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[The physician and philosopher Sir Thomas] Browne and others had argued for a variety of reasons that bad dreams could be the result of disruptive foods, personal biology, or spiritual forces. If people were in dispute over what caused bad dreams, they also espoused different theories about how to combat them. For example, some believed in the power of gemstones. Robert Burton suggested that wearing either a ruby or a coral around one’s neck could “repress troublesome dreams.” Various lapidaries offered advice concerning what gems could help or hurt one ’s dreams. Some claimed that diamonds helped a person avoid nightmares. One lapidary noted that “if a man wear it, ” then the diamond would give him strength and protect him from poison, but it would also keep “him from dreaming in his sleep,” whether bad or good. For women diamonds could be more dangerous. According to Thomas Nicols, in his Arcula Gemmea, or, A Cabinet of Jewels, a man could use a diamond to ascertain the fidelity of his wife, but it had to be a “true diamond,” that was put on the head of a sleeping woman. “If she be faithful to her husband,” she will turn to embrace him, “but if she be an adulteress” she will “turn away from him.”

If one was concerned about sad dreams, then chalcedony, also known as sardonyx, was the stone to wear. An amethyst was particularly helpful in keeping one from becoming inebriated if one was drinking, but it could also cause exciting dreams. (Certainly, wearing an amethyst was easier and more pleasant than some other early modern suggestions for avoiding getting drunk, such as eating the roasted lungs of a goat.) Cyrstal was especially valuable because it could preserve its wearers from the terrors of the night. Wearing onyx, on the other hand, could cause someone to have bad dreams. Almost as magical as these cures was one presented by Edward Topsell, who told his readers that “men are delivered from the spirits of the night, called Incubi and Succubi, or else Nightmares,” if they would eat the tongue or gallbladder of a dragon boiled in wine. Only slightly less extravagant was the recipe in a commonplace book that suggested if one took mink’s blood and rubbed it on one’s temple “and so go to your bed and you shall see marvelous things in your sleep.” The book also informs us that if one wants to have exciting dreams of wild beasts, one only has to put an ape’s heart under one’s pillow, a recipe that may have come from the 1615 text, The Secrets of Alexis, which gives the same advice.

Stan Hywet (stone quarry in Old English) was built between 1912 and 1915 near Akron, OH, by cofounder of the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company F. A. Seiberling. It houses many elegant furnishings of the era, including a bronze winged foot, the inspiration for the company’s logo. Stan Hywet Hall & Gardens has received a grant from NEH to assess the preservation of its collection of unique antiques and textiles. —Courtesy Stan Hywet Hall & Gardens

Tensions grew worse in the following weeks. Fights broke out between those who were willing to accept the new priest and those who insisted on a French pastor. Angry crowds gathered outside the church and disrupted services. Police were dispatched to the church to prevent “sacrilege.” By January, the newspapers were reporting near-riots. In one instance, a new choir arrived at the church to find the old choir, which had refused to sing for an Irish priest, threatening violence if the singers took their seats. Angry parishioners followed Father McGee out of the church, abusing and threatening him, and “calling him a d—d Irishman.”

On February 13, 1885, the Bishop closed the church and withdrew the priest, explaining that he had “been compelled to this action by the insubordination of some of the flock.” The church reopened the next year, under another Irish pastor, and conflict began again. Ethnic tensions between Irish and French Canadians in Fall River did not ease until the end of the century when the arrival of Portuguese, Greeks, Poles, Lithuanians, and Italian immigrants changed the ethnic, political, and social mix of Fall River and other Massachusetts cities.

The zither, right, commonly found in southern Germany and other parts of alpine Europe, produces the “oompahs” so typical of German folk music. Playing the instrument, though, which lies on a table in front of the musician and can sometimes have as many as forty strings, requires exceptional digital dexterity and concentration: The performer has to pluck the melody with the right thumb while the fingers of that hand play bass and accompaniment and the left-hand fingers work the frets. Iowa’s Davenport Zither Ensemble has been reviving a tradition that dates to 1885 when German immigrants would gather to engage in hausmusik. This “house music,” as the name implies, was played in peoples’ homes by anyone who showed up with an instrument. Perfection was not so much the goal, though, as was gemutlichkeit, or camaraderie. The German American Heritage Center, in Davenport, IA, has received NEH funding to preserve its growing collection of books, photographs, and personal artifacts that reflect the settlement of thousands of Germans in eastern Iowa and western Illinois.

—Courtesy German American Heritage Center

Martin Heidegger found the universe in the village or town. I found the American universe in the secular monastery atmosphere of the University of Idaho, mainly in Brink Hall, the library with a modern clock tower, the more spectacular Administration with its cathedral-like clock tower and cupola, Ridenbaugh Hall, the Alumni Center—each a triumph of architectural art, each inspirational, especially when the moon is low and looming over Moscow. 105 N. Main Street #2, once part of the hundred-year-old Hotel El Norte, has been my lodging, within sight of three notorious clubs: CJ’s, Moose Lodge and the Corner. The battle between the ascetic intellectual workbench and the profane Orphic Bacchanalias always has been a contest, now one winning out, then the other.

Up here, the long summers are for sun worshipping while the harvests are gathered by combines: green John Deere and red Case. Cycling the hilly streets of the campus demands a seasonal change of bike-brakes. However, a university set on hills is the traditional habitat for contemplation of the arts and sciences, thesis defenses, and the ultimate advances through imagination. The precincts of the campus are among warrior trees that phalanx the predominantly Gothic village where we college folk spend the working day. At night, Main Street appears to be all of Moscow until you discover the foxier locations off it, such as The Alley. On Jackson, the towering silos of the Latah County Grain Growers’ derelict noble structure is topped with a lit red star paying nightly homage to bygone union struggles, workers’ rights, and the once American communist enclave in its appropriately named context: Moscow.

Reprinted with permission of Idaho Humanities and Kevin Kiely.

HUMANITIES, September/October 2009, Volume 30, Number 5

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