And we have a history-buff winner!
Several weeks ago I asked you to tell me what kind of history buff you are--and as an incentive I offered a chance to win one of my favorite history books from recent months.
I was pleased (surprised!, stunned!) by the number of people who not only answered, but wrote long thoughtful replies. Here are some of the things I learned:
- Everyone "knows" that the vast majority of history buffs are men. Certainly the audiences for the History Channel and popular history magazines are largely male. Based on my admittedly somewhat smaller sample, I can now say "not so". At least not as far as History in the Margins is concerned.
- Not everyone had a horrible experience with history in school. Some of you had teachers who inspired a love of history. What a relief!
- Most of you have more than one historical period or theme that fascinates you.
- You were pretty much unanimous in giving history-based travel a thumbs-up, even if only in vicarious form.
Thanks for playing.
And now, drum roll please while the cat crawls into the shopping bag to pull out a winner. (A hushed silence falls over the crowd. The suspense is horrible.) And we have a winner! Stephanie, who likes 400-900 CE and the late 16th through the early 17th centuries.
Photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress
History on Display: Faces of the 1st
Last week My Own True Love and I made the long drive to outer suburbia to see a special exhibit at the First Division Museum at Cantigny Park: Faces of the 1st. It was well worth the trip.
Several years ago we happily spent a rainy Memorial Day at the First Division Museum and were fascinated.* The museum does an excellent job of placing the Army's First Division** in historical context--from the division's creation in World War One through the current conflicts.
Faces of the First takes the museum's basic mission and gives it a twist by tightening the focus from the division as a whole to the individual soldier. The exhibits tagline says it all: 17 Soldiers, 7 Conflicts, 1 Division. According to exhibit designer Jaron Kenner, "The point of the exhibit is to put a face to war. Visitors look at personal stories and can identify with them." Using photographs and artifacts from the collections of the soldiers they profile, the museum tells the stories of a diverse group of soldiers. Chaplain, doghandler, nurse, and artilleryman. Boys barely out of high school and men who thought they were too old to be drafted. A professional boxer and a professional drummer as well as career soldiers.***
Some of the stories that gripped my imagination include:
• Marlin Burns' Army and Navy Service Record from WWI which was essentially a baby book detailing a soldier's career. Burns' record included charming sketches that brought his experience to life.
• WWII infantryman and professional drummer Fred Randall who served in the occupation of Germany. His commanding officer asked him to create a nightclub for soldiers stationed in Wurtzberg
• Methodist minister Wes Geary, who enlisted as a chaplain in the Vietnam War at the request of his bishop because the Army Chaplin Corps needed college educated black men. Since he wasn't allowed to carry a weapon, he made himself a slingshot.
Faces of the First successfully put a face on war: seventeen of them in fact. The exhibit runs through September 2. If you're in the area, make the time for a visit. If you're not in the area, check out the exhibit website .
* The re-creation of World War I trenches was particularly memorable. We've seen many versions of this since then, but few are as well done.
** Aka The Big Red One
*** High-ranking officers are the only group not represented: a conscious choice on the part of the museum curators. As Kenner pointed out, war is fought by the everyday soldier.
How to Create the Perfect Wife.
The myth of one man's effort to create a perfect woman is a recurring theme in Western literature, from Ovid's telling of the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea in classical Rome to Lerner and Lowe's My Fair Lady in twentieth-century America.* In each version of the story, the creator falls in love with his creation, whether he begins with a hunk of marble or a Covent Garden flower girl.
In How To Create The Perfect Wife: Britain's Most Ineligible Bachelor and His Enlightened Quest to Train The Ideal Mate Wendy Moore tells the astonishing-- and appalling--real life story of one man's attempt to play Pygmalion. The real life version was a little more complicated than the myth.
Thomas Day was wealthy, intelligent, and a gentleman in the technical sense, if not in terms of manners or social graces. He was a disciple of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, an ardent crusader against slavery, an occasionally ambivalent supporter of the American Revolution, and the author of an enormously popular children's book. He was also slovenly in his dress, badly groomed, and impatient of fashionable fripperies.
By the time he was twenty-one he had been engaged and jilted twice. Secure in his sense of personal worth, he came to the conclusion that the problem was the way Georgian society educated upper class women. (After all, the problem couldn't possibly be him.) Inspired by Rousseau's Emile, he decided to train a young girl to be the perfect wife. Day selected two young girls as potential wives, and removed them from the Foundling Hospital under false pretenses, abetted by two of his best friends. I'm not saying another word about what happens after that, because I don't want to spoil that story.
Moore writes in a lively style that kept me eager to know what happened next. At the same time, she sets Day's experiments solidly in the world of eighteenth century intellectuals: members of Erasmus Darwin's Lunar Society,** Benjamin Franklin, novelist Maria Edgeworth, and a very irritated Rousseau all play a role. In fact, the most astonishing thing about Day's experiments is that number of people who knew about them and did not intervene.
If you have a taste for Jane Austen (or Georgette Heyer), an interest in Enlightenment thought, or a fascination with eccentrics, give yourself a treat and read How to Create a Perfect Wife.
*Does anyone know of a similar tale of a woman's attempt to create a perfect man? My guess is that none exist because such tales assume a degree of power over another human being that was historically a male prerogative.
**Sometimes known as the "lunaticks".