History – Page 2 – Everything Is Better With Dragons

Pen & Sword TBR Pile Review: Victorian Fashions For Women, by Neil R Storey & Fiona Kay

Hardcover, 248 pages
Published June 30th 2022 by Pen & Sword History
ISBN:1399004166 (ISBN13: 9781399004169)

Blurb

Victorian Fashions for Women explores the British styles and clothing throughout the long reign of Queen Victoria, from the late 1830s to the first years of the 20th century. Within are a superb overview of the dresses, hats, hair styles, corsetry, undergarments shoes and boots that combined to present the prevailing styles for each decade. From those who had enough money to have day and evening wear and clothes for sports and outdoor activities, to those with limited income and wardrobes or labouring folk with little more than the clothes they stood up in.

All decades are illustrated with original photographs, adverts and contemporary magazine features from the authors’ own remarkable collections, accompanied by a knowledgeable and informative text that describes the fashions, their social history context and influences reflected in the clothes of the time. Laid out in a clear and easy-to-follow chronological order, the key features of styles, decoration and accoutrements will help family historians to date family photographs and will provide a useful resource for students and costume historians or for anyone with a love of fashion and style to enjoy.

My Review

Review number five of the day. Don’t collapse everyone; I know I’ve posted a lot of reviews today, but I stack them up until I find a day to do all the reviews. Today is the day. I woke up early and I’ve had to stay up to wait for my post to be delivered. It was parcels, of meds and sweets. I needed more inhalers. This hot weather is screwing with my asthma so badly that I’m having to use them a lot more than usual. Since I’m awake and haven’t gone back to bed yet, I need to get these reviews done.

As you may know, I enjoy studying history and every area of life has something to tell us about history and society in different time periods, whether it’s food or military actions. Clothes are quite important facets of society and dress history is a growing area. I have visited the V&A museum in the past and was fascinated by the work that went into historical clothing. I also enjoy watching videos on YouTube by dress historians and reenactors, like Morgan Donner, Nicole Rudolph, Abby Cox and Bernadette Banner. It’s an unexpected turn for my interests, I know, because generally I don’t have much interest in clothes, beyond my swimming costumes and fancy underwear. It’s all about comfort for me.

Honestly, upper- and middle-class Victorian clothes look really uncomfortable! Heavy, fussy, and over-decorated. The figure was changed by adding padding and frames, rather than changing the body. Over seventy years fashions and figure changed in a variety of ways, from materials used to the type underwear worn. It really is quite interesting. This book is definitely focused on the dress of middle and upper-class women, because it is those women who could afford the clothes in fashion plates and fashion magazines. The development of fashion magazines and the production of paper patterns in magazines is also mentioned; I have quite a few modern patterns from magazines so the early history of these useful items is interesting to me. It shows that women were making their own fashionable clothes and using the new mechanical sewing machines that were starting to become available to the home sewer. It shows that high fashion was available to everyone if they had the money for material and time to sew.

I would have liked more information on working class clothing and fashions, which were covered only briefly, but I understand the limitations given the information available and the remaining material culture. The writing got a little sludgy at times but wasn’t bad.

TBR Pile Review: Madness in Civilization, by Andrew Scull

Paperback, 448 pages
Published September 1st 2016 by Thames and Hudson Ltd (first published March 23rd 2015)
ISBN: 050029254X (ISBN13: 9780500292549)

Blurb

This ambitious volume, worldwide in scope and ranging from antiquity to the present, examines the human encounter with Unreason in all its manifestations, the challenges it poses to society and our responses to it. In twelve chapters organized chronologically from the Bible to Freud, from exorcism to mesmerism, from Bedlam to Victorian asylums, from the theory of humours to modern pharmacology, Andrew Scull writes compellingly about madness, its meanings, its consequences and our attempts to understand and treat it.

My Review

I was recommended this book for some reason and I’ve been reading it for months as part of my research for the neurodivergent history project for work. I finished it the other day and I’m just getting around to reviewing it.

This book is very densely written covering several thousand years. I wouldn’t agree with the blurb that it is global in scope, it is much more focused on Europe and North America, with occasional excursions to other places colonised by European countries and even fewer discussions of places outside of those areas. Africa, most of Asia and all of South America are ignored. It’s very Anglo-centric. Most of the book really only covers the history of psychiatry in England, France and Germany, with some reference to the U.S. later in the book. It’s going to be helpful for my heritage project, but I would have liked to read more about the rest of the world.

I found the sections on madness in the arts fascinating. I had read something about it in Those They Called Idiots, by Simon Jarrett. This book doesn’t cover learning disability, but madness was often conflated with idiocy in the past. If you were too much hard work for your family to care for, you could quite possibly end up in an asylum or workhouse. The presentation of madness in art and literature, as with disability, changed and influenced how people saw madness and disability.

Problems with the book: Scull clearly knows nothing about Autism or being Autistic, and repeats the lie that there’s an epidemic of Autism. He treats other highly heritable neurodivergencies, such as schizophrenia, equally badly and with limited understanding.

Scull clearly doesn’t like psychiatry as a profession, which is fair enough. A lot of people have been harmed by psychiatry and the narrow ideas of psychiatrists using diagnostic manuals as check lists rather than understanding individual patients. His cynicism gets a bit much at times though.

Generally, not a bad book but approach with caution.

Pen & Sword Review: Not So Virtuous Victorians, by Michelle Rosenberg & Sonia D. Picker

38508163. sy475 — Paperback, 80 pages
Published July 30th 2018 by Pen & Sword Books
ISBN:1526700913 (ISBN13: 9781526700919)

Blurb

What springs to mind when you think of British Victorian men and women? Manners, manners and more manners. Behaviour that was as rigid and constricted as the corsets women wore. From iron-knicker sexual prudery to men so uptight they furtively released their pent up emotions in opium dens and prostitute hot spots. All, of course, exaggerated clichés worthy of a Victorian melodrama. Each generation loves to think it is better than the last and loves to look aghast at the horrifying trends of their ancestors. But are we really any different?

This glimpse at life for Victorian men and women might make millennials think again. Men and women were expected to live very differently from one another with clearly defined roles regardless of class. However, lift the skirts a little and not only will you see that they didn’t wear knickers but they were far less repressed than the persistent stereotypes would have us believe. The Victorians were as weird and wonderful as we are today. From fatal beauty tips to truly hysterical cures for hysteria to grave robbers playing skittles with human bones, we have cherry picked some of the more entertaining glimpses into the lives led by our Victorian brothers and sisters.

Pen & Sword Pile Reviews

I’ve got four for you this evening; I’ve been saving them up. Pen & Sword send me a lot of books, ones I’ve agreed to review, but you know how it is, my eyes are bigger than my belly when it comes to books, so I generally have to read a few at a time then review them all in groups. Sometimes there’s even a theme.

Today there is a theme. Daily life in various historical periods. I’ve just finished reading ‘How to survive in Ancient Egypt’, which I had been waiting on to do this set of reviews.

TBR Pile Review: Fearing the Black Body – The Racial Origins of Fatphobia, by Sabrina Strings

Book Cover — Format: 283 pages, Paperback
Published: May 7, 2019 by New York University Press
ISBN: 9781479886753 (ISBN10: 1479886750)

Blurb

In her first book, sociologist Strings (sociology, Univ. of California, Irvine) explores the historical development of prothin, antifat ideologies deployed in support of Western, patriarchal white supremacy. Beginning in the aesthetic ideals circulated by Renaissance thinkers and artists and bringing her narrative up into the 1990s, Strings charts how white Europeans and Anglo-Americans developed ideals of race and beauty that both explicitly and figuratively juxtaposed slim, desirable white women against corpulent, seemingly monstrous black women.

The work is divided into three sections. The two chapters in the first part consider how Renaissance white women and women of colour were depicted as plump and feminine, separated by class, yet belonging to the same gender. The second part of the work charts the rise of modern racial ideologies that yoked feminine beauty to Protestant, Anglo-Saxon whiteness. Later chapters and the epilogue consider how Americans normalized the “scientific management” of white women’s bodies for the purpose of racial uplift, a project that continued to situate black women as the embodied Other.

My Review

I’ve been reading this book on and off over the last few months as other commitments permitted; I found it fascinating and always picked up some new information every time I went back to it. I finished it last night with a feeling of disappointment that it wasn’t longer, but also interested in reading more by the author and on the topic.

BMI is, as I have said many times, bullshit, made-up and irrational. That it is still used by the medical profession is a travesty. Historical attitudes to fatness have varied with time and place, but scientific evidence does not support the vilification of fat people. In fact, Ancel Keys, who essentially invented the BMI and pushed for it to replace actuarial tables for insurance and medical purposes, admitted he found fat people ugly and assumed they were unhealthy. You cannot tell anything about a person’s health from a ratio of height to weight, or their appearance.

This book covers Europe and the U.S., because the author is USian, and the U.S. wouldn’t exist without European colonisation, so it covers the period from the Renaissance to the last years of the twentieth century. Five hundred years and three continents it a lot of space and time to cover.

When European’s started Othering people to justify slavery, weight was one of the things they chose to stigmatise. It coincided with Protestant disgust with bodies, with anything that might be fun, and later with changing ideas about ‘polite’ behaviour. By accusing African people of being lazy, gluttonous and dishonest, they could link that to intellect and justify colonisation and enslavement. And of course, to keep Europeans on top of the heap, the same rules had to be applied to Europeans, especially middle and upper class women.

Later still, eugenics came into play and whole new fields of scientific racism and sexism opened up for those white men determined to hold their places at the top of society. In the U.S. one of the ways they did this was to racialise Jewish, Irish, Southern (particularly Italian) and Eastern Europeans as the different groups migrated to the Americas across the 18th and 19th centuries and into the 20th century. They used the same lazy propaganda that earlier European ‘scientists’ had used to racialise and other Africans and then the indigenous populations of the Americas and Australia.

Body size and shape was used as a stick to beat people with. A ‘too thin’ rich white woman was a danger to the nation (whichever nation it was), a ‘too fat’ rich white woman, equally so, at different times. A fat black or African woman – signs of laziness and greediness – moral incontinence and hypersexuality. Because reasons.

Racist shitbags don’t actually have logical reasons, they take their beliefs and make up pseudoscience to support it. Fat hate is the same. It doesn’t matter how much evidence you have to show that ‘normal weight’ doesn’t exist, and that weight variation is just a normal part of human diversity (like the levels of melanin in the skin), they’ll still scream that fat kills.

Strings is a professional, and writes like one, unlike me; I’m just blunt and don’t mind swearing if I think it’s appropriate. I’ve seen other reviews that claim the writing is dry; I disagree. I found it clear and precise, although I would have been interested in more analysis and references from African and African American sources, but I doubt they were available given the systemic erasure and silencing of Black people in the last five hundred years.

The structure of the book puts the different strands of evidence into context and builds on Strings’ argument in a structured and organised way. Strings draws on popular and scientific literature, art and cultural movements to explore the topic and build her arguments. This is not ‘popular history but rewards careful reading and consideration.

Pen & Sword TBR Pile Review: Richard III – Fact and Fiction, by Matthew Lewis

41093351 — Hardcover, 127 pages
Published March 20th 2019 by Pen and Sword History
ISBN1526727978 (ISBN13: 9781526727978)

Blurb

King Richard III remains one of the most infamous and recognisable monarchs in English or British history, despite only sitting on the throne for two years and fifty-eight days. His hold on the popular imagination is largely due to the fictional portrayal of him by William Shakespeare which, combined with the workings of five centuries of rumour and gossip, has created two opposing versions of Richard. In fiction he is the evil, scheming murderer who revels in his plots, but many of the facts point towards a very different man.

Dissecting a real Richard III from the fictional versions that have taken hold is made difficult by the inability to discern motives in many instances, leaving a wide gap for interpretation that can be favorable or damning in varying degrees. It is the facts that will act as the scalpel to begin the operation of finding a truth obscured by fiction.

Richard III may have been a monster, a saint, or just a man trying to survive, but any view of him should be based in the realities of his life, not the myths built on rumour and theatre. How much of what we think we know about England’s most controversial monarch will remain when the facts are sifted from the fictions?

Pen & Sword Review: The Real World of Victorian Steampunk, by Simon Webb

43972585 — Paperback, 168 pages
Published November 13th 2019 by Pen and Sword History
ISBN: 1526732858 (ISBN13: 9781526732859)

In the last few decades, steampunk has blossomed from being a rather obscure and little-known subgenre of science fiction into a striking and distinctive style of fashion, art, design and even music. It is in the written word however that steampunk has its roots and in this book Simon Webb explores and examines the real inventions which underpin the fantasy. In doing so, he reveals a world unknown to most people today.

The Real World of Victorian Steampunk shows the Victorian era to have been a surprising place; one of steam-powered airplanes, fax machines linking Moscow and St Petersburg, steam cars traveling at over 100 mph, electric taxis and wireless telephones. It is, in short, the nineteenth century as you have never before seen it; a steampunk extravaganza of anachronistic technology and unfamiliar gadgets. Imagine Europe spanned by a mechanical internet; a telecommunication system of clattering semaphore towers capable of transmitting information across the continent in a matter of minutes. Consider too, the fact that a steam plane the size of a modern airliner took off in England in 1894.

Drawing entirely on contemporary sources, we see how little-known developments in technology have been used as the basis for so many steampunk narratives. From seminal novels such as The Difference Engine, through to the steampunk fantasy of Terry Pratchett’s later works, this book shows that steampunk is at least as much solid fact as it is whimsical fiction.

TBR Pile Review: Sex and Sexuality in Georgian Britain, by Mike Rendell

Peek beneath the bedsheets of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain in this affectionate, informative and fascinating look at sex and sexuality during the reigns of Georges I-IV. It examines the prevailing attitudes towards male and female sexual behaviour, and the ways in which these attitudes were often determined by those in positions of power and authority. It also explores our ancestors’ ingenious, surprising, bizarre and often entertaining solutions to the challenges associated with maintaining a healthy sex life.

Did the people in Georgian Britain live up to their stereotypes when it came to sexual behaviour? This book will answer this question, as well as looking at fashion, food, science, art, medicine, magic, literature, love, politics, faith and superstition through a new lens, leaving the reader enlightened and with a new regard for the ingenuity and character of our ancestors.

Pen & Sword Review: Life in Medieval Europe: Fact and Fiction, by Daniele Cybulskie

Imprint: Pen & Sword History
ISBN: 9781526733450
Published: 30th September 2019

Price:£12.00 was ~~£14.99~~

Have you ever found yourself watching a show or reading a novel and wondering what life was really like in the Middle Ages? What did people actually eat? Were they really filthy? And did they ever get to marry for love?

In Life in Medieval Europe: Fact and Fiction, you’ll find fast and fun answer to all your secret questions, from eating and drinking to sex and love. Find out whether people bathed, what they did when they got sick, and what actually happened to people accused of crimes. Learn about medieval table manners, tournaments, and toothpaste, and find out if people really did poop in the moat.

Review: The Spanish Flu Epidemic and its Influence on History, by Jaime Breitnauer

ISBN: 9781526745170
Published: 20th November 2019
Price: £15.99

On the second Monday of March 1918, the world changed forever. What seemed like a harmless cold morphed into a global pandemic that would wipe out as many as a hundred-million people – ten times as many as the Great War. German troops faltered lending the allies the winning advantage, India turned its sights to independence while South Africa turned to God. In Western Samoa a quarter of the population died; in some parts of Alaska, whole villages were wiped out. Civil unrest sparked by influenza shaped nations and heralded a new era of public health where people were no longer blamed for contracting disease. Using real case histories, we take a journey through the world in 1918, and look at the impact of Spanish flu on populations from America, to France, to the Arctic, and the scientific legacy this deadly virus has left behind.

My Review

Thanks to Rosie at Pen & Sword for sending me this book. It’s much appreciated, given how much time it’s taking me to read and and review books she’s been sending me.

Took me less than four hours to read this book last night. I couldn’t sleep anyway. No, really, I’m coughing a bit. It’s probably just a cold or an allergy. Might change my bedding later and vacuum the carpet, just in case. I’ll let you know if it’s something worse.

Like the Spanish Flu.

Although I’d probably be dead by now if I had Spanish Flu. In the second wave it was so virulent that it killed people as they walked down the street to the doctors to get help. Whole families died. Thousands of children were left orphaned. Up to 100 million people died in less than two years. At the time it was a shocking event, but in the years that followed it was forgotten. The author speculates that the horrors of war, mass movement of people, malnutrition and then the pandemic was too much for people to cope with. They prefered to think that people died in combat not coughing up their own lungs and choking to death.

Colonialism helped spread the pandemic. Troops from the colonies were sent to the Western Front and then sent back. European troops had been sent to the Middle East, Chinese citizens were sent through Canada and across the Atlantic as part of the Chinese Labour Corp. Millions of people from all over the planet moving around, meeting up in closely packed, unhealthy conditions, malnourished and carrying seasonal infections, then going back out into the world.

People generally know about the effects of the Spanish Flu in Europe and North America, but the pandemic covered the whole globe. People who were of European decent were less likely to die compared to indigenous people in Africa, the Americas, Australia and the Pacific Islands. European and North America people of European descent are used to getting colds and flu, so they had some immunity. Indigenous people didn’t.

Viruses do this interesting thing where they can share their genetic material with each other if they meet in a cell. At some point in the years between 1916 and 1918 some nasty H1N1 flu strains met up, shared genetic material and produced the nastiest virus humans have ever dealt with. Reconstruction of the virus from Alaskan bodies buried in the permafrost in 1920 shows that any one of the eight segments would produce a nasty virus; together they made it leathal.

The arrival of the flu in 1918 helped end the Great War, because it’s really hard to keep up violence when your soldiers are dying from disease and your support lines are falling apart because everyone who should be moving supplies is dead, dying or sick. There were mass famines as the fields weren’t harvested or planted in 1919. In industrial areas, factories and mines shut down because too many people were ill.

It encouraged new and already existing independence movements in colonies in response to the poor treatment of indigenous people during the pandemic, and probably screwed up the post-war negotiations, since it killed or sickened many of the people at the table. The loss of moderate political voices lead to greater punitive measures against Germany, the loss of expertise about the Middle East resulted in the utter mess we still have today.

People are still not sure where it started. There were outbreaks of flu in 1916, 1917 and 1918 in China, the US and France before the first wave of the Spanish Flu. I have a hypothesis that there were some nasty strains going around, and the mass movement of people from across the world, carrying these different strains, as the ‘first wave’ and finally brought together in France, allowed the nastiest of them to meet up, shuffle around some genetics and then produce the virus we call Spanish Flu. I think this is the ‘second wave’, which was the truly awful one. The one that killed millions. The ‘third wave’, less virulent was possibly a version that had drifted a bit or one or the less nasty. Might be wrong, someone else has probably looked at it and ruled this idea out.

Honestly, this is a really good introduction to the Spanish Flu pandemic and its ongoing influence. I could tell the author has a history background and a journalism background too. She made the book very easy to read and the use of real people examples really brought the events of those years to life.