In which I consider the nature of historical periods–and moving
Despite good intentions, and a couple of creative efforts,* I succumbed to radio silence here in the Margins while My Own True Love and I moved four whole blocks. The construction isn't quite done, but we're half-way settled into the new house. 
(Okay, maybe a quarter of the way. Between us we have a lot of books to unpack and stuff onto shelves organize. )
I may not have been writing about history for the last two weeks, but I've certainly been thinking about it. At the risk of revealing too clearly the zigzag way my mind works, here's an odd bit that I've been mulling over:
The relationship of historical figures to historical periods is often complicated and occasionally misleading. Several months ago I was stunned to realize that Woodrow Wilson was a child during the American Civil War--a fact that fundamentally shaped his policies in World War I. This past week I was equally surprised to learn that Charles Dickens, whose novels helped shape our images of Victorian London, was in fact born in the reign of George III.** When Victoria took the throne in 1837, Dickens was 25 years old and already a successful novelist. ( The Pickwick Papers had met with unprecedented success, with each issue selling 40,000 copies a month.***) Oliver Twist is set during the reign of George IV--making it an iconic work about the Industrial Revolution and the growth of cities but not an iconic portrait of Victorian London.
Therefore what, you ask? I'm not sure yet. Perhaps no more than a reminder that the boundaries of historical time periods are as fluid and artificial as the boundaries of nations. Perhaps a hint that we need to look more closely at books with titles like [Historical Figure of Your Choice] And His Time.
I'd love to hear what some of you think about this. Do you have favorite examples of important figures who straddle periods like the Colossus of Rhodes? Can you put me out of my misery by explaining why it's important--or alternately why it isn't? Is this just the befuddlement of a person overwhelmed by packing boxes, construction details, and the overwhelming number of colors they make bath towels in?
Now if you'll excuse me, there's an unpacked box of books calling my name.
* My apologies to those of you who were confused by the re-runs. We did not take off to Belgium in the middle of the move,though there were moments when it was tempting.
**For that matter, so was Queen Victoria.
*** A salutary reminder that today's genre best seller may well be next century's literary classic and that today's heralded literary genius may be lucky to find a fading half- life in someone's doctoral dissertation.
Moving Pictures
It's a week and counting 'til our move. I'd rather be writing blog posts than sorting, pitching, packing, and hauling. But that's not realistic.
Instead, I'd like to share with you these two video clips from the British Pathé archives. The first is King George VI giving the real speech that inspired the film The King's Speech.* The second is George VI struggling with a public speech pre-speech therapy. That takes courage.
[A reminder to those of you who read these posts in your e-mail: You may need to view the post through your browser to see the film clips. Just click the post title twice and say "there's no place like home".]
* I strongly recommend that you track it down if you haven't seen it yet. In fact, I may watch it again myself as a treat tonight or tomorrow. I'm in the mood to watch the triumph of the human spirit.
Re-Run: The First Common Market?
Bruges. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress
My Own True Love and I leave next week for Belgium and my thoughts are turning toward Waterloo, Flanders Field, and the Hanseatic League.* Especially the Hanseatic League.
I'm fascinated by traveling merchants, from the Silk Road caravans that brought luxury goods from China and India to the Muslim peddlers who sold dry goods and notions to farm wives in the upper Midwest in the nineteenth century.** Part of it's the romance of the thing: desert caravans, clipper ships and gypsy-style wagons. Part of it is the hardheaded economics of who bought what from where.
In many ways, the Hanseatic League can be seen as Europe's first attempt at a Common Market. In the twelfth century, the European economic world was expanding. Increased agricultural productivity allowed more people to work at something other than farming, creating surplus goods for sale and a need for raw materials. (This is the same thing that made the Crusades possible. Cool, huh? The way different bits of history link together like that?) At the same time, the Teutonic Knights, a fighting monastic order interested in conversion and conquest (or possibly conquest and conversion), invaded the Slavic lands to the east. They established a network of fortified bases along the Baltic Sea that became new towns with markets where foreign goods could be bought and sold.
Being a merchant was dangerous work. By land, you had to worry about armed brigands and raiding militias. By sea, you were in danger from storms as well as pirates and their legally sanctioned cousins, privateers. Merchants from the newly formed cities of the Baltic began to join together into informal associations (hansas) to make long-distance trading safer.
They soon learned that working together not only brought greater safety at sea, it also made it easier to negotiate in the foreign towns with which they traded. (Collective bargaining, anyone?) Loose associations grew into merchant companies and guilds. By the end of the thirteenth century, Hanseatic merchants had built a trading network that stretched from Bergen (Norway) in the north, to Novgorod (Russia) in the East, and London (you know this one, right?) and Bruges (modern Belgium!!) in the west.
Hanseatic merchants were intermediaries between the workshops of Western Europe and the forests of Eastern Europe. They brought salt from the mines at Kiel to the herring fisheries of the Baltic. They exchanged cloth from Flanders, wool from England, and metalwork from Westphalia for furs, timber, wax, grain, and amber from Russia. They traded in salted fish from Scandia, wine from the Rhineland, copper and iron ore from Sweden and beer from north Germany, once Hamburg brewers figured out that adding hops would stabilize their product for transportation.
The Hanseatic League dominated northern Europe until the mid-sixteenth century, when they were elbowed aside by England and the Netherlands, whose merchants had larger, more seaworthy ships and a free-trade philosophy that made them welcome in foreign markets.
Bruges and Antwerp, here we come!
*Not to mention chocolates, waffles, beer and pommes frites.
** Yes, you read that right. Muslim peddlers in rural Iowa in the 1890s. A story for another day.