Hero of the Empire
I don’t always get to books when they first come out.* And that’s not a bad thing. Speaking as a writer, I want people to continue to find and read my books long after their publication date.** Speaking as a reader, I love digging into the backlist of authors who have newly crossed my path.
All of which is a long way of saying I recently pulled Candice Millard’s Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill off the shelves where it has aged since it’s release in 2016. And is so often the case when I am late to the party, I wonder what took me so long. Because it is so very, very good.
Hero of the Empire is a slice-of-life biography: it tells the story of Winston Churchill’s capture by the Boer army in 1899, his escape, and his journey to safety through hundreds of miles of enemy territory, with a great deal of reliance on the kindness of strangers. Millard puts the story in the context not only of the Boer War but of Churchill’s overweening ambition. She tells the story of the escape with as much building tension as if it were a thriller—quite a trick when the reader knows full well that Churchill will succeed. (Though now that I think about it, in most thrillers we know that the hero will succeed, or at least survive. What keeps us reading is the how, not the what.) And she convinces us that this seemingly small, and in many ways totally unnecessary, incident in Churchill’s life has important repercussions for Britain’s morale at a demoralizing moment in the Boer War as well as for Churchill’s own career.
If you want a measure of just how good this book is: I am not a Churchill fan. And none of his actions in the book did anything to make me like him more than I did going in. In fact, I may have ended the book with less respect for Churchill as a human being than I had going in. And yet Millard kept me fascinated, page after page.
Her newest book, River of the Gods: Genius, Courage and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile*** is already on my TBR pile.
* What can I say? The To-Be-Read shelves runneth over and at any given moment I am juggling 10 or 12 Big Fat History Books related to the book I am currently writing.
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- The TBR shelves as of today, with books shelved two-deep
**And I am happy to say that they do. Yesterday I got an email from someone who had just finished my book on socialism, LINK which came out in 2011. (This is the way to make an author’s day.)
***About Richard Burton, the explorer. Another man I have significant doubts about.
Road Trip Through History: The Littleton Brothers Memorial
Moving south along the river, we stopped to visit the Toolesboro Mounds site, outside Wapello, Iowa, because I am a sucker for the Mound Builders and My Own True Love is a good sport. The site was interesting enough, but it paled in comparison to a memorial across the street.*
The Littleton Memorial is a privately maintained monument to the Littleton brothers, six brothers who died in the American Civil War. They are the largest single group of siblings known to have died in any single American war. One died in battle. One died of wounds sustained in battle. Two died of the illnesses that plagued army camps. One died at Andersonville Prison while a prisoner of war. One died as a result of an accident during troop movements. In some ways, their deaths present a microcosm of America’s losses in the war.
A descendant of one of the brothers was tending the grounds when we stepped across the street to look at the monument and we had a chance to talk to him. It turns out that the story of the memorial is as interesting as the story of the brother. At least to those of us who are interested in how history is preserved.
It turns out that the family had forgotten the story. It came to light again in a variation of the “lost documents in the attic” that every historian dreams of. A woman named Olive Mary (Kemp) Carey who was born in the area, subscribed to the local paper for her entire life as a way to keep in touch with her hometown. In 2010, her family reached out to the local historical society to see if any one was interested in her scrapbook. Someone there rightly said “Hell, yes” “yes please.” Going through the clippings, a member of the found a “Local History” column from 1907 talking about men from the county who had served in the war, including the tragedy of the Littleton family.
It took a lot of work to get from that clipping to today’s monument to loss and memory.
*In all fairness, The Toolesboro Mounds interpretive center does a very good job in a limited space of describing what we know about the Hopewell culture . It does an even better job of describing the discovering of the Toolesboro Mounds in the mid-nineteenth century and the changing relationship of archaeologists to the mounds over time. (It will not surprise you to learn that I was particularly taken with the career of Mildred Mott Wedel, 1912-1995, one of the women to work as a professional archeologist.) Not much new if you are familiar with mound builders sites, but a good introduction if you are not.
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Traveler’s Tip:
If you are in Burlington Iowa for breakfast, I highly recommend Jerry’s Main Lunch, where their motto is “No great adventure ever started with a salad.” The posted menu is limited, but within minutes of ordering the “regulars” sitting next to us at the counter let us know that there were lots of “secret” variations available. I ordered the original “hot mess”. It was so delicious that I’d have gone back for lunch if we hadn’t been on our way out of town.
Edith Wharton’s Morocco, A Literary Pilgrimage, a guest post by Stacy Holden
Today I’m going to give you a little break from the Great River Road. We’re still going to be on the road, just further afield. Morocco in fact, courtesy of writer, historian and traveler Stacy E. Holden.
Stacy is a history professor at Purdue University. Her published works focus on everyday life in the Arab world as well as Western representations of the Middle East and North Africa. She has written on historic preservation, UNESCO heritage sites, and even post-9/11 romance novels set in imaginary Arab kingdoms. She is now working on a book about how Edith Wharton shaped American attitudes toward the Middle East and North Africa.
I don’t remember who introduced us to each other, but thank you whoever you are. We’ve been talking about history, writing, and travel ever since.
Take it away, Stacy!
In 1917, Edith Wharton traveled to Morocco for five weeks, and three years later she published In Morocco. Even today, her travel account reads like “Top Ten Things To Do in Morocco 2022.”
When Wharton disembarked in Tangier, this North African kingdom had been a French colony for only five years. In Morocco was the first account of colonial rule in Morocco by an American author and for an American audience. This information is key to understanding the importance of this book. Wharton backs French colonial rule, even though the US, first under Republican President William Howard Taft and then Democrat Woodrow Wilson opposed France’s imperial expansion.
Wharton was an official guest of the colonial administration, and French scholars and officers accompanied her everywhere she went. They took her to colorful bazaars and spice markets, medieval mosques and ancient mausoleums, walled cities of the premodern era, and even a purported pirate lair. Wharton’s traveled southward from Tangier, stopping in Ksar el Kabir, Rabat, Salé, Casablanca, Meknes, Volubulis, Moulay Idriss and Fez before reaching Marrakesh, her ultimate destination.
The travelogue appeared in bookstores three years after her trip, in November 1920. The Age of Innocence was also published that month, a novel that secured Wharton’s literary fame. The fictional account of Gilded Age Society in New York City epitomizes Wharton’s keen eye for small details.
But if observation were a superpower, Morocco would be Wharton’s kryptonite. Her first-hand account of Morocco conveys a fantasy. Instead of realistically portraying life in colonial Morocco, Wharton claims, “Everything that the reader of the Arabian Nights expects to find is here.” She never discusses the hardships of colonized Moroccans or the war in Europe. Instead Wharton refers all-too-often to djinns, flying carpets, harem ladies, and “a princess out of an Arab fairy tale.”
As a professional historian, my research focuses on the modern Middle East and North Africa. I have traveled back and forth to Morocco since the late-1990s and lived full-time in Rabat, the capital, between 1999 and 2002. My travels have led me to read and visit all the sites Wharton describes.
Wharton’s travelogue does not accurately portray life in Morocco—her descriptions are fantastical and often false—yet Wharton fans and scholars should not neglect this work. In Morocco sheds light on what made Wharton tick as a writer, why she endorsed French imperialism, and how literary figures like Wharton—a woman without a government position—shaped American ideas about the world.
Amanda Mouttaki and I have decided to organize a ten-day tour of Morocco together, retracing Wharton’s footsteps. Amanda is a travel planner based in Marrakesh, and our trip merges her expertise in tourism with my own knowledge of American literature and Moroccan history.
Morocco is my “second home,” and I want to share my knowledge of it with travelers interested in the experiences of Edith Wharton and the history of the Arab world.* I also look forward to conversations with travelers, who, with their fresh sets of eyes, raise unexpected questions that can foster interesting conversations and thus allow me to reflect and process information in new ways.
At the end of the day, I hope we can all sit down and talk about what Wharton said in In Morocco. She wrote, “Everything that the reader of the Arabian Nights expects to find is here.” By the end of our ten-day tour, you will be as able to explain and critique this statement as I, merging knowledge of local sights, Wharton’s life and travels, and critical analysis among member of our small group.
For more information, you can click on this link. I look forward to seeing you in November 2022.
*Don’t get me wrong, there will be time for decompressing poolside with mimosas.
[Pamela here: I would sign up for this trip in a heartbeat if I didn’t have a book deadline hanging over my head.]