Book discussion: Black Ribbon research

[cleolinda]

Last weekend, I went and got a couple of Mead composition books--you know, the kind with the black marbled covers. I haven't used them in a while, but I like them because they're sturdy, and yet just cheap enough that I don't feel bad about writing in them and messing them up. So, properly armed with these, I have been going back through my stacks

Comments

[laughingacademy]

Oh man, I love it when authors run through their sources, especially when they sounds as wildly entertaining as these, so THANK YOU.

Also, (the kind of person I am: "Hey, I think Van Helsing name-drops Charcot in Dracula!") -- omigod me too, the point where I thought that just before I read it.

[cleolinda]

It was something about Charcot having proven something about hypnotism, wasn't it?--Van Helsing talking to Seward about all kinds of scientific business that prove that there's more out there than Seward can explain. I think the Coppola Dracula is the only one that actually uses that bit, so I'm hearing it in my head from the movie

[lylassandra]

I would just do a bibliography-- that way if people are interested they can go forth and read, but you're not necessarily giving everything away the way you would if Queen Alexandrina's name was footnoted "Thanks to Mrs. Jones' bio on Queen Victoria!" I found a little too much of that in Morgan Llewellyn's Irish Century stuff. (Of course, she's a whole other rant...) But I did appreciate her biblios.

[milurie]

Would Schama's A History of Britain be of use to you? I'm cleaning out my bookcases, and it would be no trouble to send them along.

[cleolinda]

Aw, that's really kind--it might be too broad for the point I'm at now, though. Don't worry about it. :)

[leia1912]

Cleo

[cleolinda]

Oooooh. I am really interested in things like mass culture, advertising, shopping--basically, things that a young woman who was well-off but not aristocratic would see or experience. So the Schwartz and Rappaport look particularly interesting.

[leia1912]

You'd like Walkowitz's book, too--it ties in consumerism with Jack the Ripper and all kinds of fun stuff.

BTW, if you want to see the period from the eyes of a novel, check out Zola's "Ladies' Paradise." It's a fairly good look inside what we'd call a mall.

And a key word for your research purposes: flaneur. It's a person who wanders around a city, engaging the city in all ways (shopping, mass culture, etc.). Almost all of the books above intersect with discussions of the life of the flaneur. (Schwartz is alllll about it.) So if you use "flaneur" in Google and Amazon searches, you're going to pick up similar books.

[cleolinda]

Hee, yes, the flaneurs. I have a couple of Belle Epoque books at least in part about boulevard culture. I was getting really frustrated with the Zola angle, though, because I wasn't finding English translations online. I really want to get Nana. Of course, I was on e-book download sites, and I don't think they were organized very well. But I don't think Gutenberg had what I wanted, either.

[badipew]

First, as someone who majored in International Relations, I can say that politics in Europe from around 1848 to 1914 is hard to understand in general; I personally love it, but everything - several movements, communism, anarchism, imperialism, Weltpolitik etc - starts happening at the same time in different places, so chronologically it's kinda hard to study.

Second, as someone who absolutely loves history AND politics, I already love Black Ribbon just for the amount of love and thought that's going into it. Please keep mentioning your research books as you find them, it's really interesting!

[cleolinda]

Aw, thanks. I'm just sort of exasperated with myself because the simple sequence of Empire-Commune-Republic does not actually seem that hard to grasp in retrospect. I don't know if I just came down with a prolonged case of the dumb, or if historians are so used to writing at their own level that they never stop to explain simple concepts in simple ways before going into more depth.

Of course, Tuchman also refers to the importance of "Bryan" before deigning to mention two pages later that she means William Jennings Bryan, and I'm sitting there pretty sure I know who she's talking about, and I was right, but there was no need to sit there and wonder for two pages when she could have just used his full name the first time. Historians sometimes forget that we don't have as much information at our fingertips as they do, which is WHY WE'RE READING THE BOOK.

Oddly, I seem to be okay with the overlapping social/political movements. I may be better with big picture ideas and get lost in details.

[badipew]

Having just written an 50-page academic dissertation on British nationalism (which includes internal nationalism and external nationalism, both full of contradictions), I think I can say that there's a pretty big chance these academic authors wrote the text in a different order, or added something later, and forgot to check for these kind of mentions that don't make sense. The editor, on the other hand, should notice that.

Also, I just noticed my English is really stiff and weird so... sorry about that. Picking up a second language from academic texts makes you talk funny.

[cleolinda]

I was about to say, this kind of thing really needs an editor who can just say, look, I can't follow who/what you're talking about, put the year/name in. Maybe I need to hire myself out for this, because you need someone who's just uninformed enough to tell you where a reader might get confused.

[darth_teca]

I think this is AWESOME and I would love to hear about the next batch as well.