1724: A Year in Review
For those of you who care about such things. 1724 was a leap year, giving us an extra day in which stuff could happen—and happen they did.
Royal Heads
King Philip V, the first Bourbon of Spain,* abdicated in favor of his sixteen-year-old son, Louis I on January 14. I have read several reasons why he made this unusual decision. The most compelling is that he was showing signs of serious mental decline snd made the responsible choice to step aside. Whatever his reasons, fate overturned his decision. Louis died of smallpox on August 31. Six days later Philip reluctantly resumed the throne to avoid a regency for his second son, Ferdinand, who was only ten. His combined reign, which totaled 45 years and 16 days, was the longest in the history of the Spanish monarchy.
Tsar Peter the Great crowned his wife Catherine I** as his co-ruler on February 8. When Peter died the following year without naming a successor, a coalition of the “new men”*** and regiments of the imperial guards proclaimed her the ruler. (Can you call it a coup if there is no one on the throne to overthrow?) Catherine ruled until her death two years later.
The Hapsburg Emperor Charles VI**** appointed his unmarried sister, the Archduchess Maria Elisabeth of Austria, as governor of the Austrian Netherlands (modern Luxembourg and Brussels). She held the position until her death in 1741. It was not an unusual choice. The Hapsburgs regularly placed unmarried women of their royal house as regents over provinces in their widespread empire. The Netherlands in particular were ruled by an almost unbroken succession of ruling duchesses for almost sixty years—each the niece of her predecessor. Maria Elizabeth seems to have been trained for the position. She enjoyed an above average education at the hands of professors from the university in Vienna and was competent in five languages.
Yeongjo became the 21st ruler of the Joseon dynasty of Korea.**** He ruled for almost fifty-two years. His reign appears to have been a period of political, economic, and social reform, inspired by a deep adherence to Confucian morals. (Can anyone recommend the equivalent of The Joseon Dynasty for Dummies? Or perhaps Korean History for Dummies? This is a huge hole in my historical knowledge.)
Ideas, and Reactions to Ideas
In Qing China, the Yonghzheng Emperor banned the teaching of Christianity—sort of. Catholic missionaries had been active in China since 1602, when Matteo Ricci arrived in Beijing and in fact Jesuit priests had long proved useful as advisors to the court on astronomy and scientific matters. But missionaries working in the provinces were seen as threatening to a Confucian society. The ban reflected that division: foreign priests were allowed to remain in the capital but missionaries working outside Beijing were required to move to the Portuguese enclave at Macau. Qing subjects were prohibited from practicing Christianity—which may or may not have worked. It is hard to enforce belief.
Glassblower Gabriel Fahrenheit developed the Fahrenheit temperature scale. He had previously invented the first precision thermometer, using mercury instead of alcohol. (And because it was the obvious question to ask: Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius developed his competing temperature scale in 1742.)
Jonathan Swift, published seven satirical pamphlets under the pseudonym M.B. Drapier in which he sought to rouse public opinion in Ireland against a patent that allowed a private contractor in England to minted copper coins to be distributed in Ireland. Swift, and others, objected to the coinage because there were no safeguards to insure the purity of metal used, they believed bribery had been involved in issuing the patent, and widespread resentment about Britain’s colonial control of Ireland’s economy, including control over minting its currency. “Mr. Drapier” became a central figure in the controversy and was treated as a folk hero by the Irish after the British government withdrew the patent.
Johann Sebastian Bach led the first performance of his St John Passion in Leipzig on Good Friday. He was a new director of music at the St. Thomas church, and was the congregation’s second choice for the position. As such, he was determined to prove himself with the production of a new work with which to break the Lenten music fast. And prove himself he did.(It was a busy year for Bach. He also wrote his second cantata cycle, totaling 53 new works He also began what would be a twenty-year collaboration with librettist Picander (Christian Friedrich Henrici.)
* Just in case you’re interested, Philip was born into the French royal family. But his grandmother was the half-sister of the last Hapsburg ruler of Spain, Charles V, who died childless. (His great-grandmother was also a Spanish Hapsburg.) Philip’s accession to the throne led to the War of Spanish Succession because other European powers were worried that uniting France and Spain under a single Bourbon monarch would upset the balance of power. The end result was two Bourbon kings who ruled over two important states.
** NOT to be confused with Catherine II, commonly known as Catherine the Great, who seized the throne from her husband Peter III in 1762 and reigned as empress for 34 years, 4 months, and 8 days—but who’s counting?
***Commoners whom Peter had placed in positions of power based on their competence. They stood opposed to traditional aristocrats. Or more likely, traditional aristocrats opposed them.
****It’s hard to avoid the Hapsburgs.LINK
****I hadn’t heard of him either. Which is one reason to include him here. One of the purposes of these posts is to look briefly at a broad range of historical incidents. (If any of you think these year in review posts are a quick and dirty way to create new posts in the rush of the holiday season, you would be wrong. Each one of them takes somewhere between several and many hours to produce. Just saying.)
The Queens of Animation
Nathalia Holt’s The Queens of Animation: The Untold Story of the Women Who Transformed the World of Disney and Made Cinematic History is a good example of what has become a genre in the world of women’s history: the exploration of a group of women within an industry or profession whose contribution was critical and yet has been largely overlooked. Margot Lee Shetterly gave us a name for them “hidden figures.”
As with so many of these books, Queens of Animation begins with the author’s discovery of a missing element in an often told story. Doing research for a different book, Holt interviewed a woman who told her about working for the Walt Disney Studios in the 1930s and 1940s. To Holt’s surprise, her interview subject’s stories were full of women artists working in the studios, as animators as well as members of the largely female Ink and Paint department, who traced animators’ sketches onto plastic sheets and brought them to life with color.
Holt was well aware that these women’s names did not appear in the credits for the animated features they worked on*—she had spent many hours of a cartoon-obsessed childhood watching the credits role past and looking for women’s names.** Interested in learning more, she picked up one of the many biographies of Walt Disney only to find that the women whose names she had learned didn’t appear. In a second biography, two of the women were mentioned, though their accomplishments were not. In fact on, Mary Blair, who had been an art director at Disney for decades and whose work had defined the style for many of Disney’s most important films, was mentioned merely as the wife of another, less important artist. Finding no trace of the women or the contributions in the existing histories of the company, she sent in search of the women themselves.
The result of that search is a multi-layered group biography of the women, the art they produced, the challenges they faced, and their contribution to Disney films. Along the way, she also discusses the changing technology of animation, something I knew little about and found absolutely fascinating.
If you are interested in “hidden figures” or the history of animation, this one is for you. Be warned, it may make you want to go back and watch Disney films with a new eye to the artistry.
*This is an astonishing example of erasing women from the story even as it unrolls.
**I swear, the stories find the writer, not the other way around.
1624: The Year in Review
In 2013, I wrote my first A Year in Review post: for some reason that I no longer remember I had been spending a lot of time thinking/reading/writing about 1913 and wanted to share some of the highlights. Over the next few years, Year in Review posts became a standard part of December here on the Margins. I let them slip for the last two years, mostly because I was so deep in the life and times of Sigrid Schultz. It’s a shame: 1923, for example, was quite a year.*
This year, it’s time to renew the tradition, kicking off with 1624.
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In the New World:
Captain John Smith's map of Virginia, dated 1624
The Virginia Company, which owned Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in North America, was bankrupt. King James I of England** (and VI of Scotland) revoked the company’s charter on May 24 and made Virginia a crown colony. A year later the colony of Virginia butted heads with the crown for the first time. The colonists petitioned the king (now Charles I) for the right to retained their own legislature. Charles refused. Apparently legislation without representation was an issue earlier than I realized.
Also in Jamestown that year, William Tucker was born. He was the first known Black child born in English colonies of North America. He was the son of two Africans who were among the first group of Africans to be brought to North America in 1619 by Portuguese slavers. The group were technically sold to English settlers as indentured servants, but unlike their European counterparts they did not enter this indenture freely. Also unlike their European counterparts, their children were born into slavery. Slavery, too, was an issue in the North Americana colonies from the beginning.
The Dutch West India Company established its own trading post on the Atlantic shore. New Amsterdam was part of the larger colony of New Netherland which included what is now New York City and parts of Long Island, Connecticut and New Jersey.
Sir Thomas Warner founded the first British colony in the Caribbean on St. Kitts.
The Dutch seized the capital of Spanish/Portuguese Brazil, after two previous attempts in 1599 and 1604. Their goal was control over the lucrative sugar trade, which was a very big deal.
In the larger world:
Curious Japanese watching Dutchmen on Dejima Island. Katsushika Hokusa. ca 1802.
The Japanese Shogun expelled the Portuguese and cut off trade with the Philippines, the first step in closing Japan to the west. (Some historical timelines say the Japanese expelled the Spanish. This is technically true. Portugal became part of Spain in 1580. But Portugal’s presence in Japan occurred as part of the Portuguese maritime exploration and subsequent trade empire.)
The English and Dutch were expanding their territories in Asia as well as in the New World. The Dutch East India Company established trading posts on the coast of Taiwan. The English established trading posts in eastern India.
Thanks to well-chosen dynastic marriages and New World wealth, Hapsburg Spain was the Big Bad for the rest of Western Europe over the course of the seventeenth century. In 1624, France and the Netherlands signed the Treaty of Compiègne, a mutual defense treaty designed to isolate Spain. Egged on by Cardinal Richelieu of France, England, Sweden, Denmark-Norway, Savoy and Venice coordinated action against Spain. It all fell apart in 1625, when the Huguenot rebellion distracted Richelieu
Meanwhile in Eastern Europe, Hungarian King Bethlen Gabor and Ferdinand II, who was then ruler of the Hapsburg [!!] Duchy of Lower and Inner Austria and may have been the Holy Roman Emperor,*** signed the Treaty of Vienna, ending the Bohemian phase of the Thirty Years War**** and strengthening Ferdinand’s position the Hungary. This may feel like an obscure event from the perspective of those of us whose history classes focused on American history, but was actually a big deal.
On a smaller scale:
Frans Hals painted The Laughing Cavalier. (An occasional image helps me place things in history. Also, a painting I've always loved. )
English mathematician William Oughtred invited the slide rule, building on John Napier’s invention of logarithms and Edmund Gunter invention of logarthmic scales.
Unlikely as it sounds, the first successful submarine, designed by Dutch inventor Cornelius Drebbel was publicly tested in London on the Thames before an audience of thousands, including King James. The submarine was built on a wooden frame covered with leathered and powered by oars. It submerged for three hours and traveled from Westminster to Greenwich and back—six nautical miles each way. King James took a test dive, but the British Royal Navy wasn’t interested in exploring the technology further.
Van Drebbels' submarine in the Thames
*The USSR was formed. King Tut’s tomb was opened. Hyperinflation made life difficult in Weimar Germany. It became legal for women to wear trousers in the United States. Etc, etc, etc.
**Also, and originally, James VI of Scotland.
***Untangling the Hapsburg dynasty and its march to what became the Austro-Hungarian Empire is complicated. I definitely don’t have a handle on it.
** Here’s the short version: Reformation vs Counter-Reformation. Here’s a slightly longer version: The Third Year’s War was actually a series of wars, in which Protestant and Catholic princes battled for control of the Holy Roman Empire. The conflict began when the Protestants of Bohemia rebelled against Emperor Ferdinand II, but soon spread throughout the empire and included most of the European powers at one point or another.