Response Paper 2

Select one of two options below and compose a response in keeping with the assignment guidelines.

1. We would like you to respond to this week’s readings and consider the subject position of both the authors and the people they are writing about. Via Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map, we have John Snow and Henry Whitehead considering the Broad Street/Golden Square community. We have the white, middle-class Florence Nightingale writing a manual for every home, and the Black, British-Jamaican Mary Seacole recounting her adventures. And, of course, we have Steven Johnson writing in the 2000s about people in the nineteenth century. We can also consider this grouping a collection of portraits of men and women working really hard in their vocations. How might the identities of the authors affect their perspectives? What can we learn about identity categories of class, race, and gender from these documents? Does Johnson, writing in our lifetime, help us navigate the social constructs of the nineteenth century—and, if so, how?

2. This week we are adding to the variety of genres of our reading material. In addition to The Ghost Map and the newspaper articles from last week, we now have Florence Nightingale’s how-to manual for nursing, Mary Seacole’s memoir, and Florence Nightingale’s data visualization work. Think about the (presumed) audience and goals of each narrative. What might these different forms have to offer us in terms of understanding this moment in the nineteenth century?