1947: A Year in Review
Looking back, 1947 was a year marked by fresh starts and tidying up loose ends from World War II.
India received its independence from Britain after almost two hundred years of imperial domination--the beginning of the end of European imperialism. Unfortunately, Partition, the division of British India into the two sovereign states of India and Pakistan was badly planned. No one anticipated the massive and disorderly movements of refugees driven by fear across the new borders or the violence that followed them: estimates run as high as fifteen million. The transfer was marked by sectarian murders, opportunistic murders, rape, and death from disease in makeshift refugee camps across the subcontinent. A long way from the tactic of non-violent, non-cooperation that shaped India's independence movement
Harry S. Truman gave a speech to Congress that is often considered the official start of the Cold War. The heart of the speech, later known as the "Truman Doctrine," committed the United States to support free peoples in the struggle against communist totalitarianism, thereby putting us on the road to the Korea and Vietnam Wars.
Fearful that communists would infiltrate American trade unions,Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act, formally the Labor-Management Relations Act, over President Truman's veto. Taft-Hartley unwound labor rights established in earlier bills.
George C. Marshall unveiled the basic framework of the Marshall Plan, which would dedicate billions of dollars into rebuilding Western Europe. Congress would pass the plan in 1948, in part because of the fear of--you guessed it--communist expansion into Europe.
Not everything that happened in 1947 related to the decline of empire and the rise of the Cold War. On a smaller scale:
Airman Chuck Yeager made the first supersonic flight.
Both Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire and The Diary of Anne Frank made Americans cry and reminded us about the importance of relying on the kindness of strangers now and then.
Bell Lab scientists invented the transistor and Edwin Land pioneered the Polaroid camera--two inventions that would shape the lives of the Baby-Boomers.
Teen-aged shepherds discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest extant Hebrew documents, in the Qumran Caves on the northwest shore of, well, the Dead Sea (duh), transforming our understanding of history and religion in the region.
Thor Heyerdahl sailed across the Pacific from Peru to Polynesia on a balsa wood raft, the Kon-Tiki, which proved it was possible for ancient people to have made the voyage. Which is not the same as proving they did. 
Lucy Parsons: Goddess of Anarchy
Several years ago ,* I wrote my first book for adults: The Everything Guide to Understanding Socialism. It is a history of socialism, from its roots in Utopian idealism through Tea Party accusations that Barack Obama is a socialist.** I spent considerable time reading and writing about socialism and anarchism in America prior to World War I. And I'm pretty sure I never read a word about Lucy Parsons, a famous (or infamous, depending on your politics) socialist/anarchist leader and speaker whose career lasted from Reconstruction to the New Deal . As her recent biographer, Jacqueline Jones, makes clear, its not entirely my fault. Parsons's story has been obscured by that of her husband, by her own choice to re-write her past, and by the general tendency to file notable women in the "let's forget about this" drawer of history.
Jones untangles Parsons's story in Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical. She gives us a picture of a life filled with contradictions: a love story between a former slave and a former Confederate soldier, an African-American activist who focused on the cause of white labor in American cities, the "professional widow" of one of the martyrs of the Haymarket Square riots who took lovers after her husband's death, a social reformer with a passion for fashion, a fiery public persona with a well disguised private life. With an eye for the telling detail and a vibrant writing style,*** Jones sets Parsons against a richly rendered background of American society in the years between the Civil War and the Great Depression, seen through the lens of the changing politics of race and class.
Parsons emerges as difficult, complicated, and not entirely admirable. But while Jones' depiction of Parsons is not always a comfortable read, it is always a fascinating one.
We're featuring Jacqueline Jones and Goddess of Anarchy on Non-Fiction Fans**** next week. If you're interested in five days of Q & A and a book giveaway, come on over.
*2011. A simpler time in what feels like the distant past.
** My basic take on this was and remains that if professed socialists say Obama is not a socialist, we should take their word for it.
***There's a reason Jones won the Bancroft Prize and is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist.
****Which you were previous introduced to as Illuminate. We had to change the name because 1)it didn't say clearly what the group is and 2)it was attracting crackpots.
1517: A Year in Review
On October 31, 1517, one man with a hammer changed the course of history. Thirty-three-year-old German monk Martin Luther nailed a list of 95 complaints about the practices of the Catholic church to a church door in Wittenberg--the sixteenth century equivalent of pinning them to a community bulletin board. (Or perhaps, as some scholars argue, the church door story is comic-book history* and Luther simply sent out copies to church officials.) Whether nailed or mailed, Luther was hoping to start a conversation within the church. Instead he started the Protestant Reformation.
Historically-aware media outlets highlighted Luther and that church door throughout October. But the distribution of his 95 theses wasn't the only event to change the world in 1517. Here are a few other high and low points of 1517:
- The Ottoman Turks defeated the Mamluks of Egypt, thereby adding Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula to their empire and transforming the Ottoman state from a kingdom at the edge of the Islamic world to a mighty empire, with control over the Muslim holy places at Mecca and Medina
- The Portuguese, also in the process of building an empire, established a trading post in what was then Ceylon and sailed all the way to Canton: making the world just a little bit smaller.
On a smaller scale:
- Italian physician/poet Girolamao Fracastoro suggested that fossils are the petrified remains of once-living organisms--still a controversial subject in some circles.
- A new luxury good, coffee, made its way to Europe.
- Moroccan explorer Leo Africanus (ca 1494-1554) traveled to Timbuktu and back. His travel account, Description of Africa, was the West's primary source on the Islamic world for some 400 years.
- On May 1, remembered as Evil May Day, artisans and apprentices rioted in London because they believed foreigners were taking their jobs. The story is complicated but the short version is that times were hard and the foreign-born minority who lived in London were a visible scapegoat. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
*The storybook version of history that we learn as kids and carry in out heads and hearts as adults.