From the Archives: Independence Lost
I will admit it: it didn’t even occur to me until last week that the 250th anniversary of the United States was the perfect opportunity for a series of blog posts related to the American Revolution, the creation of the constitution, and like that. Or that I could have spent the last six months reading some of the new books that have tied themselves to the anniversary.[1] If I had the bandwidth. Which I didn’t. What can I say? Sometimes I’m a little slow.
But I’m on it now. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to circle the idea of America 250.[2] A couple of posts from the archives. A couple of reports on some interesting new projects that have crossed my path.. A story or two. I’ll maybe even read one of the books from the To-Be-Read Shelves. [3]
Starting off, a post that first ran in 2015
Those of you who’ve been hanging out in the Margins for a while now know there are some types of history books that can be counted on to make me say “I want to read this”:
- Books that tell a story we think we know from a radically different perspective
- Books that deal with people outside the mainstream of history
- Books that tell a story I didn’t even know existed
- Books–oh, well, you get the idea.
In Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution, historian Kathleen DuVal, author of The Native Ground, reminds us that the American Revolution was part of a larger global conflict involving France and Spain, and that Britain had 13 other colonies in North America and the Caribbean that were also affected by the war.
West Florida, which included much of what is now Florida, Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana, had only recently become a British colony–part of the redistribution of imperial territories at the end of the Seven Years War– when the Continental Congress declared war on Britain. Located on the border between the British and Spanish empires, and a distant frontier for both, it was home to former French and Spanish citizens, British loyalists fleeing the disruptions of the revolution and well-organized Indian nations with their own agendas. The possibility of a Spanish invasion was real, and at least some of the colonists thought Spain was a better choice than Britain or France if push came to colonial shove.
DuVal considers how eight very different colonists–a second-generation African slave, a young Cajun with a deep-seated hatred of the British, leaders of the Creek and Chickasaw tribes and two British couples who chose different sides in the conflict–responded to the dangers and opportunities that the revolution brought to their doorsteps and the impact of those choices. While each of these characters stands in for a larger population, the complicated calculus of self-identity, self-interest and personal history that they use to make decisions about the world around them makes it clear that revolution and politics were always personal.
[1] A few new books on related subjects that are on my radar for your consideration:
Obstinate Daughters: The Rebels, Writers and Renegade Women Who Ignited the American Revolution by Denise Kiernan (Due out 6/23)
The Capitol: The Surprising Biography of an American Building by Brian Jay Jones
This Land is Your Land: A Road Trip Through American History by Beverly Gage
[2] It’s a slightly silly title, in my opinion. But Semiquincentennial does not roll off the tongue as easily as Bicentennial did.
[3] No promises
Chasing Beauty
I just finished reading Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner by Natalie Dykstra. Here’s the short version—wow!
Here’s the slightly longer version: Beautiful prose. Rich with insights. Wonderful storytelling. Not necessarily in that order
I did not go into Chasing Beauty cold. Natalie and I became deadline buddies and fast friends in the months in which she finished Chasing Beauty and I finished The Dragon From Chicago. For many months, perhaps as much as a year, we spoke one or twice a week about our trials and our triumphs. We touched base via text and email more often than that.[1] I got to hear her thoughts on the craft of writing in general and aspects of Gardner’s life in particular. Moreover, I interviewed her twice for the Women’s History Month series here in the Margins, in 2021 and 2024. Those conversations gave me enormous respect for Natalie’s intelligence and wisdom,[2] as a writer and otherwise. But nothing could have prepared me just how good Chasing Beauty is.
The obvious approach would have been to simply write the story of the woman who created the Gardner museum. And Dykstra tells that story. But the museum is the crescendo to which she builds. In some ways, the book could just as readily be titled The Education of Isabella Stewart Gardner. Before Gardner could build the museum that now bears her name, she had to build what I think of as the museum in her head. With Dykstra as our guide, we watch Gardner work her way through grief and friendship. We travel with Gardner, both as she visits the larger world[3] and on her personal intellectual and aesthetic journeys through books and art, and music and art, and, philosophy (or perhaps more accurately, ideas) and art, and, well, art. We share what Dykstra describes as “Isabella’s on-going romance with objects” and her “greediness for experience.” We are swept along in the wake of a woman who was larger than life, and yet Dykstra also gives us moments in which to pause and enjoy a telling detail.
Over and over as I read I was stopped by sentences that were beautiful in its clarity, images that delighted me, or a telling piece of context that opened up Gardner’s story in time and space.
All the thumbs up!
[1] Did we grumble and bemoan our fates? Yes we did. Did we reminded each other how lucky we were to have these opportunities? Yes we did, though not as often as we grumbled.
[2] Not the same thing. in my opinion.
[3] Her time in Egypt and Japan caught my imagination in particular.
Another Book That Sat on the To-Be-Read Shelves for Far too Long: Fast-Talking Dames
Fast-Talking Dames by Maria DiBattista is both a study of and homage to the fast-talking heroines of Hollywood comedies in the 1930s and 1940s. Like me, DiBattista discovered the women she writes about in her early teens, when she watched old movies after school and late at night. Like me, she saw them as a model to aspire to: classy, smart, smart-mouthed, witty (not quite the same thing as smart-mouthed, in my opinion), bold, and able to meet their male counterparts on equal terms, or even a bit ahead of them, in any given moment.
Some of the fun of Fast-Talking Dames, at least for this reader, is the skill with with DiBattista evokes the essence of movies I’ve watched many times, deepening my understanding of them with one-liner characterizations that any of her fast-talking dames would have been happy to deliver. For instance, discussing the rapid fire dialogue of His Girl Friday, arguably the fastest talking film in the genre, she describes Rosalind Russell as delivering her lines with “the assuredness of a large woman who knows she is taking up room and is enjoying the space allotted to her. “ Bingo![1]
DiBattista lays out common tropes on these comedies: madcap heiresses, spunky working girls[2] , blonde bombshells, and what she describes as “female Pygmalions” who educate and transform their male counterparts. She examines the careers of the queens of the genre—Katherine Hepburn,[3] Carole Lombard, Claudette Colbert, Jean Arthur, Barbara Stanwyck, Ginger Rogers—as well as some of their lesser-known sisters.[4] All of which make for an engaging read for those of us who are fans of movies of this period
But DiBattista does not stop there. She also follows some fascinating scholarly paths that place her fast-talking dames in a larger context. She looks at them in the context of the long-standing and misogynistic discourse against mulier loquax (the talkative woman), which has its roots in classical Greece and has never gone completely away. She considers their place in the lineage of clever women in stage plays, ranging from Shakespeare through Noel Coward. She contrasts them to the the laconic heroes of Westerns produced in much the same period.[5] And she ends with the gradual dissapearance of the fast-talking dame as movies returned to more traditional values in the post-war era.
I came away from Fast-Talking Dames with a deeper understanding of and respect for a genre I have long loved, and a substantial list of movies I want to watch. If you’re an old movie buff or a fan of smart (or smart-mouthed) broads, this one’s for you.
[1] If you’ll allow me one more: Discussing the “jubilant partnership” of Myrna Loy and William Powell, she states “there is nothing more optically exquisite in movie comedy than watching Myrna Loy, arching her brows, take in Powell’s droll manner with the bemused and appreciative air of a connoisseur.” Indeed.
[2] The spiritual ancestors of Mary Rogers in the Mary Tyler Moore Show, who was a more attainable model for many of us.
[3] In the course of looking at Katherine Hepburn, she convinced me to give Bringing Up Baby another try, if only because of the layers of meaning inherent in the title. Over the years I’ve shifted from finding the movie hysterically funny to finding it irritating. Possibly another viewing will shift it back.
[4] I wanted a word that was the female equivalent of brethren here, but didn’t find one that was quite right. Sorority and sisterhood have overtones that didn’t fit. And the actual equivalent, sistren, while popular in the late medieval period, fell out of use several centuries ago. Oh well. It was a pleasant little rabbit hole to spend sometime in.
[5] A contrast that at least some of her dames are well aware of. As one of them puts it, “I know that type—ungrammatical but strong.”