Women Warriors (aka A Moment of Blatant Self-Promotion)
Those of you who’ve been hanging out here in the Margins for a while now are well aware that I’ve spent much of the last two years* working on a global history of women warriors. Now it’s mostly out of my hands. (Though I did get a second round of copy edits this afternoon. The folks at Beacon Press don’t mess around when it comes to getting books right.)
Women Warriors is scheduled to release on February 26. Even though February feels like it’s right around the corner from my perspective, I realize that in fact it is seven months away. (Not that I’m counting or anything.) Between now and then there will be a pre-order campaign with some cool book swag,** some giveaways, etc. I’ll share big news here, but if you want the little news, details about speaking gigs, etc., you might want to sign up for my newsletter HERE.
I’ll try not to be all “My Book! My Book!” in your faces until closer to publication. But I make no promises, because My Book! My Book!
*Or four decades, depending on when you start counting.
**In fact, Women Warriors is now available for pre-order at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and your local independent bookstore. Pre-orders are important to authors because they are important to book sellers, who use them as a gauge of how popular a book is going to be and how many copies they should order.
History on Display: The Vinland Map
On October 11, 1965, just a few hours before Columbus Day,* Yale University announced that it owned a newly discovered map of the world, dating from approximately 1440 AD, that showed an island named Vinland, the Vinilandia insula of the Icelandic sagas, off the coast of North America. The timing was not accidental: if the map was real it proved that the Vikings had landed in North America several centuries before Christopher Columbus.** Indignant Italian Americas denounced the map as a fraud. Scholars at the time debated the map’s authenticity and provenance, with an emphasis on technical aspects of its production and condition. (Think ink composition and the placement of wormholes.)
My friend Karin and I were lucky enough to see the map itself during our visit to Mystic Seaport. Science Myth & Mystery: The Vinland Map Saga is a fascinating look at a subject where public opinion, “comic book history,” and scholarship collide. The small excellent exhibit considers the history of the map as an artifact, the work of the scholars who attempted to authenticate it, the brouhaha that surrounded Yale’s very public and consciously controversial announcement, public reactions to the announcement and the archaeological finds at L’Anse aux Meadows. The most interesting aspect of the exhibit from my perspective was the timeline showing the different scientific tests applied to the document over the last fifty years as new technologies became available, ending with new tests performed by a team at Yale’s Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage earlier this year. (For those of you with scientific minds, one of the new tests is called “reflectance transformation imaging“.)
The final conclusion? The map is a forgery but the Vikings did reach North America.
Science Myth & Mystery: The Vinland Map Saga will be on display at Mystic Seaport through September 30. Well worth the time if you’re in the general area.
*Which at the time was a minor holiday that had not yet become a focus for discussions about social justice, racism, etc. That would soon change.
**In fact, archaeological discoveries at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland had confirmed the presence of Viking settlements in North America the year before. But no one had deliberately rubbed Columbus’s nose in it. Personally, I don’t see that one achievement lessens the other.
***An unplanned piece of history bugg luck.
From the Archives: In which I consider soccer, or at least books about soccer
I first ran this in 2014. Looks like it’s time to run it again.
The World Cup is over and some of you are suffering from soccer* withdrawal. Unlikely though it may seem to those of you who know me in real life,I have some reading suggestions that will let you feed both lingering soccer mania and history curiosity.
Franklin Foer’s How Soccer Explains The World: An {Unlikely} Theory of Globalization looks at soccer as both an international phenomenon and as rooted in “local cultures local blood feuds and even local corruption”. (Think British soccer hooligans, the role of soccer in the Balkan Wars of 1990s, and the success of Jewish soccer clubs in 1920s Europe.) How Soccer Explains the World is a wonderful piece of social/historical reporting and totally accessible for the soccer-challenged.
David Goldblatt’s The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer directly addresses historian Eric Hobsbawm’s observation that “The twentieth century was the American century in every way but one: sport.” Goldblatt describes his work as the only history of the modern world in which the United States is “a transatlantic curiosity rather than a central attraction.” Beginning with ancient games involving a man kicking a ball and ending with soccer in Africa post-Cold War, The Ball is Round is an exhaustive account of history as a game, with a heavy emphasis on “American exceptionalism”.*** At 900 pages, this is a work for the hard-core soccer fan, or perhaps someone with ulterior motives for learning more about the game.
A lagniappe: Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch is a brilliant account of one fan’s relationship to the game, set in a specific time and space. This one is worth reading even if you are sports averse.
Score!
*Or football, depending on where you kick the ball.
**A term normally applied to the relative failure of socialism in America. And now that I think of it, there are some interesting parallels between the distribution of soccer and socialism in America. Any social scientists out there looking for a research topic?