My Date with Napoleon

"Even when I am gone, I shall remain in people's minds the star of their rights, 

my name will be the war cry of their efforts, the motto of their hopes."

--Napoleon Bonaparte

Altered Portrait of General Napoleon Bonaparte
Napoleon by David, Alterations by ~runningwave~ 

The Paris of my dreams swirled into view like a ferris wheel of bright and airy hues. The Effiel Tower seen over broad boulevards with bustling passersby appeared just as it might look in a painting by The Impressionsts.

On that day in 1987, the autumn of my eighteenth year, I felt the dark clouds internally, deeply, as I wandered through the grey, damp air of the real life Paris.

Here was I in The City of Light, and only just, that weekend because our plane was delayed on the tarmac at the London airport due to fog. But it was My Grand Tour, my freshman year of college which I gleefully spent being an ex-pat. So much to do, to see!

The morning now faded into afternoon as I passed beneath the iron limbs of Eiffel's masterpiece on a stroll through Parc Champ-du-Mars. My mission, to meet L'Empereur, Napoleon Bonaparte, the Corsican General who rose to the height of power in Europe, raised up by his own bootstraps and willing to take on the World. Sometimes -- very often in fact -- Napoleon succeeded.

At last my goal in sight and my green Michelin guidebook tucked under my arm, I walked with purpose towards Les Invalides, the great complex of buildings which houses several museums and Napoleon's Tomb.

Something happened then that I did not expect or plan.

On my way to visit Napoleon, I was spellbound by the glory of the French Army at the Musée de l'Armée. For three hours or more I admired swords, rapiers, sabers, shields, halberds, grieves, maces, daggers, battle axes, and suits of armor, not to mention pennants, flags, and heraldry. I wandered through the Medieval and Renaissance halls, never making it to the nineteenth century.

How is it that a quiet, young woman from the American Midwest goes to Paris for the first time and spends so long starring at weapons of destruction? 

You might well ask.

As a young girl, the tales of knights in shining armor captivated me. Ever since I could read fairy tales and adventures for myself, these were my favorite stories. I did not always dream of being that damsel awaiting rescue by knights. No, I think I had ambition to be a knight almost as much as I wanted to have one to come and rescue me from my rather mundane existence. 

This was long before the movie Brave or George R. R. Martin had described the character of Arya Stark, but indeed there always have been women who dreamt of being skilled at arms. In my youth I idolized Eowyn of Rohan in the Lord of the Rings for her fearless swordplay. If the plot had action, chases, battle and mayhem, I loved it. I read Greco-Roman and Norse mythology until I knew the gods and heroes moves by heart. 

There were few social networks for geeks, especially female geeks, before the internet and Facebook.  Not surprising then, that in high school I fell in with the crowd who played Dungeons & Dragons on the weekends. I developed characters skilled at warfare and cunning; my weapons of choice varied between magical spells, short swords, and crossbows.  

That afternoon in Paris was a pilgrimage for me of sorts. Alone in my sojourn, I was at last seeing what I had spent years reading about in my quiet corner of the United States: case by case lined with pole arms, blades, and armor. Indeed, one of the finest displays of arms on the European Continent, the vast collection of Les Invalides.

It was somehow fitting that I came to pay my respects to the Emperor of France after acknowledging this impressive array of battle glory (and plunder).  I had not forgotten my purpose, so dutifully I went to the crypt.  The giant, baroque sarcophagus is lifted towards the colorful dome. Just as an emperor might sit high on a dais in life, so Napoleon is raised to the heights in death.

Here was laid to rest a man who dared to be more than his birth dictated. Someone with the courage and self-confidence to dream big and bold dreams, who fought for what he believed was right. He endured the hatred of many aristocrats as he learned to master his skills and even after he became ruler of France. He promoted his officers from the ranks and ensured they were competent soldiers. 

Many scholars still demonize Napoleon for being a war-monger, but my thoughts on him are more complex. I see Napoleon as a man of letters, of strategy and skill, a great mind, who used the arts of diplomacy when he could, but was unafraid to take up arms when necessary. 

I am not a violent person, and I will always attempt to negotiate in my own conflicts, leaving battle only for the last resort. And yet, I agree with Napoleon that there comes a time to fight. And if you must fight, than it should be for the deepest convictions you hold or for the protection of someone or something you love.

If I could really meet Napoleon, I'd want to ask how he kept up his confidence in the face of goals that many might have seen insurmountable.  Although it is my natural inclination and ancestral loyalty to be on the side of England in the Napoleonic Wars, I still can admire this man for who he was and for what one person can accomplish if only he or she is willing to grasp for destiny.  

What might we all accomplish, if we believe we cannot fail?

Vive L'Empereur! Napoleon, I salute your audacity!

Posted this day, 15 August 2012, for L'anniversaire de Napoleon Bonaparte

Napoleon Bonaparte's Maxims on Character

"He who hazards nothing, gains nothing."

"My motto has always been: A career open to all talents, without distinctions of birth." 

"Impossible is a word to be found only in the dictionary of fool."

A Web of Intellectual Connections

I just finished listening to a fascinating interview of science and technology historian James Burke by a podcaster named Dan Carlin (who broadcasts Hardcore History). I had not listened to Carlin's podcast before, but was wondering around online hoping to find a new history-related podcast that I could get excited about.

So far the realm of podcasts has not delivered much in the way of "meaty" history that a professional historian who also enjoys mainstream popular culture can get into. Up until now The Napoleon Podcast has been by far my favorite because of the hosts' passion for history and their exploration of its subject on a level anyone with a basic high-school level education could understand. It's entertaining and reflects the type of conversation shared by people who really love to discuss and argue about history for history's sake.

The other day while trolling I-Tunes, one episode of Carlin's Hardcore History caught my eye, "A Fly on James Burke's Wall" (see Show 18 in Carlin's archive) I downloaded it and was instantly transported to a dynamic intellectual exchange between one of my favorite historians, Burke, and an enthusiastic amateur historian, Carlin, with some really thought-provoking insights of his own.

I am one of a generation that grew up learning about history from the likes of James Burke, with his television show Connections, which first broadcast in the US in 1979. I was at an impressionable age, but eager to learn so long as I had fun in doing so. I can remember that I was watching Connections at a time when I actually found the subject of history in school to be quite boring. I was incredibly good at memorizing the names of rulers, places, and dates of events for multiple choice quizzes, but bored to tears with the way it was presented in class by my teachers. Plop me down in front of the Tube, however, and I would watch, and re-watch Connections and its sequels over and over.

What fascinated me most was that Burke's approach appeals to my innate sense of synthesis. My brain is simply wired to draw together ideas quickly. Linear thinking is terribly uninteresting to me. Always was. Destined to be a post-modernist, my wild inclination was to draw two concepts together from different sides of the question and build a theory around them. That's how my fantasy life operated in my child's mind and, later, it's how my scholar's mind turned around sophisticated groups of facts to churn out pages and pages of grad school ramblings. Honed by a youth spent with exploring connections, I understood that history is not simply a string of happenings, but an array of decisions and inventions that might have just as easily gone the other way had circumstances been altered ever so slightly.

Popular scholars and scientists like James Burke, Carl Sagan, and Joseph Campbell showed me that ideas are power and the brain is a tool of exploration. As my education progressed I began to find the voices of scholars who opened up the field of women's history. I can remember being excited by my first readings of "serious" feminist art history in my first year of graduate school. Scholars like Whitney Chadwick and Linda Nochlin raised my awareness of just how much women had been overlooked in the previous views of world history -- not to mention all of the cultures considered "Other" or "Primitive" by First World scholars.

That brings me to the really nifty project that James Burke mentioned in passing during the conversation with Dan Carlin. He's using the Internet as a tool to expand his theories of inter-connectivity among people and moments in history on a website called the Knowledge Web. I encourage you to explore it for yourself. I highly recommend the "Mystery Tours" section which will introduce (or re-introduce) you to Burke's heady style of historic synthesis. My personal favorite tour so far is "Wallpaper to Germ Theory."

My husband and I have often batted around this crazy notion of writing a book together on a certain sub-set of myths about the history of England as filtered down to us from the Victorian era. It's rather crazy on the one hand because we are both really just armchair scholars of the period concerned, but he -- being a scientific/engineering mind with a devotion to folklore -- and I -- with my background in cultural history, archival research, and post-modernist academic training -- might just come up with a perspective on our topic that no one else has ever written. We have between the two of us background, experience, and skills related to intellectual history that combined is actually brilliant (if I do say so myself). The question is: could we produce research that anyone else would care about or want to read? Well, first we have to do the brainstorming and then the research. I'll get back to you on this topic.

I just want to conclude that human knowledge is at a peak. In my culture I am aware of just how fortunate I am to have information almost always at my fingertips. Making it far easier for me to make intellectual leaps than ever before. Its a long way from the paper card catalogues in my elementary school to the high-speed connections of the Internet on my laptop or hand-held device. Almost whenever I have a question, I can within a reasonable amount of time download all kinds of random facts, tidbits, reviews, ramblings, and conspiracy theories about it in a matter of minutes.

Oh, where, I wonder, will the connections lead?

How Do We Know? Or, Thoughts on Learning in the Digital Age

Learning is a reoccurring theme for me this past week. It has been made abundantly clear that learning is a huge component of my job. In fact, one of the reasons I haven't been updating Pull of the Tides is that I've been expending mental energy to absorb all I need to know about the job I started last summer. This past week I began to learn new software that will enable me to complete some very important assignments during the summer and beyond. I am also learning the larger lessons of how to work within the assigned parameters, whether or not I agree with the methods executives choose to use. And now I'm training two young people for their summer internships, and mentoring has always been a way for me to learn and to grow.

The fact is that I cannot imaging a life without learning. I thrive on it. If my work includes a component that allows me to learn new things and constantly, I'm as happy as a clam. I'm just doing my job to filter through the information, and hopefully the water I output from my shell is clearer than it was before.


I have also encountered the theme of learning in my women's group meeting last Friday. It was one of the dominant themes of an otherwise playful and fun gathering. I remarked on the fact that of the ten women present, nearly all mentioned that they were (or had been) a teacher of some kind or the other. It's remarkable because we came to the meeting from diverse backgrounds and disciplines and lifestyles and, yet, teaching and learning were such common threads that united us and our discussion.


Several women mentioned how the Internet has changed their ways of thinking or processing what they have learned. They talked about how communication and learning walk hand-in-hand and how the Internet brings communities of like-minded people out there together to solve problems or answer questions. The Internet can also be sensory overload -- too much information thrown at you in a small space of time. Like most tools, the Internet becomes a resource and inspiration, but it can also bring on a kind of madness. For me, Facebook has been a fascinating experiment that I have found to be a tool of connection to people in my distant and not so distant past. It's also a site that can play amusing games with the viral method of transmitting fads, mini-games, and trends. Sometimes I find it's traffic so overwhelming I cannot visit it or begin to respond to all of the "pokes" and insistent "requests" from friends. And all because a friend who lives 500-miles distant invited me to join.

In the Digital Age, we see to learn information about events and people in oddly incomplete ways. We may know the latest tragedy or scandal the instant after it happens, but try to find reliable sources for the background on a news story and you really have to use your research skills. It's not easy to find reporters who aren't all quoting the AP wire or a single source or two. This is not to denigrate the work that journalists do, but rather to comment on the fragmented and two-dimensional ways that "easy information" comes to us.

As an archivist who works with primary sources every day at work, I understand all too well how important it is to choose your information sources carefully. A personal letter might tell one side of the story for a family tragedy that results in a court case, while the official record may record very different perspectives and collate a variety of local opinions on the case. Which is true is a question that the scholar has to decide. What case will she make? Whose side will she be one? People write about themselves differently than others may write about them. And what is "Truth" anyway? My graduate education in the humanities has taught me that there is no one version of the Truth. It changes depending upon who you are, what information you have at hand, and the cultural lens with which you see the world.

This brings me to a final way that I've been learning in the past week. Reading is a huge pleasure for me and has been ever since I acquired the skill in early childhood. I read both fiction and non-fiction for fun. At the moment I am reading a book published several years ago by historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich named for a phrase she had used in a graduate student research paper that she wrote in the 1970s: Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History. In the book she explores the odd ways in which her "radical" phrase has spread through poplar culture since a reporter quoted it in an article. Women and men have interpreted her phrase to mean quite a different set of values and concepts over the years and Ulrich catalogs many of these uses. To her mind some are quite positive and life-affirming, while other uses of the quote have been negative, destructive, and even copyright infringement.

Yet Ulrich does not stop there. She then selects three literary women who made history: one in the wake of the Renaissance in Europe, one in the years of Suffragette struggle in the United States, and one modernist author very dear to my own heart (and past research). I find it fascinating that Ulrich can find threads of meaning between such distant personalities. I find it thrilling that she explores both their struggle as feminists and their struggles to find their own voices. If you are looking for a radical departure in scholarship, you will not find it in this book. You will find -- if you dare to look -- a sense that history has a way of repeating itself, of moving forward slowly. Some battles have been won, but the very popularity of Ulrich's phrase suggests there are still a few to be fought.

I'm still reading this book and still considering Ulrich's arguments. I am swayed by her argument that historians don't control history. Individuals do have the opportunity to make history themselves. Historians can sway opinion, but often they are the servants of history and their own cultural world-views. You can learn all you want about the past, but the knowledge you gain make teach you as much about the present as it has about history.

Independence

I enclose to you a copy of the declaration of independence as agreed to by the House, and also, as originally framed. You will judge whether it is the better or worse for the Critics.


—Thomas Jefferson, Letter, July 8, 1776, to Richard Henry Lee.

(Borrowed image source: Portrait Miniature of Jefferson by John Trumbull, Collection of Monticello. 1788)

I have been living near the Chesapeake Bay now for quite a few years. I have come to think of Maryland as "home" on many levels. The number of years I have lived on the East Coast is growing equal to the number of years I spent growing up in a suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio.

I have loved American history since I was a child. I never did think I would become a scholar of American history at all, but I liked to read stories of America's War for Independence from Britain such as the ride of Paul Revere and the Sons of Liberty who threw tea into Boston Harbor. When I was about 9 or 10, my parents took me on vacation to Colonial Williamsburg where I became entranced with the dirt streets, cobblestones, carriages, fine folks strolling the paths, and craftsmen inviting you to watch their works in progress. I could imagine all the important politicians rushing to meet the Governor or attend the House of Burgesses, while their pretty wives and daughters embroidered or played music in grand parlours. (Now, if you want to take an arm-chair tour of Colonial Williamsburg, you can just visit their "Tour the Town" link. If only I had Internet access as a child!)

I think it was that particular vacation, where my parents took me for the first time to visit the home of a man who I have come to admire among all the so-called "founding fathers," Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson's home, Monticello, situated on a green ridge-top in Albemarle County, Virginia, enchanted my young mind. The lush trees embrace the river winding through the valley, and you drive up a winding road towards the distant past. When I was young I thought it had been there for centuries.

I had never seen a house like Jefferson's. So stately was its octagonal form balanced right on top of the entrance hall. (I mean, who builds a house with an octagonal dome? How cool is that! ) Inside was a treasure trove, where maps hung on the walls and natural specimens from Lewis and Clark's journey were spread around the room. I was fond of Jefferson's inventions like the Great Clock that tells hours, minutes, seconds, and day of the week, using cannonballs as weights to drive the device. He also had beautiful writing instruments and nifty scientific instruments all over his office and library.

Over the years since that first trip my fascination for Jefferson has only grown more complex and deeper. I find the fact that he was a conflicted slave-owner interesting, but it becomes even more so when you learn that he had a long relationship with his wife's half-sister, the mulatto woman Sally Hemings. (Yes, I believe the DNA research.) He was truly a renaissance man, being a scholar, a traveler, a statesman, an architect, an inventor, a scientist, a amateur fiddle-player, and a lover of the finer things in life.

Yes, I must admit I have fallen under Jefferson's spell a very long time ago. He must have been a charismatic gentleman, if introverted. He strikes me as a man more apt to put pen to paper in response than to speak aloud in passion.

But to think of what he and his compatriots in Philadelphia risked in the two years leading to the Declaration of Independence is beyond me. They risked wealth, reputation, career, life-and-limb for their belief in freedom. True, they put parameters on who could be free in keeping with their own time, but I cannot hold that against them.

We each have to walk our own journey through time and space. What my "culture" is today, will become different with every passing day. That is what history is all about. Finding fragments of time standing still, but we all know time does not stand still.

Each year on Independence Day I celebrate the lives of men who were quite flawed and human, but who nonetheless changed their world, their culture, with a big idea: Liberty, that is, freedom from autocratic government.

How many countless people across this Earth have been caught up in their revolution ever since?



I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.
—Thomas Jefferson, Letter to James Madison (January 30, 1787); referring to Shays' Rebellion

My Long, Lost Atari 800

I recently had a conversation with a young lady of nineteen years about computers from the 1980s. "They were bulky, weren't they?" she speculated from accounts she'd heard.

"Bulky" is not the half of it! Compared to computers of today, the Commodore 64s, Ataris, and other PCs of the early 1980s were barely more intelligent and powerful than the a 2008 scientific calculator. And, yes, they were quite clumsy and weighed as much as a pile of my high school textbooks. The typical 21st-century urbanite carries more computing power in her or his mobile phone and iPod, then the computers of the Eighties.



That line of thinking has brought up fond memories of my first personal computer, my long, lost Atari 800. What ever happened to that old thing? I suppose we must have disposed of it when my parents moved to a second-floor apartment while I was in college round about 1989.

I was one of the first kids on my street to have my own computer. I guess I've always been a bit of a geek for new technology. My Atari 800 was all I wanted for Christmas. My parents were not well-off financially compared to many of the kids at my high school, but they understood the educational value of my desire. My father likely foresaw the advantage I would have if I could grasp the power of this new tool at a young age. Even though he preferred to draw by hand, he agreed to shell out his hard-earned commercial artist's cash, probably close to $1000 I now realize, on my one and only Christmas present that year.

I was thirteen years old. I had never had such an incredible toy! I had the mind-swirling video game Asteroids on cartridge and a -- I kid you not -- cassette-tape loading game called Energy Czar. (Those of you who remember the Jimmy Carter years, are probably snickering right about now.) That game took 30-minutes to load from cassette player to the Atari 800's memory chip. The text-based thought game tested your wits against the statistics of population-growth, demand for fossil fuels, and nuclear energy versus solar power. . . Wait a minute! That sounds like 2008, not 1983. My, my. We still exploit the earth's resources. But, I digress.

Rats! I cannot remember the other game that I loved and played so much. It was an Atari cartridge game with the player as a space pilot in a Star Wars-like fighter who must go through hyperspace and chase down all of the bad guys. (Feel free to remind me if you recognize the game I'm describing.)

My big purchase in games during 1984 was an Atari cartridge game, Defender. I loved that one! The graphics seemed so smooth and slick. I liked it even better than the space pilot game for the sound effects and joystick steering.

My Atari 800 was not the first computer I had used, so my desire for a computer of my own was based upon experiences in school. Our gifted-and-talented program classroom had a Radio Shack TRS80. My classmates and I all took turns playing. I learned how to create a simple game in several lines of Basic. Once I got the Atari 800, I was coding all kinds of little games and images using if/then statements preceded by numbers in increments of 10. Learning Basic code seemed so high-tech. I was so proud of myself, my own geek-dom.

By 1985, I bought my first word-processing software and began to draft my school reports electronically, printed out from my dot-matrix printer. For that era my word processor was actually quite sophisticated. I could code diacritical marks, change fonts, the whole nine yards. Some of my teachers actually preferred hand-written papers to printed ones back in those days. I could no longer read my wretched cursive hand (I never really learned cursive script well). I taught myself a half-print, half-cursive style that I still use today just so I could read my own hand-writing. Do they even teach cursive today in public schools? Back then computers were so rare that most scholarship was all long-hand.

My very first serious research paper on "The Wasteland" a poem by T.S. Eliot of seven pages in length with footnotes was drafted by hand, but typed on my Atari. Well, all scholars have got to start somewhere. Little did I know at that time that I would be someday giving academic conference papers on some of T.S. Eliot's friends, artists Roger Fry and Vanessa Bell.

I stored my T.S. Eliot paper and some other assignments on 5-inch floppy diskettes. There was no hard-drive in my Atari 800, so that was the only option other than the cassette-tape drive. I had a modem, too. But never really understood how the bulletin board systems worked in the early days of the Internet. It seemed so weird and the community networking climate was all academic, all scientific lingo. Way over my 14-year-old head.

By the time I graduated from high school, I knew Basic code reasonably well for an arts and humanities student. Never brilliant at mathematics, I wisely chose a liberal arts track while studying abroad in England my freshman year of college funded by a merit-based scholarship. My college in England had only very early IBM computers, so I went back to writing papers by hand for a couple of semesters. I gave up on trying to make their outdated word processor work for me.

It's just amazing to review my own little piece of personal computer history and realize I was part of an technological revolution. A child of the 1980s, I was among the first to experience computers on a daily level. Now that is taken for granted.

And now, of course, my iPod Nano could beat up my long, lost Atari 800.

Foodways: An Environmental Post for Blog Action Day

I've decided to participate in Blog Action Day, an opportunity for online authors to unite by posting their thoughts focused on one particular issue. The issue chosen this year is the environment. All I need do is write something relating to this topic and the environment is the topic on which I harbor deep-rooted beliefs and opinions. I have considered myself an environmentalist since sixth grade, the year I began some serious study on solar energy.

Solar energy isn't the topic I'm writing about today, but all life, and therefore, all food comes ultimately from the sun's energy. Back on August 31st I posted about my first foray into cooking fresh and local food. Today's entry continues on a similar theme, with the added information I have learned in the past five weeks.

Foodways is a fairly new word in common usage. Foodways of Austin, Texas website provides a useful definition of this rather academic term:

The term foodways refers to the culinary practices of a people and land, historical and popular. Food plays a defining role in local and national cultures. What people eat and how they eat it reflects numerous factors, such as landscape, societal, spiritual, artistic, psychological, political, economic, and other conditions.

I first heard this term in several cultural history courses back in the early 1990s. Now foodways is becoming a very important branch of humanities scholarship. Today (October 15, 2007) I attended a foodways lecture by culinary scholar Michael Twitty who has been exploring the intersection of West African cooking traditions of his ancestors with Chesapeake cooking techniques favored by enslaved peoples living in Maryland and Virginia. The program I attended at Historic London Town and Gardens was an opportunity for educators and living history interpreters to learn about hearth-cooking practices of African Americans from their earliest arrival as slaves in the British colonies in North America.

You may be asking at this point, how do foodways relate to my topic: the environment? The practices of acquiring, storing, and preparing food and of preserving foodways traditions relates directly to the land and to local practices of agriculture. One of the most fascinating parts of Mr. Twitty's presentation was his summary of the agricultural cycle that followed the seasons. He said that enslaved African Americans kept a "calendar of food dates" in their head, so that they might supplement the meager diet provided by their British masters. They also learned to use their wisdom of hunting, fishing, and gardening as well as their culinary traditions memorized by generations of West Africans. He argues that seasonal food preparation, foraging and cooking were necessities for enslaved peoples to survive the rigors of the oppression underwhich they lived.

Mr. Twitty also responded to a question about daily foodways practices. Again, he has taught himself the wisdom of people who labored hard and long hours by listening to the stories of his grandparents and of their generation and by reading diaries that survive from former slaves. He sees the carry-over of certain foodways from West Africa, such as the men's tradition of roasting and frying. Another West African tradition he observes in Enslaved Maryland culture is the tradition of the elder women preparing stew and hoecakes to be served to farm laborers for lunch and cooking one-pot meals for family dinners when the field hands have returned for the night.

What I find most fascinating about these ideas is their practicality and common sense. It reminds me that even people with Northern European ancestry have forgotten the ways living with the land and with the cycles of nature understood by their ancestors. As someone of likely all Northern European descent, I am on a journey of my own to discover the foodways known by the ancestors who emigrated to the New World.

I'm doing my best to seek as many local and organic foods as possible. I am also learning more about seasonal cooking and food preparation. Does this mean I'm going to start cooking with lard and molasses? No! My clean bill of health from my doctor just proves that cooking with olive oil and watching my sugar and carb intake is the best possible thing for me to be doing if I want to stay healthy long-term. But the point is, that local and organic foods are just better for you and better for the health of our planet as well.

My friend N. shared a news article about the 100-mile diet with me after my August post. I don't think I'm going to go giving up coffee, imported teas, chocolate, etc. and be quite that extreme, but I do believe that patronizing farmer's markets and local farm stands is a great thing to do for the environment. Buying local produce and limiting transportation costs or driving where possible is also something that everyone in the U.S.A. should consider doing more often. I have a good friend who is a member of a farm co-op that harvests local fruits and veggies and splits the harvest share among its investors.

All and all it's been a tough year for farmers and gardeners in much of Maryland. We don't feel the drought as our ancestors might have done who ate only local food, but the drought will have an impact on availability of local produce we like. The more we eat from the land where we live, the more we appreciate the impact we have on our environment through choices we make every single day.

As I tasted Michael Twitty's Cowhorn Okra Soup today, I remembered the goodness of eating foods grown right here in Maryland. {By the way, I'm normally disgusted by okra. But Mr's Twitty's home-grown okra is of an heirloom variety and not the slimy stuff I have come to associate with a nasty, stomach-turning "Ick!"} Mr. Twitty's personal stories and his emphasis on the importance of ancestral cooking traditions reminded me of the culture that surrounds the foods my family always likes to eat at harvest time.

I am in the beginning stages of a project to learn about my own Scots-Irish ancestry and my ancestors who came from the Old World, perhaps sometime back in the mid-18th century. I think that learning about what they ate is almost as important is reading what they wrote. So much of culture is transmitted through the preparation of food. We remember well the home-cooked foods of our families, don't we?

Below are several resources that are helping me to begin the process, and I hope to add more to this list as I continue my research.

What can you do to preserve your own foodways and culinary traditions? Cook a feast for friends or family with local foods. Dig out and prepare your grandmother's or grandfather's best recipes. Or share your thoughts and memories in comments to this post.

Slainte! ("To your health!" in Scottish Gaidhlig)

A Few Resources

Culinary scholar, Michael Twitty's Afro Foodways website.

Kentucky Foodways: Traditional and Modern by Elizabeth Mosby Adler

Our Immigrant and Native Ancestors:Southern food evolved from many ethnic influences, from The Culture of Southern Food website.

There appears to be a new book about Renewing America's Food Traditions that is available for download online. A sustainable living organization is using it to promote it's efforts to preserve heirloom plants and native animal breeds for Americans.

Time Travel to Mount Vernon

Have you ever wanted to travel back in time?

I was lucky enough to be able to get as close to time travel this weekend as current technology permits, by becoming a re-enactor at a large colonial-era event taking place at Mount Vernon this past weekend.

The concept of time travel has appealed to me since my childhood. I think a large part of my insatiable interest in history relates to the strong desire to know what it is like to live in a different era of the past or of the future.

I read a lot about time travel in science fiction novels and avidly watched the British TV series Doctor Who, about a race of super-genius beings who harnessed the power to travel in time and space. The fact that the show is the longest-running and most-revived British television programme in the genre of science fiction tells me that there are other people out there who share my wacky hope that hurling through time aboard your TARDIS ship would be the ultimate adventure travel trip.

I had a gifted teacher for advanced placement U.S. history in high school who brought the past to life by having us read Civil War diaries, newspaper entries, court records, etc. All of a sudden history class was far more than merely a boring list of names, dates, and events to memorize in order to regurgitate on an exam. It was a powerful link to real people who lived, breathed, and once walked this earth. I strongly suspected that teacher was a Civil War re-enactor. The idea of re-enacting as a hobby grew in the 1960s and has taken many forms including renaissance faires, ethnic festivals and battle re-creations of many different periods.

All of this exposition is my confession that at last I have finally become what I long wanted to be -- a living historian instead of a book-learned historian. Museum educators who work on interpretation of historic sites like me have a natural edge when it comes to making the transition from academic historian to living history re-enactor. Many living history volunteers with whom I've had the pleasure to work over the past five years have been generous with knowledge and advice about what it takes to become a re-enactor. Members of the First Maryland Regiment have slowly turning my mind around to the possibility. Over time, they have become my friends and have shared their knowledge of eighteenth-century life with me. I have also met other museum professionals and colleagues who believe in the power to make history live through living history interpretation at historic sites.

You cannot imagine how intimidating the idea of becoming a living historian has been for me. You would think that someone who lives and breathes history and who also harbors this desire to become a re-enactor, would find the transition simple. Not so. History courses teach you nothing about how to wear five layers of clothing in summer weather; how to purchase your first set of stays (like a corset); where to go to buy accurate straight-lasted shoes; how to hold your posture differently if you are a common person than if you are a gentlewoman; or to speak like someone from out of the past. No, all of these things are not taught in graduate school.

I am lucky enough to have the benefit of friends from several living history organizations and experienced character interpreters who have provided me with advice and encouragement. They have taught me the practicalities and helped me to feel comfortable wearing historic attire as it is intended to be worn. They take all of my questions seriously and often share much research and re-enactor lore. Fortunately, my Girl Scout training did teach me something of surviving in a camp outdoors and cooking over a hearth. At least I was ready to cook when asked to help prepare the stew and spiced sweet potato and apple dishes.

It is difficult to find words to describe what camping out overnight at George Washington's Mount Vernon is like. Beneath a just-recently full moon, the bustling camp was lit in lantern- and fire-light as we finished putting up our tents on Friday night. The uppermost tower in the house was light all night and the great sword of the constellation Orion the Hunter hung above me as I woke before dawn for a stroll down the hill to the necessaries. The temperature was perfect for autumn camping.

In daylight hours, the encampment was filled to the brim with more 18th-century folk than tourists. Children played hide-and-seek and giggled with each other. Women cooked, baked, washed dishes, gossiped, and had afternoon tea with Lady Washington (Mary Wiseman) on the bowling green. Infantrymen, rifle sharpshooters, and artillery troops drilled and demonstrated their training to all assembled in the valley below camp. On Saturday evening the good folks at Mount Vernon allowed the parent re-enactor organization, The Continental Line, to hold a large party for all re-enactors to celebrate the Line's 20th anniversary. It's difficult to say but there could have been one thousand re-enactors taking part during the weekend's events, certainly from every one of the former 13 colonies. I met a lady from Massachusetts during the hearth-baking class and several folks from a New Jersey unit. All volunteers. All driving to Virginia on their own dime just for the chance to be a part of this event.

For two whole days, you might have stepped into another century as a visitors walking along the plantation's main pathways. You could stroll into camp and talk to folks, watch the military drills or interact with 18th century gentlefolk going for a stroll around the grounds. For two entire days I soaked up every minute of not sitting in front of a computer, not answering phone calls, not watching t.v., but rather just living in the moment. That moment ,with the fight for liberty hanging in the balance, seems all the more real when it's enacted before your eyes and you are part of it.

Wheels of Time

Calendar from Webster.com
Etymology: Middle English calender, from Anglo-French or Medieval Latin; Anglo-French kalender, from Medieval Latin kalendarium, from Latin, moneylender's account book, from kalendae calends
1 : a system for fixing the beginning, length, and divisions of the civil year and arranging days and longer divisions of time (as weeks and months) in a definite order -- see MONTH table

Reflections about the way human beings tell time have been with me this week. It began with a news story on BBC News about the country of Ethiopia celebrating their own version of Y2K seven years after the rest of us (cf. Why Ethiopia's Millennium is seven years late, by Elizabeth Blunt BBC News, Addis Ababa). I find it rather interesting that Ethopians so love their way of seeing the world, and believe so fervently in their own Christian traditions dating to ancient Coptic times, that they staunchly refused to celebrate the Millennium on 31 December 1999. Of course, I also know sticklers to the rule in the Western World who wouldn't actually believe we had entered the Third Millennium until 1 January 2001.

I can remember that I had a childhood preoccupation with calendars from many different cultures and studied clocks, watches and timepieces in coffee-table tomes in the library at a fairly early age. It probably began with my love of history and archaeology that I nurtured during those formative years. I had a flirtation with the idea of becoming an Egyptologist or scholar of Ancient Greece back then. My elementary school librarian reminded me a few years ago when we were reintroduced, that I was the little girl in Second Grade who had every book on Egypt, Greece and Rome checked out at some point. (Yes, I was a book nerd even then.) What I was hungry to learn centered around the fact that these cultures had different languages, different ways of viewing the world, different beliefs and religions. Among the array of differences about these ancient peoples I discovered for myself was their methods of telling time. The ancient Romans were very focused on conducting business. Maybe that is why we borrow the etymology for our word "calendar" from their word for the accountant's notebook. [See epigraph above.]

There's a hilarious cartoon about Druids at Stonehenge who are deciding what to do with the standing stone calendar they've just finished constructing by Tom Cheney from The New Yorker. It made me laugh because once human beings create a system, they cannot seem to let well enough allow and enjoy the invention. No, they always make their lives even more complicated by adding extra layers of minutiae, red tape, or rules. Calendars are not simple wheels of time, but rather the starting points for entire philosophies, religions, ways of conducting business, or exchanges of communication.

Case in point: in my working life I am a museum educator for a historic site. Annapolis was founded as Maryland's capital in the late seventeenth century and had it's heyday throughout the eighteenth century up to the War for Independence. England (and, thus it's colonies in the New World) adopted the Gregorian Calendar in 1752 CE due to a parliamentary act known as An Act for Regulating the Commencement of the Year; and for Correcting the Calendar now in Use. That means that anyone born before 1 January 1752, suddenly had a new birthdate thrust upon him/her. The new birthday would depend upon whether or not s/he was born before March 25th, the Christian holiday of the Feast of the Annunciation, which in England was the first day of the Civil (or Legal) Year. Famously, George Washington's birthday moved from 11 February to 22 February due to the change from the Old Style calendar to the New. Confused yet? [See resources below.]

To make matters more confusing, you and I need to decide what heavenly body will be the basis for our calendar. For people living in North America or Europe, the sun is likely the basis for your daily existence and days of conducting business. If you come from India, Jordan, or China, your dates may be based upon lunar cycles. The Feast of Easter, the height of the liturgical year for many Christians, is often calculated as the first Sunday from the full moon on or after the vernal equinox (21 March). This is why the movable feast of Easter dances around. It comes one year in April, but might sometimes appear in late March. If you are a farmer or gardener, you might be more concerned with the lunar calendar like the one in Farmer's Almanac. If you sail, kayak or live near a large body of water like the Chesapeake Bay, then the moon is also important to you because it affects coastal tides.

This is all to suggest that calendars are very arbitrary things by nature. The next time you make a lunch date with a friend or business meeting with an associate, think about the fact that there is a social contract to which you both must agree: not only a date and time, but also upon which calendar you are using.

By the way, Happy New Year today if you are Jewish. It's Rosh Hashanah (09/12/07 or Elul 1, 5767).

Do you have a favorite movable feast? Use a minority calendar? I welcome you to post your comments and ideas here.

---

Annotated Resources:
Learn more about the Old Style vs. New Style Calendar and how to make sense of dates around the year 1752 CE in a helpful article by Mike Spathaky written for genealogists.
Use Earth Calendar to find out what holidays are celebrated on any given date on the Gregorian Calendar.
See WebExhibits for more about the minutiae of the Western World's calendar: Definitions of Our Year, http://webexhibits.org/calendars/year-definitions.html
If you are interested in the history and archaeology of calendar, I highly recommend the scholarship of Anthony F. Aveni in such books as Empires of Time: Calendars, Clocks and Cultures.
One of my personal favorite books of history and folklore about telling time is by a British history professor from University of Bristol, Ronald Hutton who wrote The Stations of the Sun among many fine scholarly works on rituals and folklore in Great Britain.

Another Annapolis

It's just after 9:00 p.m. Atlantic Time (8:00 p.m. EST), and I'm sitting at a grand old Victorian roll-top desk typing on a high tech laptop, courtesy of my hosts at Hillsdale House Inn. I'm in another Annapolis, another city named for Queen Anne of England only fifteen years after my own was renamed in her honor, Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia. The inn is full of charm and the proprietors are generous. King George V stayed here when he was a young prince.

Here are some brief observations I've made over the course of the 28 hours that I have been on the island of Nova Scotia:

• People hang their laundry out to dry here and there are recycling bins in every tiny town in the province.
• Drivers actually stop to allow pedestrians to cross the road--even when they aren't near a cross walk.
• There are rich layers of cultural diversity here from the Native Americans, to French settlers of the 17th century (Acadians), to the Scots, to the English, to the American and African American Loyalists.
• Acadians and Cajuns have entirely different cuisines; the Acadian cuisine is very meat and potatoes with little spice, where as their ancestors some of whom became Cajuns borrowed spices and cooking styles from the Caribbean and Spanish.
• The local scallops are so incredibly tasty in garlic sauce!
• This community of Annapolis Royal has world class walking tours and a compact historic district. The inhabitants are fierce preservationists and very enthusiastic to tell you all about their heritage.
• The cemetery by Fort Anne has four centuries of graves; I went on a lantern-lit graveyard tour last night.
• The Annapolis River has amazing tidal patterns--the change is over 29 feet between high and low tide. The salt marshes remind me of Maryland, except that huge dikes are used to reclaim the fertile soil from the brackish rivers.
• This is one of the most hotly-contested towns between the English and French in the whole New World; the town changed hands seven times and witnessed 13 battles.
• No matter how far away you travel in North America, Harry Potter mania is there.
• The locals apologized for the "hot weather," which has been roughly low 70s F both days and a bit humid. Compared to 95-degree Maryland swampiness this is cool and comfortable. I don't even mind that it's been overcast the whole time.
• Okay, the downside--mosquitoes out in the evenings are every bit as bad here as back home.

I'll post more as I can and eventually formulate my observations into proper paragraphs.
Au revoir!

The Chesapeake Bay: Then and Now

There are 12 people on a mission to look at the Chesapeake Bay from an unusual perspective. They are retracing the voyage of Captain John Smith on his explorations of the Bay in a 28-foot reconstruction of the shallop Smith and his crew sailed into the Bay 400 years ago. They are sailing and rowing their way to towns and cities, bringing an educational exhibit and recording the state of the Bay from their unplugged points-of-view as a modern-day crew with GPS, high-tech outdoor gear and camp stoves.

Exploring the Bay from Smith's route are a crew comprised of men and women sailors who come from diverse professional backgrounds including engineers, biologists, ecologists, anthropologists, historians and one forensic scientist. I have been reading their online journal this morning and have found some interesting comparisons and contrasts between their experiences on the Bay now and the experiences of the seventeenth-century English explorers recorded in Smith's journals. Native Americans no longer have a thriving culture on the Bay, but the 2007 crew is often relying upon the locals for supplementing their meager stores of food. Smith encountered a number of severe storms that forced him to land and occasionally ran aground. The 2007 crew has had to row quite a bit due to low winds lately, but they have also braved stormy weather and have had to struggle to put the boat back in the water after several groundings.

I do find it very haunting that Smith saw open vistas on the Chesapeake shoreline like this:
30 leagues we sayled more Northwards not finding any inhabitants, leaving all the Easterne shore, lowe Islandes, but overgrowne with wood, as all the Coast beyond them so farre as wee could see: the Westerne shore by which we sayled we found all along well watered, but very mountanous and barren, the vallies very fertill, but extreame thicke of small wood so well as trees, and much frequented with Wolves, Beares, Deere and other wild beasts.

The reconstructed shallop is now at the mid-way point in it's journey and is being celebrated all weekend at the Annapolis City Dock. This morning, the shallop will sail in a boat parade, then the Governor and other dignitaries will make speeches. The shallop will be on display 10-6 both July 14 and 15. I helped to plan an exhibit table for my employer, one of many Annapolis organizations that is welcoming the JS400 crew to Maryland's capital. I'll be helping with set-up today so I may stay downtown for the fanfare. Then tomorrow I work throughout the day helping to the staff the table along with volunteers. After reading the crew's journal I have become more aware of the significance of this recreation. There is something to be learned about the Bay now, as well as something to be taught about its past.

Storytime

We received our first major snow/ice storm of the season last Friday. While the snow generally doesn't remain on the ground very long in Maryland's Decembers, the cold weather seems to have set in for good.

'Tis the time of the year when I love to read, to listen to, and to tell stories. Something about wintry weather makes me want to find a fireplace to curl up beside while listen to tall tales. Not that I have a fireplace, mind you. Instead I light candles and our Solstice tree lights to give our little apartment by the woods a soft glow. M. and I have made it our tradition in recent years to read each other stories on or about Winter Solstice. We've enjoyed reading aloud to each other in wintertime so much that we even began reading favorite children's books to each other during the ugly part of the summer when both of us felt oppressed by the double-whammy of 90-degree heat and high humidity. We read the entire Harry Potter series to each other, Garth Nix's novel Lirael, and now we are on the second chapter of Nix's most recent novel.

Part of my current spiritual path of studies includes practicing my storytelling skills. I have received some good guidance on how to do this. One technique is to create a "mind map" of the story, remembering scenes that need to be included in your story. Storytelling is an interactive artform. When you tell the story at one time and place, it will never be the same if you tell it again. That is because with each telling, the story's mood, your voice, the audience will be different. Live storytelling is performance art. Props work best when they are few and used only for special dramatic effect. A good storyteller can express the events and describe the scene in such a way so as to transport you into the tale.

At the beginning of November I challenged two of my friends who are also learning to be bards through the same course I am taking. I suggested that each of us select one story and learn to tell it aloud before the next time we meet (which is this upcoming weekend). I stated that the story might be anything real or fantasy of their choosing. It also need not be a very long-winded story, but one that we can tell from the heart. They accepted the challenge.

It took me several weeks to find my story to tell. At first, I did some searching around online for animal tales. I'm very fond of legends and old fables with animals for main characters. Yet the story that emerged in my mind, was not an animal tale. I was driving down the road one evening and all of a sudden began to sing an old Scottish tune that I learned from my music teacher, Mr. Kaplan, in kindergarten, The Skye Boat Song. That song is of Bonnie Prince Charlie's escape from Scotland after the dreadful Battle of Culloden, where the Prince Charles Edward Staurt's army of Jacobites was crushed by the English. Since I've been attempted to learn about my heritage, it occurred to me that my idle singing of this tune had within it the potential for a great story to tell.

I began to read my books on Scottish history and find website relating to the Young Prentender, as Charlie is called. I needed an angle. Then finally I happened to see a link to one of the "minor characters" of the Prince's story on The Scotsman's Heritage and Culture webpage: Flora MacDonald. To my mind, Flora is actually the critical character in the tale of the Bonnie Prince because it is she who smuggles him (dressed as her Irish serving maid, "Betty") across to the Isle of Skye by boat. Flora also paid the price for her actions: the English Government exiled and deported her to North America with her co-conspirator husband. Without Flora's bravery, the Prince might never made it out of Scotland alive. So I have decided that the tale will be at last told from Flora's perspective. Would she judge herself harshly or proudly for having made her decision? Was fully willing and loyal to the Jacobite cause, or did she harbor doubts only partly assuaged by entreaties from her husband and father?

I don't think I will write my version of the tale down just yet. No, I think, I'll keep it as a tale to be told aloud for now. I still have some homework to do this week in order to be ready to tell Flora's story. Perhaps the first telling will not be so good. Yet with each time I tell the story I know I'll get better at it. I can feel that Jacobean lore and literature holds a great many storytelling treasures for me to uncover.