From the Archives: Slouching Toward Jerusalem
I really meant to have a brand new blog post for you all today, but the one I was working expanded in all directions (six asterisked footnotes at last count) and finally turned into a tangled mess. The footnotes are currently the only readable part. Rather than leaving you without a Friday post, I’m sharing this one from July 2011, when History in the Margins was only two months old and I wasn’t sure I could find enough to write about. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a story to untangle.
I’ve been fascinated by the Crusades for several years now. Not surprising, I suppose, given my basic interest in the times and places where two cultures touch (or in the case of the Crusades, whack at) each other and change. I’ve read accounts of what the Crusades looked like from the Muslim perspective. (Barbarian invaders who didn’t take enough baths). I’ve been fascinated by the changes in Europe that made the Crusades possible. (Do not underestimate the impact of the steel-tipped heavy plow and the horse yoke.) I’ve spent a lot of time on the innovations the Crusaders brought to Europe. (Don’t get me started.) I even toured a Crusader castle in Turkey with My Own True Love, who’s pretty fascinated by the Crusades himself.
But until recently I hadn’t given much though to the place that stands at the very heart of the Crusades: Jerusalem. I “knew”, in a fuzzy general knowledge sort of way, that Jerusalem was a sacred city for Judaism, Christianity and Islam. That was enough.
Until, of course, it wasn’t.
When a recent assignment forced me to think about Jerusalem in a more detailed way, I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to start with Karen Armstrong’s Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths or Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Jerusalem, the Biography. I choose history over theology pretty much every time. But Montefiore’s book, which traces the history of Jerusalem from the time of David through the Six-Day War, looked like a dense concrete block.
I flipped a coin. History prevailed. (Here’s where I need to say something like “don’t judge a book by its cover”, or at least not by how many pages it has.)
Jerusalem, the Biography may be long, but it’s also fast-paced and smart. Montefiore’s stated goal is “to show that Jerusalem was a city of continuity and coexistence, a hybrid metropolis of hybrid buildings and hybrid people who defy the narrow categorizations that belong in the separate religious legends and nationalist narratives of later times.” He more than succeeds. Montefiore weaves together stories I thought I knew into a larger framework that illuminates them in ways I didn’t expect. Over and over I enjoyed a flutter of recognition, followed by “wow, I didn’t know that”. The book is full of vivid characters: familiar, unfamiliar, and unexpected. (I had no clue that Cleopatra had anything to do with Jerusalem. Did you?)
Montefiore is also is a master of the miscellaneous tidbit. For example: the emperor Vespasian introduced public lavatories to Rome. Today, public lavatories are still known as vespasianos. I don’t know about you, but I find this kind of stuff irresistible.
Between big revelations and fascination tidbits, my library copy was stuffed with Post-it notes by the time I reached the end of the book.
Plenty of intellectual roads lead to Jerusalem. If you’re slouching, marching or just moseying along on any of them, Jerusalem, the Biography would make a good travel guide. But don’t say I didn’t warn you. You’re going to want your own copy–or a lot of Post-its.
The Secret Behind the Gibson Girl’s Shape
The Gibson Girl, as I previously mentioned, had a distinctive silhouette: a small waist, an ample bosom, and a graceful sway to her back that thrust the aforementioned bosom forward and the bum backward. In some ways she was similar in shape to a Barbie doll, and, like Barbie, her figure was difficult for the average woman to attain.
The secret was the swan-bill corset, sometimes called the S-bend corset. And in keeping with the Gibson Girl’s reputation as an active, modern woman, the swan-bill corset was designed as a healthier alternative to the previously popular v-shaped corsets, which created a tiny waist in contrast to rounded hips, bust and belly and which had dominated women’s fashion in one form or another for several decades.
Healthier corsets were not a new idea. Doctors and dress reformers regularly railed against the fashion of tight-lacing to create an artificially small waist. Health corsets were intended to be comfortable while still supporting the bust.* They were often made with lighter-weight fabrics, elastic instead of bone or metal, buttons instead of a rigid steel busk at the front of the corset,** and more gentle shaping. For the most part, health corsets created a less dramatic version of the popular silhouette but did not change it.
Dr. Inès Gaches-Sarraute (1853-1928) invented the swan-bill corset in the 1890s, at much the same time as the Gibson Girl herself caught the public imagination. As a doctor, she saw women with gynecological issues and other medical problems that she believed were caused by the inward curve at the waist of the v-shaped corsets, which put pressure on the diaphragm, the abdomen and “vital female organs.”. The long, straight front of the swan-bill corset was intended to support the abdomen rather than constrict it.
Gauches-Sarraute did not intended her version of the health corset as a fashion statement. She billed it as a medical device. But unlike earlier health corsets, the swan-bill corset produced a new silhouette that inspired fashion designers to create a new style of clothing and their customers to adopt a changed posture borrowed from the military parade ground.***
*Although a few enterprising corsetiers, and one ingenious society woman, had created earlier versions of the bra, they did not take off until dressmaker Ida Rosenthal and her sculptor husband created the first commercial bra in the 1920s in response to the new shape demanded by flapper look. A story for another day.
*** The two-part busk itself was an improvement that made it easier to put a corset on and off without help.
***At least while posing for pictures. Many women achieved the new shape with discreet padding for and aft rather than by hyper-extending their back.
From the Archives: A Word with a Past: Kidnap
In the mid-seventeenth century, the British colonies in North America and the Caribbean were suffering from a labor shortage.
The colonies had originally attracted Britain’s surplus population: dreamers, fortune-hunters, religious nuts, younger sons, prisoners of war, political failures, vagrants, criminals, the homeless, and the desperate. Some came with a small financial stake. Many came as indentured servants. A few were physically coerced onto ships sailing west.*
In 1640s and 1650s, the population base in Britain took a hit. More than eleven per cent of the population died in the English Civil War. (In World War I, Britain’s second most devastating war, the loss was only three percent.) With so many young men killed, the birth rate went down. Consequently, wages went up. Plenty of people must have asked themselves, “Why leave civilization for the colonies?”
With voluntary immigration down, involuntary immigration became more important. The inmates of Britain’s prisons were given a chance at a new life–whether they wanted it or not. Grown men were “Barbadosed”–the seventeenth century equivalent of being shanghaied. (Another word with a past–and ugly imperialist/racist roots–now that I think about it).
Worst of all, children were snatched from their parents and sent to the colonies as indentured servants. As a result, a new word entered English:
Kidnap. .vt. To steal or carry off children or others in order to provide servants or laborers for the American plantations.
*Re-reading this fourteen years** after I originally wrote the post, I realized I slid right past the fact that thousands of Africans were being enslaved and sent to the New World at the same time. Perhaps I notice it now because I’ve been working hard at recognizing my historical blinders.
**Time passes when you’re reading and writing about history.