Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon
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    • Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon
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    • Cindy Ott
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    • Acknowledgments
  • Online Exhibition
    • Just Another Squash: 12,000 BCE to 1600
    • From Pumpkin Beer to Pumpkin Pie: 1600 to 1799
    • The Making of a Rural New England Icon: 1800 to 1860
    • The Pumpkin and the Nation: 1861 to 1899
    • Americans Celebrate the Fall Harvest with Pumpkins: 1900 to 1945
    • The Changing Nature of Pumpkins: 1946 to the Present
    • The Changing Nature of American Rural Economies: 1946 to the Present
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Picture
Sydney Whiting, Memoirs of a Stomach (London: Chapman and Hall, 1855), engraving.

Infamous Pumpkin:
Memoirs of a Stomach

Many people thought there was no truer or funnier way to express a man’s stupidity or excesses than to use a pumpkin. In Memoirs of a Stomach, the pumpkin serves as crowning symbol of this portrait of gluttony. Likewise, in Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Ichabod Crane appeared the fool when it turned out that the headlike object tossed at Ichabod Crane by the Headless Horseman was nothing but a pumpkin.  



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