The Unruly City
Looking over past blog posts, I realize that I’ve reviewed a number of books about cities.* That’s because cities fascinate me: physically and culturally. I love exploring the infrastructures, neighborhoods, markets, hidden corners and distinctive styles of a new city. And I love books where the city itself is a central part of the story.
In The Unruly City, historian Michael Rapport considers how three cities—Paris, London and New York—became sites of social struggle in the period of the American and French Revolutions. He looks not simply at the events that occurred in each city, but how the cities as physical and social entities helped shape those events and were in turn transformed by revolutionary action.
Rapport looks at moments of revolution, familiar and unfamiliar, through the lens of neighborhoods, buildings, physical icons, and demographics. He creates a richly textured picture of eighteenth century urban life, and how it varied between the three cities. He demonstrates how the demographic composition and physical location of a neighborhood, like the Faubourg Saint-Antoine in Paris, combined to place it in the revolutionary vanguard. He examines the transformation of public places—the Common in New York, Saint George’s Field in London, the Palais-Royal in Paris—into popular gathering places for the disaffected from all social classes. He places the institutions of revolt in their meeting places—coffee houses, taverns, and, in the case of Paris, repurposed religious buildings—and explains the impact of meeting place on organization. He traces the shift of the locations of activism for London radicalism and the American and French Revolutions from established meeting halls and courts to the the places frequented by artisans and craftsmen.
In Rapport’s hands, the cities become players in the story, not simply backdrops for the turmoil of the Age of Revolutions.
*City: A Guidebook For The Urban Age remains one of my favorites. In fact, now that I think about it, I’m pulling it off the shelf to read in bits as a break from Very Serious Scholarly Books about women warriors–books for which I am eternally grateful. But sometimes I need to fluff up my brain.
Most of this review appeared previously in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
National History Day
National History Day is almost upon us. It’s the sort of event that should make history buffs stand up and shout. Maybe even dance a conga line through the local library.
I will admit, Natural History Day first came to my attention in a less than positive way. Several months ago, I began to receive emails from students asking if they could “interview” me regarding the Meiji Restoration, based on a blog post I wrote on the subject. I was flattered when I got the first email. Then I was outraged when the young woman sent me a list of many, many, many questions clearly written by an adult.* (“During the Versailles Peace Conference, why did the delegates refuse to include a clause for racial equality and how did the Japanese react to this exclusion and discrimination?” is not a question written by an eighth-grader–or at least not by the eighth-grader who wrote the original ungrammatical email.) By the fourth request I went looking on-line to find out what the *&(*^&%% this was about.
I was impressed with what I found. Founded in 1974, National History Day is the history equivalent of a nation-wide robotics contest for students from the sixth through the twelve grades. Its intention is “to provide an opportunity for students to push past the antiquated view of history as mere facts and dates and drill down into historical content to develop perspective and understanding.” (I assume that if you’re a regular reader of this blog this is a goal you can get behind.) Each year the organization chooses a theme for student research projects, which can include documentaries, exhibits, papers, websites or even performances.** If I had know about this in 1974 (or 1975. Or 1976) I would have been all over it.
On June 11, winning teams of young history nerds from across the country will converge in Washington for the final stage of the competition. This year’s theme is “Taking A Stand in History”. *** As far as I’m concerned, that means “Shin-kickers From History”. I can’t wait to find out what they come up with.
We need to know our history. We need to know other people’s history. Here’s hoping National History Day hooks a few history buffs.
*This was not my first experience at having a student try to get me to do their homework for them. About every six months some kid contacts me about a topic in my book on socialism. I am not alone in this. Grrr.
**Perhaps a Hamilton-style mini-musical?
***The Meiji Restoration is not the first thing I think of when I hear that phrase. Somewhere in California there is an eighth-grade teacher with a bee in her bonnet.
The Storied City
In 2013, Charlie English, then international news editor of The Guardian, became obsessed with the news coming out of Timbuktu. Jihadists were destroying the city’s religious monuments because they were not properly Islamic and librarians were smuggling medieval books out of the city in order to preserve them from the jihadists. He was not the first Westerner to be obsessed with the city and its treasures: throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries European explorers had tried to find their way to the legendary golden city of Africa.*
In The Storied City: The Quest for Timbuktu and the Fantastic Mission to Save Its Past, English intertwines the history of Europe’s relationship with and quest to “discover” a city that few Europeans had ever seen and first-hand reporting on the threat to Timbuktu’s historical heritage. The result is a parallel set of adventures, both of which are shaped by personal danger, the search for funding, the difficulties of traveling across the desert, the possibility of being stopped by armed bandits, the frustrations of dealing with international cultural organizations, and a passion for medieval documents.
The contemporary story will be familiar to readers of The Bad-ass Librarians of Timbuktu. English adds a layer of complexity to that story by placing it in the context 100 years of European attempts to reach a city that had taken on a mythic quality in the collective imagination and their failure to understand Timbuktu’s continued importance as a treasure trove of knowledge.
*If English leaves you with a taste for a more in-depth account of European explorers in the Sahara, I strongly recommend Steve Kemper’s A Labyrinth of Kingdoms, one of the best works of historical non-fiction that I’ve read in recent years.
Most of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.