Whaling America
The Wreck of an 1830s Whaler Offers a Glimpse of America’s Racial History
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The story of the Essex in the 2015 Movie "In the Heart of the Sea." The Essex was an American whaler from Nantucket, Massachusetts, launched in 1799. While under the command of Captain George Pollard, Jr., in 1820 a sperm whale attacked and sank her.
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PROFILES IN SCIENCE
Triangulating Math, Mozart and ‘Moby-Dick’
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Illustrations by Rockwell Kent
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Whale Oil illumined the street lamps of America, fueled the Industrial Revolution, and resulted in the mapping of unknown oceans.. |
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Illustrations by Rockwell Kent
Chapter 42, of Herman Melville’s Moby–Dick is entitled “Whiteness of the Whale.” For Melville this descriptive title symbolizes America before the Civil War. The whale, or “demon,” represents original sin, and slavery, which divides the country. While Melville was working on Moby-Dick in 1850, Nathaniel Philbrick in his book Why Read Moby-Dick, comments that “Boston became the epicenter of outrage [towards slavery and the] Fugitive Slave Law, and [that] Melville’s father-in-law, Judge Lemuel Shaw, was the reluctant focal point. Although Shaw hated slavery, he also loved his country and its laws, which it was his duty to uphold. So it was Shaw who ordered that a slave who’d made his way to Boston be turned over to his Southern captors. Riots and general bedlam erupted, with Shaw being hanged in effigy” (Philbrick 54).
Melville finished Moby–Dick and was ready to send it to his publisher when he met Nathaniel Hawthorne. In the friendship that ensued, Hawthorne challenged Melville into tapping into the dark epic strengths of Shakespeare’s tragic characters, resulting in the creation of the character Captain Ahab.
Illustrations by Rockwell Kent
Nantucket Whaling Museum
Providence Public Library Whaling Archive
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Ken Burns and his collaborators have been creating historical documentary films for more than forty years. Known for a signature style that brings primary source documents, images, and archival video footage to life on screen, these films present the opportunity to pose thought-provoking questions for students, and introduce new ideas, perspectives, and primary sources.
Lesson Plan (46), Video (322), Media Gallery (92), Interactive (1), Image (26), Document (15) for Grades 4-13+
Peabody Essex Museum
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“Embedded in the narrative of Moby–Dick is a metaphysical blueprint of the United States. Melville fills the book with telling similes and metaphors that allow a story set almost entirely at sea to evoke the look and feel of America in 1850” (Philbrick 62).
Illustrations by Rockwell Kent
Books Found In the Saugus Middle High School Learning Commons
Get a free copy of Moby-Dick
Moby-Dick Audio Book
The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is the nation's record keeper. Of all documents and materials created in the course of business conducted by the United States Federal government, only 1%-3% are so important for legal or historical reasons that they are kept by us forever.
Those valuable records are preserved and are available to you, whether you want to see if they contain clues about your family’s history, need to prove a veteran’s military service, or are researching an historical topic that interests you.
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910 PHI
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In Melville’s Moby–Dick, slavery represents the original sin of the Old Testament, with humanity like Jonah running from that sin to the ends of the world, Before finally being swallowed up by the huge white whale representing slavery and its dark consequences.
A Look At Accuracy And Turner's Whaling Quartet.
According to Oscar Wilde, life imitates art. In his The Decay of Lying — An Observation (1891), he wrote:
"Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas-lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows? To whom, if not to them and their master, do we owe the lovely silver mists that brood over our river, and turn to faint forms of fading grace curved bridge and swaying barge?"
He might have had a painter like Joseph Mallord William Turner in mind when he wrote these words. Turner's famous paintings of ships at sea do not merely illustrate their motif, but in their atmospheric and spacious qualities they can almost be said to have created it.
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Moby-Dick and Oil-Field Diving in the Gulf of Mexico
Where a 21st-century Ishmael full of wanderlust might go to ‘see the watery part of the world.’I first attempted to read Moby-Dick in the summer of 1975. My grandmother, born in 1909 and baptized Caroline Gorgas Pickel, read voraciously her whole life. She subscribed to the International Collectors Library Book Club and bought me a copy of Melville’s masterpiece as a gift. I was eleven years old and recall reading a dozen or so pages before putting it down. The book seemed unreadable, and I considered discarding it. However, the edition had a fancy-looking faux-leather cover and seemed important in the way that collectible books do to a kid. Also, the way my grandmother described Ahab and the albino whale hooked me deep. I could hear Ahab’s whalebone leg striking the deck with a sound like the “crunching teeth of sharks” and picture the immortal whale with “groves of spears” in his marble-white flank. Needless to say, I kept the novel and have it on the bookshelf now. My grandmother inscribed the front leaf. We were close, and it is the only hardback novel she ever gave me. Many years later I read Moby-Dick properly, and Melville’s world poured into my own like an ocean swell.
Works Cited
Course Hero. "Moby-Dick Study Guide." Course Hero, www.coursehero.com/lit/Moby-Dick/. Accessed 21 Sept. 2017.
Kent, Rockwell. Moby-Dick. Illustrations. 1930. Accessed 8 May 2017.
Philbrick, Nathaniel. Why Read Moby-Dick? Penguin, 2012,
Course Hero. "Moby-Dick Study Guide." Course Hero, www.coursehero.com/lit/Moby-Dick/. Accessed 21 Sept. 2017.
Kent, Rockwell. Moby-Dick. Illustrations. 1930. Accessed 8 May 2017.
Philbrick, Nathaniel. Why Read Moby-Dick? Penguin, 2012,