Category: Historical

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Hostages

A four episode documentary about the Iranian Hostage Crisis and despite having a pretty good understanding (so I thought) about this event, this show knocked me for six. It was impressively well done – they approached it objectively and interviewed both the hostages and the hostage-takers.

Watching this series gave a deeper understanding of the events surrounding the hostage crisis – the geopolitical and historical context as well as being able to see the footage from back then with those involved to the elder selves commenting back on that time.

Do not give this one a miss. It is well worth your time.

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From Appalachian Songcatchers to a Revolution

Arthur Krim, “Appalachian Songcatcher: Olive Dame Campbell and the Scotch-Irish ballad.” Journal of Cultural Geography. 2006. HighBeam Research. (October 25, 2010). http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-159390035.html

Dick Weissman, “Talkin’ ‘Bout a Revolution: Music and Social Change in America.” New York: Backbeat Books, 2010.

“Twas in the mer-ry month of May, The green buds were swel-ling, Poor
Wil-liam Green on his death-bed lay For the love of Bar-b’ra El-len.” These words come from the first verse of the English ballad, Barbara Allen, which was one of many English, Scottish, Irish, and Ulster-Scots’ ballads to have been found perfectly preserved in the Appalachian mountains. The discovery of these ballads at the turn of the twentieth century have been the subject of fascination by geographers, historians, and folklorists alike. In addition to this, the work of such people as Olive Dame Campbell, Cecil Sharp, and Charles Seeger in preserving these ballads for posterity had a direct impact on the folk and Celtic music revivals of the sixties. These ballads are not native to America, they were brought over with the waves of immigrants from Britain, Scotland, and Ireland. How and when they came to be preserved in small enclaves in the Appalachians has also been a subject of much discussion and scholarship.

Arthur Krim, in his article for the Journal of Cultural Geography, traces the scholarship surrounding these ballads, their preservation, and theorizes how they came to be in the Southern Appalachians. His thesis is how the original discoveries helped to touch off a folk/roots revival that has never quite disappeared, and how this archaic vocal music has maintained a vital part of the cultural practices and geography of the mountain core of Appalachia. It references both immigration and migration in the explanation of how the ballads came to Appalachia. Krim refers to this theory as a “sequence” of events that are tentatively described in the article, beginning with the Highland Scotch and Border British migrations to the Ulster Plantations in Ireland (mid-seventeenth century), bringing the Scottish ballads and their fiddle music, to the immigration of these Ulster-Scots-Irish to America (mid-eighteenth century) through Pennsylvania, Delaware, and the Piedmont, to finally settling down in the Appalachians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, having also acquired such instruments as the German dulcimer and the African-American banjo. While the instruments changed or were added to, the vocals did not, and out of this process of Immigration and migration is how a Scottish ballad from 1666 wound up being almost perfectly preserved in a remote Kentucky county settled in 1810 and first heard by Olive Dame Campbell in 1907.

Krim’s sources come primarily from the same people he discusses, Olive Dame Campbell and her husband, John, Cecil Sharp, and Eileen Semple’s work, as well as sources from a number of other people in the field. They are used to illustrate his points, giving background information and providing useful examples for further analysis. The article is more interdisciplinary, geographical with a social history flavor.

Dick Weissman’s book, “Talkin’ ‘Bout A Revolution: Music and Social Change in America” is a fairly comprehensive guidebook for the relationship between music and social change. He opens the book talking about the beginnings of American history and their music and then proceeds to work both chronologically and thematically up to the present day. The scope of the book is broad and diverse, covering a multitude of subjects from Native American music to union and protest songs to what he calls “music of hate” (racist and neo-Nazi music). Weissman spends an entire chapter to protest, union, and folk songs. He goes into the folk music revival and how it slowly went from songs sung back the backwards hillbillies to becoming a major influence on American music and culture. His sources and examples illustrate not only how social events impact music, but also how music impacts social events in turn. One of the examples he uses is Pete Seeger, famed folksinger and songwriter. Pete Seeger, who was introduced to folk music through his father, Charles, who collected folk songs for the Farm Resettlement Administration, and discovered a love for it himself. Pete Seeger, who among others was one of the founding fathers of the American folk music scene as it is known today. Weissman covers other huge names in the folk and celtic music revival, Joan Baez, Leadbelly, the Weavers, and Bob Dylan.

Weissman’s book is more an overview of the American music scene, specifically the complicated relationship it has with social change and events. It was published this year, so it is more current than the Krim article (published in 2006) and covers things on up to the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It does not reference immigration much past the first chapter of the book or emigration, but there is much talk of migration inside of the United States. Where the music was, where people would travel to in order to be a part of this group or this festival and how that too had an effect on the music scene and the participants in it. Like the Krim article, it is more interdisciplinary with a social history flavor to it.

Weissman’s focus is strictly on American artists and songwriters, and he states that there are several aspects of the American music scene that he did not cover (Gay and lesbian music for one and Christian music for another). Therefore while the book is deep and comprehensive, it is not an exhaustive text. His sources are legion and all of them point to the same conclusion that Weissman drives toward. That the links between music and social change start off as tenuous and grow steadily stronger as time goes by, until the period of the fifties and sixties where they become almost symbiotic with one another. Weissman also provides the connections that link the work of Olive Dame Campbell and the others to the folk/celtic music revival and the movements that sprang up in and around that period. The Krim article in a sense sets up the stage for the performance that the Weissman book portrays.

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Renaissance Research: Book Edition

A friend asked me what were some good books to read if one wanted to do more research into the Renaissance. I assembled this list for her and thought it might also be of some use to people reading this blog!   So here you go – if you want to research the Renaissance, this is where I would start.   This is not an exhaustive list, but it’ll give you a good comprehensive grounding on some of the ins and outs and how to structure any further research you choose to do.

Margaret King’s The Renaissance in Europe
This is a fairly good informative textbook – King works more or less thematically through the Renaissance and it gives you a nice grounding in just about everything. It is definitely the book I would go to first before delving into more heavier researching.

Gene Brucker’s The Society of Renaissance Florence – A Documentary Study
My Renaissance and Reformation professor made a comment once in class, that just about everything that ever happened in the European Renaissance – you could find an example of that happening in Florence. He’s yet to be proven wrong. Florence is an amazing case study for the Renaissance as a whole, and that’s due in no small part because Florence is obsessively well-documented. Where the rest of Europe will have a hundred documents or so total – Florence (not to mention the rest of Italy) has thousands upon thousands of documents. Like King, it is organized thematically – but the documents that Brucker has selected give a very good picture of what day to day life was like.

Kenneth Atchity’s The Renaissance Reader
This compilation gives access to selections from the important literary, artistic, social, religious, political, scientific and philosophical texts of the 14th, 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. Louise Labe, Bruni, Dante, Chaucer, Villon, Malory, Copernicus and Shakespeare, as well as illustrations representing the work of Giotto, Donatello, Bellini, Da Vinci, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Raphael and Brueghel. It also provides first-hand encounters with the Renaissance in the form of letters, diaries, poetry and art.

Michael Baxandall’s Painting and Experience in 15th century Italy 2nd Edition.
The Renaissance was a highly material and visual culture – there are social cues and codes incorporated into the paintings of the time. This book is both an introduction to fifteenth-century Italian painting and as a text on how to interpret social history from the style of pictures in a given historical period, this examines early Renaissance painting, and explains how the style of painting in any society reflects the visual skills and habits that evolve out of daily life. Renaissance painting, for example, mirrors the experience of such activities as preaching, dancing, and gauging barrels. The volume includes discussions of a wide variety of painters, including Filippo Lippi, Fra Angelico, Stefano di Giovanni, Sandro Botticelli, Masaccio, Luca Signorelli, Boccaccio, and countless others. Baxandall also defines and illustrates sixteen concepts used by a contemporary critic of painting, thereby assembling the basic equipment needed to explore fifteenth-century art. This new second edition includes an appendix that lists the original Latin and Italian texts referred to throughout the book, providing the reader with all the relevant, authentic sources. It also contains an updated bibliography and a new reproduction of a recently restored painting which replaces the original.

Craig Harbison’s The Mirror of the Artist – Northern Renaissance Art in its Historical Context
This book looks at the Northern Renaissance and how that transformed differently from the Southern (Italian) Renaissance – it places the art inside the historical context of the time and overlaps with the Reformation. Fascinating reading and has some amazing pictures of the kinds of Northern Art that existed or developed.

These last two names are more along the lines of primary source material, but both are rather essential for sort of understanding Renaissance-era thought.

Niccolo Machiavelli – The Prince and Discourses I & II (Free)
Machiavelli wrote more than just the Prince -which should be required reading for everyone, everywhere, but I digress. His Discourses are also very valuable readings with regards to political thought – and he was more than a simple theorist, being the foreign minister of Florence in the early 1500s–until thrown out of office and tortured by the Medici in 1513–his Discourses and the Prince illustrate Renaissance Italy’s dangerous political environment, on which Machiavelli drew for his insights on political conduct.

Baldassare Castiglione – “The Art of the Courtier” (free)

This book is amazing. It addresses the constitution of a perfect courtier, and in its last installment, a perfect lady. It is the definitive account of Renaissance court life. The book is organized as a series of fictional conversations that occur between the courtiers of the Duke of Urbino in 1507 (when Baldassare was in fact part of the Duke’s Court). In the book, the courtier is described as having a cool mind, a good voice (with beautiful, elegant and brave words) along with proper bearing and gestures. At the same time though, the courtier is expected to have a warrior spirit, to be athletic, and have good knowledge of the humanities, Classics and fine arts. Over the course of four evenings, members of the court try to describe the perfect gentleman of the court. In the process they debate the nature of nobility, humor, women, and love.

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Book Review: Kent State by James Michener

This is  an older review done for a college class a long time ago, found again as I was organizing some of my files this weekend.  I’m putting it here in case it will inspire more people to pick it up.  It was definitely one of those books that will leave an imprint on you.  DJG

Michener, James A. Kent State: What Happened and Why. New York: Random House Inc, 1971. Pp. 559

Kent State. A tragedy that shook the nation and caused several hundred universities and colleges to close their doors; a clash between two competing lifestyles resulting in students who openly discussed revolution and their parents who couldn’t understand it and took up arms against the younger generation. James Michener wrote this book in an effort to understand the events that took place on that fateful weekend at Kent State University, and more importantly, why they happened. In doing this, he tracks the lives of five students at Kent (Allison Krause, Bill Schroeder, Jeff Miller, Sandy Scheuer, and Doug Wrentmore) during these first four days of May 1970. He also explores all of the different facets of Kent State, the factors, motivations, and decisions that all contributed to the tragedy that became Kent State. The shootings themselves happened on Monday, May 4th, but the events leading up to it began with the rioting and trashing of Water Street on Friday the 1st.

The events that took place on Friday started in the late evening, with a group of rioters defacing Water Street property and then blocking traffic with a human-chain barricade. The police were alerted with news that a riot was in progress around 11:21pm, but it took another hour before they marched forth to start clearing the streets (52). By that time, the serious rioting had started, with the piles of garbage burning in the streets and the smashing of windows along Water Street. By 12:15am, the riot police slowly moved towards the affected area, at 12:35, Mayor Satrom declared a state of emergency, and at 12:57am, the Mayor was driven to the center of town so that he could announce the state of emergency and read the riot act. It took until 3am for the students to disperse and return to campus, at least those that had escaped being arrested. There were several reasons given for Friday’s rioting, it was spring and the students had gotten carried away with spring fever, it was President Nixon’s announcement that more troops going into Cambodia that had inflamed the radicals. It was organized by upperclassmen, it was organized by outsiders, the opinions of people who were present differ wildly. Michener suggests that it was a combination of both, a spring prank gone bad and a reaction to the speech Nixon had given. What is agreed upon by the majority of people present is that neither drugs nor alcohol was a factor (135). Out of 1000 rioters, only 14 arrests were made (136).

Saturday, May 2nd saw the burning of the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) building. At 7 pm a small crowd started to gather around the campus’ Victory Bell. As the crowd grew, the radical leaders started to circulate handbills speaking against ROTC. Around 8:10pm, the mob started to hurl rocks at the ROTC building before moving to an impromptu battering ram and tossing flares at the building. By 8:30, the building was ablaze. It was not a bad fire, easily extinguished, if the firemen had been able to make their way through the mob. All attempts to get through had been stopped by the students, who stole the hose nozzles, punctured holes in the hoses themselves, and in one case, had a hose hacked to pieces by a machete (195). Both extra police from neighboring cities and the National Guard had been called out. The presence of the Guard did help to prevent the burning of several other buildings. An 8pm curfew for town and 1am curfew for campus were initiated. No arrests were made.

Sunday, May 3rd was a day of contrasts. The morning and the afternoon, there had been a carnival like attitude among the students and National Guard. People were laughing and joking and having a good time. Sunday night saw more rioting, less flamboyant, but it was the watershed of the weekend, according to Michener. After the events on Sunday night, it was inevitable that some kind of conflict would happen on Monday.

Monday, May 4th was a bright sunny day and students were milling in the commons area in between morning and noon classes. By noon, there were between 800 and 1100 students gathered in the commons area. Tear gas was fired into the crowd. The order was given for the Guardsmen to regroup back at the ROTC building. At 12:24pm, with their escape route clear to the ROTC building, some Guardsmen trailing behind their colleagues, suddenly turned around, and brought their rifles up to the ready position. A single shot was heard and then a entire volley sounded. Twenty-eight Guardsmen fired, but only a few of them fired into the crowd. Many of them fired into the air instead. When the dust settled, thirteen people had been shot, four died of their wounds. The four who died were Allison Krause, Bob Schroeder, Jeff Miller, and Sandy Scheuer, students that Michener had tracked throughout the course of the book (411).

Unlike his other published works, this book doesn’t read like a novel. It is a sober piece of nonfiction writing, a well researched scholarly history complete with footnotes. Michener is careful to present not to spin the story to one side or another. He simply gives it to the reader as it was given to him, and what analysis he does do, he clearly shows the reader how he arrives at that point. Each section is divided up into explaining some of the backstory, the history behind certain movements, clarifying terms like “lifestyle” and “revolutionary.” The book has seven chapters, beginning with a brief view of Kent, Ohio and ending with a chapter dedicated to the significance of Kent State, not only for Ohio, but for the nation as a whole. For each event, there is an opening statement that simply gives the facts of what happened. There is no whitewashing, no attempts at justification, no analysis. It is a simple description of what happened when. After this opening statement, Michener includes several different viewpoints and interpretations of the events that unfolded, several of them contradictory. It is up to the reader to evaluate them and decide which they believe to be true (49). At the end of each chapter, Michener offers up what he considers to be his reasoned analysis of what happened. I enjoyed this structure, it gave me a very good grasp not only of the events that occurred, but also of the mindset of the various people involved.

This book is a product of research done in and around Kent State University from July to December 1970. The sources that the author used were all real people though some of the names were changed, and in every instance of that being the case, Mr. Michener states it plainly in the text. His sources came from the people of Kent, students, faculty, townspeople. Some of these sources were better than others. All of the dialogue in the book is as accurate as memory and notes can supply, and where there is instance of testimonies conflicting with one another, the contradictions have been allowed to stand as they are. Mr. Michener writes beautifully, his prose flows in an easily understandable way, and the organization of the book itself was very well thought out.

This book is very valuable. It provides a decent, if not troubling account of what happened during those first four days in May 1970. Every step along the path is outlined and explained and analyzed for a greater understanding of what took place and why it took place. In the foreword, Michener writes, “…You need to know what happened to you, so that you can prevent it from happening again” (viii). Kent State was a tragic accident and by becoming aware of it and what caused it, we can better understand how to avoid a recurrence of it.

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