Tag Archives: History

Katherine’s Bookshelf – The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book

The grungy tan cover of the Boston Cooking School Cook Book.
The Boston Cooking School Cook Book, a classic of home economics. This copy is rather heavily-worn, as is the fate of all cookbooks in the end. Sorta grody with what I have to assume is century-old spills and dog ears. Link to a scanned non-gross copy in the below article!

Home economics gets a very bad rap. It’s honestly unfair, given that, ideally, these are the skills which everyone needs in order to be self-sufficient. From personal finance and budgeting to cleaning and cooking, home economics is a useful and important class. While it’s sometimes looked down on today, to the point of being re-branded “life skills,” home economics has had a very weird and fascinating history, and the author Fannie Merritt Farmer had an instrumental impact on the development of the field.

The History of Home Economics

Over the course of the first half of the 19th Century, economic forces and increasing mechanization, especially in textile manufacture, shifted the center of production out of the home and into factories. In tandem with this shift, a social movement toward centering the life of (middle class) women in the home resulted in a burgeoning market in literature aimed at these very middle class women, intended to teach them how to be a housewife. If something has to be taught, it’s new.

The separation of homemaking from production was never complete for women of lower socioeconomic status, and even well into the 20th Century, girls were educated in needlework, crochet, and knitting, not just to make decorative pieces for their own homes, but also as a backup plan, in case they had to earn money for themselves. (A backup plan that my own great-grandmother took advantage of.) Doing fancy work for egg money was commonplace. Looking at vintage needlework, crochet, and knitting patterns and comparing them to modern books in the same genre gives a real sense of just how common these skills were, and just how high the standards of average achievement in them. For reference, here’s a book on filet crochet, from 1914. Just a couple of pages of definitions and basic instructions, and you’re off into the incredibly complicated patterns with absolutely no hand-holding. If it looks like computer code to you, you’re not wrong. It’s effectively code for printing pixel art with thread. This kissing-cousins relationship of the needle arts and early intelligence and computer applications is exactly why women predominated in early calculating, code-cracking, and computer software development.

By the close of the century, the old-school Progressive push to optimize labor resulted in formal education in homemaking, now termed home economics in a bid to add the gravitas of rationality to the field. This is where Fannie Merritt Farmer comes in, as headmaster of the Boston Cooking School, and author of one of the most influential cookbooks ever written.

The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book

If you measure your ingredients by cups and teaspoons, this book is why. Responsible for the standardization of American cooking measures that we all know and love, this book was a breakout hit and shaped every subsequent cook book in the United States. How does it hold up? Well… not so good. As it turns out, there’s a huge section on nutrition, which has very much failed to age well, not the least because the information here predates the discovery of vitamins. What do the food groups look like in 1906? There’s protein, fat, carbohydrates, and water (five pints a day!). The nutritional section doesn’t even mention veggies, and gives a passing nod to fruits, but only if you’re careful to only eat the ripe ones. You might get away with preserves, but watch yourself. Veggies are either poverty food like beets and turnips, or seasonal luxuries like asparagus. Fresh and preserved fruits are firmly in the rare treat category. It’s no wonder everyone was teetering on the edge of scurvy, rickets, and pellagra back then. The recommended ratio of carbs to protein to fat is 36:9:2 by the way. I imagine that a healthy plate in 1906 looks like a gargantuan heap of mashed potato with some meaty gravy and a pat of butter. Yikes.

Here’s a quote from page 3, so you can see the general tone of the nutrition section:

For school children the diet should be varied and abundant, constantly bearing in mind that this is a period of great mental and physical growth. Where children have broken down, supposedly from over-work, the cause has often been traced to impoverished diet.

Mmmm. Yes. Supposedly from over-work. Nothing to do with being a 10 year old coal miner or sweated labor in a sock factory. Cool.

Kids hunched over coal chutes in 1906.
Here are some breaker boys in a coal mine in 1906, the year of this very publication of the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book. Note oversee – I mean “shift supervisor” with a stick.
Small girl at a large industrial machine, 1909.
Industrial textile worker, 1909.
A line of cranberry pickers in a field.
Cranberry pickers, early 20th Century. I sure am glad that ripe cranberries float, and all you have to do is flood the bog and agitate the bushes to skim the harvest off the surface… or you could hire kids to pick ’em one by one on their hands and knees.

There’s definite reasons that child labor laws exist. To cheer yourself up after all that, here’s some modern cranberry harvesting. With lots of labor-saving devices.

Delicious cranberries.

After that ghastly interlude, here’s some more Fannie Merritt Farmer. So much for the information, how about the recipes? Are there heaps o’ carbs? Boy howdy are there ever.

Here’s a good rough estimate of the place that veggies and fruits have in the diet espoused by Fannie Merritt Farmer: vegetable recipes take up 29 pages, fruits 19 pages, but desserts (counting from the iced ones because puddings weren’t universally dessert back then) take up 122 pages.

I know what you’re really here for, though: weird recipes! Here’s a few that are very achievable:

Baked Bananas II (p. 571)

Arrange bananas in shallow pan, cover, and bake until skins become very dark in color. Remove from skins, and serve hot sprinkled with sugar.

It’s like baked potatoes, but it’s bananas. If I were to hazard a guess, it would be that the bananas in question are a different strain than our modern Cavendish bananas, more starchy and not as sweet, hence the added sugar. Maybe they were more plantain-ish.

Raspberry Whip (p. 414)

1 1/4 Cup Raspberries, 1 Cup Powdered Sugar, White 1 Egg

Put ingredients in bowl and beat with wire whisk until stiff enough to hold in shape ; about thirty minutes will be required for beating. Pile lightly on dish, chill, surround with lady fingers, and serve with Boiled Custard. Strawberry Whip may be prepared in same way.

Thirty minutes of beating that egg white, and if there’s any butter or grease anywhere near it, it won’t work. Have fun. When she says to chill it, she means in a literal icebox, or terrifying first-generation refrigerator, both of which were pretty expensive options. This is why anything served chilled in hot weather, anything that involved whipped cream or egg whites, like meringue, and anything jelly-like was automatically fancy. All of these relied on expensive technology, lots of labor, or lots of time. The explosion of jelly recipes in the coming decades was a response to convenience gelatin and refrigeration: now, everyone could serve aspics and molded salads! Now that we have all sorts of kitchen gadgets to make the mincing, pureeing, whipping, and chilling easier, the pendulum has swung the other way, and super-smooth consistencies, jellies, and cold are no longer high-prestige. Our fancy artisan whole grain bread would have been peasant food in the past, and a fresh mango salsa in Winter would have been an inconceivable luxury.

Turkey Soup (p. 120)

Break turkey carcass in pieces, removing all stuffing ; put in kettle with any bits of meat that may have been left over. Cover with cold water, bring slowly to boiling-point, and simmer two hours. Strain, remove fat, and season with salt and pepper. One or two outer stalks of celery may be cooked with carcass to give additional flavor.

This, however, is a perfectly sensible thing to do with a leftover turkey, or any other whole bird, really. I’d use a slow cooker, to make it easier, and just let it go on low for eight hours. I’d probably also add noodles or rice. Some things don’t change that fast.

Go read it!

— Article by Katherine, Shawnee

Katherine’s Bookshelf – Atomic Energy in the Coming Era

Bohr model atom in gold on a dark blue cover.
Nothing warms the cockles of my heart like old timey stylized Bohr atomic model atoms on an old book cover.

I love it. Everything about this book is great. Look at this stylish cover. You know exactly what it’s about: ATOMS, and THE FUTURE. Check out the spine:

The spine of the book with the title Atomic Energy in the Coming Era. Nice.
ATOMIC ENERGY in the Coming Era. Perfect. Just perfect. I can feel the boundless optimism, the promise of cheap, bountiful electricity radiating off it like… well, ionizing radiation.

This next paragraph is going to be bibliophile heresy, so you might want to sit down first.

Most of the time, you CAN judge a book by its cover. This is because publisher’s marketing departments exist for a reason. They exist to sell books, and get those books into the hands of the people who will want to pay for them, as quickly as possible. One of their methods is cover design. It’s actually a very rare cover that does a truly terrible job at conveying what the book is about, commercially, in a target audience sense, rather than a plot sense. Imagine a romance novel cover. Imagine a sci-fi space opera book cover. Imagine a teen dystopian fiction book cover. Imagine a shojo manga cover. You can. You know what these books look like, because they’ve all drifted into similar designs, so that someone expecting a romance novel doesn’t get stuck with a dry, navel-gaze-y sci-fi book instead. You know what you want and you know what it looks like. This book looks like pure, uncontaminated optimism and faith in a future that is only going to get better. Through SCIENCE.

If there’s any scientists reading this post, please keep reading and talk to some historians. This epic tragedy of the late 20th Century and the use of scientific cachet for marketing is a piece of the puzzle of why a good chunk of the American public has lost trust in scientific messaging. Throughout the century, there was a whole endless parade of products and innovations sold to the public with the promise of science. A lot of which turned out to be terrible ideas (ironically often discovered to be so with more science): DDT, plastic everything, throw-away culture, tetraethyl lead in the gasoline, eugenics (don’t get me started on the intensely creepy history of beauty pageants), radium suppositories. Not kidding about that last one. There were a few decades there in the early 20th Century when they were putting radium in everything. Including butts. In case you think this was an isolated thing, here’s a completely different brand of radium suppositories. Both of these courtesy of Oak Ridge Health Physics and Instrumentation Museum Online exhibits. Fun!

Yet, every once in a while, I read a very depressing article from scientists wondering why the public has so much skepticism about important issues. There’s a history here, which is part of the problem that I rarely see explored or even acknowledged by scientific publications. Never underestimate cultural memory or the power of marketing, whether to sell a product to the public, or to distract the public from the damage that same product is causing. Look to the tobacco industry for a history lesson in marketing and using scientific authority – or the appearance of it – as a means to shield an industry against the interests of defending public health. This is why academic disciplines need to talk to each other. Go read The Cigarette Century, and learn.

The title page of the book. 1945!
1945! That’s some blisteringly fast research and writing. Also, it’s a very good looking book inside as well.

Here’s the punchline: this book, written in 1945 – when atomic energy was a mere possibility on the horizon – is eerily, stunningly accurate. This is in fact a very sober and measured accounting of the possibilities and challenges of using nuclear reactors to generate electricity. Weren’t expecting that, were you? I bet that giddy images of mid-century futuristic flying cars and jetpacks and moon colonies were practically dancing through your head up to this point. NOPE. I was so shocked and impressed by how grounded this book was, and how disciplined its journalism, that it’s one of the few vintage books I own that I have read absolutely cover to cover. In this case, science got it right at the dawn of an age, even in conjecture.

— Article by Katherine, Shawnee

Katherine’s Bookshelf – Standard Mathematical Tables

Welcome back! Although I have the occasional novel, and a focus on non-fiction, I have a particular weakness for really old and hilariously dated textbooks. Today’s special guest star isn’t outdated in terms of its content – like all math textbooks, the math itself is still perfectly good – it’s outdated in terms of its actual function. The very existence of such a book is made obsolete by digital calculators. Let’s explore!

A big blue and gold old book, stuffed with tables for use with your slide rule.
This is the good stuff, right here.

Behold! This is Standard Mathematical Tables, 16th Edition. It’s about two and a half inches thick, printed on thin thin paper, and it’s crammed with exactly what it says in the title – tables. It was for a high school or college student, as a vital companion for a slide rule. Before there were pocket calculators or calculator apps on the phone in your pocket, there were slide rules. Here’s a nifty video on what a slide rule is, and how to use one (at least for the simple stuff).

What a slide rule is, and how to use it.

Nifty, right? So, to make things faster, you might need a big fat reference book of various functions, worked out to several places, hopefully beyond whatever precision you need. Ultimately, this lovely book is all of the things – in text – that your phone can do in less time than it takes to turn a single page. This particular copy is actually in very nice condition, and I really like seeing all the neat and tidy tables inside. It’s a masterpiece of organization and precision.

A big fat table of trigonometric functions to five places.
Trigonometric functions to five places. Squee!

Standard Mathematical Tables must have been pretty miserable to proof read, though, and check that all of these were actually correct. It went through sixteen different editions, too! I have no idea what they were adding, correcting, or updating, but I hope it was worth it.

A big fat table of integrals.
This is how you know you’re going to have a real good time.

When I saw this book for cheap one day, I decided to get it and keep it partially out of respect for the immense effort and expertise that went into making it, but mostly out of amazement for the forgotten calculating technology it represents. After a certain amount of time, this book stopped being merely out of date, and became a piece of history in its own right. But, at least, if I ever get a slide rule, I’ll be prepared.

A wildly obsolete calculating tool like Standard Mathematical Tables won’t be found in the library’s collection, although our Friends of the Library book sales might offer up some unique finds if you are willing to hunt for them. The story of Standard Mathematical Tables and its technological eclipse is a reminder that a non-fiction book is sometimes much more than a means of serving up facts.

— Article by Katherine, Shawnee

Katherine’s Bookshelf – China Under the Empress Dowager

This time, on a Very Special Episode of Katherine’s Bookshelf, I’ve got a Very Special book for you, and it’s one of my favorites, but not for the reasons you might think.

Faded yellow cover with red lettering.
LIES! It’s all lies!

Cover to cover, this book is basically the history writing equivalent of a fresh cowpat steaming in the crisp autumnal air at dawn. A giant pile of bullplop and a hot mess. In fact, it’s one of the most notorious history non-fiction forgeries of the 20th Century.

Published in 1910 – just two years before the Qing Dynasty would fall, this book about the life and policies of Dowager Empress Cixi claims to be based on the diary of a court official, which just so happened to fall into Backhouse’s hands. Backhouse then went to Bland, who was a journalist at the time, and wrote the book with his assistance. Yes, this is absolutely a work of wild-eyed sensationalism, designed to appeal to what the English-reading audience already believed, and wanted to have reflected back at them.

The first tip-off that the whole thing was a hoax probably should have been that Backhouse was a dude, his co-author Bland was a dude, and the supposed court official was also a dude. (This wasn’t, for example, claiming to be based on letters of a court official’s daughter who was serving in the inner palace, which would have been at least plausible.) There is absolutely no way that any of these biological males ever would have gotten firsthand information of what was going on in the private quarters of the Forbidden City. That’s why there were court eunuchs, whose primary job it was to relay information and orders between the Empress and Dowager Empress’ offices and the court. It’s called the Forbidden City for a reason, not the Everybody Come in and Make Yourselves at Home City.

The Dowager Empress Cixi in a sedan chair with attendant court eunuchs.
The Dowager Empress Cixi in a sedan chair with attendant court eunuchs.
Dowager Empress Cixi and four Western ladies and a small girl in a frilly dress.
Obviously, you could visit, if you weren’t an intact biological male. That’s how the lion’s share of these photos were made: biological female photographer.
Dowager Empress Cixi as the Bodhisattva Kuan Yin.
Empress Dowager Cixi was very image-conscious and savvy. She commissioned many portraits and photographs of herself and her attendants. Here, she is depicted as Guan Yin, the Bodhisattva of mercy, possibly to put a good spin on the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion. This is a political statement, definitely not a frivolous game of dress-up.

The most obnoxious part of all this for me is that it’s not like China Under the Empress Dowager by J.O. Bland was the first and only book about the topic available in English at the time. There were at least two previous accounts of Dowager Empress Cixi’s inner court atmosphere. One, published in 1907, was written by Katharine A. Carl, a painter who had made a portrait of her, and the other was a 1909 collection of published letters by the wife of the American Minister to China, Sarah Pike Conger. In 1911, just one year after the publication of China Under the Empress Dowager, a third account was published, this time by one of the ladies of the court, Princess Der Ling. But, of course, all three of these authors were women, which probably impacted their reception by the public. That’s not to say, of course, that these three books are without bias – Sarah Pike Conger and Katharine Carl had their own agenda and racist prejudices, naturally, and Princess Der Ling wanted to defend the Qing Dynasty. Nevertheless, they weren’t made up nearly whole cloth, as Backhouse’s infamous book was. Keeping their inevitable biases in mind, these firsthand accounts can be used to approach the truth, or at least something nearer to it.

Despite these accounts, two of which beat his to publication, and each of which had more direct information, Backhouse’s book was more salacious and conformed better to what his audience wanted to believe. The media echo-chamber is not a problem of the present alone, it’s a problem of human nature, and definitely not unique to the 21st Century and the Internet. Does anyone remember the Maine? William Randolph Hearst? Turn-of-the-century Yellow Journalism? We should. So spare a thought for your information, how you get it, from where and why.

— Article by Katherine, Shawnee

Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat, and Black Beauty

Rather than a collection of books, here’s a pair of books that enrich each other if read together!

Content Warning: contains depictions of animal abuse. (Yes, especially for Black Beauty. Wait, you don’t remember that? Read the unabridged version, they probably cut all the really harrowing bits to make it more palatable for kids.)

Let’s talk about the changing place of animals in society!

Cover art for Some We Love Some We Hate Some We Eat by Hal Herzog. Bright yellow and aqua.
This 2010 treatment of how cultural factors influence our relationship with animals provides a good overview, and makes for some thought-provoking and informative reading.

Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat by Hal Herzog is built on the premise that animals that live in close association with humanity are framed by human cultures in terms of three broad categories: pets, vermin, and livestock. Different cultures might construct the categories along different lines, or even apply them to individuals rather than entire species, but the book nevertheless seeks to apply this theoretical framework to all of them in order to better understand the place of animals in the human world. Interesting topic, and the first of two books to bookend this discussion.

Complications and Guinea Pigs

While Herzog’s book is certainly valuable, there’s a lot of nuance in current and historical cultures that complicate things, and for that, let’s talk about the very strange ride guinea pigs have had. Today, in the continental USA, we see them as pets, a popular choice for the classroom, or children. Alternatively, they’re the proverbial lab animals, which isn’t quite the same as a pet or livestock, but isn’t vermin, despite the fact that the other major lab animal, rats, are definitely thought of as pests before pets outside an experimental setting. Guinea pigs as a species already occupy a complex place in our society, and it used to be even weirder.

Historically, and currently, in the cultures of the Andes which created the domestic guinea pig, the animal is a highly regarded food source, called cuy in Peru (cuyes, plural). Okay, so I might have to have to ease you into this if you didn’t know already. You know how there’s the Cattlemen’s Beef Board and Cattlemen’s Beef Association, dedicated to promoting the use of beef in American kitchens? It’s what’s for dinner. They’ve got beef recipes, and information, and function as a means for beef producers to communicate about the state of the industry, as well as make beef look as good as possible to the public. There’s a similar industry and promotional board in Peru, for guinea pigs, and they have a website, too: Cuy Peru. More than worth a click if you can read Spanish, and even if you can’t. Just brace yourself for whole roasted guinea pig, like we do chicken here. (Scroll almost to the bottom for recipes.) So, pet in one culture and livestock in another, simple, right? No. The guinea pig had a long breakout career in Europe as a status symbol, more akin to a fancy watch, designer purse, or car than a pet or even a purse dog.

At the time the Spanish brought guinea pigs back, European cultures had a very different relationship with animals than we do today, mostly because the framework of morality in general was very different. In this context, it didn’t matter whether animals could think and feel, because morality was about sin, and the God-given order. This is how there were pig trials in the middle ages – a killer pig was acting out of this order, and it was up to human ecclesiastical court systems to put it to rights. (If you’re wondering why a pig would kill someone, the answer is that they’re seriously omnivorous, and are absolutely capable of killing and eating people, especially if the person is unconscious or can’t get up under their own power at the time. That’s why it’s such a big deal in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy falls in the pig pen. At the time, I guess people would have known this. Modern audiences probably don’t have enough experience with farm animals to recognize the danger. Anyway, just go to your search engine of choice and look for “killed and eaten by pigs” for a nicely horrifying roundup of the recent cases.) Animals, in this framework, were there to be used by humanity as we saw fit. This led to a huge amount of horrible animal abuse, society-wide and often formalized. I’m not talking about bullfighting alone, either, more like bull-baiting, bear-baiting, rat-baiting, anything-baiting, organized fights between basically any animal that will fight, goose pulling, cock throwing, and fox tossing, just to list a few.

Old engraving of fox tossing in Dresden.
Fox tossing. Foxes were released in a closed area and popped in the air when they ran across a blanket until they died. Note guys lining up the dead animals on the right. Looks like piglets were also killed at this particular event.

I chose the fox tossing example above, because this is the time period that saw the rise of the guinea pig in European culture. Arriving from South America with the silver galleons, guinea pigs acquired an association with this trade, and the power and wealth that came from it. Guinea pigs featured in portraits to underline elite status, and guinea pigs also played a starring role in still life paintings, whose purpose was often a visual treatise on the dominance of the expanding European trade empires. Here’s some weird European guinea pig art.

Three frilly English children from the Elizabethan age, with guinea pig and nearly dead songbird.
This image nicely encapsulates the attitude toward animals in European society at the time. The guinea pig is front and center, and held gently because it’s expensive, but the songbird is casually getting crushed in the hand of the child on the right, because it’s not seen as a pet, it’s a toy. Images like this complicate the pet/pest/livestock framework. This image is possibly the earliest portrait with a guinea pig in it.

Britain and Horses

Eventually, though, there was a major shift in the calculus of European morality, a key part of which was an equally major re-evaluation of the way in which animals were treated. Beginning in the late 1600’s, and concluding in the mid 1800’s, new measures of morals emerged, focusing on the idea of avoiding doing harm and being compassionate. It was believed that compassion shown to animals mirrored a person’s capacity for compassion to their fellow human beings, and so kindness became a new standard of behavior. The series of prints by Hogarth, The Stages of Cruelty, presents a moral along these new lines, just as the idea began to get popular traction, and here’s a link to the Tate Museum’s online exhibit on the print series so you can examine it in further detail. In a nutshell, the inevitable end result of animal cruelty is that it becomes cruelty to humans, which ends in the murderer’s corpse getting dissected by surgeons in public, as was the practice at the time.

Protip: if you have to propagandize about morals, they’re new and need to be taught.

Although modern ideas of the right way to treat animals come from the Enlightenment and Victorian Sentimentalism, a much more similar place than the earlier medieval framework, there are some key differences. Emerging nationalism also played a vital role, and in the case of Britain, the way in which people should treat horses in particular became a defining cultural touchpoint that persists to this day. In case you were curious, here’s a retrospective on the Great Horsemeat Contamination Scandal of 2013. The book that in large part forged this identity was Black Beauty.

Fancy embroidery cover art for Black Beauty.
You might have read it as a child, but come back to it as an adult, knowing how it changed English speaking society. It’s well worth it. Get an unabridged version for grownups, like this one.

Black Beauty follows the life of the eponymous horse through a series of thoughtless and cruel masters, highlighting the way in which horses were used and abused, and advocating for better treatment by tugging at the readers’ heartstrings rather than laying out a rational argument, in contrast to Hogarth.

Ultimately, filtering down to us from Hogarth’s time, and Anna Sewell‘s, our own cultural sorting scheme for animals settles into the categories outlined by Hal Herzog in Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat. It has only been two and a half centuries, yet we take this understanding for granted.

Available in book, downloadable ebook and audiobook formats.

— Article by Katherine, Shawnee

Katherine’s Bookshelf – Etiquette by Emily Post

Dark blue with gold lettering Etiquette by Emily Post.
I love books on etiquette. I have a few, but this is the one I wanted to share. More could well be on their way.

This is the grand dame of the bookshelf, an early-ish edition of Etiquette by Emily Post. When it comes to the bookshelf collection, I don’t really care whether I get a first edition. But I do like my etiquette books to be from a range of dates, and this one, whose publication history to this point spanned almost the entire 1920’s, shows just how much American society was changing. Take a close look at that list of editions!

The editions of Etiquette by Emily Post, up to the publication of this particular copy. Lots of them.
The editions of Etiquette by Emily Post, up to the publication of this particular batch in 1929. Lots of them. I love appendices, end pages, indices, endnotes, and so on. I hardcore judge history books by how fat their endnotes are.

End pages and such are anything but boring. Read closely: the use of the word “edition” indicates that the book was altered and edited for the print run. If it was just being reprinted to meet explosive demand for the book, they would be labeled “printings” instead – as you can see after the publication of the New and Enlarged Edition in 1927. So, something was actually being changed in the content of the book, continuously, from July 1922 through November 1927. There are five editions in 1923 alone. I would hope that the core content of the book was ready for publication with its first edition, but this is a huge number of subsequent tweakings, and I would wager that they weren’t all simply fixing typos. Given that it’s an etiquette book, it looks like it’s being edited to keep up with the changing expectations of society.

Polite behavior is, as nearly every etiquette manual points out, a matter of being considerate and compassionate. That doesn’t change. What does change is whether you’re expected to know what an ice cream knife is for, and if visiting cards are necessary, or if you must be able to play bridge and golf in order to survive in business. These details can change very quickly.

Super fancy 19th Century ice cream knife. Solid silver.
This is an ice cream knife, 19th Century. Until the ice cream scoop, they used big ol’ knives with a ledge on the end to cut ice cream and serve it. The ledge is to keep the ice cream from slipping off the broad face of the knife. Weirdly specialized silverware was very common 100 years ago, and although asparagus tongs are pretty much extinct, along with sugar snips, and critically endangered cake breakers, you might still run into fish forks and knives in the wild, at a very, very formal dinner.

We don’t use ice cream knives, and bridge is no longer so vital to building business and social connections. Dining has become steadily less and less formal, too. However, the fancier the occasion, the more it might conserve practices of a century ago. If you find yourself faced with the prospect of a twelve-course dinner, Emily Post has you covered.

very formal place setting anticipating lots of seafood before the main course.
Don’t panic. You can use the table setting to anticipate what will be served, if you neglected to read the menu. Caviar (tiny mother of pearl spoon on extreme right), escargot (rightmost fork resting in spoon, the tongs to hold the snail shells arrive with the snails), seafood cocktail (leftmost two-pronged fork), soup (round spoon on right), fish (broad fork second to left and broad rightmost knife), lobster (lobster pick third from left), salad (fork, second knife from right), main course presumably steak (tall fork fourth from right and steak knife), dessert (three tined fork closest to plate and knife closest to plate).

— Article by Katherine, Shawnee

Katherine’s Bookshelf – The American Woman’s Encyclopedia of Home Decorating by Helen Koue

The title of the book on the spine in gilt letters.
The cover isn’t very exciting. It’s green. That’s it.

This book from Katherine’s Bookshelf is, exactly as the title suggests, an encyclopedia of interior design… from 1947. Hmm. So, what were fashionable home interiors like in 1947? Let’s see:

What's rose and green and colonial all over? This living room.
If that sofa pattern qualifies as “a soft plaid”, I don’t think I can handle a bold plaid.

Having flashbacks to grandma’s house yet? In 1947, Colonial is in. Nothing says 18th Century Colonial like a giant plaid sofa. Also: ashtrays, ashtrays everywhere. There’s an ashtray on every single table and end table in this picture. I like the rug though. I can definitely appreciate a nice hooked rug. It’s huge. All you need to make a hooked rug is a small crochet hook, some burlap, yarn, and time – lots and lots of time.

Chartreuse walls and some kinda weird painted window border instead of moulding.
Baffling as it is now, the paint job here must have taken ages. Even with a stencil, this represents a monumental undertaking. Look at the figures on the closet door! Also, I can’t figure out how the window curtain works here. There’s no blind, so I guess sunlight just blasts through it. There must be a rail on the bottom too so that the whole thing can be pulled aside? I don’t know.

Basically, the entire book is exactly like this, which points up the problems with many interior decorating and home improvement books. If it’s incredibly fashionable, it’ll go out of fashion eventually. On-trend rapidly mutates into dated, exactly because it’s so evocative of the time period in which it was popular. Warm gray wall paint and white tile are headed that way very soon.

Another interesting aspect is that it’s fundamentally aspirational. Nobody buys a book on home improvement if their home is already improved. You don’t need advice for painting if you’ve already painted. Everything in this book is about how things should be, but aren’t yet. In the same sense that the styles shown within might be evocative of grandma’s house, few people in 1947 actually had houses that already looked like this. Like us, they made do with hand-me-down furniture and their walls were already painted. Not everyone was moving into new houses in Levittown. Some people had apartments, and some people had 1920s Cape Cod houses, or Victorian era townhomes, or shotgun houses. It’s important to read books like The American Woman’s Encyclopedia of Home Decorating to remind ourselves that the actual Mid-Century as it was actually lived in wasn’t entirely Mid-Century Modern. For every hilarious Uranium Red Fiestaware plate, there’s a whole lot of very bland porcelain teacups. Cultural memory is highly selective, filtering through only the most novel and iconic designs. The past as we remember it is not the past as it was lived.

— Article by Katherine, Shawnee

Big Ideas: Historical Narrative

It’s time for Big Ideas! Welcome to a mini-series-within-a-series on history and how it is made.

One way to think about history is as a story, a series of events that happened, and when. Get comfy, and settle in, because this post will explore the events of the Wars of the Roses, from the lead up through the aftermath – one of the most headache-inducingly complicated historical narratives I could think of. In the end, after the dust settles, and the Tudors take over, I’ll discuss the value of treating history this way, and what we can really learn from it.

Story Time (Skip to the Relationship Map if you Feel Your Eyes Glaze Over)

A long time ago in England (about 600 years ago), King Edward III had three sons (who survived to adulthood and are important to this story). His first son, Edward the Black Prince, had a son, who became King, Richard II. His second son, Lionel of Antwerp, went on to have kids, and that branch would be the House of York (White Rose). Edward III’s third son, John of Gaunt, had a son, who would depose Richard II, and become King Henry IV. Descendants of John of Gaunt are the House of Lancaster (Red Rose). John of Gaunt also had another son, by a mistress, and his name was John Beaufort, and he was legitimized later, so he could inherit and hold titles. So, for those keeping score at home, the new King, Henry IV, and John Beaufort are half brothers through their father.

Henry IV has a son who becomes king, Henry V, who marries Catherine of Valois. They have a son, who becomes king too: Henry VI. After Henry V dies, Catherine of Valois goes on to marry a second time, this time a wealthy Welsh landlord, Owen Tudor. This marriage produces another son, Edmund Tudor. Remember the half-brother of King Henry IV, John Beaufort? He had a daughter, Margaret Beaufort, and she marries Edmund Tudor.

Meanwhile, the latest King, Henry VI, marries Margaret of Anjou. He has increasing trouble keeping up with all his kingly duties, though, so she’s actually the one in charge of things, and he has two advisers, also. One of these advisers is the wealthy and influential descendant of Edward III’s second son Lionel of Antwerp, Richard of York. The other is another wealthy power-broker, Richard Neville, AKA Warwick the Kingmaker. Richard Neville married his daughter Anne Neville to Henry VI’s son and heir, Edward of Westminster. You hanging in there? Breathe into a paper bag if it gets too complicated and you need a break.

So, Richard of York and Margaret of Anjou basically hate each other, because he figures that the House of York descends from the second son of Edward III, and not the third, like the House of Lancaster, so by rights, he should be King instead. He gets Richard Neville’s support and fights with Margaret of Anjou and the House of Lancaster to get Henry VI deposed. In one of these battles, Edward of Westminster, the King’s heir, is killed. THEN Richard Neville has his daughter, the newly widowed Anne Neville, marry Richard of York’s youngest surviving son, also confusingly named Richard. He also marries off his oldest daughter, Isabel Neville, to Richard of York’s third surviving son, George. Then, Richard of York dies in battle, too. His oldest surviving son eventually wins the fight, and deposes and replaces (and, let’s face it, probably has murdered) poor Henry VI, who has been held hostage, rescued, and then re-captured, and ends his life in the Tower of London. Richard Neville switches sides, and mounts a rebellion with George against Edward IV. Richard Neville is killed in battle, Edward IV puts down the rebellion, and has his brother George drowned in a butt of wine for his backstabbing ways. Somehow, the new King Edward IV actually dies of natural causes, and has a son, the new King Edward V.

BUT WAIT, there’s more! It turns out that Richard of York’s youngest son Richard thinks that HE should be king, and has Edward IV’s marriage declared illegal, so that King Edward V is now illegitimate, and has him thrown in the Tower of London with his younger brother (they’re both just kids at this point). He’s declared King Richard III, and then the two “Princes in the Tower” just… disappear. (Again, probably murdered on the order of Richard III.) So… remember Edmund Tudor, from waaaaay back there? He had a son, who figures that he’s as close as anybody to being King, and comes back from France and defeats Richard III, who dies in battle, and, in the distant future, is discovered buried under a parking lot (confirmed by DNA testing in 2013). The End.

That was complicated and horrible, so here’s a relationship map, to help you figure out what happened:

A disgustingly complicated chart of all the major relationships of all the major players in the Wars of the Roses
This is like the seventh draft of this chart. I should’ve stuck with my original plan for this series to follow up rocket science with quantum mechanics. Ugh.

Fun fact: my history knowledge strong points are really East Asian and African history, not European, so I didn’t really know most of this until I researched this article. In fact, I picked this particular topic purely because I didn’t know much about it. We’re learning together! Yay! It really doesn’t help things that nearly every dude is named either Edward or Richard. At least the various Henrys are numbered. So that’s the story of the Wars of the Roses. But, in the end, after all that, what has changed? England has a different king. The family in charge is now these guys, not those guys. The Tudors would continue the foreign policy aims of trying to get back France, so that didn’t change. The social structure is the same. The economic structure is still the same too. It’s a story dramatic enough for a whole batch of Shakespeare plays, but is the series of events actually important enough to how the world turned out to remember in detail?

On one hand, you can argue that without the Wars of the Roses, there isn’t a Henry VIII to have a succession crisis and kickstart the Catholic vs Protestant divide that would dominate the politics of later England (and then the United Kingdom, and everything including the potato famine in Ireland, and even a really scary undertow of Brexit negotiations much later).

For want of a nail a horseshoe was lost

For want of a shoe, a horse was lost

For want of a horse, a rider was lost

For want of a rider, a battle was lost

For want of a battle, a kingdom was lost

And all for the want of a horseshoe nail

On the other hand, the horseshoe nail approach ads nothing to our understanding. Sure, it’s easy to say that future events come from events in the past, but that’s the very definition of what “past” even is: it’s the events that led here, so of course that’s what they do. There’s a lot of value in looking deeper, and asking more questions. If it wasn’t Henry VIII, would it have been someone else anyway, due to rules of succession and legitimacy being what they were? Could someone in a position of power have simply done the same thing, with their own pivotal decisions? Or, if you prefer, would the real reason be the way that English culture passed property on to children, and the critical role of religion in supporting this system? These questions are the core of historiography – the discipline of how history is written.

In a very literal sense, history is the practice of finding meaning in events of the past. History is writing about events of the past, but FOR the sake of the present and ultimately the future. Otherwise, why remember it? For everything you know about history, consider all that has been forgotten, or left unknown. History is what we choose to remember, and how we choose to remember it. As for historiography, narrative alone isn’t bad, and can be compelling. Remember, the narrative of the Wars of the Roses itself – with lots of spin, of course – was good enough for Shakespeare. Next time, we’ll dive into the dueling perspectives of historiography, and the question of whether it is pivotal decisions or socioeconomic forces that drive this narrative.

— Article by Katherine

The Bottle Imp and the Limits of Logic

Logic! It’s fantastically useful stuff. Use it all the time for sorting out your options, thinking up plans, and generally making your life easier. There’s some very real limits to it, though, and whether an idea checks out logically doesn’t always have anything to do with its relevance to the real world. Here’s the test: can this idea be used to predict what will happen?

vintage photo of a dog in a top hat and white tie suit
Very dapper, but will this dog hunt? (Also proof that dogs have been putting up with the human impulse to dress them in clothes for a very long time.)

There’s a Robert Louis Stevenson story called The Bottle Imp. Go read it in this collection, here, if you like. No plot spoilers, but I will be discussing the premise of the story, so if you want to read it before we get to that, do. The main idea of the story is this: there’s a bottle that contains an evil imp. It can grant any wish except to prolong the bottle owner’s life, and if you die with the bottle in your possession, you go straight to Hell. The only way you can get rid of the bottle is to sell it to someone for less than you paid for it. Here’s where it gets interesting.

A display of ancient glass bottles of various murky clear shades
Some 17th Century glass bottles in a museum. Probably not full of evil, though.

Truth and Consequences

Let’s play a game, and think about the Bottle Imp problem logically. Eventually, there’s an ultimate loser: someone stuck with the bottle who bought it for a single penny, and they can’t sell it. So, following that, the next person up, who sold it to them, bought it for two cents, and must have known that they wouldn’t be able to sell it to someone for one cent. There must have been someone above them who got it for three, but should have known that they couldn’t sell it for two, because the person who got it for two would have to convince someone to take it for one, which nobody would ever do. Theoretically, nobody should ever take the bottle for any price, because the problem of not being able to sell it for a cent should cascade up the chain of prospective bottle owners. This is, of course, assuming that everyone involved is thinking logically (and whenever you hear that phrase, you should also assume that this perfectly spherical, frictionless dog hunts perfectly spherical, frictionless partridges in a vacuum).

The trouble here is that real people just aren’t rational actors, any more than real hunting dogs are spherical and frictionless. Realistically, everybody in the chain, down to perilously close to the bottom, is probably going to think “eh, I’ve got plenty of time, and I’m sure I can find some sucker to sell the bottle to” – and, in the main, they’d probably be right. The existence of the whole idea of gambling in general testifies to the idea that people – real people – generally do a terrible job of thinking logically and rationally. If the odds could really be in your favor in the long term, casinos wouldn’t exist.

a shack by a creek, with a man and a dog sitting outside
Las Vegas in 1895, before the gambling industry really took off.
a view of the Vegas strip in 2011. Reasonably recent.
A view of the Las Vegas strip. Practically a monument to the irrationality of humans. Keep feeding those one armed bandits, guys…

Sometimes, especially when dealing with real human behavior in the real world, logic does a truly wretched job of predicting real-world outcomes and decisions. There’s a distinction between logic, and actual utility. Most of the time, logic is very useful, but sometimes, especially when you’re dealing with questions of real human behavior, not so much.

— Article by Katherine.

Available Light: Louisville Through the Lens of Bud Dorsey

The Louisville Story Program recently released a fourth book, Available Light: Louisville Through the Lens of Bud Dorsey.  This time the book is set in the West End of Louisville, including the Shawnee and Chickasaw neighborhoods.

Bud Dorsey, lifelong photographer, has compiled a small collection of photos that focus on West Louisville, as well as the people that make up the community.  With an Introduction by Dorsey about his journey through multiple cameras, you feel that you are walking alongside him while capturing photos. They range from his childhood in Beecher Terrace, his service to our country in the naval forces, and on to photo shoots for Jet Magazine.

When America heard of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s death on April 4, 1968, Louisville had rioting in the street.  Survival was not guaranteed on 28th & Greenwood Streets, Dorsey says, because it was the police who started the riots.  If you have lived in Louisville but haven’t been to the West End, you will see what Dorsey witnessed in this collection of his photographs.

Mr. Dorsey also includes photos of folks from around the country in the music industry, such as  James Brown and Michael Jackson, and political activists like Anne Braden and Dick Gregory.

A tour de force for local history and visual art, this book shows the compassion of West Louisville from its past to the present, with hope for the future.

[Editor’s Note:  An exhibit of Mr. Dorsey’s photographs from Available Light are on display at the the Muhammad Ali Center until January 5, 2018]

Formats Available:  Book

Reviewed by Micah, Shawnee Branch