06.17.08
Posted in UIS, Books at 9:08 pm by Stephanie
Here it is, Summer Break and while some would think it’s the time for reading mind candy, my current book is Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City by Stephan Thernstrom. One of the main themes of my American Urban History class was that of social mobility. Turns out while we may all have the American dream of moving into a more financially successful class, upward mobility outside of one’s class isn’t all that common. Moving around within your class and downward mobility are common. This book studies the working class in the town of Newburyport, Massachusetts from 1850 to 1880.
Many of the prejudices against the poor and the uneducated sound the same over 100 years later. “The poor are poor because they spend their money on frivolous things or don’t apply themselves to work.” “If only everyone was educated and would avail themselves to our schools, life would be just peachy.” Christians doled out help to only those they deemed worthy, i.e. the submissive who promised to behave as the charity wanted them to.
I’m finding this all resonates into today. Discussions about the poor, the uneducated, the sick, etc. follow the same lines and the solutions don’t always fit.
I don’t look at neighborhoods the same way after this class.
For anyone interested in learning more about America’s urban history I recommend not only this book but the following as well:
- City People: The Rise Of Modern City Culture In Nineteenth-Century America by Gunther Barth
- The Evolution Of American Urban Society (6th Edition) by Howard P. Chudacoff and Judith E. Smith (NOTE: This is a textbook but fairly easy to read and very interesting.)
- The Immigrant Experience: The Anguish Of Becoming American edited by Thomas C. Wheeler. (NOTE: A slim volume of essays written by children of immigrant parents discussing what it was like to be a first generation American.)
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05.03.08
Posted in UIS, Doing History, Books at 8:39 pm by Stephanie
The terms “hip” and “hipster” probably came from the jazz age in 1920s Chicago and can be defined as:
a fanatic of jazz, alcohol, and cabarets who defiantly carried a flask hidden in a hip pocket
Source:
William Howland Kenney, Chicago Jazz: A Cultural History 1904-1930, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 152.
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03.28.08
Posted in UIS, Books at 10:15 pm by Stephanie
Think about the implications of this:
I was like a brain-damaged child born into the bosom of a hearty, muscular clan, and I felt guilty for a long time.
Young black writers will go through the same thing until we have established as a race here in America a tradition of books, literature, and writing. Once in this nation, it meant death for a black man to even learn to read; but we are freeing ourselves of this fear.
John A. Williams in his essay, “Time and Tide: Roots of Black Awareness.”
The Immigrant Experience: The Anguish of Becoming American ed. Thomas C. Wheeler (New York: Penguin Books, 1971)
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11.24.07
Posted in Religion, UIS, Books at 10:18 pm by Stephanie
There are times when I am surprised that people don’t know more about the world and religions that surround them. But because I am biased as an historian and a very curious person, I try to understand that others aren’t as fascinated as I am.
Take, for instance, the fascinating intersection of Islam and Christianity. Margaret Smith in her book The Way of the Mystics devotes an entire chapter (VI) to the influence of Christianity on Islam in the early stages of Islam’s development.
This came up for discussion in class a few weeks ago and I was satisfied to read in our assignments something I have been saying for years, Christianity had a profound influence on Islam. In fact, Mohammad (pbuh) believed Islam to be the logical extension of Christianity building upon the teachings of Abraham, Moses and Jesus.
Mohammad was a trader which meant he traveled through the Middle and Near East, meeting people of all stripes along the way. Of course he talked to them, learned from them and exchanged ideas with them. How can you not when your business, indeed your livelihood, depends upon making contacts?
We cannot think that Islam just sprang into being, like Athena born full-grown out of Zeus’ head. Islam grew as time went on and was influenced by the cultures around it and Mohammad’s influences, one of which was Syriac-Christian. The Qur’an was not written in a vacuum, and this needs to be acknowledged.
I think if people knew a little more history, they might be more tolerant of the world around them. Every day I encounter people who believe that Islam is a hateful religion based simply on a minority of maniacs who slammed planes into buildings. These people have not bothered to look beyond those images to see what the truth of Islam is and what its influences are, and that’s just sad for the entire world.
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08.28.07
Posted in UIS, Books at 5:53 pm by Stephanie
This was the first. And for a cool $1,794US, all 16 volumes totaling 10,000 pages, Al-Tabari’s Annals of the Apostles and Kings: A Critical Edition can be yours. I’d love to get my hands on a copy, but more importantly I’d love to have the time to read it.
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08.25.07
Posted in Movies, Books at 8:06 pm by Stephanie
In the charming movie 84 Charing Cross Road, Anne Bancroft’s character, Helene Hanff, lovingly berates her transatlantic book dealer, Frank P. Doel played by Anthony Hopkins, for sending her an unacceptable copy of Pepys’ Diary. While cruising the internet, I found this article about a new film now in production in England based on his diaries.
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03.03.07
Posted in UIS, Books at 6:31 pm by Stephanie
Cross-posted from Logs of the Written Word
Finished Reading: Completed 17 Feb, 2007
Status: Remains in Library
Book Name: Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce
Author: Stanley Weintraub
ISBN: 0452283671
LOC: N/A
Publisher: Plume - a division of Penguin Putnam (New York, NY)
Synopsis:
In the early months of World War I, on Christmas Eve, men on both sides of the trenches laid down their arms and joined in a spontaneous celebration. Despite orders to continue shooting, the unofficial truce spread across the front lines. Even the participants found what they were doing incredible: Germans placed candlelit Christmas trees on trench parapets, warring soldiers sang carols, and men on both sides shared food parcels from home. They climbed from the trenches to meet in “No Man’s Land” where they buried the dead, exchanged gifts, ate and drank together, and even played soccer.
Throughout his narrative, Stanley Weintraub uses the stories of the men who were there, as well as their letters and diaries, to illuminate the fragile truce and bring to life this extraordinary moment in time.
From: Penguin Books
UIS Spring 2007 Independent Study
A much more straightforward, and easier to read (than Modris Ecksteins’), history of the Christmas Truce.
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Posted in Those Amazing Women, UIS, Books at 6:09 pm by Stephanie
Cross-posted from Logs of the Written Word
Finished Reading: Completed 19 Feb, 2007
Status: Remains in Library
Book Name: The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period
Author: Patricia Buckley Ebrey
ISBN: 0520081587
LOC: HQ684.A25 1993
Publisher: University of California Press(Berkeley, Los Angeles, London)
Synopsis:
The Sung Dynasty (960-1279) was a paradoxical era for Chinese women. This was a time when footbinding spread, and Confucian scholars began to insist that it was better for a widow to starve than to remarry. Yet there were also improvements in women’s status in marriage and property rights. In this thoroughly original work, one of the most respected scholars of premodern China brings to life what it was like to be a woman in Sung times, from having a marriage arranged, serving parents-in-law, rearing children, and coping with concubines, to deciding what to do if widowed.
Focusing on marriage, Patricia Buckley Ebrey views family life from the perspective of women. She argues that the ideas, attitudes, and practices that constituted marriage shaped women’s lives, providing the context in which they could interpret the opportunities open to them, negotiate their relationships with others, and accommodate or resist those around them.
Ebrey questions whether women’s situations actually deteriorated in the Sung, linking their experiences to widespread social, political, economic, and cultural changes of this period. She draws from advice books, biographies, government documents, and medical treatises to show that although the family continued to be patrilineal and patriarchal, women found ways to exert their power and authority. No other book explores the history of women in pre-twentieth-century China with such energy and depth.
From: UC Press
UIS Spring 2007 Women in Chinese and Japanese history assigned reading.
A very thorough study of life in the Inner Quarters for Chinese women. Ebrey presents ideas that may be familiar to western readers: Chinese girls were the property of their father, then their husband upon marriage; footbinding; wives had very few legal rights, boy children were preferable to girl children. Yet, behind each of these stereotypes is reasoning and the story of an exception. Fascinating in its subject matter and the depth Ebrey plumbs to bring us the full story of Chinese women in the Sung era.
Favourite quotes:
For Ebrey, women played their assigned, even longstanding roles in the great drama of Sung history, but they were also extraordinary improvisers in a world that seemed structured to their disadvantage. (From Bonnie Smith’s forward - p. ix)
Emphasizing women’s victimization … only tends to obscure what women were able to accomplish. (p. 2)
Footbinding was an alteration of the body that changed everything about a woman’s body. (p. 41)
… new notions of masculinity stimulated the creation of revised standards of feminine beauty. (p. 42) [Editor’s note: The Sung era was the time in Chinese history when civil service exams became the way to advance in government, therefore an emphasis on intellectual acuity was now placed on men, making them “softer” and less warrior-like. With this less physical lifestyle, men began to look differently physically, changing their outlook on masculinity and therefore revising the standards of feminine beauty.]
Monogamy, in this model, did not limit a man to one woman at a time; but it did limit him to one wife. (p. 47)
Symbolically women were associated with cloth, and since ancient times the sexual division of labor had been epitomized by the saying that men plow and women weave. (p. 132)
Long-entrenched practices of sexual segregation, after all, were built on the assumption that sexual desires were easily stimulated in both sexes. (p. 162)
Girls who expected to marry one day and women alread married were taught to look on rape as a violation of their personal integrity so fundamental that suicide was the most appropriate response. (p. 163)
For a woman, remarriage meant renouncing the family she had joined. It was comparable to a son abandoning his parents, not a man taking a new wife. (p. 199)
Most people in Sung times looked on second marriages for women as an expedient - a course of action that was routine and often necessary, but less admirable than remaining a widow. (p. 215)
To establish a firmer sense of security in such a negotiable world, Confucian scholars wanted to fix people in well-defined roles. (p. 269)
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02.19.07
Posted in UIS, Books at 11:55 pm by Stephanie
Cross-posted from Logs of the Written Word
Finished Reading: Completed 12 Feb, 2007
Status: Remains in Library
Book Name: Rites of Spring
Author: Modris Eksteins
ISBN: 0395937582
LOC: N/A
Publisher: Mariner Books - a division of Houghton Mifflin (New York, NY)
Plot:
Dazzling in its originality, witty and perceptive in unearthing patterns of behavior that history has erased, Rites of Spring probes the origins, the impact, and the aftermath of World War I — from the premiere of Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring in 1913 to the death of Hitler in 1945. “The Great War,” as Modris Eksteins writes, “was the psychological turning point . . . for modernism as a whole. The urge to create and the urge to destroy had changed places.” In this “bold and fertile book” (Atlantic Monthly), Eksteins goes on to chart the seismic shifts in human consciousness brought about by this great cataclysm through the lives and words of ordinary people, works of literature, and such events as Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight and the publication of the first modern bestseller, All Quiet on the Western Front. Rites of Spring is a remarkable and rare work, a cultural history that redefines the way we look at our past and toward our future.
From: Houghton Mifflin Company
UIS Spring 2007 Sr. Seminar assigned reading.
If you’re looking for a general history about World War I, this isn’t the book for you. Rich, dense and complex, Ecksteins explores the cultural ramifications of modernity and its affect on the soldiers on the Western Front. Using Stravinsky’s The Rites of Spring as its framework, this book goes beyond a “simple” chronology of events as they unfold. What effect on the war did modernity have, and what effect did the war have on modernity? A case can be made for the seeds of Nazism arising from the seeds of modernity as portrayed in the premiere of the Russes Ballet’s production of Stravinsky’s (produced by Diaghilev) The Rites of Spring as choreographed by Nijinsky. The production which so affronted many of those in the audience that it engendered a riot.
Rich in anecdotal stories with quotes from war-time poets, Ecksteins presents a unique way to interpret the war.
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12.19.05
Posted in Books at 3:19 pm by Stephanie
I loved this book! Meant to be a biography about the Buddha based on what Armstrong admits is sketchy information from Buddhist texts, she gathers enough to give a full idea of who the Buddha was before he became the Buddha and what the Ganges plain was like during his lifetime.
She skillfully tells the story of the Buddha’s enlightenment and his lifetime of teaching others to reach enlightenment. Explaining what makes Buddhism different from other teachings and religions, Armstrong makes sense of the politics, the upheavals as society moved from agrarian to urban and the yearning we all feel for peace and tranquility within ourselves.
The best lesson for me is that everything is transitory. Emotions, physical discomfort (and comfort), other people’s stuff, memory, everything is transitory. Nothing is permanent, it all comes and goes. Once we learn this, nothing seems so important that we cannot be more compassionate and loving to those around us. Something I have come to realize (and continue to forget and relearn) over the past few years. Above all, Buddha taught compassion toward everyone.
Armstrong’s tale of Buddha does not paint him as the saint many would have him be. She shows his blind spots as his life goes along, especially toward the women who wish to become disciples. Buddha struggles mightily with the role of women in his teachings and learns from one of his male disciples that the Buddha’s training is meant for everyone, it’s an equal opportunity road to Enlightenment which means it should be for women too. Whether a product of his time, or he truly has a blind spot, Buddha’s attitude toward women reflects history’s attitude toward women.
Buddha is short (187 pages), easy to read and absolutely fascinating.
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