Today:
You know the drill: this is the thread for all your history-related outpourings that are not necessarily questions. Minor questions that you feel don't need or merit their own threads are welcome too. Discovered a great new book, documentary, article or blog? Has your Ph.D. application been successful? Have you made an archaeological discovery in your back yard? Did you find an anecdote about the Doge of Venice telling a joke to Michel Foucault? Tell us all about it.
As usual, moderation in this thread will be relatively non-existent -- jokes, anecdotes and light-hearted banter are welcome.
In honor of the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots and the LGBTQ-activists of the late 1960s:
I’ve also talked about how the Stonewall riots, in a lot of ways, became the launchpad for the idea of “the lesbian community” and “the gay (male) community,” not just regional or local pockets of activists and clubbers:
(That’s only an answer to part of the question—I hope someone can come along and address the rest!)
I'm leaving to go on vacation Monday (yaaaaaaaaaay!), so I had to get everything on my end ready for the museum's gala today. For most of the afternoon, that meant dressing a single form.
See, the original gown I intended to use (a grey silk damask evening dress made by Moshier's of Utica around 1895) turned out to have been made for a woman whose build did not match any of the dress forms. She was rather robust, with broad shoulders and a long torso, but her waist was still somewhat narrow. I tried a male dress form first, but the waist was not small enough. I tried a female form next, and it proved impossible to get the shoulders big enough because the padding squished down and in and the bodice just kept falling off.
After more than an hour of futilely wrestling with this, I tried another dress. Needing something that didn't require much under the skirt, I tried a beautiful late-1830s evening dress made from an 18th century brocaded blue silk. A little clumsy, but so pretty. But late 1830s evening necklines are quite wide, and I ran into the same problem. On a mannequin, with a relatively full body, you have arms to help hold up a wide neckline, but on a dress form, just very soft stumps at the shoulders. Finally put it back.
Third try was another mid-1890s evening dress in various shades of purple-grey. (It was worn, according to the donor, to one of Mrs. Astor's famous New York balls with extremely restricted guest lists. It's not what I would call ball dress, though ...) This had a narrow neckline, not-too-broad shoulders, and a shorter waist, and it went on the form ... I wouldn't quite say "without a hitch", because I had to do some jiggery-pokery with the skirt to get it to stay on, and I also missed a button halfways down the bodice and had to undo and redo so many small silk buttons. But it fit and I was able to walk away, and that's the important thing.
Apologies if this doesn't belong here, but there's a (possibly official) YouTube channel that has been posting clips from the Sharpe TV series over the past few months.
I've been reading newspapers this week for my dissertation. One, a Catholic newspaper in Dortmund, Germany, had a great headline. Writing sympathetically about the nascent miners' strike in the region in 1905, the headline read "Der Würfel sind gefallen!" ("The Dice are Cast!"). It was a big, momentous, "the die is cast" kind a moment, but it still reads as sooooo melodramatic to a 21st century reader.
Around last year i remember reading a book on (probably) early modern Muslim empires, The Ottomans and Mughals (and probably Safavids too). The book basically a modern comparative history of the three empires, with some political-cultural history mixed in (probably) . The conclusion is particularly interesting, since it rejects the usual 'decline' narrative, stating rather than going into a decline after the 17th century, these empires experienced a period of transformation and change which isn't necessarily a decline and flourished in their own way. The Mughals, even though collapsed in the 18th century in turn resulted in general prosperity and development in local provinces (the one that i particularly remembered)
...And now i'm struggling to find or even remember that book. The citations in the conclusion provides a plethora of other sources regarding the decline narrative, which i want to explore on the Mughals. It's definitely not Islamic Gunpowder Empires or The Muslim Empires of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals, i've checked. If anyone knows what book i'm talking about please let me know. It couldn't even be a book, probably an article which i mistook for a book.
Who was the best leader of the Roman Empire?
I am a first period history student in Brazil, and have been studying the formation of american colonial societies during the 16th and 17th centuries. We have only now started studying the formation of north american societies and the 13 colonies. Our next class will be on how slavery developed in the USA and how it shaped its society.
But I've noticed that the available texts and materials are somewhat limited: the only available text is Slavery and Freedom: the American Paradox, a publication in the Journal of American History by professor Edmund S. Morgan.
So I got curious: what publications or books are used as references in the US, when studying the subject? As in, what do american history students first read on the subject of slavery and the trans-atlantic slave traffic?
The fantastic old cemeteries of New Orleans deserve a word for themselves. On account of the shallow soil all burials are above ground. The wealthy lie in fantastic tombs, whilst less opulent citizens are enclosed in oven-like vaults along the ten-foot-thick brick walls of the necropolis. Of all these grotesque ossuaries, the old St. Louis Cemetery just outside the Vieux Carré is undoubtedly the most interesting. Lafcadio Hearn has written of it movingly & gruesomely somewhere in his “Fantastics”—which, by the way, I must re-read now that I’ve seen N.O.
The next day, Lovecraft would meet E. Hoffmann Price in the Vieux Carre, thanks to a telegram sent by Robert E. Howard so they could find each other. Lafcadio Hearn was an (in)famous journalist, who wrote much of old Nawlins:
And I passed with him through the Egyptian gates, and beyond the pylons into the Alley of Cypresses; and he showed me the dwelling- place of the rich in the City of Eternal Sleep,—the ponderous tombs of carven marble, the white angels that mourned in stone, the pale symbols of the urns, and the names inscribed upon tablets of granite in letters of gold. But I said to him: "These things interest me not;—these tombs are but traditions of the wealth once owned by men who dwell now where riches avail nothing and all rest together in the dust."