Today:
Saturday Reading and Research will focus on exactly that: the history you have been reading this week and the research you've been working on. It's also the prime thread for requesting books on a particular subject. As with all our weekly features, this thread will be lightly moderated.
So, encountered a recent biography of Stalin that revealed all about his addiction to ragtime piano? Delved into a horrendous piece of presentist and sexist psycho-evolutionary mumbo-jumbo and want to tell us about how bad it was? Need help finding the right book to give the historian in your family? Then this is the thread for you!
COMPLAINTS DEPARTMENT WARNING
Woo boy. This book is a hot mess. I was putting off reading this thing for a long time, I will admit. I will also preface this by saying I gave this book an extremely close reading, a much closer reading than I think the book was supposed to ever get, or was written to stand up to. This is some sort of pop history book, maybe, perhaps you could call it a "pop humanities" book if such a thing is a thing, because, after my close reading, I wouldn't quite call it history.
The front half of the book (prose) is relatively straightforward, look-clever-at-the-coffeeshop writing, but the back half (notes and citations) are where the big ole cracks start to show. The author has no historical training, and normally I'm very generous to historical amateurs, being one myself, but he really needs some guidance here, or at least some deeper critical analysis. He seems to have done a lot of research, I was able to spot most of the "touchstone" works in eunuch-land, but cites a lot of works extremely uncritically. Lots of his secondary source citations are from the 60s and 70s, some go so far back as the 1930s. I mean, yes, this is a quiet field, but you really don’t need to be citing some 40+ year old books and articles here, even back in 2000. There was newer stuff back then.
Occasionally in the book he'll surprise me and really do some darned good history work. His chapter on the early Christian church’s struggles with castration, including the writings of St. Augustine etc, followed by a chapter with some quality critical interpretations of Jesus' saying on eunuchs (especially Matthew 19:11-12) is actually a very good overview of the major schools of thought at work on eunuchs in that time period. His analysis of 17th century English writing (including Middleton and Shakespeare) is also very good. All and all, whenever there’s a Western literary work to break down or give context, he really shines.
And then he'll shit all over himself and cite friggin Jared Diamond as his source for some evo-psych bullshit. He is really into reading an evo-psych "purpose" into eunuchs, such as that the “invention” of eunuchs was the reason harems were able to exist, because without castrated males (as an extension of the reproductive male's power) you can't build a safe secure harem, so eunuchs had an "evolutionary purpose" to humanity. This is a woefully simplistic view of the extremely complex roles they served in societies, and to boot I think he's got the causation ass-backwards. And even if eunuchs are the ultimate tool of the patriarchy, you’re going to have to work for that argument a lot harder than he did.
Most upsettingly, he does not seem interested with engaging any single historical eunuch as a person, other than himself of course, because in the beginning he says he is a modern day eunuch because he had a vasectomy. Eunuchs are either name-dropped once or twice to show the audience at home that he knows who’s who, or lumped together as so hard as to lose all identity and become just a homogeneous mass of the author’s idea of eunuchitude.
He is also obsessed with the play A Game at Chess, in fact he goes so far as to say "A Game at Chess should be as central to theories of castration as Oedipus has been for theories of incest." (pg 31) He essentially bases his entire book around it. (I have never seen it mentioned in any eunuch work published after his book, so I’m sad to say his anticipated revolution didn’t come.) Oh, and he has a lot to say about Freud's castration complex. Lavish time is devoted to that.
About a third of the way into the book I finally figured out what I think he was trying to do - he was doing a full-on literary analysis of the entire history of eunuchs. (I mostly figured this out by reading the back cover and seeing he was an English professor, it is not immediately obvious from the text.) When you have a hammer I suppose… He was trying to read deep humanist meaning into the existence of eunuchs in every time and place, and apply the symbolic readings gleaned from the entirety of their history to the modern psyche. Needless to say, this didn't work too well for me. History is a rough, messy ride, there is no overarching plan, and there is (at least I believe) no grand author working deep unified meanings into the acts of societies or individual people. People aren't characters and history isn't literature, and you can't pick it apart it like literature.
In the last chapter he abandons all semblance of history and throws out lots of strange predictions about the future of Western masculinity, including men openly breastfeeding in public and a society full of eunuch-analogous cyborgs.
Well anyway, it’s an interesting book, and he’s probably an interesting guy to have a beer with, but this book is not good scholarship by any measure.
The library just got this in on Monday, and DAMMIT does it suck, I am so annoyed. I was so pleased we finally had a documentary on castrati libraries could actually buy! I will admit watched it while trying to teach myself Kitchner stitch from written instructions, which probably didn’t help my emotional state, but this is seriously one of the most boring documentaries ever made. It has no narrative structure in use that I could notice, no recognisable take-home message about the legacy of the castrati in modern opera, and should probably just be titled Badly Edited Interviews with Modern Countertenors Interleaved with pictures of Farinelli.
All of the artists interviewed are probably annoyed right now, because other than Ernesto Tomasini who seems to be the focus of the doc, they all came off pretty dumb. I’ve seen Cencic, Jaroussky, and Fagioli do interviews before and they are all smart cookies and very historically knowledgeable about their work, but the managed to get quoted saying such silly things as “Modern operas with travesti roles shouldn’t look like a drag show.”
Halfway through my husband observed “They didn’t even talk about Farinelli, did they?” No, they did not. They only put him in the documentary to cash in on his fame I guess. Poor Farinelli.
The best castrato documentary continues to be the one produced by the BBC in 2006, which hasn’t been released on DVD so no libraries can add it to their collection, and hasn’t been run on any BBC channel in 4 years. You’ve got Youtube, or torrents. So that’s the state of castrato documentaries, the best one isn’t legal, and the legal one isn’t the best. ╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
This week I'm reading Indian Slavery in Colonial America by Alan Gallay. The influence of the Indian slave trade on Native American populations is not really in the public consciousness. Growing up in the South I never heard about the Indian slave trade, and would guess few people, outside a few specialists in the field, would recognize how influential the slave trade was in dictating the evolving politics of the southeast during the late 17th century.
Thus far the Gallay has done a wonderful job highlighting the underlying motivations (for both European and Native American) that influenced the spread of the Indian slave trade throughout the U.S. Southeast, and details the influence of warfare, the slave trade, and disease on Southeastern Amerindian populations.
Here is one of my favorite sections...
the drive to control Indian labor-which extended to every nook and cranny of the South- was inextricably connected to the growth of the plantations... The trade in Indian slaves was the most important factor affecting the South in the period 1670-1715: its impact was felt from Arkansas to the Carolinas and south to the Florida Keys. It created a swirl of activity that involved almost all, if not all, of the South's many peoples. It forced migrations and realignments, bringing misery to thousands and wealth to others. It existed on such a vast scale that more Indians were exported through Charles Town than Africans were imported during this period.
Asked this in the free-for-all thread yesterday and got an answer, but I'll check here, too: What's a good book for an intro on military logistics, specifically post WWII?
So I was looking at the National Registry of Historic Sites nomination for the Majestic Theatre [PDF link] in San Antonio, Texas – You know, as you do – and I noticed a bit of a jarring thing:
The entrance doors are original, as is the marble and cast iron ticket kiosk. The old segregated entrance on College Street consists of a mini-version of the Houston Street marquee and ticket kiosk. This is presently not used, though funds are being raised to restore and reopen it. [Emphasis mine]
This is pretty glossed over in the original text, but I'm not an American, so it was kind of jarring and it got me thinking - American public buildings from this part of the 20th century must have had a sort of architecture of exclusion to them, a bunch of architectural features, even entire rooms and sections, that were built to accomodate the needs of racial segregation and which presumably went on to be adapted, disused, or removed entirely. Does anyone have any expertise on this? And if so could I pick your brain? /u/AnOldHope? Bueller? Anyone?
Recordings of Beethoven's ACTUAL surviving pianos
So, I have been reading about German music in the 19th century, mostly on the so called "War of the Romantics." However, I deviated for a while to read about Beethoven (who has been influential way after his dead), and then I found myself reading for the second (or third) time some stuff about his pianos because of a situation mentioned during the Monday Mysteries. And people say Reddit is not productive...
Anyways. Thomas Broadwood, a famous piano maker met Beethoven in Vienna, in the summer of 1817. When Broadwood got back to London, he asked 5 pianists to help him select the best instrument available from the pianos he had made. He then gave this instrument to Beethoven. It took 7 months to deliver it to Vienna.
Here is a documentary about that piano, and some restoration work done. The first video is about the piano and its history, the second about some restoration details (not much information here), the rest of the videos are actual performances. Those recordings are the real deal, this is Beethoven's actual piano.
I think at least two other of Beethoven's pianos survive: an Érard from 1803, and a Graf from 1825.
Here are some recordings of the 1825 Graf. These were made in Bonn to celebrate Beethoven's 200th birthday. This is also the real deal, it's not a replica.
Sonata Op. 81a (Les Adieux)
Sonata Op. 111 in C minor (his last piano sonata)
Hi there,
I would be interested to know more about Russia's colonization of the far east, including but not limited to Siberia. Could you recommend me good books on that topic ?
So I posted a few weeks ago that I was reading God's War: A New History of the Crusades by Christopher Tyerman. Well, I finished it a couple of weeks ago, but have been unable to write about it until now. Now, I read this merely for my own enjoyment, and came at it with nothing more than a basic understanding of the Crusades (as in I knew how many there were, and roughly when they happened and some bigger names).
I rather enjoyed the book. It was generally divided so that each Crusade had two chapters: one to discuss the philosophy and background to each Crusade, and one detailing the actual Crusade itself. This I found useful as each Crusade had specific circumstances that led to them happening, and the European background that led to them is something that I had little understanding about. There is also a substantial part written about both the Albigensian and Northern Crusades, which are definitely overlooked. Conversely, he does only briefly touch on the last two Crusades; they are definitely rushed through, especially when compared to the detail afforded the earlier ones.
There was no thorough description of battles or anything, though he did mention them and what their impact was. A lot of detail went into the political maneuvering, both in Europe and in Outremer, and Tyerman does a good job at making this, though at times very confusing, simple to follow and understand what was happening.
Tyerman also managed to use a bit of humour in his writing. Not much, but some things he wrote would make people who read history have a bit of a laugh at times, while still keeping everything serious and formal. It made for a better read, as it was definitely not a dry recitation of names and dates that can occur when writing about a topic like this.
Though I have nothing to really compare it too, and Tyerman himself admits it is not meant to be a definitive work on the Crusades (as he says, it is impossible to do in one volume), I would suggest the book to anyone who is looking to gain some knowledge of the Crusades.
Whats a good intro book to nautical affairs? Interested in the UK mostly but a general history of ships and sailing methods would be great
thanks in advance!
I am very interested in recommendations for books on Renaissance Venice and/or Florence. I currently own and am reading A History of Venice By John Julius Norwich, and Venice, A Maritime Republic by Frederic C. Lane. In addition to general historical overviews, I would love more information about the social history of the people of these cities: what did people do, how was the day set up, how did people worship, etc. Basically, how did people live their lives, what did they enjoy (or not).
I would also love recs for both general and social overviews of Venice in the 18th century, if there are such things.
What does OP have against evolutionary psychology?
