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.

SEE MORE:

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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. Image is in the public domain via Wikipedia.

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.

Anti-war protest in New York City in 1967, including a group of young men burning their draft cards. Image is in the public domain via Wikipedia.

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.”)

President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965 while Martin Luther King and others look on. Image is in the public domain via Wikipedia.

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.

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.

Image from p. 358 of Peking Temples and City Life: 1400-1900 by Susan Naquin. Originally published in the Gazetteer of Shuntian, 1407.

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

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 Riley—”The Slots King of Shanghai” (North China Daily News)

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.

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.

Anastasis. Research in Medieval Culture and Art is an international peer-reviewed journal edited by The Research Center of Medieval Art, ”Vasile Drăguț” at the “George Enescu” National University of Arts  of Iași, România.

Anastasis. Research in Medieval Culture and Art is an open access journal, which publish original articles in the areas of medieval art and medieval culture. The aim is to stir people’s interest for scientific research regarding the Middle Ages in order to qualify the modern preoccupation with medieval art.

In order to offer a more complex and nuanced set of ideas, the journal has an interdisciplinary character and publishes research about visual arts, restoration, architecture, music, theatre, theology, philosophy, literature, sciences etc.

Each issue contains research articles on varied topics, as well as sections on Medieval Art and Civilisation and Medieval Culture in Contemporary Research. Finally, there is a section with book reviews. Judging from the table of contents, the journal offers a fine and varied glimpse into a lively research center somewhat on the periphery of the mainstream (Anglo-American) milieu of medieval art research.

The first issue for 2018 has just been published. Call for papers for issue two ends 15.09.2018

Table of contents

Constantin Ciobanu
Les inscriptions simulées de la peinture médiévale roumaine dans le contexte de l’art et de la pensée orthodoxes / Simulated Inscriptions of Romanian Medieval Painting in the Context of Orthodox Art and Thinking
Article PDF

Florin Crîșmăreanu
Théologie de la beauté dans les écrits de Maxime le Confesseur / The Theology of Beauty in the Writings of Maximus the Confessor
Article PDF

Brînduşa Grigoriu
Yseut et Tristan comme parents : le Roman d’Ysaÿe le Triste / Yseut and Tristan as Parents : the Romance of Ysaÿe le Triste
Article PDF

Irina-Andreea Stoleriu
Adrian  Stoleriu
Representations of the Pope in Western Art
Article PDF

Bogdan Ungurean
Notes on the St. Theodore’s church iconostasis from Iași. Technique of execution, stylistically description and state of conservation
Article PDF

Oana Maria Nicuţă
Visual Litteracy and the Crux of the Visible: Is Stained Glass a Manifestation of the Diaphanous?
Article PDF

Cristina Gelan
Ideology, Symbolism and Representation through Byzantine Art
Article PDF

Angela Simalcsik
New Cases of Symbolic Trepanation from the Medieval Period Discovered in the Space between Prut and Dniester
Article PDF

MEDIEVAL CULTURE IN CONTEMPORARY RESEARCH

Ioana Palamar 
Self-Portrait: Between Normality and Psychosis
Article PDF

Codrina-Laura Ioniţă
“Le Buisson Ardent de la Vierge”. Une lettre et une icône / The Burning Bush of Virgin Mary. A letter and an icon
Article PDF

Luana Stan 
Teodora-Sânziana Stan
Revalorisation des rituels ancestraux des amérindiens du Canada dans la musique de Murray Schaffer / Revalorization of Canadian Amerindian Rituals in Murray Schafer’s Music
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Paula Onofrei
Medieval Symbols in “The Name of the Rose”, by Umberto Eco
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Rosângela Aparecida da Conceição
Thomaz Scheuchl, the Trajectory of a Disciple of Beuron: from the Restoration of the Cathedral of the Ascension in Satu Mare to the Paintings of Churches in Brazil
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by Philip Jett

Robert Todd Lincoln did not resemble his famous father. At seven inches shorter and quite a few pounds heavier, many who met him were disappointed. He lacked the ability to spin a tale like his father, often referred to as an “unsympathetic bore.” Yet, after his brothers died at ages three, eleven, and eighteen, Robert became the only living legacy of the most popular U.S. president.

Robert attended the finest schools, such as Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard College, and Harvard Law School. By age twenty-one, he’d already attended both of his father’s presidential inaugurations. A year later, he left Harvard Law School to become the assistant adjutant to General Grant, a mere two months before the Civil War ended. He was present during General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House. After the war, Robert moved to Chicago and finished school at what is today Northwestern School of Law. He married Mary Eunice Harlan, whose father was a U.S. Senator and Secretary of the Interior. They had two daughters and a son.

Robert was asked to run for president or vice-president several times but refused, although he did accept positions as the U.S. Secretary of War in 1881 and the Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of St. James in 1889. He became a successful corporate lawyer and later became president of the enormous Pullman Palace Car Company, which produced streetcars and luxury railway cars. He and his family traveled the world and owned beautiful homes, including the twenty-four room mansion, Hildene, with eight bathrooms, eight fireplaces, and a basement, on 400-acres in Manchester, Vermont. Quite an improvement over his father’s childhood log cabin.

Yet sadness also followed Robert. He’d lost his father to an assassin’s bullet when he was twenty-one years old. His only son, Abraham “Jack” Lincoln II, died at the age of sixteen of a blood infection. His mother’s notoriously odd behavior grew more bizarre so Robert committed her to a private sanitarium for women. She eventually lived out the remainder of her life quietly with a sister in Illinois. Her relationship with Robert never recovered.

Uncannily, Robert was associated with each of the first three presidential assassinations. He’d eaten breakfast with his father, but refused his mother’s invitation to join them at Ford’s Theatre that evening, preferring to stay at the White House instead. When Robert received word of the shooting, he rushed to his father’s bedside at the Petersen House and wept there until his father succumbed.

While serving as Secretary of War in 1881, he accompanied President James Garfield to the Sixth Street Train Station in Washington, D.C. where he witnessed the shooting of the president. “How many sorrows have I passed in this town?” he said. Twenty years later, he accepted the invitation of President William McKinley to attend the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, where McKinley was shot as Robert made his way through the Exposition to join him. Feeling cursed, Robert refused subsequent presidential invitations, once writing: “No, I’m not going . . . because there is a certain fatality about presidential functions when I am present.”

No event exemplifies Robert’s blessed and cursed life more than one that took place in 1864 on a New Jersey railway station platform. Years later, Robert recalled the incident: “The train began to move, and by the motion, I was twisted off my feet . . . and was personally helpless, when my coat collar was vigorously seized and I was quickly pulled up and out to a secure footing on the platform.  Upon turning to thank my rescuer, I saw [the gentleman], whose face was of course well known to me, and I expressed my gratitude to him.” A member of General Grant’s staff wrote a letter to that gentleman expressing President Lincoln’s gratitude, something the man kept and displayed often. The gentleman was the famous actor, Edwin Booth, brother of John Wilkes Booth, who would assassinate Robert’s father months later.

Robert made his last public appearance at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. in May 1922. He died at Hildene four years later, one week shy of his eighty-third birthday. Though he desired to be buried in the Lincoln Tomb in Springfield, Illinois, his wife interred him in a grand sarcophagus at Arlington Cemetery.

Many might say Robert Lincoln became a millionaire off of his father’s presidency and assassination and achieved little in the way of public service. He was anti-labor and did not stand up against discrimination. Instead, he felt comfortable steering the high-paying helm of the largest manufacturing company in America at the turn of the century. Yet, it is hard to criticize the son of Abraham Lincoln. He had some mighty big shoes to fill—size 14 as a matter of fact.

PHILIP JETT is a former corporate attorney who has represented multinational corporations, CEOs, and celebrities from the music, television, and sports industries. He is the author of The Death of an Heir: Adolph Coors III and the Murder That Rocked an American Brewing Dynasty. Jett now lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

The post Robert Todd Lincoln—Blessed and Cursed appeared first on The History Reader.

How did Henry the Fowler and his son, Otto the Great, turn Germany into the political centre of 10th century Europe? By besting the Magyars? Or by more traditional mythmaking? New book explores the various sources and their role in the later historiography.

The Construction of Ottonian Kingship: Narratives and Myth in Tenth-Century Germany
Series: Intellectual and Political History
by Antoni Grabowski
Amsterdam University Press 2018
ISBN: 9789462987234

ABSTRACT:

German historians long assumed that the German Kingdom was created with Henry the Fowler’s coronation in 919. The reigns of both Henry the Fowler, and his son Otto the Great, were studied and researched mainly through Widukind of Corvey’s chronicle Res Gestae Saxonicae. There was one source on Ottonian times that was curiously absent from most of the serious research: Liudprand of Cremona’s Antapodosis. The study of this chronicle leads to a reappraisal of the tenth century in Western Europe showing how mythology of the dynasty was constructed. By looking at the later reception (through later Middle Ages and then on 19th and 20th century historiography) the author showcases the longevity of Ottonian myths and the ideological expressions of the tenth century storytellers.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Dr Antoni Grabowski works at the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History at the Polish Academy of Sciences. He is interested in the historiography of the tenth century and its later reinterpretations.

The post The Construction of Ottonian Kingship appeared first on Medieval Histories.

by Anne de Courcy

Towards the end of the nineteenth century and for the first few years of the twentieth, a strange invasion took place in Britain. The citadel of power, privilege, and breeding in which the titled, land-owning governing class had barricaded itself for so long was breached. The incomers were a group of young women who, fifty years earlier, would have been looked on as the alien denizens of another world—the New World, to be precise. From 1874—the year that Jennie Jerome, the first known ‘Dollar Princess’, married Randolph Churchill—to 1905, dozens of young American heiresses married into the British peerage, bringing with them all the fabulous wealth, glamour and sophistication of the Gilded Age.

In her new book, The Husband Hunters: American Heiresses Who Married into the British Aristocracy, Anne de Courcy sets the stories of these young women and their families in the context of their times. Based on extensive first-hand research, drawing on diaries, memoirs and letters, this richly entertaining group biography reveals what they thought of their new lives in England – and what England thought of them. Keep reading for an excerpt of The Husband Hunters.

* * * * *

Alva’s costume for the 1883 ball. Image is in the public domain via Wikipedia.

At the news of the ball, the society papers were agog. Who would come to it and who would stay away? What would happen when the different branches of the Vanderbilts met? Would the boycott of Alva still continue?

The Duke, as Alva had guessed, proved too much of a draw for anyone to resist, and her invitations were all eagerly accepted. Consuelo, seeing the inexorable approach of a fate she dreaded, was in despair. As Alva was determined that nothing would interfere with her plan—let alone the fact that her daughter was in love with someone else and did not wish to marry the man her mother had selected—Consuelo was kept a prisoner in the Marble House.

The porter was under orders not to let her out alone, her mother and her governess were always with her and when friends called they were told she was not home. She was unable to write a letter because she had no means of buying a stamp or posting it and all the letters that arrived for her were taken straight to Alva, who destroyed them. Equally powerful as a prison wall was the psychological factor that she had been brought up from babyhood with the habit of total subordination to someone whose will was the law.

It was not long before the Newport society, aware of Alva’s treatment of her daughter, echoed with the phrase: ‘A marble palace is the right place for a woman with a marble heart.’

Consuelo held out against the prospect before her as long as she could but, after five months without word from her lover, and unable to reach him, with her mother raging, screaming and shouting that either she would have a fatal heart attack or that she would ‘shoot Winthrop Rutherfurd’ and threatening that therefore she would be arrested, imprisoned and hanged, she cracked, and agreed to accept the Marlborough when he proposed. She was barely eighteen, completely isolated, utterly miserable and brought up to be subservient to her mother in all things.

When the Duke arrived in Newport as part of an American tour her was entertained by several of its notables, with others crowding to watch where possible. But the highlight was Alva’s ball, planned so that she would outdo any previous entertainment in both taste and lavishness.

Image via Library of Congress.

She succeeded. The grounds were lit by thousands of tiny lights, a host of servants wore livery in style of Louis XIV, there were nine French chefs, three orchestras and the tables were decorated with pink hollyhocks among which swarmed tiny hummingbirds. In the yellow marble hall, a bronze drinking fountain held pink lotus plants, above which hovered artificial butterflies.

Even the cotillion favors, previously chosen by Alva in Paris – Louis XIV fans, etchings, gold watch-cases—were so splendid that guests actually stole them from one another. Alva wore white satin with a court train and a dazzle of diamonds; beside her stood Consuelo in white satin and tulle. It was a triumph—except that there was no offer of marriage from the Duke. The parties and dinners went on…and on…and on—and still nothing. Finally, the evening before he was due to leave, the Duke proposed. Alva, determined to waste no time in clinching the matter, announced the engagement the following day, even ordering her servants to spread the good news with the words ‘Go out and tell everyone you know.’

Interested in more from The Husband Hunters? Listen to an excerpt of the audiobook:

Anne de Courcy is the author of thirteen widely acclaimed works of social history and biography, including MARGOT AT WAR, THE FISHING FLEET, THE VICEROY’S DAUGHTERS and DEBS AT WAR. She lives in London and Gloucestershire.

The post The Real Women Who Inspired Downton Abbey appeared first on The History Reader.

Recent issues of Speculum shows that literature departments currently have the upper hand regarding the content of this journal. Out of 18 articles published this year, only two falls into the categery, history proper.

The Medieval Academy of America was founded as an interdisciplinary association including members from language, literature, history and philosophy. In practice it works a seesaw where literature-based medievalists compete with medieval historians.

Currently, it is obvious the medievalists working inside medieval literature studies have the upper hand. Of 18 articles published in vol. 93 of Speculum this year (2018), only two may be classified as representing medieval history, two have an art historical focus, and the rest concerns literature and texts.

Speculum. The journal of the Medieval Academy of America
Editor: Sarah Spence
Volume 93, Number 3,  July 2018

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Rethinking the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215
Jeffrey M. Wayno
pp. 611–637

“All the Way to the British Isles”: Ayyūbid-English Diplomatic Networks in an Early Thirteenth-Century Exchange
Ilan Shoval
pp. 638–668

Lydgate’s Virtual Coteries: Chaucer’s Family and Gower’s Pacifism in the Fifteenth Century
R. D. Perry
pp. 669–698

Augustine on Lying
Erika T. Hermanowicz
pp. 699–727

Hildesheim Avant-Garde: Bronze, Columns, and Colonialism
Ittai Weinryb
pp. 728–782

The post New Issue of Speculum 2018 appeared first on Medieval Histories.

Is Early Medieval Europe in the process of merging with The Journal of Late Antiquity? Four out of five articles touch upon people and events in the 4th, 6th, and 6th centuries.

Table of Contents

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