WHY DO WE SAY THAT?

The word Yankee is bound up intimately with American history, starting life as a term of disparagement, especially for New Englanders, before becoming a synonym for American, as in “the Yanks are coming” or—after they’ve gotten there and finished the fighting—“Yankee go home.”

Yankee has been dated to 1683. The earliest references are to “Yankee Duch” and “Captain Yankey,” two Dutch pirates (or possibly the same one) in the West Indies. A century later Dutch farmers in New York complained about sharp-dealing traders in Connecticut and their “Yankee tricks.”

They also used yankee as a verb meaning “to cheat,” and as early as 1798 they described their neighbors to the immediate northeast as “damn Yankees,” thus anticipating American Southern usage by several generations.

The British, meanwhile, employed Yankey or Yankey Doodle as derisive terms for New Englanders from the time of the French and Indian War. British military bands mocked the colonials by playing “Yankee Doodle,” and the brigade that was sent to reinforce the expedition to Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, marched to the tune. But the despised Yankee Doodles made the redcoats high-step it back to Boston, keeping them under fire almost all the way. The rebels took the tune as their trophy, put their own words to it, and proudly anointed themselves “Yankees.” Within a space of a single day, Yankee had metamorphosed from a bad word into a good one. “General Gage’s troops are much dispirited … disposed to leave off dancing any more the tune of Yankee Doodle,” reported the Pennsylvania Evening Post on July 22.

Americans puzzled over the origins of this nickname they had adopted for themselves. Many guessed that it represented a Native American form of English or Anglais. For example, James Fenimore Cooper asserted in The Deerslayer that it derived from a native pronunciation of English as Yengeese. Washington Irvine suggested that it came from an Indian word for the settlers, yanokies, meaning “silent men.” (Irving was making a joke, but many people took him seriously.) Other proposed sources included the English dialect term jank (excrement), the Scottish yankie (a smart, forward woman), and the Swedish änka (a widow). Modern etymologists prefer simpler explanations, however, and look to a Dutch source, either Jan Kees (“John Cheese,” comparable to the British John Bull) or Janke (“Little John”), with the former perhaps a shade the more likely of the two.

—Hugh Rawson

Historical Celebrity Boxing

A surprise ratings winner on television this spring was “Celebrity Boxing,” the pugilistic equivalent of karaoke, which showcased such long-awaited matchups as Tonya Harding vs. Paula Jones and Vanilla Ice vs. Todd Bridges. Purists condemned the show for defiling the noble sport of boxing, something they evidently feel is best left to professionals. Yet we can’t help wondering how American history might have been different if some of our nation’s greatest feuds and rivalries had been worked out between the ropes:

The hotly anticipated showdown is a disappointment because of Standish’s curious reluctance to fight. His request for Alden to throw a few punches at himself is scornfully rejected. Alden scores a quick knockout and is immediately married to Priscilla Mullens at center ring.

Instead of dueling with pistols, the original Federalist-era gangsters lace up the gloves. Burr knocks Hamilton around the ring for several rounds as the latter prudently covers up. But Hamilton, who has secretly intrigued with the judges, wins a unanimous decision. A furious Burr storms off to Louisiana and starts his own boxing federation.

The aristocratic Davis, having no wish to mix it up with a Kentucky backwoodsman, sends one of his slaves into the ring in his place. Lincoln emancipates him on the spot, and Davis is declared the loser by forfeit.

A poll of spectators beforehand shows that only one-tenth favor Du Bois, who is believed to be long on theory but short on skills. This assessment proves correct, as less than a minute into the fight Du Bois drops his guard to dispute a rules interpretation with the referee and is knocked cold.

It’s an unbeatable clash of styles: Dancing Darrow vs. Bryan the Bruiser. Darrow uses fancy footwork to land frequent but harmless jabs, while Bryan plants his feet and tries vainly to set up his haymaker. Observers swear they saw Bryan backed against the ropes, but film of the fight does not confirm this. Judges declare a draw, since one of Bryan’s shoelaces was not tied properly. After the fight the combatants shake hands and split their share of the gate receipts.

West lands by far the majority of the blows, despite her odd habit of shaking her hips before and after every punch. But Roosevelt wins over the crowd with her doughty persistence, and even when West is awarded a unanimous decision, she remains unbowed: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

—F.S.

ON EXHIBIT

“It would be far better for American art students and painters to study their own country and portray its life and types. … They must strike out of themselves and only by doing this will we create a great and distinctly American art,” said Thomas Eakins in 1914. By the time he died two years later, at 72, he had sold fewer than 30 works, but in the ensuing decades his unswerving realism and depth of expression have established him as one of the nation’s greatest painters, instrumental in creating that “distinctly American art.” His pleasure in memorializing the American commonplace is obvious in Thomas Eakins, an exhibition of more than 150 of his works—including oils of rowers, wrestlers, and musicians, as well as watercolors, drawings, sculptures, and photographs (Eakins was one of the first painters to recognize the artistic possibilities of the medium)—at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (212-535-7710; www.metmuseum.org) through September 15. Included are two of his most controversial paintings, The Agnew Clinic (1889), an unflinching scene of a woman undergoing a mastectomy, and The Gross Clinic (1875), a depiction of bone surgery rejected by the judging committee for Philadelphia’s 1876 Centennial Exhibition (several of the judges claimed to be repulsed, although they may have been merely envious of Eakins’s mastery). A catalogue edited by Darrell Sewell (Yale University Press in association with the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 445 pages, $65) accompanies the exhibit.

To commemorate its 150th anniversary, the American Society of Civil Engineers has constructed Me, Myself and Infrastructure: Private Lives and Public Works in America, on view at the New-York Historical Society (www.nyhistory.org; 212-873-3400) through September 15 and at the National Building Museum in Washington (www.nbm.org; 202-272-2448) from October 4 to February 2. By reproducing everyday settings, the exhibit examines how civil engineering defines every aspect of life today: A mock coffee shop shows how engineers have made water readily available, while a re-created living room reveals the massive infrastructure required to support our modern conveniences. A companion exhibit, I on Infrastructure, at the New York Public Library’s Science, Industry and Business Library (www.nypl.org/research/sibl/index.html; 212-592-7000) until December 14, concentrates on the aesthetics and cultural contexts of our infrastructure. Twelve installations, including a Brooklyn-Queens Expressway sign and images of the George Washington Bridge, each focus on a particular aspect of civil engineering. For more information, visit www.asce.org/150/infrastructure.

America’s only museum of Spanish Colonial art, set on a hilltop overlooking Santa Fe, opened this summer. Its roots go back nearly 80 years, to when artists started coming to live in the old Spanish town. There they admired centuries-old pieces of furniture, religious sculptures, and paintings that had long since fallen into neglect, largely dismissed by Gilded Age America. Santa Fe’s painters and writers were also charmed by , the contemporary Spanish-influenced and indigenous art they saw around them. In 1925, to preserve artifacts both old and new, they founded the parent of today’s museum, the Spanish Colonial Arts Society. Newly housed in a low-slung building originally designed in 1930 as a residence, the museum holds 3,000 objects—textiles, jewelry, paintings, furniture, and pottery—spanning five centuries and four continents. “In 2002 it is very trendy to be Latino in America,” says Carmella Padilla, one of the curators. Trendy is one way to look at it; another is timeless.

The Museum of Spanish Colonial Art is open seven days a week. For more information, call 505-982-2226 or visit www.spanishcolonial.org.

HAVE YOU SEEN THIS FOUNDING FATHER?

In March 1809, two months before his death, a sickly Thomas Paine was refused a plot at a Quaker cemetery in New York City. The pamphleteer and political activist, who had incited the colonies to rebel with Common Sense and horrified Christians with his deist The Age of Reason, resigned himself to being interred on his farm in nearby New Rochelle. He predicted to a friend, “The farm will be sold, and they will dig up my bones before they be half rotten.”

Paine was prescient. The man who unearthed him was William Cobbett, a radical English writer who wrote in 1819, “Paine lies in a little hole under the grass and weeds of an obscure farm in America. There, however, he shall not lie unnoticed much longer. He belongs to England.”

That same year, in an attempt to stir up revolutionary feeling, Cobbett crossed the Atlantic, went to New Rochelle, and illicitly dug up the body. He took it back to England, where he hoped to erect a reverential monument. But King George III’s death a few months later aroused a nationwide sorrow that precluded any attempt at rabble-rousing.

Cobbett died a debtor in June 1835, and his estate fell into the hands of a receiver, George West. As is elucidated in two articles reprinted in the March 2002 Journal of the Thomas Paine National Historical Association, in 1837 West gave Paine’s bones to Cobbett’s friend Benjamin Tilly, who hoped to revive the idea of erecting a shrine. But Tilly, too, fell into debt and never reburied them. He died in 1860 at the London home of some friends named Ginn. Mrs. Ginn later said she had sold the aging relics to a rag-andbone collector for destruction soon after Tilly’s death. Her house was the last known resting place of Tom Paine.

Even at the time of Tilly’s death, bits and pieces of Paine’s skeleton were embarking on a grisly diaspora. At some point in the mid-nineteenth century the Reverend Robert Ainslie bought the skull and right hand, either at an auction of Tilly’s estate or from a corn merchant who had bought them from West, the receiver. When Ainslie died, he left the bones to his son, but a hired man absconded with them, and they were lost to history.

Years earlier, when the remains were still in Cobbett’s possession, Tilly had taken a lock of hair and a two-by-oneinch chunk of brain. In the late 1870s Mr. Ginn sold these two relics to a minister, who sold them to a bookseller, who in 1900 sold them to Moncure D. Conway, the first president of the Thomas Paine National Historical Association. He described his purchase: “’Mr. Paine’s hair’ is soft and dark, with a reddish tinge. The remnant of Paine’s brain is … leaden in color, and quite hard.” The association has held on to the hair and the brain fragment ever since.

They are now the only verified parts of Paine’s body whose whereabouts are certain. A couple in Australia has claimed since 1988 to have Paine’s skull, but no DNA testing has yet been performed. Numerous other tales about purported pieces of Paine have been discounted.

While all those well-meaning Englishmen were busy not burying Paine, Americans were building him the sort of memorial Cobbett had envisioned. In 1839 a private group erected a stone pillar on top of his vacated gravesite, and in 1905 the association crowned it with a bronze bust. Whenever the rest of Paine does turn up, the association is ready to pay it the respect Cobbett never could.