The Reading Corner.

[Dio]

Major Problems in California History: Documents and Essays is an anthology for interested people in American history. This book covered the entire period of California history from Spanish colonization into the twentieth century with reproductions of primary sources from different periods. My favorite author in the book remained Mary Gibson's article "Mary S. Gibson Explains Why Progressive Women Should Uplift Immigrant Women, 1914" for educating immigrants.

Note on a definition: Primary sources in history represents materials from people at the time of the event or productions of materials from people who lived through an event at a future date. The usage of books, newspapers, films, advertisements, diaries, pamphlets, interviews, and oral histories, to name a few possible historical mediums, represent forms of primary sources.

This book again contains more racist, sexist, and violent material, so you can proceed at your own risk. If you have not noticed yet, then many primary sources on historical materials contain prejudiced content.

(click to show/hide)

Gibson's article demonstrated women's involvement with the racism and xenophobic attitudes against contemporaneous immigrants. Mary Gibson argued for the "home teacher program . . . designed to send female teachers into the immigrant home to teach the foreign mother ‘American’ standards” (227). These women entered into immigrants' homes because the immigrant women's culture represented an alleged inferior culture to the White Anglo Saxon Protestant culture of the period. Immigrant women needed the guidance of allegedly superior White culture because the white progressive women must "make Americans out of the little swarming aliens” (207). These women's involvement in the affairs of the immigrant included the belief of how immigrant women lost control of their children because the children developed without the controlling influence of literate mothers in the native language of a region. The inclusion of English language courses would have developed the women and men's language skills for better integration into the American culture.

[Dio]

A recent book I have read is Leslie Chang's Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China. This book touched on issues involving the cultural and social differences between migrants in urban areas and people residing in the migrants' home villages. The book reminds me of the struggles British migrant women felt in places like Manchester England in the First Industrial Revolution of the 1840s and 1850s and the struggles of American women like the Lowell Mill Girls during the Second Industrial Revolution in the 1870s to 1880s. These women struggled with the transition from an impoverished predominantly rural lifestyle into an impoverished rigid urban structured industrial lifestyle. This transition transformed women's ideas on independence and separated these women from traditional sources of cultural connections in the villages. Women in these conditions often straddled a technological, cultural, ideological, and economic divide between the more communal lifestyles on the farm with the more individualistic attitudes in urban areas. People straddling the urban to rural division experienced the resultant tensions between the migrant and family members residing in the village.

These same struggles exist in the present United States of America and other countries between rural communities and urban communities despite the vast majority of present Americans and Western Europeans living in urban areas. On the micro level, an astute observer might notice these cultural, religious, social, and attitudinal differences in the people on this forum because the forum members have different education levels, different residential locations, and different cultural attitudes from living in diverse areas of the world.

Citation:
Chang, Leslie T. Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2009.

[Elok]

I know I've mentioned it here before, but for crying out loud, read ACOUP: https://acoup.blog

Military history prof from one of the Carolinas, specializing in Rome but with good general knowledge.  Does in-depth analysis of fantasy battles--he has some excellent breakdowns of Helm's Deep and the Pelennor Fields from LOTR--detailed descriptions of historical craftsmanship including ironworking and cloth manufacture (did you know that almost every pre-industrial woman from a settled/agricultural society, rich or poor, would have spent most of her waking hours spinning?), analyses of armor kit, reviews of various military subjects ... right now he's partway through a series on fortifications.

[Buster's Uncle]

He's in the Good Carolina; it's not a trivial distinction.

[Dio]

I know I've mentioned it here before, but for crying out loud, read ACOUP: https://acoup.blog

Military history prof from one of the Carolinas, specializing in Rome but with good general knowledge.  Does in-depth analysis of fantasy battles--he has some excellent breakdowns of Helm's Deep and the Pelennor Fields from LOTR--detailed descriptions of historical craftsmanship including ironworking and cloth manufacture (did you know that almost every pre-industrial woman from a settled/agricultural society, rich or poor, would have spent most of her waking hours spinning?), analyses of armor kit, reviews of various military subjects ... right now he's partway through a series on fortifications.

Thank you for the suggested reading. This blog will appear on my recreational reading list.
 
While I enjoy most history, I have more interest in modern history, history after 1500, then history before 1500. Explicit bias from fragmentary ancient written primary sources, and resulting secondary sources, annoys me.

He's in the Good Carolina; it's not a trivial distinction.

This is probably off topic for the thread, so I will delete this part if it is.

I know very little about South Carolina and North Carolina's specific features beyond generalizations on political and economic demographic distributions in the United States of America. Both states' general political landscapes appear highly conservative. What makes North Carolina non-trivially better then South Carolina?

[Buster's Uncle]

General Sherman burned South Carolina to the ground is, I think, the proximate cause.


It's North Carolina's New Jersey.  Everyone thinks the neighboring state(s) is/are inferior, and sharing half a name, as we do, we really notice what a trash-heap that place is.

[Geo]

I know I've mentioned it here before, but for crying out loud, read ACOUP: https://acoup.blog

Thanks for the link!

[Dio]

Heart of a Dog represented an allegorical science fiction novella on the conflicts between socialism and early industrialization in Russia during the 1920s. The novel criticized both the capitalists and the socialists through Mikhail Bulgakov's depiction of the main characters. Sharikov, a transformed dog, represented the proletariat while Dr. Preobrazhensky represented the stereotypical capitalist. Orthodox interpretations of the Heart of a Dog favored Dr. Preobrazhensky as the protagonist because Dr. Preobrazhensky saved people from Sharikov's disastrous antics. Revisionist interpretations of the novel, however, raised questions on Dr. Preobrazhensky's forced conversion of Sharikov from a dog to a man for the acquisition of greater profits and later forcible de-conversion of Sharikov to a dog for the perceived moral failures from his creation. Several allusions exist in the novella to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus and the novel followed an Russian early twentieth century trend of employing science fiction novels for social commentary as seen in We by Yevgeny Zamyatin.

Citation:
Bulgakov, Mikhail, and Mirra Ginsburg. "Heart of a Dog." New York: Grove Press, 1987.

Context:
Mikhail Bulgakov represented one of the last major critical authors to the Soviet Union in Vladimir Lenin's New Economic Policy of 1919 through 1926.  Joseph Stalin's power solidified in the mid to late 1920s after the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924.

Another lesson in historical methods for those interested in the topic.

(click to show/hide)

I discussed how primary sources represent material from people or objects directly associated with an event or time. Secondary sources represent works analyzing primary sources and writing an interpretation based on secondary and primary sources. Historiography represents how people perceive write about events in history. Throughout history and the present, people perceive the past from mythical lens, scientific lens, economic lens, political lens, militarist lens, sociological lens, and so on. Different lens on history create different interpretations of events, concepts, and actions from different academic fields. For example, the history of the twentieth century Cold War contains orthodox, revisionist, and heterodox interpretations based on different sources from different periods throughout the twentieth century and the present. Orthodox views on the Cold War developed in the 1960s through the 1980s and presented the United States of America and Western Europe as defending the world from aggressive expansionist Communist forces; revisionist positions developed in the 1960s through the 1990s and presented information on communists' legitimate defensive interests from communist expansion against an aggressive capitalist imperialist coalition; heterodox positions combined elements from orthodox and revisionist positions in the 1990s through the present day and believed both parties possessed legitimate interests in their respective expansionist actions during the Cold War. These examples of schools of thought on the Cold War demonstrates historiography's usage in interpretations of historical events based on evolving ideas from primary and secondary sources.

(click to show/hide)

These posts on the books I have read serve as a memorial. I suppose I want a memento for other people if something bad should happen to me.

[Dio]

Eugenia Ginzburg's Journey into the Whirlwind covered her descent from loyal party member to target of Joseph Stalin's Great Purges of the mid 1930s. Her narrative covered her trial, imprisonment in solitary confinement, and eventual transfer to hard labor for a decade. Her arrest in 1937 and release in 1951 covered fourteen years of her adult life. Deployed terror methods in the novel demonstrated the effectiveness of political terror in the silencing and paralyzing of perceived opposition to an authoritarian government. Graphic details of starvation demonstrated the torture and dehumanization of the opposition among Soviet Russians and the pullulation of political terror for social control. These terrorist tactics included every level of government and denuded Joseph Stalin's military officers upon Soviet Russia's entry into World War II. Ginzburg represented a prototypical case of a woman with misguided beliefs in the government's lip service for loyalty and eventual disillusionment with the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin.

Citation:
Ginzburg, Eugenia, P. Stevenson, and Max Hayward. Journey into the Whirlwind. [First edition]. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1967.

[Buster's Uncle]

I am not currently reading, but-

I find myself thinking about reading Cheaper By the Dozen as a kid as I work through a set of pages - the sheer volume and repetition of my workflow really rewards efficiency, and Frank and Lilian Gilbreth, the parents, were pioneers in Motion Studies.  She's still cited in business texts, and she did all her publishing over 100 years ago.  I've discovered that the aggravation of dealing with Secret Project pages I renamed with the project name -which means the numbered addresses in the originals that scroll to next in line are useless- is ameliorated considerably by dealing with the scrollbar and page title stuff 10 or so at a time, THEN going back and correcting all the crosslinks and pic addresses one at a time.  I don't have to change what's in the paste buffer nearly as often, and with this many little pages, it adds up.

Read the book, is my point of quoting this.  It's good.

I should have mentioned back then - Cheaper By the Dozen changed my life.  Not merely in how I approach drudgery like the fixing up of the Firaxis Alpha Centauri site rescue I was talking about in my original quote, but, like, every necessary task; the first thing I do every. single. day., making coffee is carefully arranged for efficiency, with an inflexible order the supplies are laid out in the cabinet lining up with the inflexible order the ingredients are added -I wake up stupid and slowly, and the faster I can get to what I wake up wanting to do (DRINK coffee, not MAKE coffee) the better.

That Frank Gilbreth was a pioneer in motion studies is not what Cheaper By the Dozen is about is both true and profoundly untrue - it informs almost everything about the childhoods of his (actually 11; Mary died real young) children, to the extent that I'm spoiling the end significantly.  But just exposure to the concept of motion studies/working efficiently young has informed a lot of my life in both the hard work I could not get out of and the hard work I want to do, witness that AC site again.  It also interacts in a way that's difficult to articulate with the example of my own father, who lined up his shoes when he went to bed, but frankly, had little/no concept of working smart instead of hard.

-All that being as it may, Cheaper By the Dozen is a charming yarn, comes highly recommended - and Elok, it's family-friendly, too.

[Dio]

I am not currently reading, but-

I find myself thinking about reading Cheaper By the Dozen as a kid as I work through a set of pages - the sheer volume and repetition of my workflow really rewards efficiency, and Frank and Lilian Gilbreth, the parents, were pioneers in Motion Studies.  She's still cited in business texts, and she did all her publishing over 100 years ago.  I've discovered that the aggravation of dealing with Secret Project pages I renamed with the project name -which means the numbered addresses in the originals that scroll to next in line are useless- is ameliorated considerably by dealing with the scrollbar and page title stuff 10 or so at a time, THEN going back and correcting all the crosslinks and pic addresses one at a time.  I don't have to change what's in the paste buffer nearly as often, and with this many little pages, it adds up.

Read the book, is my point of quoting this.  It's good.

I should have mentioned back then - Cheaper By the Dozen changed my life.  Not merely in how I approach drudgery like the fixing up of the Firaxis Alpha Centauri site rescue I was talking about in my original quote, but, like, every necessary task; the first thing I do every. single. day., making coffee is carefully arranged for efficiency, with an inflexible order the supplies are laid out in the cabinet lining up with the inflexible order the ingredients are added -I wake up stupid and slowly, and the faster I can get to what I wake up wanting to do (DRINK coffee, not MAKE coffee) the better.

That Frank Gilbreth was a pioneer in motion studies is not what Cheaper By the Dozen is about is both true and profoundly untrue - it informs almost everything about the childhoods of his (actually 11; Mary died real young) children, to the extent that I'm spoiling the end significantly.  But just exposure to the concept of motion studies/working efficiently young has informed a lot of my life in both the hard work I could not get out of and the hard work I want to do, witness that AC site again.  It also interacts in a way that's difficult to articulate with the example of my own father, who lined up his shoes when he went to bed, but frankly, had little/no concept of working smart instead of hard.

-All that being as it may, Cheaper By the Dozen is a charming yarn, comes highly recommended - and Elok, it's family-friendly, too.

I appreciate the positive messages in your message. I learned about motion economy from working in retail. Retail managers demanded reduced movement costs from the workers. Workers' improvements in personal movement economy increased productivity for the company.

[Buster's Uncle]

I flew two convenience stores solo on third shift back in the 90s, and I think it's safe to say that developing efficient habits in ringing up the merchandise, becoming faster w/o necessarily trying harder, was not only good for my employer, it was definitely good for the customers -especially when there was a line- and it was good for me, as it increased whatever break time I had w/o -again- actually working any harder.

-Incidentally, the Reverend Dr. Buster's Daddy didn't read Cheaper By the Dozen, and still takes Daddy's attitude that how hard he works is some fundamental proof of his manhood - I tend to find it more proof of his foolishness, not being the only unfortunate quality Daddy had that he apes.

[Dewbacca]

I noticed several posts back that someone had read "Leviathan Wakes" by the pair of authors going under the pen name "James S. A. Corey". I was disappointed in that mention not to read more love for that novel or the rest of the books (8 so far, last book is released in 2 days from this post (Nov.30th).

The authors are a peculiar pair. Daniel Abraham was a "ghost writer" for George R.R. Martin and helped him and HBO finish off the GoT series even though the books were not complete.

Ty Franck was hired by an unnamed gaming company to flesh out a "world" 300 years in the future where mankind is exploring our solar system at sublight speeds. He did tons of background work for the game, and it was rejected, not his work, but the game was scrapped and he was left owning the world that became "The Expanse".

He took that detailed info and turned it into a RPG that he was informally hosing for himself and friends, including his wife, who was attending a Jr college with Daniel's wife. The women became friends and introduced their husbands, who decided to write a 3 book series for spare cash to keep the pizza's flowing at their regular game sessions.

They have a outstanding formula for co-writing and I read all 8 books back to back and am waiting on the final release with baited breath. I've laughed, I've cried, I've learned new things (they are commended for their commitment to scientific accuracy, no "magic tech", no shields or inertial dampeners, just shipping containers with directional thrusters in many instances.

I can't recommend this series strongly enough for sci fi fans, and the Amazon Prime series is a fantastic rendering of the books with few deviations. Youtube abounds with real physicists commending the show on scientific accuracy and applying space physics right. 

[Dio]

I have recently begun searching for guidance on platonic intimacy between men in friendships on another forum through historical sources. One of the larger issues cited for straight men in the literature and from some users remains the absence of willingness for emotional vulnerability in straight men's friendships with other men. Secondary sources on men's friendships in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century have provided the most leads on these topics since most of the twentieth century and twenty-first century consists of a barren wasteland of homo-hysteria for men's friendships. A few resources beyond the articles on bromances mentioned earlier in this thread include a decent blog on men's friendships you users might find interesting and several books with availability in libraries and universities.

Authors: Brett and Kate McKay
https://www.artofmanliness.com/people/relationships/the-history-and-nature-of-man-friendships/

Ibson, John. Picturing Men: A Century of Male Relationships in Everyday American Photography. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002.

Rotundo, E. Anthony. American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era. New York: BasicBooks, 1993.

[Dio]

@Unorthodox:
I recently read Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane per your recommendation. Ursula Monkton's seduction of the narrator's father and abuse of the male narrator reminded me the most of the Beldam's behavior against Coraline and John Keat's nineteenth century poem "La Belle Dame sans Merci." All of these pieces of literature addressed the underlying trope of the femme fatale in men's relationships with women. The Ocean at the End of the Lane's theme of transitions from childhood to adulthood also touched on the power of nostalgia in the shaping of people's experiences and relationships with people, places, and spaces across time. Emotional resentment appeared, for example, in some recounted narratives of people's differential treatment through the lens of nostalgia. Nostalgia, guilt, and anxiety can drive people's actions on a subconscious and conscious level, so literature reflects these themes in the behavior of the male narrator of The Ocean at the End of the Lane.