With Dia de Muertos right around the corner, I thought this article might be of interest to many people.

• Brandes, Stanley. “Iconography in Mexico’s day of the dead: Origins and meaning.” Ethnohistory (1998): 181-218.

Abstract

This article analyzes the origin and meaning of artistic representations of death-principally skulls and skeletons-in Mexico’s Day of the Dead. It challenges stereotypes of the death obsessed Mexican by tracing mortuary imagery in the Day of the Dead to Two separate artistic developments, the first deriving from religious and demographic imperatives of colonial times, the second from nineteenth-century politics and journalism. Now generally perceived as belonging to a single, undifferentiated iconographic tradition, cranial and skeletal images of death have become virtually synonymous with Mexico itself.

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2tt3663j

What I learned is that Day of the Dead is not simply a continuation of pre-Columbian beliefs or practices. The origin of the holiday is much more complex than that. There is a disconnect between pre-Columbian motifs and Day of the Dead artwork with different things depicted, different meanings, and different contexts. But Day of the Dead is not quite European in origin either, though there are things drawn from European religions and traditions. Instead, Day of the Day is a unique combination of the two roots that make up the heritage of modern Mexico. This unique combination was then made prominent in Mexican society and the world during the years between Mexico's independence and revolution.

I hope you take some time to read the article and appreciate the holiday for what it truly is.

Been doing some rather scattershot reading lately. So enjoy some scattershot reviews. Also, increasingly rarely for me, none of these reviews are “sponsored,” none are advance copies from publishers! All ethically sourced from the public library and available right now!

#You Could Look It Up: The Reference Shelf from Ancient Babylon to Wikipedia, by Jack Lynch, 2016 Probably a book only a librarian would select to read of their own free will… I love reference books and could power rank my favorites right here right now. But the book was disappointingly shallow, and mostly about dictionaries, and dictionaries have already had their own (better) pop history treatments (OED alone has two recent pop histories! two!!) so there’s not much point to dedicating 50% of the book to them. There’s definitely some good overview histories of academic reference favorites, like I didn’t know the history of Grove Music, which is my most consulted academic reference, nor did I know all the drama surrounding Grey’s Anatomy. You always suspected these books were written by crazy people, and lo, they were. But the author is an English professor and it really shows, as he’s not a reference librarian he’s clearly never seen the truly weird reference books, nor been taught how to do reference out of textbooks on reference, nor seen the reference materials normal people actually use.

He does a particularly irritating thing in the intro where he mentions that whether or not cookbooks are reference books is a debated thing, then never mentions it again. Well come on, give your own opinion! You going to act like Mrs Beeton’s isn’t worthy of inclusion in this history, a book that earned the reputation of being one of the only two books a new English wife needs, the other being the Bible? As a home-ec-history buff, enraging. Either he has a very indulgent spouse or subsists on takeout, no person who cooks would fail to give the correct opinion on that question, 3 particular cookbooks (and a self-written binder of Secret Recipes involving mostly lentils and my bread machine but not in combination) are my most-used household reference books. And even if we indulge that he is the sort of old-school American man who has never even poured his own milk on his Cheerios, he has apparently never used anything classified under the subject heading “Automobiles -- Handbooks, manuals, etc.” a vital and heavily used part of any public library’s reference collection, with several competing publishing brands, and which takes up over 100 non-circulating shelf spots at my city’s public library.

The best populist reference he included is the history of the 18th century Hoyle books on the rules of basic card games, and originator of the phrase “according to Hoyle.” (For a more modern Hoyle, I think no public library’s reference collection is complete without the Pokemon Essential Handbook, now in its second edition.) The only popular female-oriented reference he covers is the development of Emily Post’s Etiquette, which is a masterpiece of historical documentation, and disgustingly undercited in American history. (Footnote rant: You want the best way to judge the point at which gay rights became mainstream in America? Go look up when the major etiquette books start including how to address a same-sex couple on an envelope. There is nothing more salient. When class-anxious middle-aged women started being concerned about offending gay couples when addressing their daughter’s wedding invitations, that is a true turning point in lgbt history, and you can fite me irl if you don’t agree.) Having the Good Blue Book included was very appreciated. In general though, the book misses the reference you take for granted, like the phonebook.

I think an English professor is a very unobjective profession to write this book actually. It’s why it’s so much dictionaries, dictionaries matter deeply to this man, whereas Chilton’s DIY Auto Repair Database does not. The whole thing made me feel slightly warmer towards my library school professor who taught my reference class, who annoyed the beans out of me with his APA pedantry on grading, but he did try to convey his lifetime of genuinely loving and using quality reference resources for all human needs, which this pop history failed to do entirely. I hope a public librarian writes a new one.

Finished off The Black Image in the White Mind. I tried hard to adjust for my lack of familiarity with post-Reconstruction white supremacy, but even doing that it seemed to lose steam in the last few chapters. Aside that, I had the seminal book from decades ago problem: my previous reading told me most of the content, albeit often by implication, so it was about half systematizing what I already knew. Still good stuff, but I over-hyped it for myself.

For at least a quarter of the rest, I agree with Frederickson's new introduction that there's probably a hair too much post-Civil Rights frustration. The racism of antislavery whites deserves attention, and recognition as such. It is of a kind with proslavery racism, both accepting a fundamental inferiority of black Americans which has serious, and vicious, consequences down the road. But he at least verges on, and maybe crosses over, into viewing them as essentially the same as their opposites. There are moments when he feels more like an anti-abolitionist historian of a few decades before, albeit one who damns them more for their racism than their abolitionism. Fairness demands that I also grant his point that a historian writing now would probably feel more inclined to excuse or downplay antislavery racism than he did.

More significantly, though, TBIitWM isn't a standalone work. I dug into the first chapter and was almost immediately lost in a concept that I don't think he ever explains. He simply refers to environmentalist racism as if the reader should understand its meaning. I can't be the only reader who first thought that referred to some nineteenth century conservationist movement's faults. I backed up and realized he must be referencing a concept from Winthrop Jordan's White Over Black. I checked the scope and, sure enough, Jordan ends in 1812 and Frederickson begins in 1817. He wrote what's functionally a sequel...to a book I have yet to read.

So it's time to move that up the list, but in the interim let's get Whiggery. My copy of The Political Culture of the American Whigs arrived and it is tremendous fun, even when Howe is gushing about how conservative the Whigs were. I'm not sure that's so, but maybe if you take Burke at his word rather than Burke at his practice it makes sense. Either way, it's not like our notions of left and right map remotely well to the early nineteenth century.

The book shows a strong influence from Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men. Since that's among my favorite history books ever, that's a decided plus. Howe's organization is similar to Foner's, laying out basically thematic chapters. Unless its still coming -I'm about 120 pages in- there seems to be even less narrative. Foner's book concerns party formation at least as much as ideology. Howe replaces that with a semi-biographical approach where aspects of the Whig mind are explored through the ideas and lives of prominent figures, starting with John Quincy Adams. After him, Howe turned to Henry Carey, who I know entirely from Calculating the Value of the Union, and Nathan Appleton, whom I had never heard of before. Now I'm on the cusp of a chapter on Henry Clay, whom Howe dubs "Ideologue of the Center". I predict that will manage one or both of the following: drive me up the wall or strike me as one of those ostensibly counter-intuitive observations that makes a lot of sense on second examination.

Holt's behemoth The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party arrived too. I am excited and terrified by it. The print isn't that small and I've read far worse in the Congressional Globe, but there is a lot of it. The chapters swell to over forty pages, which is about where my chapter-a-day plan stops seeming a little demanding and starts to feel like a slog. But the cover design is the famous image of Henry Clay pleading with the Senate while Calhoun tries to make his head explode by shooting laser beams out of his eyes. I did not previously notice this, but seeing it in color brought how to me just how much it looks like Clay is trying to impress the Senators with his, ahem, manly stature. I will never look at it the same way again.

Clay is the figure standing, looking better fed than photographs of the time. Millard Fillmore is the President of the Senate, up on the high chair. Calhoun is at his elbow. Seated a little bit to Clay's rear and looking sick of all this crap is Daniel Webster. He's the other dude with the funky eyes. I think the guy seated directly at Clay's rear, checking out his butt, is meant to be Stephen Douglas. This was all drawn in 1855, so that would make a lot of sense given Douglas finished off what Clay started. William Henry Seward may be one of several senators with prominent noses. Beyond that, I'm bad with faces.

I finally found a document I've been looking for for years!

I had access to it years ago but between then and now it for whatever reason wasn't available no matter how much I looked. Now I see it in multiple places. For the curious:

Trigrams and Tortoises: Sino-Tibetan Divination

EDIT: I can't seem to reddit today.

Picked up Bernardo de Vargas Muchaca's The Indian Militia yesterday, which Geoffrey Parker described as the first European manual of Guerrilla Warfare (or Counter Insurgency, as the editor parses it). Gonna be doing an in class presentation on evolution of warfare as a result of colonial experience.

Looking for reading suggestions on mourning of children in New England circa 1750-1820. Paywalls not an issue.

I've heard a lot about The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler and A Study of History by Arnold Toynbee. I've been debating reading them. But before I do I'm wondering if anyone has read them. If you have could you tell me if they're any good and what their impact on historians views have been?

What are your favorite works of microhistory?

I was listening to a podcast about some of the recent trials of the Guantanamo Bay detainees and they discussed the military tribunals of the Lincoln assassination conspiracy suspects as a relevant precedent. Is anyone here familiar with any relevant sources in regards to those cases? They may have been practically straightforward, but constitutionally they sound fascinating.

I'm reading "Dracula, Prince of Many Faces: His Life and His Times" by Radu R. Florescu and Raymond T. McNally. It's very well written, easy to read, immersive since the first pages, goes into some detail on the general situation in Europe and Asia for the context, etc. I'd be interested in historian opinions on this book, how about it's factual accuracy? What other historical books on Vlad Tepes would you recommend?