans.
Sewell’s dissertation topic is “Gendering the Spaces of Modernity: Women and Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1917.” She has been mining Bancroft’s collections for several years, especially suffragist Annie Haskell’s diaries from the Haskell Family Papers and guidebooks of the time.
“Social conventions were much stricter then,” she says. “It was not appropriate for women to be in certain places unchaperoned — it could even get them arrested for prostitution.
“Restaurants advertised tables for ladies, department stores became all-female spaces, banks had a ‘womens window,’ and library reading rooms had separate spaces for women.
“Cafeterias and movie houses, both new at the time, became places where women could go, even alone.”
Part of Sewell’s investigation is the use of space in the suffragist campaigns of 1896 and 1911. Thanks in part to a greatly expanded use of public space in 1911, California women won the vote nine years before the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed.
Sewell received a BA from Harvard and Radcliffe and attended Parsons School of Design/The New School for Social Research.
Julia Sommer is Editor of Bancroftiana.
Volume 114
Spring 1999
Table of Contents
Bancroft Launches Bioscience Program with Stellar Symposium March 12–13
From the Director: Just what is it that you do, exactly?
The Business of the Humanities The “Trade”— what it is and how Bancroft uses it
The Thrill of the Chase Or, How the Biography of Poet Jack Spicer Came To Be
“The Times, They Are a’ Changin’” Bancroft Launches Free Speech Movement Archive
The Many Uses of Bancroft Collections
Joseph Esherick’s Oral History Illuminates an Architectural Icon
Where Do You “Find” Mark Twain’s Letters?
1999’s Keepsake: San Francisco in the Early 1850s
Bancroft Fellows Research Women and Space, Tobacco and Chocolate
