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Engineering Manhood: Race and the Antebellum Virginia Military Institute

Jonson Miller 2020 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license © Jonson Miller
Open Access Open Access
It is not an accident that American engineering is so disproportionately male and white; it took and takes work to create and sustain this situation. Engineering Manhood: Race and the Antebellum Virginia Military Institute examines the process by which engineers of the antebellum Virginia Military Institute cultivated whiteness, manhood, and other intersecting identities as essential to an engineering professional identity. VMI opened in 1839 to provide one of the earliest and most thorough engineering educations available in antebellum America. The officers of the school saw engineering work as intimately linked to being a particular type of person, one that excluded women or black men. This particular white manhood they crafted drew upon a growing middle-class culture. These precedents impacted engineering education broadly in this country and we continue to see their legacy today.
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ISBN(s)
  • 978-1-64315-018-5 (open access)
  • 978-1-64315-017-8 (print)
Subject
  • History
  • 19th Century United States
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  • Table of Contents

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  • Cover
  • Title Page
  • Copyright Page
  • Contents
  • Introduction
  • 1. VMI: Challenging the Northern Story of Antebellum Engineering
  • 2. Education and White Manhood in the Struggle for Political Power
  • 3. Creating the “West Point of the South”
  • 4. Engineering Knowledge and the Struggle for Authority in Higher Education
  • 5. Engineering as a Profession of Service to the Progress of Virginia
  • 6. The Necessary White Manhood of Engineering
  • 7. Secession: Realigning Identity and Power
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Acknowledgments

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Black-and-white map showing, from east to west, the Tidewater, Piedmont, Shenandoah, and Allegheny constitutional divisions of Virginia, with Rockbridge County in the Shenandoah division.

Virginia in 1829

From Chapter 1

Figure 1.1. Virginia in 1829. County boundaries as they existed at the time of the 1829–1830 constitutional convention. Bold lines show the four constitutional divisions of Virginia. The Blue Ridge Mountains separate the Piedmont and Shenandoah Valley. The star indicates the location of Lexington in Rockbridge County. Note that what is today West Virginia was part of Virginia until 1861.

Simple color portrait of John Preston, probably in his twenties or thirties.

John Thomas Lewis Preston (1811–1890)

From Chapter 2

Figure 2.1. John Thomas Lewis Preston (1811–1890). Portrait of John Thomas Lewis Preston, Preston Library, Virginia Military Institute, Lexington, Virginia.

Simple black and white portrait of Claudius Crozet, probably in his fifties.

Claudius Crozet (1790–1864)

From Chapter 3

Figure 3.1. Claudius Crozet (1790–1864). Portrait of Claudius Crozet, Preston Library, Virginia Military Institute, Lexington, VA.

Simple color portrait of Francis Smith in his VMI uniform.

Francis Henney Smith (1812–1890)

From Chapter 3

Figure 3.2. Francis Henney Smith (1812–1890). Portrait of Francis H. Smith, Preston Library, Virginia Military Institute, Lexington, VA.

Black ink drawing using solid and dashed lines to show two planes tangent to a sphere and intersecting each other

Cadet Descriptive Drawing Exercise

From Chapter 4

Figure 4.1. Cadet Descriptive Geometry Exercise. B. Cooke, January 28, 1857, “Tangent plane to a sphere through a given line,” Cadet Architectural Drawings, MS 203, Virginia Military Institute Archives. Copied from Davies, Descriptive Geometry, Plate 9, Fig. 2.

Hand-drawn and colored double-arched structure supported by four pillars and including dashed lines used to calculate the shape of the arch in three dimensions

Cadet Shades and Perspective Exercise

From Chapter 4

Figure 4.2. Cadet Shades and Perspective Exercise. Edward L. Smith, 1856, Untitled, Cadet Architectural Drawings, MS 203, Virginia Military Institute Archives.

Six equal square panels showing hand-drawn maps; including evenly spaced treetops in a nine-by-nine square; a flat landscape with unevenly distributed trees; a three-dimensional grassy landscape with two steep, unvegetated terraces; a swampy lowland surrounded by grassy hills with a few trees; an irregularly planned town with roads and property lines surrounded by fields and a grassy landscape; and layout of roads and piers of a port town.

Cadet Lanscape and Topography Exercise

From Chapter 4

Figure 4.3. Cadet Landscape and Topography Exercise. William E. Kemble, 1851, Untitled, Cadet Architectural Drawings, MS 203, Virginia Military Institute Archives.

Scan of a printed table with ten columns showing the merit scores of the top twenty cadets. Columns headed from left to right: General Merit (ranking from 1 to 20), Names, Counties (county of residence), Conduct, Engineering, Tactics, Chemistry, English, Total (overall merit score), and Remarks (positions or ranks held).

First-Class Merit Roll

From Chapter 6

Figure 6.1. First-Class Merit Roll. “Semi-Annual Report of the Superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute, Together with Accompanying Documents,” Doc. No. 28, Journals of the House of Delegates, 1845, 11.

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