by Mary Jo McConahay

Of all the fighting units struggling toward the final liberation of Italy, the men of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force are among the most warmly remembered in the towns and villages of the Apuan Alps and the Apennines, where they freed towns from occupying fascists. On local commemorations of the end of the war in the north three flags may fly: The Italian Tricolore, the U.S. Stars and Stripes, and the striking blue, green and gold banner of Brazil. With the passage of time the Brazilian Smoking Cobras, however, are largely forgotten in their own country, and rarely appear in Allied accounts of the war.

Nevertheless, the only Latin American unit thrown up against the Reich in Europe possesses a history as rich and dramatic as any other troops: twenty-five thousand underprepared men who arrived late and were battered by early losses in the field, but ended the war as a band of brothers with significant victories to call their own.

“The Brazilians will go to war when the snake smokes,” Hitler is reputed to have said, dismissing the possibility that the far-away, pro-fascist dictatorship of Gen. Getulio Vargas would commit troops to the European theatre, let alone to the Allied side. By 1943, however, President Roosevelt had cajoled the biggest country in South America with the promise of U.S. assistance to post-war industrial development – a Vargas dream; Rio allowed the U.S. Navy to begin building airstrips and bases on the strategic Brazilian hump, only 1800 miles from the closest city in Africa – Dakar; and U-boats began to sink Vargas’ ships.  The die was cast. In July, 1944, the first ships from Rio arrived in Naples, and the Brazilians found themselves learning about U.S. arms under U.S. trainers at an old royal hunting ground outside Pisa. In a challenge to the Fuehrer, they called themselves the “Smoking Cobras” and sewed insignia of green and gold onto their sleeves. The patches carried an image of a rising cobra with a pipe in its mouth, smoke wafting up from the bowl.

When the Brazilians arrived 1944 Allies had occupied Italy south of the Arno River, but the country north of the river was still in enemy hands. The region was defended by the Gothic Line, 180 miles of iron, tank traps and sniper towers designed to be impregnable.

Lt. General Euclides Zenóbio, a charismatic 51-year old officer, led the assault that gave the Smoking Cobras their first victory, taking back from the enemy the town in western Tuscany called Camaoire. “He did not waste time,” the Brazilian chief of Staff, Floriano de Lima Brayner wrote. Zenóbio commanded “with bits of recklessness…not worrying about the dangers surrounding him.”

The Brazilians succeeded joyfully at Camaiore, but in general they lost more skirmishes to the Germans than they won in their first weeks in the field.  Churchill had been wrong to say the Germans would not fight for Italy. Only when the Smoking Cobras crossed into the Serchio River Valley did they begin to come into their own. Zenóbio led the men town by town toward the Northern Apennines, which the historian of the Fifth Army, to which the Brazilians were attached, has called “the most formidable mountain barrier [the Fifth Army] was ever to face in combat operations in Italy.” Unfortunately, the advance was a miserable slog: seasonal rains came down in torrents, trucks slid from the roads, soldiers on foot were prey to flash floods and mud so deep it could swallow a man.

The Brazilians found the Serchio Valley towns occupied by the Germans, or elements of the Italian Black Brigade, loyal to Mussolini. Not far away, fascist troops slaughtered civilians, sometimes as warnings for suspected collaboration with the Italian partisans. In a hill town called Sant’Anna de Stazzema, SS troops took reprisals for one partisan operation by murdering 700 residents, including 130 children, and burning their bodies. A local priest in the town of occupied Barga, a walled city 25 miles from the massacre, wrote that his flock looked “like anyone with a loved one dying.”

As the Allies approached Barga in numbers, however, the Germans and Italians retreated to nearby hills. On October 11, 1944 townspeople cheered as the Brazilians entered triumphally in jeeps.  Too triumphally. “Get out of the streets!” someone yelled, perhaps one of the partisans who had entered the town two days before. Enemy fire rained down from the hills.

For weeks, the Brazilians and other allied troops fought to root out the enemy, liberating more towns. One night in November they moved by truck 75 miles east and north of the Serchio Valley to a new frontline in sight of a 3,240-foot-high rise, Monte Castello.  Many of the South Americans stared in wonder when the first snow fell because they had seen the white flakes descend and pile up in drifts only in movies, or in their dreams. Soon the snow meant not enchantment but frostbite, rotting feet, burning skin.

Ferocious cold or not, the commander of the expeditionary force, Joâo Baptista Mascarenhas de Moraes, was determined his men would do their country – and himself – proud. German Field Marshal Albert Kesserling described Monte Castello as “of maximum importance for the possession of Bologna and the routes of communication toward the south, north and northwest.” The Brazilians’ new orders from Allied headquarters: take the mountain. Thus Mascarenhas began the trial by fire that finally forged the Smoking Cobras into seasoned fighters.

For the next months, Monte Castello loomed before the Smoking Cobras like Ahab’s white whale, taunting, seemingly unconquerable, yet something that must be mastered no matter what the cost. They threw themselves at the mountain in November, December and January, without success. One battalion failed to perform reconnaissance, and became sitting ducks for the Germans. On another day, rain turned the slopes into fatal marshes; forty-nine Brazilians died.  Finally, on their fifth attempt, on February 21, 1945, the Brazilians launched an assault by way of the mountain’s flanks, not frontally as they had done before. As dark fell, Zenobio placed a call to Mascarenas. “The mountain is ours,” he said.

Buoyed by success, the Smoking Cobras became unstoppable, ending the war by taking the surrender of the entire 148th division of the German army. Commemorative plaques can be found today in Italian towns the Brazilians liberated during the war, some engraved by locals with the image of a rising snake confidently smoking a pipe.

BONUS – Watch the book trailer for The Tango War:

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Born in Chicago, MARY JO MCCONAHAY is an award-winning reporter who covered the wars in Central America and economics in the Middle East. She has traveled in seventy countries and has been fascinated by the history of World War II since childhood, when she listened to the stories of her father, a veteran U.S. Navy officer. A graduate of the University of California in Berkeley, she covers Latin America as an independent journalist. Her previous books include Maya Road and Ricochet. She lives in San Francisco.

The post The Smoking Cobras of WWII—Brazilians Go to War in Italy appeared first on The History Reader.

by Terry Golway

The post FDR and Al Smith: An Unlikely Political Alliance appeared first on The History Reader.

by Alice McDermott

On a dim winter afternoon, a young Irish immigrant opens the gas taps in his Brooklyn tenement. He is determined to prove―to the subway bosses who have recently fired him, to his pregnant wife―“that the hours of his life belong to himself alone.” In the aftermath of the fire that follows, Sister St. Savior, an aging nun, appears unbidden to direct the way forward for his widow and his unborn child.

The Ninth Hour is a historical novel that begins deep inside Catholic Brooklyn, in the early part of the twentieth century. Decorum, superstition, and shame collude to erase the man’s brief existence. Yet his suicide, although never spoken of, reverberates through many lives and over the decades testing the limits and the demands of love and sacrifice, of forgiveness and forgetfulness, even through multiple generations.

The characters we meet, from Sally, the unborn baby at the beginning of the novel, who becomes the center of the story, to the nuns whose personalities we come to know and love, to the neighborhood families with whose lives they are entwined, are all rendered with extraordinary sympathy and McDermott’s trademark lucidity and intelligence. Alice McDermott’s The Ninth Hour is a crowning achievement by one of the premiere writers at work in America today—keep reading for an excerpt.

* * * * *

At six, the streetlamps against the wet dark gave a polish to the air. There was the polish of lamplight, too, on streetcar tracks and windowpanes and across the gleaming surface of the scattered black puddles in the street. Reflection of lamplight as well on the rump of the remaining fire truck and on the pale faces of the gathered crowd, with an extra gold sparkle and glint on anyone among them who wore glasses. Sister St. Saviour, for instance, a Little Nursing Sister of the Sick Poor, who had spent the afternoon in the vestibule of the Woolworth’s at Borough Hall, her alms basket in her lap. She was now on her way back to the convent, her bladder full, her ankles swollen, her round glasses turned toward the lamplight and the terrible scent of doused fire on the winter air.

The pouch with the money she had collected today was tied to her belt; the small basket she used was tucked under her cloak and under her arm. The house where the fire had been looked startled: the windows of all four floors were wide open, shade cords and thin curtains flailing in the cold air. Although the rest of the building was dark, the vestibule at the top of the stone stoop was weirdly lit, crowded with policemen and firemen carrying lamps. The front door was open, as, it appeared, was the door to the apartment on the parlor floor. Sister St. Saviour wanted only to walk on, to get to her own convent, her own room, her own toilet—her fingers were cold and her ankles swollen and her thin basket was crushed awkwardly under her arm—but still she brushed through the crowd and climbed the steps. There was a limp fire hose running along the shadowy base of the stone banister. Two of the officers in the hallway, turning to see her, tipped their hats and then put out their hands as if she had been summoned. “Sister,” one of them said. He was flushed and perspiring, and even in the dull light, she could see that the cuffs of his jacket were singed. “Right in here.”

The apartment was crowded with people, perhaps every tenant in the place. The smell of smoke and wet ash, burned wool, burned hair, was part and parcel of the thick pools of candlelight in the room, and of the heavy drone of whispered conversation. There were two groups: one was gathered around a middle-aged man in shirtsleeves and carpet slippers who was sitting in a chair by the window, his face in his hands. The other, across the room, hovered beside a woman stretched out on a dark couch, under a fringed lamp that was not lit. She had a cloth applied to her head, but she seemed to be speaking sensibly to the thin young man who leaned over her. When she saw the nun, the woman raised a limp hand and said, “She’s in the bedroom, Sister.” Her arm from wrist to elbow was glistening with a shiny salve— butter, perhaps.

“You might leave off with that grease,” Sister said. “Unless you’re determined to be basted.” The young man turned at this, laughing. He wore a gray fedora and had a milk tooth in his grin. “Have the courtesy to doff your hat,” she told him.

It was Sister St. Saviour’s vocation to enter the homes of strangers, mostly the sick and the elderly, to breeze into their apartments and to sail comfortably through their rooms, to open their linen closets or china cabinets or bureau drawers—to peer into their toilets or the soiled handkerchiefs clutched in their hands—but the frequency with which she inserted herself into the homes of strangers had not diminished over the years, her initial impulse to stand back, to shade her eyes. She dipped her head as she passed through the parlor, into a narrow corridor, but she saw enough to conclude that a Jewish woman lived here— the woman on the couch, she was certain, a Jewish woman, she only guessed, because of the fringed lampshade, the upright piano against the far wall, the dark oil paintings in the narrow hallway that seemed to depict two ordinary peasants, not saints. A place unprepared for visitors, arrested, as things so often were by crisis and tragedy, in the midst of what should have been a private hour. She saw as she passed by that there was a plate on the small table in the tiny kitchen, that it contained a half piece of bread, well bitten and stained with a dark gravy. A glass of tea on the edge of a folded newspaper.

In the candlelit bedroom, where two more policemen were conferring in the far corner, there were black stockings hung over the back of a chair, a mess of hairbrushes and handkerchiefs on the low dresser, a gray corset on the threadbare carpet at the foot of the bed. There was a girl on the bed, sideways, her dark skirt spread around her, as if she had fallen there from some height. Her back was to the room and her face to the wall. Another woman leaned over her, a hand on the girl’s shoulder.

The policemen nodded to see the nun, and the shorter one took off his cap as he moved toward her. He, too, was singed about the cuffs. He had a heavy face, stale breath, and bad dentures, but there was compassion in the way he gestured with his short arms toward the girl on the bed, toward the ceiling and the upstairs apartment where the fire had been, a compassion that seemed to weigh down his limbs. Softhearted, Sister thought, one of us. The girl, he said, had come in from her shopping and found the door to her place blocked from the inside. She went to her neighbors, the man next door and the woman who lived here. They helped her push the door open, and then the man lit a match to hold against the darkness. There was an explosion. Luckily, the policeman said, he himself was just at the corner and was able to put the fire out while neighbors carried the three of them down here. Inside, in the bedroom, he found a young man on the bed. Asphyxiated. The girl’s husband.

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ALICE MCDERMOTT is the author of seven previous novels, including After This; Child of My Heart; Charming Billy, winner of the 1998 National Book Award; At Weddings and Wakes; and Someone. That Night, At Weddings and Wakes, and After This were all finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and elsewhere. She is the Richard A. Macksey Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University.

The post Historical Fiction: Alice McDermott’s The Ninth Hour appeared first on The History Reader.

In 1962 an Alemannic graveyard in Niederstotzingen in Southern Germany was discovered and excavated. New studies of the aDNA of thirteen individuals – ten male adults and three infants – presents a snapshot of the local group of warriors.

The Alemannic graveyard in Niederstozingen dated to the end of the 6th century is famous for three reasons. First of all, the results were published soon after the excavation. Thus it came to define a horizon, against which other and later excavated burial grounds were compared. Secondly, some of the grave goods were exceptional, particularly the helmet and armour made in a Byzantine style from overlapping scales. Thirdly, one of the buried individuals was later identified as a woman, albeit buried with “male” grave-goods, This raised a scholarly debate on the phenomena of “amazons” in the migration period.

Recently, new studies were published adding to as well as offering corrections to the general understanding of the graves, the grave-goods, the interred individuals and not least the social structure of the group. The studies were carried out by researchers at the Eurac Research Centre in Bozen-Bolzano, Italy, and at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, in Germany.

No female warrior

First of all, the new studies laid the question of a “female” warrior to rest. Eleven of the thirteen individuals had enough DNA preserved to identify them as males, while no definitive sex could be determined for two. But “she” was not among these two. Accordingly, the graves witness to a burial practice with males to one side, and females to the other. If women were ever buried at the site, they were later translated from a pillaged grave and moved elsewhere.

Also, analyses of strontium showed that eleven out of thirteen individuals had grown up and lived locally, while two individuals, who had grown up in another locality, had lived as grown-ups in Niederstotzingen. These two individuals were further characterised by the wear and tear on their skeletons, signalling that they were professional soldiers. One of these individuals probably derived from Southern or South Eastern Europe.

A recent study of the aDNA of all the individuals aimed to reconstruct patterns of kinship. This new information has helped shed even more light on the cultural context presented by the funerary artefacts.

Genome-wide analyses helped to estimate the genetic affiliation of the majority to modern West Eurasians. Of these, at least five individuals belonged to the same patrilinear kin-group, consisting of two brothers – obviously leaders of the group – one of which had two sons, and a grandchild, thus constituting three generations. Mothers, though, had judged by the mapping of haplogroups been recruited from far away, confirming the results from other similar investigations that marriages were exogenous and patrilocal.

Panoply of grave goods

Remarkably, though, neither kinship nor geographical origin could be related to the different ensembles of grave-goods. Thus, the objects found in the graves of the five individuals, who were identified as belonging to the same patrilineal kin-group, could be characterised as Byzantine, Franconian, as well as Lombardian. Especially the two assemblages, belonging to the two brothers in the first generation, are unusual: one was Byzantine, while the other was Franconian. Compared with the finds in all twelve graves, both these interred individuals were laid to rest with the most magnificent objects – respectively the Byzantine Helmet and the Franconian double-edged-ring-sword together with an engraved lance. In this context, it is interesting to note that the study of the strontium profiles of the two brothers showed that they had not only been born locally, they had for several years also lived together locally. Which means that we have two brothers born and living together with descendants and retinue while showing off military equipment of very diverse cultural styles. It does not seem farfetched to imagine that they laid their hands on the weapons and armour as part of raids less than gifts from the war-lords, for whose service, they had signed up. Perhaps, though, the Franconian Ring-sword did represent a gift from a Merovingian overlord recruiting our man to be the local official representative.

The research group publishing the results conclude that kinship and fellowship was held in equal regard. We might add, that the findings also show the outline of a small band of brothers with their retinue, who had settled on the crossroad of two former Roman highways living off the countryside as early medieval highway robbers. Or as the authors write, they constituted a “military outpost guarding an important land route”. The remaining question is: would there be a difference?

Sadly, the corresponding female burial ground has not been found and excavated.

SOURCE:

DNA of early medieval Alemannic warriors and their entourage decoded
Researchers from Eurac Research and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History have analyzed human remains dated between 590 and 630 CE
EURAC RESEARCH/press Release September 2018

READ:

Ancient genome-wide analyses infer kinship structure in an Early Medieval Alemannic graveyard.
by Niall O’Sullivan, Cosimo Posth, Valentina Coia, Verena J. Schuenemann, T. Douglas Price, Joachim Wahl, Ron Pinhasi, Albert Zink, Johannes Krause, Frank Maixner. Ancient genome-wide analyses infer kinship structure in an Early Medieval Alemannic graveyard. Science Advances( 2018), vol. 4, no. 9

Neue Erkenntnisse zur frühmittelalterlichen Separatgrablege von Niederstotzingen, Kreis Heidenheim
By Joachim Wahl, Giovanna Cipollini, Valentina Coia, Michael Francken, Katerina Harvati-Papatheodorou, Mi-Ra Kim, Frank Maixner, Niall O’Sullivan, T. Douglas Price, Dieter Quast, Nivien Speith and Albert Zink. (2014)
In: Fundberichte aus Baden-Württemberg (2014) vol. 34, 2 p. 341-390

Helm und Ringschwet. Prunkbewaffnung und Rangabzeichen germanischer Krieger. Eine Übersicht.
By Heiko Stuer
In: Studien zur Sachsenforschung (1987) Vol. 6, pp. 190 – 236.

READ ALSO:

Genetic Perspective on the Bavarians from the Migration period

The Genetics of Longobard-Era Migrations

The post Kinship and Culture in an Alemannic Burial Ground from the early 7th century appeared first on Medieval Histories.

After an extensive renovation of the Musée de Cluny in Paris, the first major exhibition focuses on the birth of the Gothic sculpture in and around Paris.

Between 1135 and 1150, a new and revolutionary art form was launched at St. Denis north of Paris. Here Abbot Suger ruled from 1122, and it was here, he propelled an aesthetic rethinking as well as the massive rebuilding of the Abbey church. In the following centuries, this came to set its mark from one end of Europe to the other. Labelled Gothic – that is antiquated and barbarous – by the masters of the Renaissance, contemporaries thought of it as highly modern.

Suger was a jack-of-all-trades. Accomplished politician, writer, and administrator, we never the less know him best as a dedicated patron of his Abbey, as witnessed today by the rebuilt western end, the famous ambulatory and shrine choir, and the creative use of stained windows and sculptural embellishments. Out of reverence for the old Merovingian church, Suger was keen to preserve the fabric of yesteryear. Nevertheless, the new Abbey Church at St. Denis came to be considered the crucible of Gothic Art. Not least, because we have personal reflections preserved in his writings and his testament on what he thought about his building projects – theologically, aesthetically, and regarding practicality.

Nevertheless, St. Denis has an obscure artistic context. The challenge is, that we seem to know so much about St. Denis, that we forget that considerable parts of the surrounding edifices and preserved artistic legacy is not so well dated. The question is, what and whom, inspired Suger? And what influence did Suger and St. Denis have on the burgeoning art scene of île-de-France? Thus, it is still debated whether Chartres inspired St. Denis or vice-versa. Also, did the choirs in the Cathedral at Noyon and in the Abbey church at St-Germer-de Fly predate or postdate the work of Suger?

One of the significant elements to ponder in connection with this question is the use of early Gothic Sculpture, which spread throughout the île-de-France region from 1135 – 1150. The most prominent feature was, of course, the use of triple portals flanked by sculptures, such as is still preserved at Chartres. We know from fragments of the portals from St. Denis as well as a series of pre-revolutionary drawings from the 18th century that such sculptured portals also graced the Abbey church.

However, this early Gothic sculpture was not limited to the emblematic portals adorned with column-statues, while new models circulated and new forms of expression were explored. An unprecedented virtuosity in the cutting and carving of stone allowed for infinite variations on decorative themes, which were shared with illuminations and stained-glass windows. With a sense for narration and a marked taste for the monumental, such refined and detailed work helped to spread the new artistic gospels across borders.

This autumn, Musée de Cluny invites the public to enjoy, study, and compare the magnificent sculptural heritage of the early 12th century and how it came to inspire Europe in a gigantic wave rapidly reaching the outer shores of England, Scotland, and Germany. With loans of statues from the Royal Portal at Chartres, the fragmentary vestiges of those from the western portals of the Abbey in Saint-Denis, as well as other sculptural remnants from the Sainte-Anne Portal of Notre-Dame de Paris and the Saint-Denis Cloister, visitors will be able to observe how the birth of a whole new form of art came about.

Afterwards, it is suggested to make a short detour to St. Denis, in order to experience the Cathedral, as it stands today, as well as the interesting archaeological museum where finds from extensive excavations are exhibited.

Under the leadership of its curators, Damien Berné and Philippe Plagnieux, the exhibition brings together about 130 works. In addition to the collections in the Musée de Cluny Museum and the Louvre, sculptures and other pieces of work have been loaned from museums in France as well as abroad

VISIT:

Birth of Gothic sculpture. Saint-Denis, Paris, Chartres 1135-1150
Cluny Museum – National Museum of the Middle Ages
10.10.2018 – 31.12.2018

Curators: Damien Berné, Heritage Curator at the Musée de Cluny, and Philippe Plagnieux, Professor of Medieval Art History (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne & École Nationale des Chartes). In partnership with RMN-GP.

SEE MORE:

Mapping Gothic France

With a database of images, texts, charts and historical maps, Mapping Gothic France invites you to explore the parallel stories of Gothic architecture and the formation of France in the 12th and 13th centuries, considered in three dimensions. The Mapping Gothic France project was initiated by Stephen Murray, Professor of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University and Andrew Tallon, Assistant Professor of Art at Vassar College and funded through the generosity of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Mapping Gothic France was developed within the framework of collaboration between the Media Center for Art History in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, the Visual Resources Library at Vassar College, and the Columbia University Libraries.

READ:

La naissance de la sculpture gothique en Ile de France
de Collectif
Series: RMN Architectur
RMN 2018

 

 

 

 

 

 

Microarchitectures médiévales : L’échelle à l’épreuve de la matière Broché
Ed. by  Jean-Marie Guillouët (Sous la direction de), Ambre Vilain (Sous la direction de) Coédition Picard
Collection : PICARD HISTOIRE
ISBN-10: 2708410423 ISBN-13: 978-2708410428

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Gothic Art and Architecture in Paderborn

Gothic Art and Style

The post Early Gothic Art from île-de-France 1135 – 50 appeared first on Medieval Histories.

Vertical, emotional, illusional, terrifying… Gothic Art dominated the architecture as well as minor art forms from the 13^thto 15^thcenturies, lifting the soul of mankind towards the heavens. This autumn Paderborn houses a major exhibition on Gothic Architecture

Vertical, emotional, illusional, terrifying… Gothic Art dominated the architecture as well as minor art forms from the 13th to 15th centuries, lifting the soul of mankind towards the heavens. This autumn Paderborn houses a major exhibition on Gothic Architecture

Charlemagne may have commissioned the first cathedral in Paderborn. Completed in 799 it was trice destroyed by fires in the 11thand 12thcenturies, the present building dates to the 12thand 13thcenturies and presents itself predominantly as a Gothic monument. This autumn, the Cathedral and the Diocesan Museum mount a major exhibition on Gothic style, celebrating the 950-year anniversary of the building of the second cathedral.

The Diocesan Museum in Paderborn is renowned for its large exhibitions on its Carolingian past. 2018, the focus has shifted to a later epoch, the Gothic era. Parading treasures borrowed from Pamploma, Paris, Reims, Mainz, and elsewhere, the exhibition is shown in the Cathedral as well as the Diocesan Museum.

The aim is to present an overview of the Gothic style and how it spread as a distinctive architectural style from12th century France across Europe. And how the Gothic style came to reverberate in other art forms – stone sculptures, carvings, ivories, the works of goldsmiths, manuscripts etc.

Characteristic for Gothic Art is its fundamental links to the art of architecture and the main focus in the exhibition will be the interplay between the new forms of architecture, and the sculptural implementations of the new ideal. Other art forms, however, will also be represented – reliquaries, covers of manuscripts, ivories etc. All inspired by architecture. And ll inspired by the new idea of the contemplative soul moving vertically towards a full reunion with God.

Highlights

The Reims Palimpsest

Consisting of several sheets of parchment, which were used by a Gothic artist to draw various designs for church façades, choir stalls, and decorative details, the parchments were reused in a book of martyrs and obituaries from 1263 – 70. Although effaced and maltreated, the twenty parchments witness to the “Geometry of Creation”, the fashion of drawing elevations and work plans to design the new and complicated architectural forms of the Gothic style. © Archives départementales de la Marne, Reims

Head with a bandage (Kopf mit der Binde)

Haunting in its ephemeral beauty the sculptured head by the Naumburg Meister represents the Gothic vision of the bared soul reaching towards Heaven through the embodied pain. Discovered in the upper part of the Cathedral of Mainz in 1914, it represents the leading German artist of the early Gothic period: the Naumburger Meister. Known primarily for his lifelike mimics and plasticity of his arts, the name of the artist derives from his sculptural work in the Cathedral in Naumburg. © Copyright Bischöfliches Dom- und Diözesanmuseum, Mainz. Foto: Bernd Schermuly

The Madonna from Fuststrasse

This sculpture was probably part of the original portal to the Cathedral in Mainz. Later, the Madonna got its name from the street, Fuststrasse, where it was located at a later date. A highly emotional bond between mother and child expressed eerily in the soft movements of their facial expressions as well as clothes and the grips of the hands, characterise the sculpture as pure Gothic. © Dom- und Diözesanmuseum Mainz, Foto: Marcel Schawe, Frankfurt a. M.

Reliquary of the Holy Grave from Pamploma

The famous reliquary is believed to have been a gift from St. Louis in connection with the marriage of his daughter, Isabel, to Theobald III, king of Navarre, in 1255. Another date proposed is 1284. The reliquary is a unique presentation of the scene at the empty grave when the women arrive early Easter morning. One of the peculiar characteristics may be seen from above. The open and otherwise empty tomb contains several relics, among them a presumed fragment of the Sudario (headcovering) of the Lord. Source: Wikipedia

Three –Tower-reliquary from Aachen

From Aachen comes the famous “Dreiturm” reliquary from c. 1370 -90. Made of chased and gilded silver, it measures nearly a meter. Central are the three towers fitted with tubes of transparent rock crystal showing off a fragment of St, John the Baptists hair-shirt, the sweat rag of Christ, and the Rod from his flagellation. Inside are the three figures of St. John, and Christ flanked by an unknown donor.© Domschatskammer Aachen, Foto: Ansgar Hoffmann, Schlangen

Diptych with Scenes from the Passion of Christ

The Ivory diptych is dated to c. 1250 – 60 and was probably created at Soissons. Traces of gilding and colouring remains. It represents a typical Gothic art form, the small private alterpieces of the nobility. © Skulpturensammlung und Museum für Byzantinische Kunst der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz
Foto: Antje Voigt

VISIT:

Gotik. Der Paderborner Dom und die Baukulturerbes 13. Jahunderts in Europa

Erzbischöfiches Diözesanmuseum und Domschatzkammer
Markt 17 · 33098 Paderborn
21.09.2018 – 13.01.2019

READ:

Gotik. Der Paderborner Dom und die Baukulturerbes 13. Jahunderts in Europa

von Christoph Stiegemann
Imhof Verlag 2018
ISBN-10: 3731907348
ISBN-13: 978-3731907343

 

 

 

Gotik. Der Paderborner Dom und die Baukulturerbes 13. Jahunderts in Europa

Free programme and leaflet 2018

 

 

 

 

READ MORE:

Gothic Art and Style

Early Gothic Art from île-de-France 1135 – 50

READ ALSO:

The post Gothic Art and Architecture in Paderborn appeared first on Medieval Histories.

Architecture identifies Gothic Style. Just think of breath-taking cathedrals, mounting pillars, soaring vaults. It pays, though, to think of it as the physical expression of a special theological motive, the transgressing soul climbing through the Heavens. As such, it marked a plethora of other – minor – art forms.

Gothic architecture was the predominant art-form in 13^th–15^th century Europe. It arose out of the attempts of the medieval builder to lift massive masonry vaults over wide spans without causing the downward and outward pressures threatening to collapse the walls in an outward movement – such as happened in 1284 at Beauvais, when some of the vaultings in the choir fell causing an uproar in the international guild of masons; and perhaps, a turn towards less spectacular building projects. The significant constructional element in this new and innovative way of building large monuments was the invention of the ribbed vault, which was first applied in the rebuilding of the Cathedral of St. Denis in 1140. With its dispersion of the weight to the ribs, these might be supported by pillars and piers, which would replace the continuous thick walls. In between the pillars, light could be channelled through the impressive windows, graciously decorated with elaborately stained glass. The primary example of this – the Rayonnant or decorated Gothic style – is the Sainte Chapelle in Paris. With its jewel-like character, it seems to enshrine the visitor together with its most famous relic, the Crown of Thorns. Later, the style became even more flamboyant. We know this from numerous town- and guild-halls from the 15^th century.

However, Gothic cathedrals and later chapels were just one of the many Gothic pieces of art, which came to dominate the period. Reliquaries, altars, retables, tombs, fonts, pulpits, stalls, sculptures, ivories, manuscript covers and paintings as well as textiles all came to represent a kind of “micro-architecture”, typically featuring scenes framed or traced by pillars, buttresses and ribbed vaults.

Albeit these obejcts appear to have always been based on strict geometry, deft implementation of optical and colouristic elements overcame this, in the creation of micro-worlds or spectacles, inhabited by people gripped by all the spectres of emotion as may be seen in the famous Reliquary of the Holy Sepulchre from Pamplona.

We know from contracts that a dividing line was seldom drawn between metalwork, carpentry, and construction. This furthered dissemination of the artistic ideas from France and outwards to the peripheries to the north and east. As did the use of architectural drawing on parchement.

Gradually, through this diffusion of minor decorative pieces of art, Gothic also came to represent a particular idea of how to dress and comport yourself in gliding vertical movements enshrined in the tableaus of the courtly romances depicted on ivory caskets, jewellery and other objects of art.

In the end, the Gothic style gave away to the Renaissance, known to have designated the art form as precisely “Gothic”, that is quaint and barbarous.

The Idea of the Gothic

We may identify Gothic Art with cathedrals like those of St. Denis and later Reims, Amiens, Bourges, Chartres, Beauvais, Lincoln, Westminster and Cologne. The fact remains, however, that Gothic aesthetics was more visually present in the numerous pieces of decorative art as well as in literary renditions, found in poetry and novels in the later Middle Ages. We may think of the phantasmagoria of the grail and the temples erected to hide it from the unjustified. But also the rendition of the Heavenly Jerusalem in liturgies as well as in later poetry, like The Pearl. Another genre, Gothic in its inner core, is mysterious writing like “the Cloud of unknowing” offering a way into the mysterious “beyond” – through contemplation, ascension, transformation and finally transcendence and revelation.

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by Andrew Grant Jackson

More than half a century ago, friendly rivalry between musicians turned 1965 into the year rock evolved into the premier art form of its time and accelerated the drive for personal freedom throughout the Western world.

The Beatles made their first artistic statement with Rubber Soul. Bob Dylan released “Like a Rolling Stone, arguably the greatest song of all time, and went electric at the Newport Folk Festival. The Rolling Stones’s “Satisfaction” catapulted the band to worldwide success. New genres such as funk, psychedelia, folk rock, proto-punk, and baroque pop were born. Soul music became a prime force of desegregation as Motown crossed over from the R&B charts to the top of the Billboard Hot 100. Country music reached new heights with Nashville and the Bakersfield sound. Musicians raced to innovate sonically and lyrically against the backdrop of seismic cultural shifts wrought by the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam, psychedelics, the Pill, long hair for men, and designer Mary Quant’s introduction of the miniskirt.

In 1965, Andrew Grant Jackson combines fascinating and often surprising personal stories with a panoramic historical narrative. Keep reading for an excerpt.

* * * * *

Per rock critic Richie Unterberger, the earliest-known use of the term folk rock was in a Billboard cover story on June 12, “Folkswinging Wave On—Courtesy of Rock Groups,” by Eliot Tiegel, who used the term to describe the Byrds, Sonny and Cher, the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Rising Sons, Jackie DeShannon, and Billy J. Kramer.

It was around that time that Dunhill Records owner Lou Adler gave a copy of Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home to one of his songwriters, P. F. Sloan, and told him to come up with a Dylanesque protest single for the Byrds. Between midnight and dawn, “Eve of Destruction” came to Sloan in a torrent.

He was nineteen, old enough to be sent to Vietnam but not old enough to vote yet (the voting age was twenty-one in all but four states), the same injustice Eddie Cochran sang about in 1958 in “Summertime Blues,” except now there was a war on. Sloan was still haunted by the pounding martial drums from President Kennedy’s funeral and worked those in, along with fears of nuclear apocalypse. He decried the hypocrisy of calling the Communists hateful while the Klan murdered in the South and congressmen dithered.

The Byrds rejected the song, though, so Sloan pitched it to Byrds imitators the Tyrtles (later, simply, Turtles) backstage at the Sunset Strip club the Crescendo (later the Trip). Howard Kaylan recalled, “Our jaws hit the ground. We all knew that it would be a monster hit, it was that powerful. But we also knew that whoever recorded this song was doomed to have only one record in their/his career. You couldn’t make a statement like that and ever work again.”

But a growly singer named Barry McGuire was looking for work after leaving the New Christy Minstrels in January. Byrd Gene Clark had once been in the Christys, so he invited McGuire to come watch them play at Ciro’s. After the Byrds’ performance, McGuire led a conga line into the street. Dunhill’s Lou Adler was there, and the two started talking about working together.

On Thursday, July 15, McGuire went into the studio with Sloan on six-string and harp, alongside two of LA’s top session men, drummer Hal Blaine and bassist Larry Knechtel of the Wrecking Crew. McGuire recorded Sloan’s “What Exactly’s the Matter with Me” and needed a B side. They had ten minutes of studio time left, just enough to lay down one take of “Eve of Destruction.” McGuire read the lyrics off the wrinkly paper on which Sloan had written them, building to a rage for the climax in which he bitterly reminds Selma, Alabama, not to forget to say grace while they bury their murdered black neighbors.

Sloan’s writing-producing partner, Steve Barri, took a copy of the tape with him so he could listen to it in his office the next day. The president of Dunhill, Jay Lasker, heard it and took the tape to listen to it again himself.  A few hours later, Lou Adler burst into the office, enraged. “Eve of Destruction” was playing on the radio, in what Adler believed was a completely unpolished form.

Lasker had instructed a promo man to take the tape down to radio station KFWB to find out if it was too controversial to air. The program director was so exhilarated by the track that he played it on air immediately, and it became their most requested song since “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Adler initially thought McGuire needed to redo his vocals—after all, the singer had had trouble reading Sloan’s handwriting—but in the end, Adler simply added a ghostly female background choir to make it sound less like a rough mix. Just as “Like a Rolling Stone” was doing that same July, the song had bypassed the gatekeepers. “Eve” would make it to No. 1 on September 25, as the kids across the country returned to school. Ironically, it would block its inspiration, Dylan, from rising above No. 2.

In October a group called the Spokesmen—comprised of a deejay and two of the songwriters responsible for “At the Hop,” Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me, and “1-2-3,” by Len Barry—issued “Dawn of Correction,” their answer to “Eve of Destruction.” The song made it to No. 36 on October 16, with lyrics affirming that Americans needed to keep the world free from Communists and that the A-bomb was ultimately good because it fostered negotiation. The song pointed to progress in voter registration, vaccination, the United Nations, and decolonization. (Luckily for the writers, these all rhymed.)

Sloan’s reaction was “This is great! Maybe it’s a dialogue happening: via the radio via musical recordings.” Sonny Bono sang in “The Revolution Kind” that men weren’t necessarily radicals just because they spoke their minds (which he would prove when he became a Republican congressman in 1994). “It’s Good News Week,” by Hedgehoppers Anonymous, took the black comedy approach for their knockoff, in which nukes reanimate the rotting dead.

Now that Dylan had left topical protest behind, Phil Ochs stepped in with “Draft Dodger Rag.” Ochs’s “I Ain’t Marching Anymore” was an epic account of the history of U.S. warfare in two minutes and thirty-five seconds, and he even tried his own electric version, though the acoustic original has more grace. Tom Paxton sang “Lyndon Johnson Told the Nation” and, in “We Didn’t Know,” equated the Americans who turned a blind eye to Jim Crow and Vietnam with “good Germans” ignoring the Holocaust during World War II. The Chad Mitchell Trio sang “Business Goes on as Usual,” in which the economy booms while the singer’s brother dies in a war he doesn’t understand.

Both English folkie Donovan and Glen Campbell, the session guitarist struggling to become a country-pop star in his own right, covered Buffy St. Marie’s “Universal Soldier.” (On the flip side, Donovan covered Mick Softley’s “The War Drags On.”) Campbell seems to have been caught unaware by the antiwar slant of the lyrics, and by October he was telling journalists, “The people who are advocating burning draft cards should be hung. If you don’t have enough guts to fight for your country, you’re not a man.” He was perhaps stung by the Jan and Dean answer song, “The Universal Coward.”

On the country front, neither Loretta Lynn’s “Dear Uncle Sam” or Willie Nelson’s “Jimmy’s Road” offered an opinion on the war itself. Rather, the songs focused on the death of a husband and a friend, respectively. However, Dave Dudley’s “What We’re Fighting For” and Johnnie Wright’s “Hello Vietnam” were the pro-war anthems to be expected from the country and western genre. The latter song said that we had to learn to put out fires before they got too big, alluding to how the Allies had avoided going to war with Hitler for years, allowing him the time to grab more countries, implying we couldn’t afford to do the same thing again with the Soviets and China. The writer of “Hello Vietnam,” Tom T. Hall, also wrote a female version called “Good-Bye to Viet Nam,” in which Kitty Hawkins sings how she just got news her man is coming back home to her.

Staff sergeant Barry Sadler of the Green Berets was a combat medic in Vietnam wounded by the booby trap stake called the Punji stick.11 In the hospital, he wrote twelve verses of “The Ballad of the Green Berets.” The author of a book called The Green Berets, Robin Moore, helped Sadler edit the song down. It was recorded late in the year, for the military, and was so popular that it leaked out, and RCA decided to release it. It sold a million copies in two weeks and topped the charts on March 5, becoming the No. 1 single of 1966.

A few weeks after “Eve of Destruction” itself leaked out, the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles detonated into flames. Though it’s impossible to say how many of its residents listened to the lyrics of a white folk-rock single, the song’s rage at the state of race relations grew even more disturbing when the rioters began torching white-owned stores. LA disc jockey Bob Eubanks asked, “How do you think the enemy will feel with a tune like that No. 1 in America?”

Sloan said that Dunhill Records received death threats. McGuire said, “‘Eve of Destruction’ was a scary song because it made it on its own; it had no ‘payola,’ no disc jockey manipulation. Phil [Sloan] told me later on that there was a letter that went out from The Gavin Report [the trade magazine for radio programmers] or something saying, ‘No matter what McGuire puts out next, don’t play it.’ . . . Because their feeling was that I was like a loose cannon in the record industry, and they wanted to get me back in line.”

It was a shame, because McGuire’s other Sloan-penned tracks are terrific. “What Exactly’s the Matter with Me” mines the same ennui that the Mike Nichols film The Graduate would two years later. McGuire bemoans the futility of going to college just to get a job to buy a TV, but admits he can’t march because he’s too insecure. “Child of Our Times” expresses his worry for children being born into the “Eve of Destruction.” Its B side, “Upon a Painted Ocean” is an invigorating mash-up of Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” and “When the Ship Comes In,” its title borrowed from eighteenth-century British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

In the wake of the success of “Eve of Destruction,” P. F. Sloan got to release his own solo singles. “Sins of a Family” was another of the songs he wrote that night while listening to Dylan. It was certainly the catchiest folk-rock ditty to beg compassion for the daughter of a schizo hooker. But Sloan’s pinnacle was “Halloween Mary,” which uses all Dylan’s tropes to sing the praises of a Sunset Strip scenester. (The title was itself probably inspired by a line in “She Belongs to Me.”)

The Turtles made a passionate single out of Sloan’s “Let Me Be,” since, as lead singer Kaylan explained, it was “just the perfect level of rebellion . . . haircuts and nonconformity. That was as far as we were willing to go.” Sloan also wrote hits for Johnny Rivers, Herman’s Hermits, the Seekers, and the Grass Roots, but his career mysteriously faded after another year. Still, he could take solace in the fact that “Eve of Destruction” may have helped speed the passage of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, which lowered the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen. Congressmen had attempted to lower the requirement during World War II, and President Eisenhower had backed a new constitutional amendment in 1953, but these efforts never passed. In 1969 the National Education Association began a new push with the help of the YMCA, the AFL-CIO, the NAACP, and U.S. congressmen, including Edward Kennedy. The Twenty-Sixth Amendment was ratified in 1971. Perhaps the fact that one of the biggest hits of the decade lamented being old enough to kill but not to vote was a crucial bit of agitprop that helped the campaign finally to succeed.

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ANDREW GRANT JACKSON is the author of Still the Greatest: The Essential Songs of the Beatles’ Solo Careers, Where’s Ringo? and Where’s Elvis? He has written for Rolling Stone, Slate, Yahoo!, and PopMatters. He directed and co-wrote the feature film The Discontents starring Perry King and Amy Madigan. He lives in Los Angeles.

The post Folk Rock Explosion: Protest Music in Summer 1965 appeared first on The History Reader.

by Elsa Hart

The Forbidden City is an iconic image of imperial power. Its imposing gate channels today’s tourists to a glimpse of China’s awe-inspiring dynastic history. The vast courtyards, towering pavilions, and exhibited treasures uphold a vision—pervasive in western imagination and suggested by its very name—of an entire domain consolidated within its massive walls.

It might be a surprise to learn that even early in the Qing dynasty, at the height of imperial supremacy, the Forbidden City was only one organ—albeit the heart—of a thriving urban capital. In the Inner and Outer Cities that surrounded the enclave of the emperor, ministries performed their administrative functions, nobility built their mansions, trade and industry bustled, and foreigners established their own communities. And at no time during this period was Beijing more animated and astir than during the tri-annual civil examinations.

In the weeks leading up to the tests, Beijing transformed. Thousands of hopefuls poured into the city. They arrived on horseback, carrying fluttering banners that identified them as candidates. Inns were quickly filled to capacity, as were temple guestrooms. In addition to servants and family members, candidates brought with them their anxieties and superstitions. Charlatans were quick to take advantage, offering to read fortunes and concoct potions that would increase a candidate’s chances of success. More legitimate vendors sold writing supplies and copies of previous examination answers.

For any man who aspired to become an official, passing the civil examinations was essential. To guarantee placements for those with degrees, a quota system limited the number of candidates who could pass each year to approximately two hundred. In the resulting atmosphere of nervous energy, the entertainment districts thrived. Among the diversions on offer were beauty competitions that invited candidates to play the roles of examiners, rank women according to their looks, and award them mock degrees. For a price, a candidate could request the reverse fantasy, in which a courtesan acted the part of his examiner. Alcohol flowed freely as first-time candidates exchanged rumors of what the inside of the examination yard would be like, and returning candidates fortified themselves for another grueling attempt.

In the final hours before the exams commenced, commercial activity became concentrated around the examination complex located on the eastern edge of the city. Peddlers had one final opportunity to sell brushes, ink, food, and bedding before the candidates filed into the yard. Once inside, they were not permitted any contact with the outside world for three days. The complex contained thousands of identical cells divided by thin walls, but open to the sky. Within each tiny cell were two planks to be used as a seat, desk, and bed. More comfortable quarters were provided for the examiners and their clerks.

Upon entering, candidates were subjected to rigorous searches to ensure they had no hidden copies of the classics. For the next three days, they wrote their essays. If it rained, they huddled under oilskin blankets. Unlucky candidates were assigned to cells near the latrines, which exuded increasingly foul odors as the hours passed. Illness was not an excuse to leave—if a candidate died, guards passed his body through a hole in the outer wall. Nighttime brought the threat of fire, as candidates lit candles and continued their work. With thousands trapped inside wooden walls and locked doors, a blaze could easily claim hundreds of lives. Outside, the families waited.

After three arduous days, the candidates emerged to a new ordeal. It took weeks for the essays to be graded. When at last the results were posted, a new period of festivities began for the successful candidates. The experience of those whose names were not on the list of degree-winners is well described by the 18^th-century writer Pu Songling, who wrote that the failed candidate “collects all his books and papers from his desk and sets them on fire; unsatisfied, he tramples over the ashes; still unsatisfied, he throws the ashes into a filthy gutter. He is determined to abandon the world by going into the mountains, and he is resolved to drive away any person who dares to speak to him about examination essays.” (Translation of Pu Songling from A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China by Benjamin A Elman)

Recommended reading:

Peking: Temples and City Life, 1400-1900 by Susan Naquin

Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio by Pu Songling

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ELSA HART was born in Rome, Italy, but her earliest memories are of Moscow, where her family lived until 1991. Since then she has lived in the Czech Republic, the U.S.A., and China. She earned a B.A. from Swarthmore College and a J.D. from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. City of Ink is her third novel.

The post Beyond the Forbidden City: Examination Time in Early Qing Dynasty Beijing appeared first on The History Reader.

by Paul French

Shanghai, 1930s: It was a haven for outlaws from all over the world; a place where pasts could be forgotten, fascism and communism outrun, names invented, and fortunes made—and lost.

From Paul French, the New York Times bestselling author of Midnight in Peking—winner of both the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime and the CWA Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction—comes City of Devils, a rags-to-riches tale of two self-made men set against a backdrop of crime and vice in the sprawling badlands of Shanghai.

“Lucky” Jack Riley was the most notorious of those outlaws. An ex-U.S. Navy boxing champion, he escaped from prison and rose to become the Slots King of Shanghai. “Dapper” Joe Farren—a Jewish boy who fled Vienna’s ghetto—ruled the nightclubs. His chorus lines rivaled Ziegfeld’s.

In 1940, Lucky Jack and Dapper Joe bestrode the Shanghai Badlands like kings, while all around the Solitary Island was poverty, starvation, and war. They thought they ruled Shanghai, but the city had other ideas. This is the story of their rise to power, their downfall, and the trail of destruction left in their wake. Shanghai was their playground for a flickering few years, a city where for a fleeting moment even the wildest dreams could come true. Keep reading for an excerpt of City of Devils.

* * * * *

A big weekend, the Double Fifth—fifth day of the fifth month. Shanghai’s 1932 celebration of Chu Yuan, the Dragon Boat Festival, is in full swing. And Jack’s got something to celebrate: he has turned the Manhattan into the top bar on Blood Alley.

It’s more a strip than an alley, really; 110 yards max. Two dozen bars, maybe more, mostly holes in the wall; plenty haven’t even got electricity and you don’t want to think about the latrines out back. Punters wander from one to another, crawl from one counter to the next. Stick to the hooch, however bad it’s watered down, because the local water’s got cholera and amoebic dysentery. Each bar stinks of sweaty linen, hair oil, pomade, brilliantine, cigarette smoke, rotten breath, cheap working-girl perfume. Mix that with the petrol stink from the paraffin vapor stoves and kerosene lamps, and there’s a hell of a funk. These dive bars aren’t afraid to give themselves some grand names, though—the Palais Cabaret, the ’Frisco, Mumms, the Crystal, George’s Bar, Pop’s Place, Monk’s Brass Rail, the New Ritz… and, of course, the Manhattan. The working girls are a League of Nations—Cantonese from the south, unfussy fat Koreans, French-speaking Annamite girls with wide hips, and really skinny, gorgeous ‘Natashas’, the collective Shanghailander noun for White Russian women of dubious occupation. The latter are double the price of any other girl, except the Americans tucked away in the higher-end bordellos on Kiangse Road and away from the groping paws of the soldiers and Navy boys. They all work the bars alongside dead-eyed Eurasian Macanese and hardworking Filipinas and Formosans. The dim lights of Blood Alley disguise the track marks and pox scars.

Jack is straight in for the army crowd—Fourth Marines, Seaforth Highlanders, Welsh Fusiliers, Savoia Grenadiers, and French matelots, along with the men of the Liverpool tramps of the Blue Funnel Line. They love him and his hooch. Jack lays out plates of ham sandwiches and bowls of watery slumgullion stew, gratis, for the boys to keep them drinking. Men with empty bellies don’t booze hard, they just fall over early and get picked up by the shore patrol. A marine private is pulling in thirty bucks a month, a gunnery sergeant maybe eighty bucks, and Jack is selling beer at two cents, a bottle of top-shelf London gin for sixty-seven cents, and a bottle of legit Johnnie Walker for under a dollar. Meanwhile back home they’ve got the Great Depression and Prohibition. The Alley’s a slum, but these schmucks think they got lucky winding up on it.

Jack’s got a small combo playing on the tiny stage—Manilamen with a wailing sax and blasting trumpet. The Manhattan and Pop’s Place are the two best joints to hit on Blood Alley, but if you’re smart and sober, you keep your hands on your wallet at all times. Jack’s barman and bouncer is Mickey O’Brien, his old pal from the door over at the Venus Café. Mickey is Jack’s equal in the muscleman stakes and keen on the work too. Babe, also from the Venus, is his main girl. When she’s not off on the end of the pipe, she sits in the window and pulls in plenty of randy marines and High- landers. Jack buys her white linen dresses from Madame Greenhouse’s on the Bubbling Well Road to keep her looking good. He tells her to quit the smoke, it gives her a runny nose and glassy eyes, but she just smiles and avoids his glare.

There’s a hierarchy to Shanghai bar streets. Bottom of the heap is Jukong Alley up north of the Soochow Creek—‘Varicose Alley’, Jack jokes—with bathtub gin that’ll blind you. That year Aimee Semple McPherson and her band of holy rollers hit ‘the wickedest city in the world’ and started patrolling Jukong Alley looking to save souls and baptize the working girls. Jack makes a donation to keep the Bible-thumpers out of Frenchtown. To everyone’s surprise, McPherson does actually baptize and save the souls of eight working girls and one poor punter before she sails back to America. But too many drunk squaddies are getting rolled for their pay, so Jukong gets declared out of bounds by order of the British Army Red Caps and the American Miltary Police. Also to the north of the Settlement is Scott Road, which has been called ‘the Trenches’ since the 1890s and isn’t much better. It too is out of bounds for any man in a uniform. Consequently Blood Alley, marginally a step up from Jukong and the Trenches, gets the soldier and sailor traffic.

Jack branches out. He invests his Blood Alley profits and opens Riley’s Bamboo Hut up on the North Szechuen Road, not too far from the Venus—kind of a luau theme mixed with rattan furniture round the bamboo-lined walls, waitresses wearing Honolulu leis and not much else. North Szechuen in Hongkew is marginally classier than Blood Alley, though far from top drawer. Jack taps Nellie to get in some dancers who didn’t quite make the cut for the Follies; Joe finds him a band looking for a gig who can work up a few ukelele tunes to fit the theme. Hongkew is mostly out of bounds to squaddies and leathernecks, but not to officers. And so Jack covers the bases—the Manhattan coins it in from the leathernecks and the ranks; the Bamboo Hut gets the NCOs and the brass.

The money is rolling, and Jack is building a stash as 1932 rolls into 1933. But he’s still trying to wipe out his past. He takes a steamer to Yokohama. Some all-American dollars get Jack T. Riley a Chilean passport from the consul general before he’s inevitably recalled after, equally inevitably, another military coup in Santiago. Jack stays and relaxes in the Grand Hotel, wastes a few nights in the famous Nectarine bordello, gets bored and jumps a steamer back to Shanghai. At dockside he tells customs he’s Jack T. Riley, bar proprietor in Shanghai and proud to be a Chilean citizen.

He is waved through with a low bow and a smartish salute. Tonight he’s out back of the Manhattan decanting cheap apple cider into champagne bottles. He’d have gone for apple juice at half the price, but it needs a little fizz when it comes out of the bottle to look real. Still, apple cider knocked out at champagne prices is a good margin for the Manhattan. Later on, he’ll baptize the whisky with a little holy Shanghai water to boost his margins a touch more. He can’t stop thinking of those lines of slots pouring coin into buckets back in Manila, with that lanky Canadian collecting the dough. There aren’t any slots in Shanghai, just illicit high-end roulette for the swells, which keeps on getting busted by the Shanghai Municipal Police, and the Hwa-Wei Chinese lottery for everyone else. Business has been booming in Manila, with the rackets down there running booze across the Pacific into Prohibition- dry San Francisco and bringing back three-reel ‘Liberty Bell’ slot machines in parts in the empty whisky barrels. Jack wires Joe, who’s on tour down in Manila with Nellie and their Follies. Maybe Joe can look into it? Joe wires back, sure thing, finds a supplier; Jack orders his first shipment, wires the guy the money, and they arrange delivery. Shanghai is about to welcome the reign of the Slots King.

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PAUL FRENCH was born in London, educated there and in Glasgow, and has lived and worked in Shanghai for many years. His book Midnight in Peking was a New York Times Bestseller, a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, and will be made into an international mini-series by Kudos Film and Television, the UK creators of Broadchurch and Life on Mars.

The post The Two Men Who Ruled the Underworld of Old Shanghai appeared first on The History Reader.