Re-Run: Word With A Past: Kidnap
I'm dipping into the archives again, because I'm in over my head here at the Margins. (So much so that I didn't even celebrate the blog's 3 year anniversary on May 11. Hmmmm....) We move on June 2 and to say we are not yet ready is an understatement. Too much to do, not enough hands to do it.
And speaking of labor shortages...
In the mid-seventeenth century, the British colonies in North America and the Caribbean were suffering from a labor shortage.
The colonies had originally attracted Britain's surplus population: dreamers, fortune-hunters, religious nuts, younger sons, prisoners of war, political failures, vagrants, criminals, the homeless, and the desperate. Some came with a small financial stake. Many came as indentured servants. A few were physically coerced onto ships sailing west.
In 1640s and 1650s, the population base in Britain took a hit. More than eleven per cent of the population died in the English Civil War. (In World War I, Britain's second most devastating war, the loss was only three percent.) With so many young men killed, the birth rate went down. Consequently, wages went up. Plenty of people must have asked themselves, "Why leave civilization for the colonies?"
With voluntary immigration down, involuntary immigration became more important. The inmates of Britain's prisons were given a chance at a new life--whether they wanted it or not. Grown men were "Barbadosed"--the seventeenth century equivalent of being shanghaied (another word with a past, now that I think about it).
Worst of all, children were snatched from their parents and sent to the colonies as indentured servants. As a result, a new word entered English:
Kidnap. .vt. To steal or carry off children or others in order to provide servants or laborers for the American plantations.
History on Display: Railroaders
What with one thing and another,* My Own True Love and I haven't made it to many museums in the last few months. Last week we made an exception. The current exhibit at the Chicago Historical Society Chicago History Museum looked too good to miss. Some of our favorite things-- history, art, and railroads--together in one place. In fact, Railroaders: Jack Delano's Homefront Photography exceeded our expectations.
When the United States entered World War II in 1941, Jack Delano was a photographer with the Farm Security Administration--the same government agency that hired Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange to document poverty in rural America. He took pictures of coal miners in Pennsylvania, African Americans in Georgia, and small farmers in New England. His work as a whole was marked by an awareness in the dignity of working people and a fascination with the idea of diversity.
In 1942, Delano received an assignment from the newly-formed Office of War Information to take pictures that would tell the story of railroad workers as a critical element of the American war effort: soldiers of the homefront. Over the course of four months in 1942-1943, he took more than 3000 photographs of America's railroad workers, two-thirds of them in Chicago, the heart of the nation's rail industry. The work he produced went far beyond its purpose of morale-building propaganda. At their best, Delano's photographs combine the moral authority of Evans and Lange's best work with lighting reminiscent of Rembrandt or the impressionist. (One photograph in particular made me think of Claude Monet's Gare Saint-Lazare.)
The Chicago History Museum has done an excellent job of using works of art to explore a historical moment--appropriate since Delano never forgot that the point of his work was to tell a story. His photographs are combined with brief biographies of the workers who portraits he took, explanations of how the war changed their work, railroad artifacts, and a montage of propaganda film clips, collectively titled "Railroaders for Victory".** They also include a few interactive exhibits and make an unusual plea for the visitor to take pictures and share them on social media:
(I couldn't resist. Obviously My Own True Love was meant to be a railroad man.)
Railroaders runs through August 10. If you're going to be in or around Chicago, it's worth taking the time to see--especially if you're interested in photography, railroads, or World War II. If a visit to the exhibit isn't in the cards, you can still see Delano's photographs. Since his work was produced for a government agency, you can find his photographs on the Library of Congress website.*** Even easier, check out the Delano page on the Shorpy Historical Photo Archive.
*The polar vortex, a bad case of bronchitis, a bad case of home renovation
**While I was watching the clips, the man next to me gave a sad smile and said "It's too bad we can't mobilize our forces the same way to solve a peacetime problem, like poverty or pollution." Something to think about.
***The search function is unwieldy, but there's gold in there if you're willing to take the time.
The Warrior Queens
I'm in the midst of re-reading an old friend--Antonia Fraser's The Warrior Queens: The Legends and the Lives of the Women Who Have Led Their Nations in War. If I were a more patient sort, I would wait to finish and then write a reasoned post with carefully thought out conclusions. But sometimes you just need to talk about a book while you're reading it.
As a child, I read every biography I could find about women who ignored society's boundaries and accomplished things. Lucky for me, our school's revolving library owned a whole series of them. Each week a new one arrived and I snatched it before anyone else could get it, eager to read about Clara Barton, Madame Curie, or Julia Ward Howell. Those books were an inspiration and I remember them with great affection, though I couldn't give you the name of a single title or author.(1)
I remembered The Warrior Queens with the same affection--as if it were an adult version of those biographies. Well…yes and no. I find that it is informed by the same mindset (sensibility?) that led me to those biographies. Fraser begins the book with an author's note in which she describes her childhood fascination with Queen Boadicea,(2) met in the form of a biography written for children. She is absolutely clear that part of what fascinated her was that the child's-history version of Boadicea was a heroine as opposed to a hero--exactly the quality that called to me in those long-ago cherished biographies. Returning to Boadicea's story, and those of other warrior queens, Fraser returns also to interwoven themes of patriotism and femininity, which she found neither outmoded or irrelevant in 1988--and which seem to me to be neither outmoded nor irrelevant today.
At the same time, The Warrior Queens is not a simple catalog of chicks with sticks.(3) Fraser looks at her warring queens as a whole as well as individually, trying to understand the tropes that [mostly male] historians have used both to make them bigger than life and to demean them as women.(4) In the process of untangling legends from lives, she transforms many of her queens from capital-H Heroines to powerful and often tragic historical figures.
Here are a few things that strike me about The Warrior Queens thus far:
- I remembered her discussion of Boadicea more clearly than any of the other figures she discusses. I assumed it was because she was the first queen in the book. In fact, Fraser uses her as the pivot for the entire book.
- There are several variations of Boadicea's name. The one that is probably "correct" (6), Boudica, resembles several Celtic words for victory. Which means Boudica, as we shall now call her, could also be called Queen Victoria. (Evidently nineteenth century British historians loved this. I don't blame them. I love it too.)
- Writing during Margaret Thatcher's third term as Prime Minister, Fraser ends (7) with a chapter titled "Iron Ladies" that focuses on women leaders of the twentieth century who led their countries to war. India Gandhi, Golda Meir and Thatcher herself. One of the questions I'm stewing over at the moment is how works of history are relevant to the time in which they are written: what is the hook that says "this is why it matters today". (8) This big fat hook--which I had totally forgotten--took me by surprise.
So what about you? Have you recently returned to any works of history from your distant past? How did they hold up?
(1) Does this sound familiar to any of you? I know I'm not the only girl-child who was eager for these stories; those books existed for a reason.
(2) Here's the short version: British ruler who led a revolt against the Roman occupation in 60/61 CE.
(3) I'm not entirely sure this phrase is mine. If you recognize the source, please let me know so I can give credit where credit is due.
(4) To put this in context, Sidney Hook, in his classic(5)The Hero in History, devotes only eight pages to women, uses almost every trope Fraser identifies to deny the importance of specific women in history, and accords only one his accolade of "event-making"-- Catherine the Great of Russia.
(5) Trying to resist the temptation to make jokes about it being seminal. And failing.
(6) To the extent that spelling can be correct for a name from a non-literate culture.
(7) What, you never peek ahead?
(8) A topic for a blog post in the future, perhaps