Are You Shakespearienced? Roundup

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"How should Shakespeare really sound?" Telegraph, March 12, 2012

Inspired by working with Kevin Spacey, Sir Trevor Nunn has claimed that American accents are "closer" than

contemporary English to the accents of those used in the Bard's day.

The eminent Shakespearean scholar John Barton has suggested that Shakespeare's accent would have sounded to modern ears like a cross between a contemporary Irish, Yorkshire and West Country accent.>>>

"Was Macbeth Irish? Juliet from Cornwall?" Guardian, March 18, 2012

If you listen to a new CD that tries to capture the original pronunciation of Shakespeare, you might think so.

I'm not a great fan of "authenticity" in Shakespeare: partly because tastes change, and partly because we can never be absolutely sure how the plays once looked and sounded. But a new 75-minute British Library CD, seeking to recapture the original pronunciation of Shakespeare through a selection of scenes and speeches, has a certain historical curiosity.>>>


Nick Clark, "Is this a dagger which I see before me? Historian to explore Shakespearean violence," Independent, March 21, 2012

Rising knife crime in London, youth gangs out of control, and helpless lawmakers attempting to curb the fighting by banning certain types of blade. It may sound familiar, but this was the London of William Shakespeare's day, and gives an insight into one of his most enduring love stories.>>>

Sarah Fay, "How to Talk to Shakespeare, H.G. Wells, and Emily Dickinson," The Atlantic, March 14, 2012

Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris envisions the ultimate creative writing program. In the film, Gil Pender, an American screenwriter and struggling novelist, travels back in time and gleans writing advice from literary luminaries living in Paris during the 1920s and the fin de siècle. Pender is a 21st-century, wannabe writer, a Hollywood hack who is awkward and uncertain in the presence of iconic figures like Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. When Pender asks how he can become a "real" writer, Stein tells him to strengthen the plot of his novel. Hemingway—speaking in "clean," "honest" prose—recommends he overcome his fear of death. We never find out if Pender makes it, but many of us would prefer his experience to that of enrolling in one of America's 300 graduate writing programs: no silly workshops, no other aspiring writers, and direct instruction from "true"—i.e., deceased—masters of the craft.>>>

17th-Century English History Roundup

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James Weeks, "Diggers for victory: 17th-century radicals inspire choral music," Guardian, June 9, 2011

As we wallow in our 21st-century mires of recession, environmental destruction and gluttonous children of a selfish and profoundly unequal society we seem to have no serious intention of reforming, it's salutary to read these bracing words from a distant, more hopeful time. In 1649, as parliament consolidated its triumph in the civil war and Charles I mounted the scaffold, Gerrard Winstanley and his band of True Levellers climbed St George's Hill, near Weybridge in Surrey, and began digging to cultivate the earth for food.>>>

"Nameberry: 12 best virtue names," Kansas City Star, June 13, 2011

In the 17th century, for some of the most puritanical of the Puritans, even biblical and saints' names were not pure enough to bestow on their children, and so they turned instead to words that embodied the Christian virtues. These ranged from extreme phrases like Sorry-for-sin and Search-the-Scriptures (which, understandably, never came into general use) to simpler virtue names like Silence and Salvation.>>>

Antoinette Kelly, "English aristocracy consumed the skulls of Irish killed in battle," Irish Central, May 26, 2011

The skulls of Irish who lost their lives during 16th and 17th century battles were ground up and consumed by the English aristocracy, as it was believed they could cure illnesses and heal wounds.

The claim is made in a new book "Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires", by the British academic Dr Richard Sugg, who is a lecturer at Durham University.>>>


George Webster, "Real 'pirate of the Caribbean' was funded by London elite," CNN World, May 25, 2011

Forget peg-legs, parrots and eye-patches -- the real pirates of the Caribbean were much more complicated.

According to an eye-opening new exhibition near the bank of London's river Thames, a number of Britain's most notorious buccaneers colluded with high-profile politicians and businessmen during the "golden age" of piracy in the 17th century.>>>

Franklin W. Knight, "The fading allure of revolution in the Caribbean," Jamaica Observer, June 8, 2011

WITH all the political agitation throughout the Arab World, there is resurgence in the use of the word revolution to describe the aspirations of the restless ones. But with few exceptions such as Venezuela, Ecuador and Cuba, revolution hardly emerges in the political discourse in the Americas. That is a pity, especially among Caribbean folk. After all, the Caribbean constitutes the region par excellence for revolutionary change. . . .

By the end of the 17th century, the word had passed into all the European vernacular languages. The English parliament used the phrase, "Glorious Revolution" to describe its overthrow of the Catholic King, James II, in 1688 and his replacement by the Dutch Protestant, William III of Orange-Nassau and his English queen, Mary II of England. But monarchical replacement hardly constitutes revolutionary change. This so-called "Glorious Revolution" was more a coup d'état than any profound change, so Jamaicans need not worry about replacing their monarchy with a republic.>>>

Medieval History Roundup

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Emma Sykes, "History buffs who know their stuff: Re-enacting history," ABC Brisbane, June 8, 2011

It's the closest you'll ever come to Knights, Roman Legionaries, and Napoleon's men in the 21st century, and its big business in Queensland. Each year thousands of people in Queensland alone transport themselves back to their century of choice to re-enact history.>>>

Liam Sloan, "Latin dictionary is a lifetime career," Oxford Mail, June 8, 2011

FOR 32 years, Dr David Howlett has been scouring medieval Latin texts, picking out unusual words and compiling them in one of the world’s most extraordinary dictionaries.

But, if that sounds like a lifetime’s work, it’s just a fraction of the time spent by scholars on a monumental effort to record the definitions of every Latin word used in Britain for more than 1,000 years.>>>

Karen Rosenberg, "Medieval Style Files: Tailored Artistry," NYT, May 26, 2011

Can you judge a hunter by his houpeland, or a prince by his pouleines? You certainly can in “Illuminating Fashion: Dress in the Art of Medieval France and the Netherlands” at the Morgan Library & Museum. This lively show will teach you to scrutinize centuries-old manuscripts as you would a style magazine. (For the uninitiated: a houpeland is a high-waisted, drapey gown; pouleines are shoes with long, pointy toes.)>>>

Tom Payne, "Dante in Love by A N Wilson: review," Telegraph, June 6, 2011

Let me confess immediately that I haven’t read The Divine Comedy. Not much of it, anyway. I feel terrible about it, and should be punished, but, as Lucifer says somewhere, it comforts the wretched to have companions in their pain. And what companions there are. In Small World, David Lodge gives us Philip Swallow, who has had a copy of the poem with him on trips “for the last 30 years without ever having made much progress in it”.>>>

Biography Reviews Roundup

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Wesley Stace, "David Bowie, magpie and chameleon," TLS, May 25, 2011

Paul Trynka’s Starman pinpoints the moment when David Bowie made his mark: his performance on Top of the Pops in July 1972. (It also has the best title of a species that has always been extra-terrestrial – Loving the Alien, Moonage Daydream, Stardust, Hallo Spaceboy). As Bowie, playing a blue guitar, skin like china, hair bright carrot, draped his hand over his guitarist Mick Ronson’s gold lamé shoulder, he seemed on the point of kissing him.>>>

Liesl Bradner, "'Linda McCartney: Life in Photographs' reveals intimate family moments," LA Times, May 31, 2011

Before Linda McCartney ever laid eyes on her husband-to-be at the launch party for the album "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" in 1967, she was already a reputable rock 'n' roll photographer capturing candid behind-the-scenes images of late '60s artists such as the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, the Doors and Janis Joplin.>>>

Jesse Sheidlower, "Noah Webster, Founding Father," NYT, May 27, 2011

Even if he had never written his famous dictionary, Noah Webster (1758-1843) would be regarded as one of the most interesting and influential figures of the early days of the American republic. His phenomenally popular “American Spelling Book,” first published in 1783, outsold every book in the 19th century except the Bible. His relentless book promotion pioneered now common techniques like the author tour, the fabricated blurb and the aggressive stoking of manufactured controversy.>>>

Russell Baker, "The Charms of Eleanor," NYRB, June 9, 2011

In 1918, during the fourteenth year of their marriage, Eleanor Roosevelt, age thirty-three, discovered that Franklin, age thirty-six, was in love with her young social secretary, Lucy Mercer. Long afterward, Eleanor told her friend Joseph Lash that the discovery was devastating, that the bottom seemed to have dropped out of her life. Yet as her subsequent history persuasively testifies, it was also her liberating moment, a life-changing event that opened a world of glorious possibilities for a woman not too timid to explore them.>>>

Tristram Hunt, "Why Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton," Guardian, May 29, 2011

As the IMF dishes out its medicine in Lisbon, Dublin and Athens, and the limitations of neo-liberalism become more apparent, the moment is surely right for a compelling account of Karl Marx's relevance to the modern world. And in campus conferences, continuing sales of Das Kapital, and even the words of Pope Benedict XVI (moved to praise Marx's "great analytical skill"), there is a growing appreciation for Marx's predictions of globalisation, rampant capitalism, and the instability of international finance. As the Times put in the middle of the 2008 crash: "He's back!">>>

What on Earth was a “Bourbon Democrat?”

Heather Cox Richardson

Recently, I went over the importance of the Paris Commune in American politics in the 1870s with a group of teachers. As we examined James S. Pike’s 1874 The Prostrate State, written by a man consumed with concern over the Commune, one of them noticed Pike’s reference to “the Southern Bourbon.” With France firmly in mind, he asked if Pike had been referring to the French aristocracy when he used that term.

I’ve studied nineteenth-century American politics for almost thirty years, and have written extensively on the importance of the Paris Commune to American political thought, but this had never occurred to me. To the degree I even thought about it, I honestly thought the Bourbon Democrats were dubbed that because they drank bourbon.

So as soon as I got home, I set out to track down where, exactly, the name “Bourbon Democrat” came from. That search yielded an answer—of sorts—and it also revealed just how much work historians can now do on the internet.

Most general histories on-line and scholarly articles (available on JSTOR), where I started, examined the Bourbon Democrats themselves rather than their name, and dated their importance from 1875 or 1876 to the turn of the century. They noted that the Bourbons were straight-out, old-fashioned Southern Democrats who stood against black rights.

But Pike used the term in his book in 1874. Where did he get it?

To find out, I started where I almost always start a nineteenth-century search: with the New York Times (available at the Historical New York Times). That turned up surprising little from this continent. There were a large number of stories from the very beginning of the newspaper’s publication in 1851, though, referring to the Bourbons of France and Spain. Obviously, “Bourbon” was a term with which Americans would have been very comfortable, and which they would have associated with the European aristocrats. (There were also a few advertisements for bourbon whiskey).

The first time I found a reference to “Bourbon Democrats” in the New York Times was in 1872. It was in an article that looked to the upcoming presidential election and attacked the Democrats by arguing that the “Bourbon Democrats” were the same men who had in 1864 been strong advocates of peace with the South and a return to pre-war conditions. They were essentially unchanged, still firm Confederates. (New York Times, May 8. 1872, p. 4.)

From the New York Times I went to the Chicago Tribune, where I found the term “bourbons” used in an editorial in May 1872. There, though, the term was used for extremists on both sides. The editorial complained about how “bourbons” in both parties were hurting the nation. (Chicago Tribune, May 31, 1872, p. 4).

So far I had discovered that, in the same month, the New York Times had used the term as if its meaning were established and the Chicago Tribune had used it as if its meaning were still malleable. Clearly, it had emerged shortly before May 1872.

My next stop was the New York Daily Tribune. Its editor, Horace Greeley, was a political animal and could even have invented the term, I figured. The New York Daily Tribune is on that incredible Library of Congress website, Chronicling America. On March 5, 1872, Greeley published the first salvo in James Pike’s attack on Republican Reconstruction policies in the South. In this article, titled “A State in Ruins,” Pike referred to South Carolina’s antebellum leaders as an “aristocracy,” before going on to argue that those leaders were now being trodden underfoot by black upstarts. This was the same part of his argument that used the term “Southern Bourbons” in his book—the one the teacher identified. This put aristocracy and “Bourbons” together.

Was there an earlier reference to “Bourbons” that might clarify why Pike used the term?

Perhaps. In May 1871, an editorial in the New York Daily Tribune identified as Bourbon Democrats a faction of the Democratic Party in Bourbon County, Kentucky. According to the editorial, the faction was made up of ex-Rebels who had not fought in the war, and who still spouted extremism. They refused to recognize the 14th or the 15th Amendments to the Constitution, and abhorred black voting. Gaye Keller Bland, in The Kentucky Encyclopedia—where I went next—had a slightly different take on this group, saying they took their name not from Bourbon County (although they were centered there) but from the House of Bourbon that “held to royal tradition after the French Revolution.” Bourbon County, though, according to the article above Bland’s in the encyclopedia, was named for the French royal family.

So was it a county political faction or the French Bourbons who prompted the name Bourbon Democrat? A final newspaper article might provide the answer. On September 20, 1871, the Louisiana Democrat (also at Chronicling America) stood firm against the Democrats who wanted to accept the Reconstruction amendments and move forward. It made the term a symbol of the entire Old South when it said “. . . we believe that when the old Bourbon banner, torn, tattered and fragrant with the blood of a hundred thousand heroes, kisses the sunlight again, victory will nestle in its folds.” (Louisiana Democrat, September 20, 1871, p. 3)

So my best guess is that the term began by identifying a Democratic faction in Kentucky, but quickly got picked up as a reference to the French royal family that stood against the French Revolution. In 1871, Southern Democrats described themselves as the bastions of old tradition and culture, standing in the storm of socialism unleashed by the dregs of society. It only made sense to pick up the limited Kentucky name and use it more widely to describe those who held to the Old South as Bourbons. This was precisely the sentiment of Pike’s The Prostrate State.

So, in answer to that teacher’s question: while Pike’s work in general referenced the Paris Commune, in The Prostrate State he used the term “Bourbons” to invoke those who stood against the French Revolution. (Of course, the two French events tended to run together in Americans’ minds.) Two things are even more certain: that many of the Bourbon Democrats drank bourbon was clearly incidental, and that you can do more research now from home than you could do even a few years ago in most libraries.

Americanisms, Britishisms, and History

Randall Stephens

I approve Jefferson's word 'belittle' and hope it will be incorporated into our American Dictionaries—We ought to have an American Dictionary: after which I should be willing to lay a tax of an eagle a volume upon all English Dictionaries that should ever be imported. -John Adams to Benjamin Rush, 1812

Jan Freeman recently wrote about British vs. American usage in the Boston Globe. "Just last month," she noted, "the Guardian’s David Marsh devoted his Mind Your Language blog to readers’ complaints about 'ugly Americanisms.' 'Recent examples include pony up, mojo, sledding, duke it out, brownstones and suck,' said one correspondent." I'd throw in dude as well.

Over at the Daily Mail, others complained about creeping Americanisms like "autopsy for post-mortem; burglarized instead of burgled; filling out forms instead of filling them in; fries for chips; chips for crisps; and food to go as opposed to take away." A tetchy lot, that.

It goes both ways, says Freeman. "Some Americans, it’s true, dislike some Britishisms — go missing and gobsmacked leap to mind—but few complainers, in my experience, object to (or even recognize) these terms as British. It’s their novelty or illogic or 'ugliness,' not their origin, that annoys."

I like Americanisms. I'll never say that so and so went "in hospital." I'll probably also never utter phrases like: "He’s doing my head in, he is"; "Know what I mean?"; or "Take a pew."

All this talk about British and American usage made me reach for my old worn copy of Americanisms: A Dictionary of Selected Americanisms on Historical Principles, edited by Mitford Mathews (Chicago, 1951, 1966). Language tells us something about the patchwork, polyglot quality of American history. America's peculiar words also shed light on westward expansion, national conflicts, political struggles, subcultures, and pastimes. (An interesting history class exercise might involve compiling a long list of words that are commonly used in the United States, which first appeared in dictionaries in the 19th century. Students could then track down the origins of the words.)

Mathews' dictionary includes Africanisms like "tabby," and a range of Native American and Mexican American words: tamale, incommunicado, schenectady, scuppaug . . .

Here's a collection of interesting entries.

Now I just have to figure out how to slip "skunkery" into a casual conversation with a Brit.

Dirty Words of the Academy

Randall Stephens

This past weekend I was down in Atlanta for the American Academy of Religion meeting. The sessions I attended on history were dynamic and produced some terrific discussions and debates.

The field of religious studies tends to be far more grounded in theory than history, as far as I can tell. (Is it true that all "studies" programs are theory driven? Peruse the conference programs of the AAR and the AHA. Do a word search for "performative" and "postcoloniality." See also the pluralization of concepts: "hybridities," "boundaries," "theologies.")

As I listened to several papers in various sessions at the AAR I thought about how scholars in the humanities employ certain words to discredit a range of views. So, I've compiled a list of dirty words. This list could certainly be extended.

Essentialist
Homogeneous
Dualistic
Static
Monocausal
Top down
Metaphysical
Teleological
Simple
Uncomplicated
Exceptionalist
Bianary

What does it mean that historians and humanists in other fields use these words almost always as code for bad or wrong?

Naming Names and So-and-So the So-and-So

Randall Stephens

James Davidson's essay last month in the London Review of Books got me thinking about names. ("Flat-Nose, Stocky and Beautugly," LRB, 23 September 2010.) He spans over English history, coming away with nuggets like this: "Boys’ names remain less susceptible to fashion – Jack has been number one for many years now, while Olivia has had to contend for top spot with Emily, Jessica and Grace – and there remains a tendency towards the classics. But the classics have been redefined more classically."

The ancients, writes Davidson, had a real flare for descriptive, colorful names: "Ancient Greek names were much closer to those of pre-Conquest than post-Conquest England. Just as we translate Native American names such as Tashunka Witko (‘Crazy Horse’), Tatanka Iyotake (‘Sitting Bull’), Woqini (‘Hook Nose’) and Tashunka Kokipapi (‘Young Man Afraid of His Horses’), and even those of the ancient Maya (King ‘Jaguar Paw II’, ‘Smoking Frog’, now renamed ‘Fire Is Born’), so we could refer to famous Greeks as ‘He Who Loves Horses’ (Philip), ‘Masters (with) Horses’ (Hippocrates), ‘Flat-Nose’ (Simon), ‘Stocky’ (Plato), ‘Famed as Wise’ (Sophocles)."

It reminded me of some of the fun, bizarre, or just downright interesting names I've encountered in the American South. One spring some years back my wife and I were on an Appalachian work trip with our Episcopal church. We heard of a local with the mouth-full name: El Canaan Lonson Tonson Tiny Buster Dobson. I hope he had a nickname. (You can read about the kudzu-like profusion of Billy Bobs, Peggy Sues, and Bobbie Joes in Dixie in The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Volume 5: Language, eds., Michael Montgomery and Ellen Johnson.)

Something as simple as a name can tell historians, linguists, and anthropologists interesting details about a nation, a people, or a family. What do the most popular names of our day say about society? Here are the 2009 winners courtesy of the Social Security Administration: Jacob, Isabella, Ethan, Emma, Michael, Olivia, Alexander, Sophia, William, Ava, Joshua, Emily, Daniel, Madison, Jayden, Abigail, Noah, Chloe, Anthony, Mia. Signs of a neoclassical revival? A renewed interest in history? With the exception of Mia and Jayden, these have the ring of the early-19th century.

Some memorable royal nicknames:

Peter the Great
Julian the Apostate
Sigurd Magnusson the Bad
Edward the Black Prince
Coloman the Bookish
Vlad III the Impaler
Charles VI the Mad
Halfdan of Romerike the Mild
Ethelred II the Unready
Eric VIII the Pagan
Pippin III the Short
Maria II the Good Mother
Ragnar Lodbrok Hairy Breeches
Olav III the Silent
Dmitry of Tver the Terrible Eyes
Arnulf III the Unlucky
Harald Hildetand Wartooth
Afonso II the Fat
Sweyn I Forkbeard
Henry I the Fowler
Fortun I the Monk
Edgar Ætheling the Outlaw

See more: Albert Romer Frey, Sobriquets and Nicknames (Boston, 1887).

Ye Very Olde English

Randall Stephens

Ammon Shea's enlightening piece on a comprehensive Old English Dictionary has been making the rounds from Humanities magazine, to Arts and Letters, to the Chronicle, and beyond. ("Violent but Charming: The Dictionary of Old English Explores the Brutality and Elegance of Our Ancestral Tongue," Humanities (Jan/Feb 2010.) Rightly so. Shea's essay is a fun romp through the twisty, turny (er, higgledy piggledy) story of Old English and its fastidious scholars. Why devote so much time and energy to a moribund tongue, some might ask. Is there an extensive dictionary of Nesili?

"The [Dictionary of Old English] corpus is comprehensive," observes Shea, "and contains about four million words, which makes it almost five times the size of the collected works of Shakespeare. It represents at least one copy of every piece of surviving Anglo-Saxon writing, although in some cases the corpus has more than a single copy of a work if it is in a different dialect or from a different date."

The essay made me further appreciate the importance of the evolution of language to history. Where's the Society for More Philological Studies in History when you need it? Trapped in the 1890s, maybe? Anyhow, historical and comparative linguistics, along with etymology, shed much light on the peoples and cultures of the past. Will it make the average history student fall asleep sitting upright? Not sure about that.

Take Shea's musings on the meaning and context of OE for example:

Browsing through a small section of the alphabet, I happened across gederednes, derian, gederian, gederod, deriendlic, deriendnes, derung, gedeþed, and gedigan, all of which are words that have to do with injuring, harming, or killing (with the exception of the last word, which means ‘to survive’). But lest you come away with the idea that

the speakers of this language were linguistically brutish, I would draw your attention to a word that appears shortly after all of these bruising terms: digollice.

Digollice is one of those words of which any language should be proud. It is elegant yet robust, clear yet multi-faceted—a description that perhaps sounds like that of an overpriced wine, but which is apt nonetheless. Among the meanings of this single word are the following: in a manner intended to avoid public attention, stealthily or furtively, in a manner that is unnoticed, with a lack of ostentation, in hiding, secluded in monastic life, spoken in a low or soft voice, spoken with circumspection or restraint, whispering slander, relating to secret thoughts of inward affliction, obscure or requiring interpretation, and a handful of others that I’ll let you find on your own.

Robert MacNeil's unsurpassed 9-part 1986 PBS series The Story of English is perfect for premodern and early modern history courses. (I've used it in my colonial America class to explore the divide between southern and northern accents, West Country vs. East Anglia. Watch selections from many of the episodes here.)