City of the Century
Many moons ago I bought Donald Miller’s City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America as background material for a book proposal I was working on. I stopped the proposal halfway through, when I got the commission to write Mankind: the History of All of Us for the History Channel and my writing career took an unexpected leap forward.* City of the Century languished unread on the To-Be-Read shelves for almost a decade.
I recently pulled it off the shelf, thinking I would read it in conjunction with Erik Larson’s Devil in the White City as background material for my current book. I quickly abandoned Devil in the White City—I’m just too squeamish for the serial killer part of the story. But I continued reading City of the Century, even after I realized that the questions I was hoping to answer weren’t actually relevant for the book I’m writing.*** All 500+ pages of it.
Miller begins with Marquette and Joliet’s voyage of exploration and ends with the years immediately after the Columbian Exposition of 1893.**** He tells a lot of stories that I already knew, thanks in part to several decades of living in Chicago as a history nerd: , the Great Chicago Fire and its aftermath, the rise of the skyscraper, the foundation of Jane Addam’s Hull House, the Haymarket Square riot, and the Pullman strike. But he links those stories in ways that were new to me, sets them in expanded contexts, and occasionally he changed my mind about a story I thought I knew. He looks at the impact of both wealth and poverty, the growth of the city as a transportation and industrial hub, the importance of immigrant ethnic groups in Chicago politics, and the efforts of wealthy and middle-class “native-born” Protestants to de-fang such groups politically and to control and assimilate them. The result is a fascinating and rich account of Chicago’s history.
I am now eyeing another book of Miller’s that has been aging on my shelves for a while now: a history of New York in the jazz age.
*Truth be told, I probably would have abandoned the proposal anyway.**
**Pro tip: Proposals are maddening to write, but you should be excited by the material. If writing the proposal bores you, imagine how bored you’ll be writing the book.
***The start of the research process—or at least the start of my research process—is as much about finding the shape of the story and the things I don’t know as it is about finding answers. I read deeply in my central subject, but I also read widely in the period surrounding my subject. It is messy. It is not very efficient. But it works for me.
****I was disappointed to realize that he left out Jean-Baptiste Pointe DuSable.
Road Trip Through History: The Gateway Arch
I must begin by admitting that it is possible to drive from Chicago to Springfield Mo in one day. I have done it alone and with My Own True Love many times. But when faced with the prospect of the drive this past Christmas we looked at each other and admitted that we were tired. Really, really tired. Instead of sucking it up and pushing through, we decided to overnight at Saint Louis and spend a couple of hours the next day at the small museum at the base of the Gateway Arch. It was a really good decision
The museum has been completely renovated since we last visited it—thirteen years ago almost to the day. What a difference a decade makes!
The Arch is located at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, a site which had been important to America’s history since the days of Cahokia. When the location was named a National Historic Site in 1935, it was intended as a monument to westward expansion. The museum in its current form offers a more complex version of that story.
The exhibit is divided into six sections, titled
• Colonial St. Louis
• Jefferson’s Vision
• Manifest Destiny
• Riverfront Era
• New Frontiers
• Building the Arch
Despite the tone of the titles, each section, with the exception of “Building the Arch,” was designed to look beyond the story of westward expansion as it was taught in my school years. Women, people of color, and Native Americans are explicitly included, both in the form of individual biographical panels and in discussions of how the expansion of the United States into the west affected their lives and their rights. (I was stunned by a series of panels that laid out the effects of the Louisiana Purchase. Basically everyone living in the region prior to the Purchase lost rights and economic opportunities.) One of the central ideas is how experiences of westward expansion differed, summed up in a triple panel with the titles “How the West Was Won”, “The North Was Taken From Mexico”, and “The West was Stolen”.
I came away with new insights into stories I thought I knew and stories I had never heard.*
The museum is well worth a stop, even if you have no interest in taking the tram ride to the top of the arch. (Which we did not.) Be sure to leave time for the bookstore, which has an excellent selection of books that reflect the themes of the museum.
Once again, the National Park Service does not disappoint.
*How many times have I said something similar in ten years of blog posts? “So Much I Don’t Know” could be the subtitle of this blog.
Tamaris, Boccaccio, and the Importance of Being Her Father’s Daughter
15th century image of Tamaris painting an image of the Virgin Mary. Bibliothèque nationale de France
As I mentioned in my last blog post, Mary Wellesley’s The Gilded Page includes a recurring theme of women who were involved in the creation and use of medieval manuscripts, and why we know about them.
One of my favorite examples: the teeth of a middle-aged woman buried in a church-monastery complex in Germany show traces of ultramarine pigment, a very expensive paint used to color the robes of the Virgin Mary in manuscripts. She probably got the pigment on her teeth when she sucked her paintbrush to give it a fine point to allow her to work with more precision. Sometimes you have to look closely to find women who are otherwise forgotten.
Examples like this are fascinating, and resulted in lots of exclamation points and notes in the margins of my copy. But it was a different reference that sent me running down a research rabbit hole. Wellesly mentions a fifteenth century manuscript in the Bibliothèque national in France depicting a woman named Tamaris,* a painter who lived in the fifth century BCE. According to Giovanni Boccaccio,** says she was the daughter of a painter, Micon the Younger, who “scorned womanly tasks and practiced her father’s craft with remarkable talent” and was an acclaimed artist during her lifetime.
Wellesly was interested in the man grinding material to make paints on the table next to Tamaris. But it was the phrase “and practiced her father’s craft” that caught my attention. One of the recurring themes that I found in the stories of women warriors is that many of the women were encouraged by their fathers “to scorn womanly tasks” in favor of the arts of war. Evidently the same rubric can be applied to women in other fields.
Anyone have other examples to share?
*Alternatively Thamyris, Thamar and Timarete. Because why make it easy.
**In his work On Famous Women !!!! Why did I not know that this existed?
Evidently Tamaris was a popular subject. This image of her painting the goddess Diana appears in another 15th century French manuscript, De Cleres et Nobles Femmes. British Library.