Category Archives: Travel and Adventure
It’s rough, but someone has to do it….
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By Holly Tucker
While Wonders & Marvels hums along as usual (with the help of my amazing editorial team), I’m actually spending the summer in France. Yes, France. To be more precise, the South of France. Aix-en-Provence. Yes, it’s a rough life.
I’m here teaching at my university’s study abroad program. We’ve had a program in Aix for almost 50 years. One of the greatest perks for faculty is that we get to teach in rotation here.
Several years ago, my family and I spent a full year in Aix. So being here is like coming home. In fact, just yesterday, we had our neighbors—whom we’ve known for years–over for an American breakfast. You can imagine how fun it is to serve grits and bacon here!
Aside from the grits, I can’t begin to tell you how delicious it is to be here. First, of course, because of all of the delicacies to be found. Fresh fruit and vegetable markets dot the city each day. Olives, tapenade [an olive spread], fresh goat cheese, and wine—de préférence, rosé, are a staple for our evening aperitif.
It’s delicious to me for an even more important reason, however. As a professor, I am nearly giddy with the opportunities my students and I get to share together. I’m teaching a course called “Textes et Contextes,” which covers history, art, and literature from the Middle Ages to the Eighteenth Century.
Last week, I talked to the students about medieval architecture—and particularly the shift from Roman to Gothic styles in church construction. A student had a question about a specific type of arch. I pulled up some Google images to give her a better idea. Then it occurred to me…duh, we were literally RIGHT NEXT DOOR to a 13th century church: Saint Jean de Malte.
Fred Harvey and his Bird’s-eye View of History
By Stephen Fried
When I set out to write a book about Fred Harvey–who all but invented the American hospitality industry at his trackside restaurants and hotels between Chicago and Los Angeles along the Santa Fe–I thought I’d be writing a business biography set in the late 1800s, with some nice historical touches of the Wild West. It didn’t occur to me until about six months into the process that the story would actually have to extend two generations beyond Fred—all the way through the 1940s (when the physicists from Los Alamos used the Fred Harvey hotel, La Fonda, as their regular Santa Fe watering hole for successes and setbacks.) So instead of a historical biography, the book would need to be, for lack of a better term, a biographical history (which is why it took six years and not the two I promised my publisher.)
Fred, his son Ford, their top managers and the generations of their beloved waitresses, the “Harvey Girls” were afforded a birds-eye view of an enormous number of events in U.S. history that we often take for granted, and sometimes learn about pretty dryly. So I decided to recreate as many of the events that Fred and his employees experienced as I could, based on a new reading of original newspaper accounts (some on microfilm others, mercifully, now available on ProQuest) and then cross-referenced with the cache of never-before-seen Harvey family datebooks, correspondence and business files, as well as Santa Fe railroad archives.
Napoleon’s Egyptomania
By Jed Z. Buchwald and
Diane Greco Josefowicz
In August 1799, Napoleon returned to France from an ill-fated imperial adventure in Egypt, leaving behind a demoralized force headed by Jean-Baptiste Kléber, the Revolutionary hero shortly to be assassinated in Cairo. “L’oiseau était déniché” was how the disappointed Kleber described Napoleon’s departure: The bird had flown the coop.
In France, Napoleon touted the campaign as a triumph despite the late debacles at Acre and in Aboukir Bay, where not only lives but also the expedition’s greatest prize, the Rosetta Stone, were lost. Back home in France, his propaganda touched off a wave of popular enthusiasm for all things Egyptian. This “Egyptomania” was additionally fueled by the publication of compelling eye-witness travelers’ accounts, such as the artist Vivant Denon’s illustrated Voyage dans la basse et la haute Egypte.
These immensely popular publications provided rich sources of imagery for fine and decorative artists. Wallpapers featuring Egyptian motifs, furniture carved with Egyptian emblems, and variations on themes from Egyptian architecture (including the 1806 peristyle of the Hôtel de Beauharnais in Paris) flooded French homes and buildings.
Perhaps the strangest—certainly the most fragile—of these artifacts was the “Egyptian Service,” a 115-piece, Egyptian-themed porcelain dinner service commissioned from the Sèvres porcelain factory by Napoleon in 1804. Using Denon’s and others’ drawings as inspiration, the designs were produced by one Lepére, an architect who had served on Napoleon’s expedition. (Denon’s drawings were also featured on the set’s seventy-two plates, including one that bore the image of the Dendera zodiac, the central subject of our book.) Most magnificent of all, the set included porcelain models of the temples of Dendera, Edfou, and Philae, as well as the colossi of Memnon, and even a colonnade of rams leading to a replica of the temple at Luxor (ancient Thebes).
Despite the difficulty of fabricating these objects, and despite Napoleon’s exigent demand that the result be “of the first, not the second order,” the Sèvres company was pressured to work quickly, lest they lose the imperial imprimatur and with it, their position as Europe’s premier porcelain manufacturer. An initial set of plates, decorated in rich blue and gold, appeared in relatively short order at the end of 1805.
The first complete service, including the magnificent replica temples, was produced in 1808, and sent by Napoleon to Czar Alexander as a gift; it is today exhibited at the Kuskowo ceramics museum in Moscow. Napoleon ordered a second set as a divorce gift to Josephine, who rejected it as too severe for her taste. It was later given to the Duke of Wellington, and it can be seen today at his residence, Apsley House, in London.
Jed Z. Buchwald is the Doris and Henry Dreyfuss Professor of History at the California Institute of Technology. His books include The Creation of Scientific Effects: Heinrich Hertz and Electric Waves. Diane Greco Josefowicz teaches in the writing program at Boston University. They are co-authors of The Zodiac of Paris: How an Improbable Controversy over an Ancient Egyptian Artifact Provoked a Modern Debate between Religion and Science
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IMAGE: Photograph of a replica temple in the Sèvres tea service, from the set in London.
Congratulations to the following W & M winners of this book:
Sheri, Evelyn, and Chris
The Birth of America’s Disposable Culture
By Jessica DuLong
In the summer of 1932, the phrase “planned obsolescence” was born—conceived by a Manhattan real-estate broker named Bernard London as a remedy for the Depression then wracking the nation. He proposed that the government “assign a lease of life to shoes and homes and machines, to all products of manufacture,” after which time “these things would be legally ‘dead’ and would be controlled by the duly appointed governmental agency and destroyed if there is widespread unemployment.”
These days that strategy wouldn’t work as an unemployment cure, since U.S. workers don’t produce the bulk of our daily-use products. And today, of course, we don’t need government to collect and throw away perfectly usable “dead” objects based on some arbitrary expiration date, because the goods we buy die of “natural” causes inherent in their making, or get tossed when they’ve become outmoded.
This trend toward producing throwaway items began in the nineteenth century. Among the earliest examples was invented along the Hudson River: the detachable cuffs and collars that gave Troy, New York the appellation “Collar City.”
Then, as now, the driving market forces were status and convenience. Men needed clean, white, starched shirts to wear to work in occupations that were just coming to be known as “white-collar.” And it was women’s job to wash them. Laundry burdened women with a routine of time-consuming, hard physical labor.
Hannah Montague of Troy wearied of having to wash her husband Orlando’s shirts when only the collar was dirty. So one day in 1827, she snipped off a collar, laundered it, and then sewed it back on, creating the world’s first detachable collar.
Recognizing the business opportunity stemming from his wife’s ingenuity, Orlando opened a factory overlooking the Hudson that produced collars, dickeys, and cuffs. Soon, factories started making these shirt pieces out of paper. In 1872, 150 million paper shirt collars and cuffs were produced in the U.S., and by 1886 more than 8,000 workers were employed in the trade in Troy alone.
Blue-collar labor manufactured white-collar status symbols that could be discarded after a single wear, and the age of disposability had begun.
NOTE: Detachable collars continue to be manufactured today, and are available for purchase from Amazon Drygoods Collars and Cuffs in Davenport, Iowa, which still uses 1860s presses. You can visit their website by clicking here.
Jessica DuLong, one of the world’s only female fireboat engineers, is also a journalist whose work has appeared in numerous publications. In her memoir/history, My River Chronicles: Rediscovering the Work that Built America; A Personal and Historical Journey
, DuLong explores what the U.S. is losing in our shift away from hands-on work and more. Read more about the author and the book here.
IMAGE: High Wing Collar from Amazon Drygoods Collars and Cuffs, Davenport, Iowa
Congratulations to the following W & M winners of this book:
JSlion, Anne, Susan, Maverick, and Kelly
Feeding Kids’ Curiosity
By Melissa L.
Over the past few years, I’ve noticed that the world history courses taught in school have been getting broader and broader in their scope. Far from focusing mainly on Europe, classes now delve into Asia, Africa, and Latin America, among other regions. On the one hand, I suppose this is a good thing, since it gives a truly global history rather than just a history of the West. On the other hand, though, with so many places and times to cover, no region or period is studied very thoroughly.
That’s where history and historical fiction titles come in. The books we write can help to feed curiosity that may go unsatisfied in a class that’s moving too quickly to go in-depth on any one topic. Perhaps a child’s world history class spends only two or three days on the Aztecs—but if that child is intrigued and hungry for more, she can go to the library, check out a stack of books, and read about the topic to her heart’s content. And who knows? Maybe what she reads about the Aztecs will spark her interest in other pre-Columbian civilizations in the Americas, and she’ll check out more books to learn about the Incas and the Olmecs and the Maya.
Satisfying curiosity. Sparking interest in a new topic. Giving children the history they can’t learn just from a textbook. That’s what those of us who write history and historical fiction for children do, and I’m constantly amazed by what our books can do.
Do you agree that good historical titles can feed a child’s curiosity or encourage a new interest? What are some other things that historical fiction for children can do?
Melissa L. is the YA Editorial Assistant for Wonders and Marvels. You can read more about her here: Editorial Staff.
Cyriacus, Renaissance Man
By Marina Belozerskaya
When we use the phrase “a Renaissance man” we typically think of someone of cultivated tastes, diverse cultural interests, and multiple talents. Cyriacus of Ancona was a true Renaissance man, but in a very different way. A self-made merchant and traveler, he became a diplomat and spy, hobnobbing with kings, emperors, the pope, and sultan – all thanks to his passion for archaeology, of which he was a founding father.
Cyriacus lived at the time when only a handful of Italian humanists were beginning to study the classical world, and none were interested in or willing to brave the rigors of travel to investigate the monuments of ancient Greeks and Romans outside Italy. Cyriacus, undaunted by the perils of journeys by land and sea, or by the enormity of the task he set for himself, devoted his life to preserving the past for posterity through direct documentation of ancient remains on the ground.
His training as an accountant came in very handy: having taught himself Latin and Greek in his 30’s, he turned his careful eye for details to the examination and recording of the material vestiges of the ancients. And he arranged his mercantile assignments to get to places where he could find such precious relics: Egypt, Syria, Turkey, Greek islands and mainland.
Alas, as happens with people driven by vision, Cyriacus gradually turned from a dreamer into a zealot, stirring up the flames for a new crusade by the Europeans against the Ottomans in order to save his beloved antiquities from destruction. Yet the value of the research he accomplished far outweighed his shortcomings. His life offers a fascinating glimpse at the Renaissance, with its accomplishments as well as shortcomings, and introduces us to one of its remarkable representatives.
Marina Belozerskaya, author of To Wake the Dead: A Renaissance Merchant and the Birth of Archaeology,
was an award-winning teacher at Harvard, Tufts, and Boston Universities. To read more about her and the book, go here: W. W. Norton & Company
IMAGE: Cyriacus’s drawing of the Parthenon. After Sangallo, Giuliano da. Il libro di Giuliano da Sangallo Codice vaticanobarberiniano latino 4424 riprodotto in fototipia, ed. Cristiano Huelsen. Lipsia: O. Harrassowitz, 1910.
The Paris you don’t know
By Andrew Hussey
The big idea behind Paris: The Secret History
is to tell the story of Paris from the point of view of what the French historian Louis Chevalier calls the ‘dangerous classes’. By this, Chevalier means drinkers, vagabonds, anarchists, prostitutes, drug addicts, sexual outsiders – all those who are outside ‘official’ histories of the city. From my point of view this is not only an exciting journey through centuries of hedonism, cruelty and vice but also the true story of this most ancient and modern of European capitals. It combines history with interviews with footballers, sex workers, philosophers, drinkers, writers, rappers – real Parisians living real Parisian lives.
One way of thinking about my book is that it reveals the dark side of the City of Light. Paris has always been the world-capital of sex, revolution, philosophy, food and art. My method was to read as much as I could of texts that lay outside mainstream historical works - I am interested in jokes, songs, slang, children’s’ rhymes, prostitutes working techniques. All of these hidden texts reveal, I argue, the hidden maps of the real life of the city. More than this, they tell us about the living substance of this enigmatic city.
So this book is meant not just as a history book, but also as a guide to the hidden underground life of Paris. From Villon to Piaf, Baudelaire to Céline to Houellebecq, Paris has always been a carnival of light and dark: that is what this book is about.
Andrew Hussey, author of Paris: The Secret History is a cultural historian and biographer, born in Liverpool, England. He was a Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Wales Aberystwyth and since 2006 he has been the Head of French and Comparative Studies at University of London Institute in Paris.
East of the Sun
By Julia Clegson
My research for East of the Sun began when I was five years old and met a remarkable woman called Mrs. Smith Pearse. She was in her sixties and had just returned from twenty years of living in India.
Superficially, she was a classic Memsahib- the literal translation means wife of the Sahib, the master. She’d gone to India, aged eighteen, as a member of the Fishing Fleet, the slightly derogatory name given to the English girls who went to India for the social season in search of husbands.
I loved everything about her: the battered tweeds, the honking laugh, the wonderful stories about India: the snakes under the bath, the tiger hunts with Maharajahs, the three day treks on ponies up to Simla. I dressed up in tiny silk saris, spice-scented tunics and salwar kameeze, produced from her mother of pearl trunk.
Four years ago, I met her nephew. He had a box of tape recordings made by her. Listening to these tapes as an adult made me realize that the India that had given her pleasure had taken in equal measure. My childhood heroine spoke on the tapes of the agony of missing children sent home to be educated.
“It was the biggest decision we all had to make: husband or child.” Passionately fond of nursing- she’d served with distinction in France in 1917- in India, she was only allowed to run a few village clinics- working Memsahib were frowned on.
Other women of the Raj spoke to me of botched births in remote areas, of burying young children, of flies and heat and snakes, of runaway or workaholic husbands, of terrible homesickness.
Because the British suffer from post- colonial guilt the Memsahib is often portrayed in literature or films as a gin swilling, narrow-minded snob. Some, of course, deserve our contempt; many didn’t. It’s easy to forget how young and ill prepared and uneducated many of these women were.
East of the Sun is my raised glass to these women: to their friendships, their naiveté, to the men they loved, to the work they did, and for the price they paid in loving India.
Julia Clegson is author of East of the Sun: A Novel.
Henry Hudson’s Lost Voyage
By Peter C. Mancall
On April 17, 1610, the English sea captain Henry Hudson maneuvered his small ship called Discovery out of St. Katherine’s dock in London toward the Northwest Passage, the water route Europeans believed connected the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. On board were twenty-two men and two boys, one of whom was Hudson’s seventeen-year old son.
In the late summer of 1610 the captain guided the Discovery into modern Hudson Bay. He decided to spend the winter in Canadian waters even though he knew the ship would become trapped in ice. At some point during the bitterly cold months, some crew members decided they had suffered enough. When June came and the bay thawed, rebels put Hudson, his son, and seven loyal or ill men on a small boat (known as a shallop) and set them adrift. According to the survivors, the mutineers soon met a just fate when a group of Inuit killed four of them. A fifth rebel died, apparently of malnutrition, as the boat sailed homeward.
Sixteen months after its initial departure the Discovery, its decks stained with blood, returned to London with seven men and one boy. The survivors blamed the mutiny on the five men who had since died, but lingering suspicions about the captain’s fate prompted the High Court of Admiralty to investigate further. The suspects could not be charged with mutiny, because there was no such crime in England yet. The sailors had not committed treason because private financiers, rather than the King, owned the ship. The court charged four of the survivors with murder for purportedly exposing those on the shallop. But the accused were exonerated, probably because the court lacked evidence to prove that they had caused Hudson’s demise.
The bodies of Hudson and his last companions have never been found. No one was ever punished for the crime.
Peter C. Mancall is the author of Fatal Journey: The Final Expedition of Henry Hudson
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- History, Medicine, and Science: Nonfiction and Fiction's Currently-Reading Book Montage
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Discussion about the fascinating stories of our scientific and medical past
