History in Books

[Gaston de Foix]

1 hour ago, SeanF said:

I visited the Prado and Thyssen in October, as well as the Archivo Historico Nacional.  I finally completed my Dissertation, last night.

Congratulations!  What's the title/subject?

[SeanF]

49 minutes ago, Gaston de Foix said:

Congratulations!  What's the title/subject?

Thanks.  Of course, there are plenty of typos to be corrected and revisions to be made, although I largely edited it as I went along.

"The Great Forgotten":  The Contribution Made by the Spanish to the Allied Campaign in the Peninsular War, 1808-1814.  It's for an MA in Military History with Buckingham University.

[Gaston de Foix]

1 hour ago, SeanF said:

Thanks.  Of course, there are plenty of typos to be corrected and revisions to be made, although I largely edited it as I went along.

"The Great Forgotten":  The Contribution Made by the Spanish to the Allied Campaign in the Peninsular War, 1808-1814.  It's for an MA in Military History with Buckingham University.

Great topic.  I'm not really a serious student of history, but there's a great scene in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell set in the Peninsula War...

[Zorral]

5 hours ago, SeanF said:

I visited the Prado and Thyssen in October, as well as the Archivo Historico Nacional.  I finally completed my Dissertation, last night.

Congratulations! Sean!  You must be so relieved and happy!

Tomorrow we're being conducted around the archivo historical Gedir/Cadiz, and later next week, to the one in Seville by a colleague there!

Currently in Cadiz, where it is impossible not to time travel: "the city whose name sailed a thousand seas."  The city at the end of the world, the city at the edge of the world.  But we didn't fall off.  After all, Havana is over there . . . .  Today we went from the excavated Phoenician Harbor docks and ship building sites, to the B.C. Roman Theater -- not a coliseum, but a theater where entertainments both ritual and popular took place.  A friend here observed, as we stood at the topmost rung of seats, "Well, here we are with the women and children.  The gods forbid that the howling, drunken, vomiting men below us be disturbed by whiney kids and women taking care of them!"

And O, the salty humidity, as one person described it.

Spectacular.  This is HORSE LANDIA.  Not even England, Virginia or Kentucky have an awareness and admiration and appreciation of the horse that is bred in the bone of southern Iberia.  And dancing.  The horses, the dancers and the bulls and matadors, such flow through of form and action.  At the dressage competition in Jerez, which is also heart of Flamenco and guitar -- a friend who is head of one of the institutes of Flamenco there as sister city of Flamenco in New Orleans showed us, these horses standing quietly, munching oats, hear the Flamenco clap, and the horse start to dance with the rhythm of the clapping.  Astonishing.

My mind's eyes dream of them every night -- which began as soon as the two days in the Prado -- of these Iberian horses, these Andalusians, equine poetry in motion.

 

 

[SeanF]

1 hour ago, Zorral said:

Congratulations! Sean!  You must be so relieved and happy!

Tomorrow we're being conducted around the archivo historical Gedir/Cadiz, and later next week, to the one in Seville by a colleague there!

Currently in Cadiz, where it is impossible not to time travel: "the city whose name sailed a thousand seas."  The city at the end of the world, the city at the edge of the world.  But we didn't fall off.  After all, Havana is over there . . . .  Today we went from the excavated Phoenician Harbor docks and ship building sites, to the B.C. Roman Theater -- not a coliseum, but a theater where entertainments both ritual and popular took place.  A friend here observed, as we stood at the topmost rung of seats, "Well, here we are with the women and children.  The gods forbid that the howling, drunken, vomiting men below us be disturbed by whiney kids and women taking care of them!"

And O, the salty humidity, as one person described it.

Spectacular.  This is HORSE LANDIA.  Not even England, Virginia or Kentucky have an awareness and admiration and appreciation of the horse that is bred in the bone of southern Iberia.  And dancing.  The horses, the dancers and the bulls and matadors, such flow through of form and action.  At the dressage competition in Jerez, which is also heart of Flamenco and guitar -- a friend who is head of one of the institutes of Flamenco there as sister city of Flamenco in New Orleans showed us, these horses standing quietly, munching oats, hear the Flamenco clap, and the horse start to dance with the rhythm of the clapping.  Astonishing.

My mind's eyes dream of them every night -- which began as soon as the two days in the Prado -- of these Iberian horses, these Andalusians, equine poetry in motion.

 

 

Thanks.  My only visit to Andalucia has been Granada, which is a place of great beauty, only spoiled for me when I contacted a vomiting virus.

[Clueless Northman]

On 3/13/2023 at 12:07 PM, Zorral said:

Woo.  Last week in the Prado Museum of Art we spent hours looking at Goyas

Prado is amazing with an astounding collection of Goyas, Grecos and Bosch.

You're most probably going to enjoy Sevilla a lot, the city is great (alas archaeological museum seems to still be closed). I hope you'll also go on to Cordoba and Granada - though, specially with Granada, I was very lucky to go there in 2021 when tourism level was still low due to recent lockdowns and pandemic messing with travels.

[Zorral]

15 hours ago, Clueless Northman said:

Prado is amazing with an astounding collection of Goyas, Grecos and Bosch.

You're most probably going to enjoy Sevilla a lot, the city is great (alas archaeological museum seems to still be closed). I hope you'll also go on to Cordoba and Granada - though, specially with Granada, I was very lucky to go there in 2021 when tourism level was still low due to recent lockdowns and pandemic messing with travels.

We are doing so. Yes, the crowds are massive here in Sevilla-lots of school tours of all levels from everywhere, not only Spanish children and uni students either. Plus all the Europeans who live here either full or part-time, and then people like us.  We managed very well despite this for some reason today in the Real Palace Al-Cazar.  Sometimes tours are our frieds, as we learned first in the Prado. The guides move the groups along quickly, so one can then take one's own time. It wasn't crowded in Cadiz, though, at all. Nor in Jerez, which isn't a tourist destination.

The way covid safety protocols are practiced are terrific. Of course it helps immensely since everything has for centuries been constructed to be as maximally ventilated as possible. Unlike say NYC, where everything is built to airtight. And the so-called 'outdoor' dining sheds are too, as well as not fitting at all into street and sidewalk traffic, and making the whole city a Feria 24/7 to expand the rat population.

 

[Zorral]

Reading In a Dark Wood Wandering (1949) by Hella Haasse, one of the books waiting for me upon return to home.  Which is a good thing since by about 7:30 PM all I want to do is get in bed with a book and read  ... and I'm asleep by ten, which means I'm up by 6 or 7. Jetlag is a funny thing, particularly combined with daylight savings time having kicked in while away, when it hadn't yet in Europe.

It centers this fellow:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles,_Duke_of_Orléans

Hella Haasse is fascinating figure herself:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hella_Haasse

[Zorral]

Splendid! Unmitigated Pedantry features guest scholar Michael Taylor re-examining John Keegan's 1976 Face of Battle.  I have read this book more than once, along with others in the military history canon, such as Caesar and  -- drink! -- Clausewitz*, when I was still writing fiction, and then yet again, when dealing with the war aspects of the history of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery.  I've read several other of Keegan's books as well: the one I really disliked was The American Civil War.  Like so many Brit historians (not all!) he surprisingly possesses great blocks of either ignorance of, or blindness to, US history and culture, and the history thereof -- and continued the Civil War's Brit upper class-mercantile bias toward the South -- something of which he surprisingly seemed equally unaware.  For demonstration of which see the current Manchester Guardian's excellent series on the history of the effect of slavery -- and cotton - on British capitalism and colonialism generally, and her actions in the US Civil War.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/cotton-capital

* This is not to say I understood/understand/comprehend well what they tell me -- this includes the many hours spent in museums and on battlegrounds -- though battlegrounds themselves have been the most fruitful venues of information and understanding for me, much more so than books, though the books is where I always begin.

Military history of tactics and so on is very difficult for me. My mind doesn't work that way.  However, one must persevere, absorbing a bit more with each grapple. 

Edited March 31, 2023 by Zorral

[SeanF]

1 hour ago, Zorral said:

Splendid! Unmitigated Pedantry features guest scholar Michael Taylor re-examining John Keegan's 1976 Face of Battle.  I have read this book more than once, along with others in the military history canon, such as Caesar and  -- drink! -- Clausewitz*, when I was still writing fiction, and then yet again, when dealing with the war aspects of the history of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery.  I've read several other of Keegan's books as well: the one I really disliked was The American Civil War.  Like so many Brit historians (not all!) he surprisingly possesses great blocks of either ignorance of, or blindness to, US history and culture, and the history thereof -- and continued the Civil War's Brit upper class-mercantile bias toward the South -- something of which he surprisingly seemed equally unaware.  For demonstration of which see the current Manchester Guardian's excellent series on the history of the effect of slavery -- and cotton - on British capitalism and colonialism generally, and her actions in the US Civil War.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/cotton-capital

* This is not to say I understood/understand/comprehend well what they tell me -- this includes the many hours spent in museums and on battlegrounds -- though battlegrounds themselves have been the most fruitful venues of information and understanding for me, much more so than books, though the books is where I always begin.

Military history of tactics and so on is very difficult for me. My mind doesn't work that way.  However, one must persevere, absorbing a bit more with each grapple. 

I've never read John Keegan on the US Civil War.

Is it that he focuses exclusively on the military aspects, while overlooking the wider political and social context that led to war.

[Zorral]

1 hour ago, SeanF said:

I've never read John Keegan on the US Civil War.

Is it that he focuses exclusively on the military aspects, while overlooking the wider political and social context that led to war.

No. Though he utterly overlooks the lead-up to the war, the enslaved and how the North felt about it, and the numbers of white southerners who did not want secession, even if they may have been ambivalent about abolition. And geography.  Nor does he understand the sort of person Grant was, the sort of person, who despite having gone to West Point -- which he really didn't want to do -- is so utterly unlike any product out of Sandhurst.  Or a Lincoln, or any of the personalities who played such important roles in the war, whose characters and personalities were forged in a frontier thinking world, as well as world forged out of slavery.  Let's just say, like most Brits (not all!) who have written about this war, they don't understand USians then or now -- just as much as we USians then and now mostly don't understand Brit personalities, etc.  Partly this is because the Brits' slavery was offshored, unlike as in the US -- and indeed the NA colonies were one of the most profitable places to outsource their slavery starting in the 17th C, as well as the Indies. 

[Zorral]

Beginning amigo-historian David Waldstreicher's wonderful The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/07/books/review/the-odyssey-of-phillis-wheatley-david-waldstreicher.html

Quote

.... It’s a testament to Black endurance and brilliance that the little girl called Phillis Wheatley became, within 12 years of her arrival in Boston, the most significant African American poet of the 18th century. Yet, as the historian David Waldstreicher shows in “The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley,” his thoroughly researched, beautifully rendered and cogently argued biography, Wheatley is brilliant not merely because she survived and composed some of the most important works of trans-Atlantic literature. Rather, Waldstreicher insists, Wheatley was a supremely gifted neoclassical practitioner of language, an “organic intellectual of the enslaved.” “The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley” is at once historical biography at its best, literary analysis at its sharpest and a subversive indictment of current political discourse questioning the relevance of Black life in our country’s history. ....

 

Edited April 1, 2023 by Zorral

[AncalagonTheBlack]

From the upcoming academic year, school textbooks in India have removed whole chunks of history.

https://m.thewire.in/article/education/ncert-mughal-empire-gujarat-riots-class-12/amp

A number of scholars on the Mughal empire have reacted strongly to the move. Simon Schama, a British historian, tweeted, “This is another preposterous war on history – the Mughals were a magnificent civilisation producing transcendent art, music, architecture”.

Katherine Schofield, who is a historian of music and listening in Mughal India, tweeted, “This RIDICULOUS. The Mughals ruled over much of India for over 200 years (technically over 300) and left behind an enduring legacy.

Love them, loathe them, or really not care — leaving the Mughals out of school history textbooks won’t magic them away.”

Author and historian Audrey Truschke said that the move marks another “chapter in the embrace of ignorance over knowledge that is increasingly common in Indian society under Hindu nationalist rule”. She tweeted, “Indian history remains untouched by such censorship. Modern ignorance thereof is another matter.”

Edited April 5, 2023 by AncalagonTheBlack

[Zorral]

Saw that in the international thread.  Congratulations India for joining the KKK Dixie Secession Racist Misogynist Religious Intolerant Authoritarian states of the USA like Florida, TexAss, Arizona, Missouri, etc. May your fate be the same.

11 hours ago, AncalagonTheBlack said:

school textbooks in India have removed whole chunks of history

Also, get rid of books and libraries all together.  Education and particularly history are only for the ruling elite.  How sfnal can we get?

[Zorral]

The Widow Queen: The Bold (2022) and The Last Crown: Bold 2 (2023) by Elżbieta Cherezińska.

Highly, highly recommended for those of us who have loved such novels set in Europe's North and East, after the end of the western Roman Empire, and in the early medieval era -- you know you are one of those if you loved Nicola Griffith's Hild, or Cornwell's Saxon Chronicles.

Here we have the intersection of the beginning of Poland as a state, Bohemia, the Rus, Kiev, Hungary, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and England, paganism and Christianity, all connected via the family of and the figure, Queen Swietoslawa

Edited April 12, 2023 by Zorral

[SeanF]

On 4/5/2023 at 7:16 AM, AncalagonTheBlack said:

From the upcoming academic year, school textbooks in India have removed whole chunks of history.

https://m.thewire.in/article/education/ncert-mughal-empire-gujarat-riots-class-12/amp

A number of scholars on the Mughal empire have reacted strongly to the move. Simon Schama, a British historian, tweeted, “This is another preposterous war on history – the Mughals were a magnificent civilisation producing transcendent art, music, architecture”.

Katherine Schofield, who is a historian of music and listening in Mughal India, tweeted, “This RIDICULOUS. The Mughals ruled over much of India for over 200 years (technically over 300) and left behind an enduring legacy.

Love them, loathe them, or really not care — leaving the Mughals out of school history textbooks won’t magic them away.”

Author and historian Audrey Truschke said that the move marks another “chapter in the embrace of ignorance over knowledge that is increasingly common in Indian society under Hindu nationalist rule”. She tweeted, “Indian history remains untouched by such censorship. Modern ignorance thereof is another matter.”

Modhi likes to speak of “five hundred years of foreign occupation,” the implication being that Muslim Indians are foreigners.

The Moghuls could be very brutal, but no one should pretend that contemporary Hindu rulers were any less ruthless.

And of course, the Moghuls’ impact upon Indian culture was profound.

[Zorral]

Cartas del Viaje de Asturias by Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaspar_Melchor_de_Jovellanos#:~:text=su casa natal.-,Obra,espíritu reformador del despotismo ilustrado.

This is the wikipedia translated into English.  I love in this translation; where, in English we'd have said, 'genre', it says 'gender.'

[Zorral]

12 hours ago, SeanF said:

Modhi likes to speak of “five hundred years of foreign occupation,” the implication being that Muslim Indians are foreigners.

The Moghuls could be very brutal, but no one should pretend that contemporary Hindu rulers were any less ruthless.

And of course, the Moghuls’ impact upon Indian culture was profound.

In the Entertainment Watch thread I put up the news that Dalrymple's The Anarchy is going to be made into a television series.  The description of the book's subject is essentially -- this in a Hindi pub -- the disintegration, the word chosen, of the awful Mughals and how the Brit East India Company had to step in.  National authoritarianism all over the globe is putting us all in a world of hurt, doing nobody any good.

[Gorn]

On 4/20/2023 at 4:42 AM, SeanF said:

Modhi likes to speak of “five hundred years of foreign occupation,” the implication being that Muslim Indians are foreigners.

The Moghuls could be very brutal, but no one should pretend that contemporary Hindu rulers were any less ruthless.

And of course, the Moghuls’ impact upon Indian culture was profound.

To be fair, early Moghuls at least were ethnically Central Asian and culturally Persian, so they were foreigners. They were also descendants of Timur, who committed one of the most horrific atrocities in India's history.

[Zorral]

3 hours ago, Gorn said:

They were also descendants of Timur, who committed one of the most horrific atrocities in India's history.

Which has nothing whatsoever to do with the British East Company setting off a war of conquest and looting on prosperous, long integrated states, does it.  And the Hindi's calling it disintegration.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Guédé, Alain, trans. By Gilda M. Roberts (1999 in France, 2003 in US). Monsieur de Saint-George: Virtuoso, Swordsman, Revolutionary; a Legendary Life Rediscovered.  This is infinitely more interesting than that bio pic that came out last weekend.  This book is fascinating, in fact. A very good translation.

We've been listening non-stop to the Hayden music the Chevalier commissioned from him, since having been so deeply disappointed by the film.