cacakerbamakhlukpolitik

Since July 4, 2010, I have been suggesting here that George W. Bush, not Barack Obama, was the key President of our third great national crisis, and that he set us on a course which we are fated to keep for some time.  That course involved lower taxes and a permanent deficit that made a drastic government response to economic crisis impossible at home.  Abroad it included a new definition of America's role in the world: essentially, it asserted a unilateral right to remove any regime that either supported terrorism or developed or used "weapons of mass destruction," broadly defined, that we believed should not have them. That doctrine repudiated more than a century of American adherence to international law, as well as the charter of the United Nations.  Sadly in Syria the Obama Administration has adopted a modified version of that doctrine. The United States reserves a unilateral right to take any military action it finds appropriate against a regime that seems to have u

My editor’s notes for revisions to the 464-page manuscript of my next nonfiction release, INGLORIOUS ROYAL MARRIAGES: A Demillennium of Unholy Mismatrimony (NAL/November 2014), just arrived in my inbox yesterday, so this will be a brief post, as I need to buckle down ASAP. I think this is my first History Hoydens Post since moving down to our nation’s capital. I’ve been so busy that I haven’t taken advantage of the myriad opportunities to explore the cool things about the city, steeped as it is in history; but last Sunday my husband decided that I needed to get out a bit more. So we went on a two-hour walking tour of "Georgetown during the War of 1812." The irony is that the war didn’t really touch Georgetown proper—except that we DID begin the tour at the federal-era Dumbarton House, now the HQ of the Colonial Dames of America, known as the place where Dolley Madison (my favorite First Lady) stopped for tea on August 24, 1814, the day she fled the White House with, among

I just got back from a fun and thought provoking few days at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland (there are my daughter Mélanie and I above at the Member Lounge). Along with well-loved plays such as an enchanting A Midsummer Night's Dream and a complex, touching, brilliant My Fair Lady , we saw a couple of very intriguing world premieres, Liquid Plain and The Tenth Muse . Both were historical, Liquid Plain about African Americans who had escaped slavery in the 1790s, The Tenth Muse about nuns in 18th century Mexico.  Both plays were strong and intriguing and provided a great deal of conversational fodder for my friend and fellow writer Penelope Williamson and me over lattes and cosmopolitans. In particular, The Tenth Muse got me thinking about how we frame historical fiction. The play is inspired by the story of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, famed for her writing and intellectual pursuit. But instead of dramatizing Sor Juana's story directly, playwright Tanya Saracho s

Three years ago, a Chicago labor lawyer named Thomas Geoghegan--a nearly exact contemporary of mine and a fellow Harvard graduate--published his sixth book, Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? How the European Model Can Help You Get A Life. It got very little attention and not a single public library in the state of Rhode Island, where I was still living, decided to acquire it.  I finally got my hands on it this month and I have just finished it.  In some respects I was disappointed.  Geoghegan makes clear that is was a miracle that this book (or his others, which deal with issues drawn from his own working life) was written at all.  Like most trial attorneys, he is ridiculously busy, but he arranged in the 1990s and 2000s to spend a good deal of time in Germany, which is the focus of the book.  It isn't particularly well organized and it could have used a lot more hard data to make its points.  But it still leaves a powerful impression.  By the middle of the twentieth century,

This is another from Walker, c. 1814. To me, it looks like she’s wearing a blue bedgown with short sleeves, black mitts, a white apron, a brownish-red (dare I say puce?) petticoat, a red handkerchief, black half-boots, and a chip-straw bonnet with blue ribbons. I could, however, also make a case for the blue gown being of a front-fastening style from the turn of the century like the one pictured below. It’s just that it wasn’t the norm for these to be worn over a colored petticoat.

I was originally going to call this post a "wrap-up", but in these types of matters nothing is ever really wrapped up. That's especially important to keep in mind in this case, I think. Now that all three parts of Walt Chiquoine's amazing work on the origins of the Greenbank and Marshallton mills [ Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 ] are up, I wanted to take a moment and look at a few specific angles. There's a lot of information in what Walt has written, and there are a few key points that I want to make sure don't get lost. But do you want to know where there's even more information? In the full version of his report! Yes, the three posts published on the blog here are actually an abridged version of the full work. The full version, in PDF form and including even more information and documentation, can be found here . A permanent link can be found along the righthand margin of the blog. I want to thank Walt again for A)doing all this research in the first place,

Another one from Walker's 1814 Costume of Yorkshire . Here we're looking at craftsmen practicing a skilled labor. The man at the center is wearing a shirt, a waistcoat, breeches, stockings, shoes, a knit hat, and a cravat. His apprentices are similarly dressed, with the addition of aprons and varying headgear. It's worth noting that the waistcoat depicted is of a slightly older style (the bottom is not squared off like a fashionable one would be) and the breeches are old-fashioned at this point except for leather ones worn for riding. This is obviously a workroom/studio. No doubt the master cutler would slip on his coat before entering the shop proper (assuming he also had his own shop and wasn't employed by someone else to create stock.

This image is from Walker’s 1814 book. You can see that some of the women are in Empire-waisted gowns (like the beauty who is front and center), but others are still in 18thC garments. The rural beauty is in a round gown, with an apron, mitts, handkerchief, and a cap and bonnet. The woman on the left with her back to us is of particular interest, as she’s wearing her stays (possibly leather ones from the look of them) as her main upper garment, along with a handkerchief, an apron, and a short petticoat. The woman on the far left appears to be in a man’s coat, and the one just behind our rural beauty is in what I think is a form of smock (smocks could be either shirts or coats that were work over your other clothing to keep them clean). The only information I can find about “lowkers” is that it’s a form of “looker” and is related to looking after something. So perhaps these women are so labeled because they are looking after the field/crop.

There’s a LOT going on in this image (another from Pyne’s 1805 Costume of Great Britain ). I’m going to ignore the soldiers, as military uniforms are a whole other topic. The old woman pouring the salop* is wearing a long green bedgown over a blue petticoat, an apron, a handkerchief around her neck, and another tied over her head, holding on her hat. There appears to be a red cloak on the back of her chair, which would be very much in keeping with her class. Behind her stands what appears to be a member of the watch (he’s leaning against his box; note the lantern hanging there). He has on a great coat and a simple round hat. And it appears he has a handkerchief tied about his throat. You can just see his brogans peeking out from under the old woman’s chair. Drinking his bowl of salop is a coal dust covered boy. He’s grubby and a bit tattered, in trousers, a shirt with no cuffs, and an open waistcoat. He has a simple knit cap on his head. This is pretty much how I would picture a climbi

One of the things we rarely talk about in historical romance circles is the clothing of the lower classes (unless they’re servants, then we talk about it a lot). There are two very interesting sources for studying what the lamp lighters, orange girls, fish wives, and mine workers would have been wearing. The first is W. H. Pyne’s Costume of Great Britain (1805). The second is George Walker’s Costume of Yorkshire (1814). The think I find interesting about both of these is that the people shown are predominantly wearing the clothing styles of the late 18th century. I’ll post a few this week and talk about them in detail. Here you can see a street vendor from Pyne’s 1805 work. She’s wearing brogans (simple, unisex shoes), a somewhat short petticoat (typical of a lot of working class women), a blue apron (typical of butchers), what appears to be 18th century style stays (yes, these are quite commonly worn as an outer garment by women of this class), but might also be a bedjacket (the stand

Researched and written by Walt Chiquoine -- PART THREE: JUSTA JUSTIS JR. AND THE GREENBANK MILL So far, I have discussed the property of Thomas Gillet on Red Clay Creek, and then the southern half of this property settled by Isaac Hersey and his family. Justa Justis, Jr. was settled on the northern property, possibly as early as 1711. As late as 1708, mention of a mill is conspicuously absent from a sheriff’s deed for the entire Gillet property. But in 1747, Justa sells several acres to his son Swithin, mentioning a mill on the tract. This was Swedes’ Mill, later to become the Greenbank Mill. Swedes’ Mill has had a fuzzy history, first mentioned by Scharf in his History of Delaware published in 1888. In Scharf’s own words,   Scharf was let down by his staff, since this story doesn’t hold up. He notes the mill is located on John Stalcop’s “Southern Land” property, but Stalcop’s property is clearly on the eastern side of Red Clay Creek. (Swedes’ Mill is on the western side, on

    Some months ago I reviewed the film 42 , which I found very disappointing because the Jackie Robinson on the screen had so little in common with the real man.  Two weeks ago, at the convention of the Society for American Baseball Research, I picked up a copy of his second autobiography, I Never Had it Made , which was published just before his sudden death from diabetes and heart disease (the same combination, as it happens, that killed my paternal grandmother long before I was born), in 1972, when he was only 53.  The book was written with the help of Alfred Duckett, a black journalist and poet who was two years older than Robinson.  Only a few of the books' 24 chapters deal with Robinson's playing career.  It goes in depth into his early life and especially into his very active life after baseball, when he became an executive for Chock Full o- Nuts, a chain of coffee shops, a newspaper columnist, a fundraiser for the NAACP, a political activist--mostly inside the Republic

PART TWO: ISAAC HERSEY AND THE MARSHALLTON MILL Researched and written by Walt Chiquoine -- In my first post , I discussed the early history of the property of Thomas Gillet, lying on Red Clay Creek between Ham Run and Hyde Run. This property passed to Nicholas Allum and Mathias Mattson of Cecil County, MD, then likely to Mattson’s nephew, Richard Rumsey. Rumsey lost the property at sheriff’s sale to Hipolitus Lefeaver, who sold the tract to Nils Laican in 1711. Laican would split the property in two halves.   Much of the early history of both properties of Nils Laican comes to us from his will of 1721 and a deed for the southern property written in 1730. By will, the southern property was to be sold to cover the expenses of Laican’s estate. In 1722, and after Nils’ death, John Seeds married Brita Laican. About the same time, he bought both a tract in Christiana Hundred and the southern Laican tract. Not long after, Seeds sold an interest in the southern property to Isaac Hercé

Researched and written by Walt Chiquoine -- I do a lot of property research for MCH, from original grants up through the 18 th century.   Sometimes it is rather tedious and boring, like reading a family genealogy that is nothing but names and dates.   But sometimes the land and court records provide a thread that ties together other facts and ideas into a real story about the early families of MCH , a story that has not been told before.   I’d like to share the story of one such property on Red Clay Creek that involves two of our founding families (Justa Justis Jr. and Isaac Hersey) and two of our earliest mill seats (Greenbank and Marshallton).   The complete story, more fully illustrated and referenced, is available elsewhere on this site.   PART ONE :   THE PROPERTY OF THOMAS GILLET The story begins with two warrants (1682 and 1684) and a 1684 survey to Thomas Gillet.   Gillet came from England in 1682 on the Welcome , a passenger on the same ship as William Penn.   Penn’s first l

If there were such a thing as "Sweeps Week" for blogs, the next few posts are the ones I'd put up during it. I'm so excited about it that I'm confining my introduction to this separate post, for fear of getting in the way. Those of you who are regular readers of the blog are probably familiar with Walt Chiquoine (usually Walt C. in comments) and what he's brought to numerous discussions and topics in the past. I've talked before about how most people who stumble across the blog have a specific area of interest in addition to a general love of history. Walt's area of expertise is the early history of property ownership in Mill Creek Hundred. His modest goal is to map out, as completely as possible, all of the original land grants and purchases in MCH. I've seen his work, and he's well on his way to completing it. I daresay he has a better understanding of who owned what 300 years ago than anyone since then, if even then. What makes Walt's wo

In 1990 I published Politics and War: European Conflict from Philip II to Hitler , which was in many ways my most ambitious book and the one that took the longest time to write.  It was a comparative study of four periods of general war in European history:  1559-1659, years characterized in general by anarchy and civil war; 1661-1715, during which Louis XIV created a much stronger national state, leading other European nations to follow suit; 1789-1815, when the French Revolution set the European state system aflame and introduced a new scale of warfare; and 1914-45, when European war became world war.  The field of European international politics had lain at the center of scholarship at least since Ranke in the late 19th century, but I can now see that I finished that book at the moment that it was dying.  Offhand I do not know of a single college or university that still offers a course on the development of the European state system and its spread around the world to include nation

Johnson with the Pittsburgh Crawfords Time for another Guest Post here at the Mill Creek Hundred History Blog, as this time Bill Harris has stepped up to the plate. Bill has a post for us about arguably the greatest athlete ever to have lived in (or very close to) Mill Creek Hundred. (You can put your Randy White arguments in the comments section, if he did actually live in MCH as well as go to high school here.) Johnson's home on Newport Road is technically in Christiana Hundred, but A) it's part of Marshallton, and B) it's close enough that he could probably hit a ball into MCH, so he's close enough for us. After Bill's piece, I'll follow up with a few thoughts of my own. The Mill Creek Hundred History Blog has highlighted dozens of people and families that have been innovators, businessmen, and politicians that have contributed to the region and state’s growth. However its arguably most famous [very close] resident gained national notice in through his skills

   I realized today I had forgotten a very important point from the weekend's post, and I am making it a separate one to try to make sure everyone sees it.     Ms. Obst talks a lot about the obsession with a film's first weekend gross, and at one point, in a footnote, she explains why it's so important: because the distributor receives a higher cut of the receipts during the first weekend.  After that the exhibitor does better.  This obviously makes the marketing ten times more important than it otherwise might be and it is probably one of the biggest reasons that studios don't want to take a chance.  I can't imagine why they ever wanted to make this deal, unless they are confident that they can consistently fill the first weekend by sticking to the same formulas.  Obviously more good movies would be made if the studios could allow them to take some time to discover their audience, and vica verca. 

  This week I have been reading Sleepless in Hollywood,  by a Hollywood producer named Linda Obst. She is a Boomer, born 1950, and she got into the movie business because, as she puts it, she loved movies.  (Our youths were probably the greatest movie-watching age in American history.) Her first major credit was on Flashdance and she produced an old favorite of mine, Adventures in Babysitting .  Her career peaked in the 1990s when she produced Contact , The Siege, One Fine Day , and Hope Floats , and co-produced the great Sleepless in Seattle .  Her tastes, in short, overlap with mine,. although they are not the same.  But she's a product of the same literate culture I grew up in, apparently, and she wrote her book to try to explain what has gone so wrong in Hollywood and why it has become almost impossible to get the kind of movie either she or I like produced. I will attempt to summarize her findings. It will not come as a surprise to anyone to realize that the studios focus rel