Papers by William D . Moore
Shaker Fever, 2020
In 1962, journalist Richard Shanor, writing in the magazine Travel, reported on a booming subfiel... more In 1962, journalist Richard Shanor, writing in the magazine Travel, reported on a booming subfield of heritage tourism. "Today," he wrote, "an increasing number of visitors each year are discovering... the fascination of Shaker history, the beauty of Shaker craftsmanship, and the amazing number of ways Shaker hands and minds have contributed to the American heritage.'" Shanor and the editors of Travel recognized the fruits of the efforts of individuals from New Hampshire to Kentucky who were opening Shaker villages to the public as heritage sites.
Solomon’s Temple in America
Freemasonry and the Visual Arts from the Eighteenth Century Forward, 2020
The Masonic Lodge Room, 1870-1930: A Sacred Space of Masculine Spiritual Hierarchy
Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, 1995
Book Review:Washington Allston: Secret Societies and the Alchemy of Anglo-American Painting David Bjelajac
Winterthur Portfolio, 1998
Book Reviews Stephen Bowe and Peter Richmond . Selling Shaker: The Commodification of Shaker Design in the Twentieth Century . Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007. x+404 pp.; 56 black‐and‐white illustrations, index. $40.00
Winterthur Portfolio, 2009
Suffering for Territory is one of those rare monographs that has much to offer to numerous audien... more Suffering for Territory is one of those rare monographs that has much to offer to numerous audiences as it interlayers a sophisticated theoretical analysis with highly insightful historical and ethnographic detail. It also combines a carefully situated political and ethical commentary with an engaging writing style that easily carries the reader through a rich landscape while conveying a historicized terrain of power and struggles, localized vulnerabilities, and ironic humor. In this ethnography, Donald S. Moore examines the cultural politics of power, place, and social identification at various levels of action (e.g., local, national, regional) as they intersect with the livelihoods and struggles of people living in or passing through an eastern Zimbabwean locality on the border with Mozambique that resonates highly with African nationalist import. The focus is Kaerezi, home of the late Chief Rekayi Tangwena, famous in Zimbabwe and elsewhere for leading his people against colonial land evictions in the late 1960s and early 1970s and in 1975 for escorting Robert Mugabe, who was fleeing the Rhodesian forces, over the border into Mozambican camps controlled by the guerrilla forces of the African nationalist group he was soon to lead. Moore makes substantive contributions to the understanding of Zimbabwe and southern Africa, to the conceptual and heuristic tools deployed in analyzing state power, development, sovereignty, and livelihoods in Africa and beyond, and to refashioning ethnographic studies to become more astutely engaged in the cultural politics informing the localities of their research. Drawing on thirty months of fieldwork between 1988 and 1996, including a period of over two years spent in Kaerezi, Moore lays bare the dense (or to use his apt metaphor of choice, "entangled") social geographies of racialized, gendered, and at times, ethnicized land politics in Zimbabwe. He invokes the idiom of "suffering for territory" used by many of his Kaerezian interlocutors to convey the brutalities they experienced during the colonial period and what they struggle with now to make land claims
Darius Wilson, Confidence Schemes, and American Fraternalism 1869-1926
Journal for Research into Freemasonry and Fraternalism, 2013
Many scholars, including Mark Carnes and Mary Ann Clawson, have noted that the last quarter of th... more Many scholars, including Mark Carnes and Mary Ann Clawson, have noted that the last quarter of the nineteenth century was the ‘golden age of fraternity’ in the United States. These years, during which America transformed from a rural society with an economy based in agriculture to an urban nation funded by industrial manufacturing, were also a time of frauds, hucksters, and charlatans who exploited the country’s rapid changes as opportunities to enrich themselves at the expense of others. This paper examines the career of Darius Wilson, who founded the Royal Arcanum, assumed the title of ‘Grand Master of the Venerable Symbolic Grand Lodge Ancient Egyptian Rite of Freemasonry for the United States of America’, and claimed to have developed a cure for deafness. Between 1875 and 1915, Wilson was both hailed for providing insurance to poverty-stricken immigrants and decried as a fraud who foisted worthless fraternal, medical and financial certificates upon a credulous public. A resident of Boston, Massachusetts, Wilson was a member or Rochester, New York’s Yonnondio Lodge No. 163, F. & A.M., before he was expelled. Subsequently he was repeatedly arrested and tried for improperly selling masonic degrees. Wilson provides a case study for the exploration of issues of authority, legitimacy, and confidence within the American industrializing economy, and will provide new perspectives for understanding fraternalism at the birth of the twentieth century.
Freemasonry and the Visual Arts from the Eighteenth Century Forward: Historical and Global Perspectives, 2018
Americans of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries shared specific ideas concerning t... more Americans of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries shared specific ideas concerning the appearance of Solomon's temple. This conception was shaped by a specific set of artists, art works, and buildings. This American conception of Solomon;s Temple was not exclusive to Freemasonry. Rather, the fraternity was so prevalent within American society during this time that the organization's concern with Solomon's temple influenced the nation's culture more broadly.
Jerome Count, his Shaker Village Work Camp, and the Rediscovery of Shaker Music
An analysis of the role that an educational summer program played in rediscovering and disseminat... more An analysis of the role that an educational summer program played in rediscovering and disseminating the music of the Shakers in the middle decades of the twentieth century.
Engineered Epiphanies: Harvard’s Folklore & Mythology Pedagogical Outcomes Revisited Retrospectively.
Examines the learning outcomes of Harvard's Folklore & Mythology undergraduate concentration duri... more Examines the learning outcomes of Harvard's Folklore & Mythology undergraduate concentration during the 1980s.
Catechism, Spectacle, Burlesque: American Fraternal Ritual Performance, 1733–1933
Fraternal organizations, which have often been called “secret societies” or “mystic orders” becau... more Fraternal organizations, which have often been called “secret societies” or “mystic orders” because of their proprietary rituals, have thrived in America since the 1730s. Membership initiations defined these groups throughout their existence, yet ceremonial practices transformed over time in relation to changing social, political, and economic contexts. This illustrated presentation will examine the historic dynamics of American fraternal ritual performance while simultaneously examining the breadth of sacramental objects produced for these groups.
Freedom, Fury and Citizenship: David Bowser's Flags for Pennsylvania's African American Civil War Regiments.
In 1863, David Bustill Bowser, a trained decorative artist, activist abolitionist, and African Am... more In 1863, David Bustill Bowser, a trained decorative artist, activist abolitionist, and African American resident of Philadelphia, painted battle flags for the troops raised by Pennsylvania’s Supervisory Committee for Recruiting Colored Regiments. These flag, presented to the regiments by friends and supporters including groups of ladies and Republican gentleman’s clubs, featured differing charges upon the fields of their obverse and reverse. In creating these military standards, Bowser drew upon patriotic American emblematic traditions through the use of eagles, symbolic female figures, portraits of the founding fathers, classical visual references, and Latin mottoes. However, Bowser combined these elements with images of uniformed African American soldiers wielding swords, carrying rifles, brandishing bayonets, and single-handedly subduing white Confederate officers that spoke of African American agency and empowerment. Broken shackles and abandoned plantations indicated the changes already wrought, while mottoes lettered upon scrolls, including “One Cause, One Country,” “Sic Semper Tyrannis,” “We Will Prove Ourselves Men,” “Freedom for All,” and “Let Soldiers in War Be Citizens in Peace,” were meant to both inspire the men who would march behind these flags and present a vision of the new social order that Bowser and his cohort hoped would follow a Union victory.
By drawing upon visual, documentary, and artifactual evidence, this twenty minute interdisciplinary paper argues that Bowser’s remarkable works, preserved in albumen photographs taken at the time, provide unique insights into the dynamics of how African Americans viewed their role in the nation during the Civil War. Inspired by Dr. Patricia Hills’ seminal work in placing paintings within their historical, economic, and political contexts, in exploring the art of African Americans, and in analyzing the visual culture of the Civil War era, this paper will interpret the complex messages concerning race, class, and citizenship which are encoded within these martial artifacts. Bowser’s works are considered as part of the artist’s oeuvre, within the genre of Civil War regimental flags, and in the shifting and contradictory social and political milieu of Philadelphia in Wartime. Analysis of these tools of African American liberation created by a black artist with the support of white elites offers new insights into a pivotal American moment.
Limning Belief: Freemasons, Shakers, and Adventists
Solomon’s Temple in America: Masonic Architecture, Popular Culture, and Biblical Imagery, 1865-1930
Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, 1995
From Barbara J. Mitnick, ed. George Washington Aemrican Symbol, 1999
Analyzes works within the American tradition of representing George Washington as the Master of a... more Analyzes works within the American tradition of representing George Washington as the Master of a Masonic Lodge. Looks at works produced during his lifetime up to the twentieth century. Examines paintings, lithographs, and sculpture.
In Burlesque Paraphernalia and Side Degree Specialties and Costumes, Catalog No. 439 (Fantagraphics Books), 2010
A cultural and contextual explication of the 1930 DeMoulin Bros. & Co. Burlesque Paraphernalia ca... more A cultural and contextual explication of the 1930 DeMoulin Bros. & Co. Burlesque Paraphernalia catalog which included such bizarre items as spanking machines, altars containing spitting skeletons, and electrical initiation devices. This article explains the importance of humorous "side degrees" within the larger fraternal movement.
Journal for Research into Freemasonry and Fraternalism (3) 1, 2012
Many scholars, including Mark Carnes and Mary Ann Clawson, have noted that the last quarter of th... more Many scholars, including Mark Carnes and Mary Ann Clawson, have noted that the last quarter of the nineteenth century was the ‘golden age of fraternity’ in the United States. These years, during which America transformed from a rural society with an economy based in agriculture to an urban nation funded by industrial manufacturing, were also a time of frauds, hucksters, and charlatans who exploited the country’s rapid changes as opportunities to enrich themselves at the expense of others. This paper examines the career of Darius Wilson, who founded the Royal Arcanum, assumed the title of ‘Grand Master of the Venerable Symbolic Grand Lodge Ancient Egyptian Rite of Freemasonry for the United States of America’, and claimed to have developed a cure for deafness. Between 1875 and 1915, Wilson was both hailed for providing insurance to poverty-stricken immigrants and decried as a fraud who foisted worthless fraternal, medical and financial certificates upon a credulous public. A resident of Boston, Massachusetts, Wilson was a member or Rochester, New York’s Yonnondio Lodge No. 163, F. & A.M., before he was expelled. Subsequently he was repeatedly arrested and tried for improperly selling masonic degrees. Wilson provides a case study for the exploration of issues of authority, legitimacy, and confidence within the American industrializing economy, and will provide new perspectives for understanding fraternalism at the birth of the twentieth century.
From: Southern Crossroads: Perspectives on Southern Religion and Culture, 2008
William Moore and Walter Conser review the construct of "outsider art" and explore its relevance ... more William Moore and Walter Conser review the construct of "outsider art" and explore its relevance as a category for the artistic career of McKendree Robbins Long. In contextualizing Long's art, they suggest that theological and political disputes at the national level help to situate his career, while conflicts over the meaning of his southern identity subvert his biography.
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Papers by William D . Moore
By drawing upon visual, documentary, and artifactual evidence, this twenty minute interdisciplinary paper argues that Bowser’s remarkable works, preserved in albumen photographs taken at the time, provide unique insights into the dynamics of how African Americans viewed their role in the nation during the Civil War. Inspired by Dr. Patricia Hills’ seminal work in placing paintings within their historical, economic, and political contexts, in exploring the art of African Americans, and in analyzing the visual culture of the Civil War era, this paper will interpret the complex messages concerning race, class, and citizenship which are encoded within these martial artifacts. Bowser’s works are considered as part of the artist’s oeuvre, within the genre of Civil War regimental flags, and in the shifting and contradictory social and political milieu of Philadelphia in Wartime. Analysis of these tools of African American liberation created by a black artist with the support of white elites offers new insights into a pivotal American moment.