On the television, we have Bad History
So, I've been watching the baseball playoffs, which means I've been exposed to ads for Other Shows, and thus I started watching Sleepy Hollow.
This show has even less to do with Washington Irving's story than that movie with Johnny Depp and Christina Ricci did, despite having a Headless Horseman and everything. So far, I have my love for Orlando Jones' brand of keyed-up intelligence left intact, and have spent a lot of time shaking my head over the writers' urges to drag in every bit of early Colonial and Revolutionary American history they vaguely recall from school and couldn't be arsed to study further.
Because they're so lazy, not only do they perpetrate absurdities*, but they end up missing lots of opportunities for Cool Stuff, and really, a show like this should have all the Cool Stuff it can fit in.
We start out (skipping over the introduction where Crane meets the Headless Horseman and kills, gets killed, and then exhumes himself) with Crane's explanation of himself. He was a professor at Oxford who ended up in the British Army, got sent to America, and deserted to the Rebel side.
Shall we unpack that just a little? (Let's admit that letting the historical Ichabod Crane and his Revolutionary war-veteran father go is a valid choice, just in passing.) Even more than now, the military and academic career choices were very separate paths in the 18th century, and having invested the time and effort (and use of family and social connections, no doubt) to get onto the faculty (and into a professorship at a relatively young age, rather than being a reader or a lecturer, surely more likely for someone under thirty or thirty-five), it's sublimely improbable that Crane would have dropped all that to get into the army. Even if he had done Something Bad, or was accused of Something Bad, that thing would have to be Very Bad for his connections not to get him off the hook somehow, and in 18th Century Britain, connections were, if not everything, then right up there on the top three things you needed to have to get ahead. There are plenty of examples of brilliant men lacking connections who failed to advance as much as their talents merited, and even more examples of well-connected semi-competents and incompetents making a mess of things. About the only things I can think of that couldn't have been resolved would have been sedition, blasphemy, and the like, which would have been unlikely to indicate the sort of mindset which would lead a man into the army, or else capital offenses--and if his connections couldn't have saved him from trial and conviction, they might well have been able to wangle a pardon and transportation.
That is, being kicked out and sent to the colonies, which up until 1776, would have meant the North American colonies. Want to convince a Briton that he's had it with the mother country and should go ahead and throw it in with the rebels? You could even pitch it as an unjust accusation, giving him even more reason to be in a rebellious frame of mind.
If, on the other hand, you've decided (because you know something about how the academic and military fields worked in 18th century Britain), that in order for your hero to be reasonably young and appealing to your target audience, that chair at Oxford (and the red coat that follows it**) are Not Working but you don't want to make Crane a convicted felon, you could have sent your bright young Oxford scholar over to the colonies to take up an academic position there. Because they totally had real institutions of higher learning in the colonies before the American Revolution!
Here they are***, with the potential advantages to show writers looking for a way to drag in more Cool Stuff:
•Harvard, established 1636, chartered 1650. Boston area, which would hook Crane up with people like Sam and his cousin John Adams, and the other people in the Sons of Liberty Boston Committee of Safety. Then there was the bookseller Henry Knox, who became Washington's chief of artillery. Harvard had a Dissenting (non-Anglican) religious affiliation, but by the early 1770s they might have been willing to tolerate an Anglican† faculty member who was talented enough and didn't get snippy about things.
•William and Mary, established and chartered in 1693. This would tie Crane more closely to people like Washington, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and the Lees. William and Mary was an Anglican institution, in keeping with the official policy of Virginia before the Revolution.
•Yale, established and chartered in 1701. Another place set up by Dissenters, Yale produced such Revolutionary War notables as Nathan Hale and his classmate Benjamin Tallmadge. American school children, at least in my day, were taught about Nathan Hale and his "I regret that I have but one life to give for my country," speech (given just before the Brits hanged him for spying in occupied New York), but Tallmadge is less famous. He was, however, a very important cog in Washington's intelligence operations, and if Crane was spying for Washington, then it's likely Tallmadge would have known him--or known of him. Tallmadge had a fair number of interesting New York area connections himself--his father was a clergyman on Long Island, and after the war he married a daughter of William Floyd, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a wealthy New York politician. Also, let me note in passing that Crane, in the original story, was described as coming from Connecticut. Given the violence done to the original concept, it would have been a nice touch.
•Princeton, established and chartered in 1746. Founded by Presbyterians, Princeton was not so much worried about which denomination its students fell into as it was with getting them educated. Aaron Burr's father was the second president, although he died in 1757, a little too early for us. During the Revolutionary War era, the president was John Witherspoon, another signer of the Declaration. The younger Burr was a student there, as were James Madison and the writer Philip Freneau, and also Hugh Brackenridge. The latter was a chaplain in Washington's army, which might give you an in on Christian occultism to work with.
•University of Pennsylvania, established 1740, chartered 1755. Technically Anglican, but nonsectarian in its policies, the school was a pet project of Benjamin Franklin's. From the 1750s up through the early 1770s, Franklin traveled often between American and Europe, and had many academic and scientific connections. I can see him recruiting for his school quite easily. Also he was a Mason, which has interesting possibilities.
•Columbia, established and chartered in 1754, as King's College. Another technically Anglican but officially nonsectarian institution. Teaching at Columbia would have brought Crane into contact with the young Alexander Hamilton (one of Washington's favorite staff officers), and living in New York would have put him in the position of encountering the old Dutch portion of New York society, people like the Schuylers (Hamilton married a daughter of Philip Schuyler; her sister Angelicamarried the wealthy British merchant John Barker Church, who acted as a military supplier to both the American and French armies during the Revolution), the de Peysters, the De Lanceys, the van Cortlandts (the van Cortlandts had land in the Westchester County area, where the van Texels--van Tassell in the Americanized version--also settled, and a van Cortlandt descendant, Margaret Kemble married the British general Thomas Gage, of occupied Boston fame), the Livingstons, and so on. Not only would this get him hooked up with the Revolutionary War and George Washington, it would get him married to Katrina van Tassell.
•Brown University, established and chartered in 1764, officially Baptist, but, like the colony of Rhode Island, open to all comers. Useful connections here would have been General Nathaniel Greene, and Stephen Hopkins (who signed the Declaration) and Samuel Ward (who died in March 1776, and so missed out), as well as some alumni who fought during the Revolution.
•Rutgers, established and chartered in 1766. Dutch Reformed, and pretty blunt about it.
•Dartmouth, established 1769. Puritan/Congregational, like Harvard and Yale.
I find these last two institutions less interesting. Rutgers was close enough to the action, but not terribly well-organized in the early 1770s, and Dartmouth was way the hell up in New Hampshire, and so pretty far from most interesting activity that might have led a faculty member, imported from Britain, into dissent, sedition, and rebellion. Also, Rutgers's reason for being makes it seem unlikely that they would import a faculty member from Britain, as opposed to the Netherlands.
I could go on, and I probably will, but you see what a great chance at an interesting background they missed giving Crane, by giving him a poorly-researched 'romantic' one instead. I admit my favorites are Yale and Columbia, but any of the first seven schools have a lot of interesting possibilities to exploit over the course of the story, even if some have more than others. It wasn't even very hard to dig this up. You'll notice the majority of these links are from Wikipedia, online source for those who fear libraries since 2001. My starting point? I knew who Nathan Hale and Benjamin Tallmadge were (Tallmadge was involved in that awkward business with Major Andre), and that Alexander Hamilton went to Columbia. I'd heard of transporting criminals to North America and the Test Act, which is pretty irrelevant to the main point. The rest could have been done simply by following links, if you don't have a strong background in Late Colonial and Revolutionary War America. I did look up executions for witchcraft as a sidelight, because 1782 seemed very late for that.
*Executing witches in 1782? Here, let's look at this historical detail, inconvenient as it may be. Also, this post is pretty long already, so I'll express my opinions about Hessians and tea parties later.
Also, surely Genevieve Valentine has gone to work on Katrina's clothing in all those dream sequences. It looks like a Goth-dyed GunneSax prom dress from the 1970s. Plus, why can't Ichabod button his shirt? Besides the Beefcake rule, of course. A well-bred man from the 1770s wouldn't be running around with his shirt unbuttoned in public like that. He'd shave, too, I suspect. Beards were a sign you hadn't been by the barber, or were for seamen; mustaches were for German officers. This leaves aside the issue of why his clothes didn't rot away while he was buried.
**I can't believe he enlisted--that is, took the shilling. Becoming an officer would have involved shelling out the cash to buy his commission, and I think that instead of deserting over his awakening political sentiments, he'd have sold out--why waste that money?--and then gone native. I really can't believe he held a professorship (a really big deal at Oxford and Cambridge, as opposed to lesser posts like Reader and Lecturer) at such a young age without having connections that would have gotten him off the hook for anything short of murder, and possibly even that.
***The Wikipedia article on the Colonial Colleges also has a list of schools which later became post-secondary institutions. Any of these might also have worked, although I'd have my doubts about the female academies, especially among the Moravians.
†in the 18th century, any Oxford graduate (ditto Cambridge), let alone faculty member, would have been an Anglican, at least on paper. Test Act, anyone? So Crane might have been a Deist inside his head, or a Freemason‡, but officially, he was an Anglican (cue song††)
‡There are a lot of Masonic connections for American Revolutionary figures. Franklin and Washington were Masons, as was Paul Revere. There were Masons in both the British and American armies.
††This one...
This show has even less to do with Washington Irving's story than that movie with Johnny Depp and Christina Ricci did, despite having a Headless Horseman and everything. So far, I have my love for Orlando Jones' brand of keyed-up intelligence left intact, and have spent a lot of time shaking my head over the writers' urges to drag in every bit of early Colonial and Revolutionary American history they vaguely recall from school and couldn't be arsed to study further.
Because they're so lazy, not only do they perpetrate absurdities*, but they end up missing lots of opportunities for Cool Stuff, and really, a show like this should have all the Cool Stuff it can fit in.
We start out (skipping over the introduction where Crane meets the Headless Horseman and kills, gets killed, and then exhumes himself) with Crane's explanation of himself. He was a professor at Oxford who ended up in the British Army, got sent to America, and deserted to the Rebel side.
Shall we unpack that just a little? (Let's admit that letting the historical Ichabod Crane and his Revolutionary war-veteran father go is a valid choice, just in passing.) Even more than now, the military and academic career choices were very separate paths in the 18th century, and having invested the time and effort (and use of family and social connections, no doubt) to get onto the faculty (and into a professorship at a relatively young age, rather than being a reader or a lecturer, surely more likely for someone under thirty or thirty-five), it's sublimely improbable that Crane would have dropped all that to get into the army. Even if he had done Something Bad, or was accused of Something Bad, that thing would have to be Very Bad for his connections not to get him off the hook somehow, and in 18th Century Britain, connections were, if not everything, then right up there on the top three things you needed to have to get ahead. There are plenty of examples of brilliant men lacking connections who failed to advance as much as their talents merited, and even more examples of well-connected semi-competents and incompetents making a mess of things. About the only things I can think of that couldn't have been resolved would have been sedition, blasphemy, and the like, which would have been unlikely to indicate the sort of mindset which would lead a man into the army, or else capital offenses--and if his connections couldn't have saved him from trial and conviction, they might well have been able to wangle a pardon and transportation.
That is, being kicked out and sent to the colonies, which up until 1776, would have meant the North American colonies. Want to convince a Briton that he's had it with the mother country and should go ahead and throw it in with the rebels? You could even pitch it as an unjust accusation, giving him even more reason to be in a rebellious frame of mind.
If, on the other hand, you've decided (because you know something about how the academic and military fields worked in 18th century Britain), that in order for your hero to be reasonably young and appealing to your target audience, that chair at Oxford (and the red coat that follows it**) are Not Working but you don't want to make Crane a convicted felon, you could have sent your bright young Oxford scholar over to the colonies to take up an academic position there. Because they totally had real institutions of higher learning in the colonies before the American Revolution!
Here they are***, with the potential advantages to show writers looking for a way to drag in more Cool Stuff:
•Harvard, established 1636, chartered 1650. Boston area, which would hook Crane up with people like Sam and his cousin John Adams, and the other people in the Sons of Liberty Boston Committee of Safety. Then there was the bookseller Henry Knox, who became Washington's chief of artillery. Harvard had a Dissenting (non-Anglican) religious affiliation, but by the early 1770s they might have been willing to tolerate an Anglican† faculty member who was talented enough and didn't get snippy about things.
•William and Mary, established and chartered in 1693. This would tie Crane more closely to people like Washington, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and the Lees. William and Mary was an Anglican institution, in keeping with the official policy of Virginia before the Revolution.
•Yale, established and chartered in 1701. Another place set up by Dissenters, Yale produced such Revolutionary War notables as Nathan Hale and his classmate Benjamin Tallmadge. American school children, at least in my day, were taught about Nathan Hale and his "I regret that I have but one life to give for my country," speech (given just before the Brits hanged him for spying in occupied New York), but Tallmadge is less famous. He was, however, a very important cog in Washington's intelligence operations, and if Crane was spying for Washington, then it's likely Tallmadge would have known him--or known of him. Tallmadge had a fair number of interesting New York area connections himself--his father was a clergyman on Long Island, and after the war he married a daughter of William Floyd, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a wealthy New York politician. Also, let me note in passing that Crane, in the original story, was described as coming from Connecticut. Given the violence done to the original concept, it would have been a nice touch.
•Princeton, established and chartered in 1746. Founded by Presbyterians, Princeton was not so much worried about which denomination its students fell into as it was with getting them educated. Aaron Burr's father was the second president, although he died in 1757, a little too early for us. During the Revolutionary War era, the president was John Witherspoon, another signer of the Declaration. The younger Burr was a student there, as were James Madison and the writer Philip Freneau, and also Hugh Brackenridge. The latter was a chaplain in Washington's army, which might give you an in on Christian occultism to work with.
•University of Pennsylvania, established 1740, chartered 1755. Technically Anglican, but nonsectarian in its policies, the school was a pet project of Benjamin Franklin's. From the 1750s up through the early 1770s, Franklin traveled often between American and Europe, and had many academic and scientific connections. I can see him recruiting for his school quite easily. Also he was a Mason, which has interesting possibilities.
•Columbia, established and chartered in 1754, as King's College. Another technically Anglican but officially nonsectarian institution. Teaching at Columbia would have brought Crane into contact with the young Alexander Hamilton (one of Washington's favorite staff officers), and living in New York would have put him in the position of encountering the old Dutch portion of New York society, people like the Schuylers (Hamilton married a daughter of Philip Schuyler; her sister Angelicamarried the wealthy British merchant John Barker Church, who acted as a military supplier to both the American and French armies during the Revolution), the de Peysters, the De Lanceys, the van Cortlandts (the van Cortlandts had land in the Westchester County area, where the van Texels--van Tassell in the Americanized version--also settled, and a van Cortlandt descendant, Margaret Kemble married the British general Thomas Gage, of occupied Boston fame), the Livingstons, and so on. Not only would this get him hooked up with the Revolutionary War and George Washington, it would get him married to Katrina van Tassell.
•Brown University, established and chartered in 1764, officially Baptist, but, like the colony of Rhode Island, open to all comers. Useful connections here would have been General Nathaniel Greene, and Stephen Hopkins (who signed the Declaration) and Samuel Ward (who died in March 1776, and so missed out), as well as some alumni who fought during the Revolution.
•Rutgers, established and chartered in 1766. Dutch Reformed, and pretty blunt about it.
•Dartmouth, established 1769. Puritan/Congregational, like Harvard and Yale.
I find these last two institutions less interesting. Rutgers was close enough to the action, but not terribly well-organized in the early 1770s, and Dartmouth was way the hell up in New Hampshire, and so pretty far from most interesting activity that might have led a faculty member, imported from Britain, into dissent, sedition, and rebellion. Also, Rutgers's reason for being makes it seem unlikely that they would import a faculty member from Britain, as opposed to the Netherlands.
I could go on, and I probably will, but you see what a great chance at an interesting background they missed giving Crane, by giving him a poorly-researched 'romantic' one instead. I admit my favorites are Yale and Columbia, but any of the first seven schools have a lot of interesting possibilities to exploit over the course of the story, even if some have more than others. It wasn't even very hard to dig this up. You'll notice the majority of these links are from Wikipedia, online source for those who fear libraries since 2001. My starting point? I knew who Nathan Hale and Benjamin Tallmadge were (Tallmadge was involved in that awkward business with Major Andre), and that Alexander Hamilton went to Columbia. I'd heard of transporting criminals to North America and the Test Act, which is pretty irrelevant to the main point. The rest could have been done simply by following links, if you don't have a strong background in Late Colonial and Revolutionary War America. I did look up executions for witchcraft as a sidelight, because 1782 seemed very late for that.
*Executing witches in 1782? Here, let's look at this historical detail, inconvenient as it may be. Also, this post is pretty long already, so I'll express my opinions about Hessians and tea parties later.
Also, surely Genevieve Valentine has gone to work on Katrina's clothing in all those dream sequences. It looks like a Goth-dyed GunneSax prom dress from the 1970s. Plus, why can't Ichabod button his shirt? Besides the Beefcake rule, of course. A well-bred man from the 1770s wouldn't be running around with his shirt unbuttoned in public like that. He'd shave, too, I suspect. Beards were a sign you hadn't been by the barber, or were for seamen; mustaches were for German officers. This leaves aside the issue of why his clothes didn't rot away while he was buried.
**I can't believe he enlisted--that is, took the shilling. Becoming an officer would have involved shelling out the cash to buy his commission, and I think that instead of deserting over his awakening political sentiments, he'd have sold out--why waste that money?--and then gone native. I really can't believe he held a professorship (a really big deal at Oxford and Cambridge, as opposed to lesser posts like Reader and Lecturer) at such a young age without having connections that would have gotten him off the hook for anything short of murder, and possibly even that.
***The Wikipedia article on the Colonial Colleges also has a list of schools which later became post-secondary institutions. Any of these might also have worked, although I'd have my doubts about the female academies, especially among the Moravians.
†in the 18th century, any Oxford graduate (ditto Cambridge), let alone faculty member, would have been an Anglican, at least on paper. Test Act, anyone? So Crane might have been a Deist inside his head, or a Freemason‡, but officially, he was an Anglican (cue song††)
‡There are a lot of Masonic connections for American Revolutionary figures. Franklin and Washington were Masons, as was Paul Revere. There were Masons in both the British and American armies.
††This one...