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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02.24.08
Posted in UIS, Doing History at 6:07 pm by Stephanie
For many years now, my friends and I have questioned the propriety of singing the national anthem before sports events. We never quite understood why this was such a tradition. Well, I’m here to tell you I now know the answer.
According to Gunther Barth in “Ball Park,” a chapter found in his book City People we can blame it on William H. Cammeyer, builder of the first enclosed baseball field in the country.
Cammeyer left his mark on the atmosphere of the ball park by playing at the beginning of a game a popular song, “The Star Spangled Banner,” which in 1916 by presidential order became the official anthem of the United States.
Let’s parse this some shall we?
- The national anthem did not became the national anthem just because Francis Scott Key wrote new lyrics in 1812 for a popular drinking song. Why this particular song with its peculiar melody was so popular is still a mystery to me.
- Cammeyer built his baseball field in 1862. “Star Spangled Banner” was a popular patriotic song of the time but still not the national anthem.
- By the time the “Star Spangled Banner” became the national anthem, the tradition of singing it before sporting events had been in place for 54 years.
So I think we can blame baseball for the tradition of singing the national anthem before sporting events.
Source
Barth, Gunther. “Ball Park” in City People. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). 167.
(required text for “American Urban History,” Spring 2008)
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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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10.21.07
Posted in UIS, Doing History at 11:39 pm by Stephanie
Now entering Week 10 of the semester and I am busily researching my paper for History of Islam due at the end of the semester. I was really excited and happy to spend most of my day reading one of the many books from my bibliography. It has been a very long time since that’s happened, usually I feel like I’m just slogging through.
My topic is Sufism and my approach will be a descriptive narrative using mostly secondary sources. I want to write about the origins of Sufism and its impact upon Islam itself. The book I am currently reading is J. Spencer Trimingham’s The Sufi Orders in Islam which turns out to be a book about the origins of the many different orders of Sufism. It wasn’t what I was expecting but it’s a good read anyway.
I choose this topic because mysticism always fascinates me and I remember copies of Idries Shah’s books about Nasrudin in the house when I was a teenager. I had no idea what they were all about and wanted to explore that. I am not reading any of Shah’s books for this paper but I am beginning to understand that Nasrudin is the clown found in all mystic traditions.
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09.29.07
Posted in UIS, Current History at 3:40 am by Stephanie
A lot of interesting things noted in this week’s readings and lectures.
A book recommendation from DrB: Race and Slavery in the Middle East by British historian Brent Lewis.
Further, on the topic of slavery, DrB says that Mauritania just abolished last month!
This map used in DrB’s lecture. Which led me to this photo essay and this article, “Does the Koran Condone Killing?”
“Al-Zarqawi,” says Khaled Abou El Fadl, a professor of Western and Islamic law at UCLA, “searches for the trash that everyone threw out centuries ago and declares the trash to be Islam.”
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09.09.07
Posted in UIS at 10:11 pm by Stephanie
According to DrB:
The follower of Muhammad was called the “caliph”, which comes from the Arabic word khalifa, which means viceregent. The first four caliphs and the Umayyad caliphs took the full title, which was “Viceregent/Successor to the Prophet of God” or “Khalifat Rasul Allah“.Later on as the Abbasid leaders became the most powerful dynasty, its charismatic rulers expunged the title “rasul” and simply called themselves “Khalifat Allah” or The Viceregent of God!
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Posted in Those Amazing Women, UIS at 1:25 pm by Stephanie
In Islam: An Illustrated History by GSP Freeman-Grenville & Stuart C. Munro-Hay on page 102, there is this very brief mention of a woman:
The Mamluk system was initiated by a woman, Shajar-al-Durr (”tree of pearls”), who ruled for only 80 days before she was murdered.
Who was she and why was she murdered? At Women in World History, there is this story about her.
Shagrat al-Durr is one of the very few women in Islamic history to ascend to the throne. Her melodramatic life illustrates the fact that an ambitious woman had to depend on the good will of men to be able to lead.
Briefly: She was married to the sultan of Egypt, Salih Ayyub who died in 1250 CE. She took on the role of Sultan, after the leaders of the army who have defeated the Crusaders, plot to kill her stepson because they would rather have her on the throne. The Caliphate in Baghdad takes umbrage at placing a woman in power and appoints a man to do the job.
Here the details differ from Freeman-Grenville and Munro-Hay. Their snippet, quoted above, make it sound as though she was murdered after 80 days in power. But Women in History says that Shagrat-al-Durr married the new ruler, Aibak, a Mamluk soldier. They are married for seven years, but when Aibak proposes to take another wife, Shagrat-al-Durr kills him out of jealousy. But she is found out:
Spurred on by Aibak’s former wife, Shagrat is beaten to death by the slaves of the harem with their wooden clogs. Her half-naked body is thrown into the moat of the citadel.
The story is fascinating but she seems to be given short shrift in my books. More investigation is necessary.
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Posted in Movies, UIS at 12:29 am by Stephanie
Not an Islamic tenet, a Christian one. The Catholic Encyclopedia defines plenary indulgences as:
By a plenary indulgence is meant the remission of the entire temporal punishment due to sin so that no further expiation is required in Purgatory.
This comes up in Islam: An Illustrated History by GSP Freeman-Grenville & Stuart C. Munro-Hay in the section on “Latin Kingdoms and Muslims.” In November, 1095, Pope Urban II made a call for the Crusade to retake Jerusalem from the “infidels” aka the Muslims. Part of his recruitment plan was to offer the lands each knight took from a Muslim to keep as his own, and plenary indulgences for his participation in the Crusades. (p.84)
The phrase “plenary indulgence” leapt out at me because I had just watched, for the sixth or seventh time, Kevin Smith’s very funny movie, Dogma, about two angels banned from heaven who find a loophole, in the form of a plenary indulgence, that will allow them to return to heaven.
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