All,
There are few more sensitive issues than abortion, and I certainly do not see it as my job to tell you what to think about it.
However, as we study Roe V Wade in 1973 as part of our work on the Divided Union (USA 1945 – 1975) course it is notable how contentious the issue remains today in the USA. Below are three links that explain what is presently happening in Alabama.
Mr Kydd
If you click here, you will an article exploring the identity of the famous Rosie the Riveter. It is well worth a read – not least for the insight the casual sexism of the caption next to Naomi Parker. This at least helps us to understand the frustrations of women like Betty Friedan.
“For years, people believed that a Michigan woman named Geraldine Hoff Doyle was the model for the poster. Doyle, who had worked briefly as a metal presser in a factory in 1942, saw a photograph of a bandanna-clad woman working at an industrial lathe reprinted in a magazine in the 1980s, and identified the woman as her younger self; she later linked this photo to Miller’s famous poster. By the 1990s, media reports were identifying Doyle as the “real-life Rosie the Riveter,” a claim that was widely repeated for years, including in
Doyle’s obituary in 2010.
But Kimble wasn’t so sure. “How do we know that?” he says of his initial reaction to reading that Doyle was the woman in the image that (supposedly) inspired Miller’s poster. “Everything else we think we know about that poster is dubious. How do we know about her?”
Though he already knew the artist had no descendants, and had left limited papers behind, with no clue of who his model might have been, Kimble began looking into the 1942 photograph. And after five years of searching, he found “the smoking gun,” as he calls it—a copy of the photograph with the original caption glued on the back. Dated March 1942 at the Naval Air Station in Alameda, it identified “Pretty Naomi Parker” as the woman at the lathe.
Here is the original caption, which speaks volumes about how women working in factories during the war were seen:
“Pretty Naomi Parker is as easy to look at as overtime pay on the week’s check. And she’s a good example of an old contention that glamor is what goes into the clothes, and not the clothes. Pre-war fashion frills are only a discord in war-time clothing for women. Naomi wears heavy shoes, black suit, and a turban to keep her hair out of harm’s way (we mean the machine, you dope).”
Following on from today’s lesson, the following pages help us understand what the English Sweat or the Sweating Sickness was.
Click here for a description of it.
“The disease began very suddenly with a sense of apprehension, followed by cold shivers (sometimes very violent), giddiness, headache and severe pains in the neck, shoulders and limbs, with great prostration. After the cold stage, which might last from half-an-hour to three hours, followed the stage of heat and sweating. The characteristic sweat broke out suddenly, and, as it seemed to those accustomed to the disease, without any obvious cause. With the sweat, or after that was poured out, came a sense of heat, and with this headache and delirium, rapid pulse and intense thirst. Palpitation and pain in the heart were frequent symptoms. No eruption of any kind on the skin was generally observed; In the later stages there was either general prostration and collapse, or an irresistible tendency to sleep, which was thought to be fatal if the patient were permitted to give way to it. The malady was remarkably rapid in its course, being sometimes fatal even in two or three hours, and some patients died in less than that time. More commonly it was protracted to a period of twelve to twenty-four hours, beyond which it rarely lasted. Those who survived for twenty-four hours were considered safe.”
Click here for a possible identification of it today.
“Then in 1993, an outbreak of a remarkably similar syndrome occurred among the Navajo people in the region of Gallup, New Mexico. This episode, known as the Four Corners outbreak after the region of south-western USA in which it was located, turned the attention of sweating sickness investigators towards its causative agent: Sin Nombre virus. Sin Nombre is a hantavirus, a member of a group of viruses that were mostly previously known in Europe for causing a kidney failure syndrome, and a cousin of several tropical fever viruses transmitted by biting insects. The new disease was given the name hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (HPS).”
Click here for a possible discussion of why it died out.
“Sweating sickness had disappeared by late Elizabethan times. Its reign of terror barely lasted a century. If indeed it was an ancient variant of HPS, we can perhaps speculate about what led to its demise. The virus may have mutated to a less virulent form, perhaps in the process acquiring the capacity to be passed between humans as a more benign feverish illness, rather than being just a sporadic environmental hazard. Or perhaps its evolutionary trajectory took it in the other direction, becoming more fatal to its rodent hosts, thereby reducing the quantity of infected droppings around human habitations.”
Mr Kydd.
If you click here you will get to the excellent #VersusHistory website to hear historians discuss and debate. Upper Sixth historians should click here to get to a very sharp podcast analysis of Soviet industrial policy.
Mr Kydd.
If you click here you will get to a Scotsman obituary for the Hungarian historian John Lukacs. Perhaps his most famous work was his tribute to Winston Churchill – “Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat”. I always remember him for being one of the first to call out David Irving.
He is perhaps most interesting to us, because he prided himself on his intellectual independence, as the extract below reflects. Whether you agree with his views or not, this rejection of the consensus was clearly a healthy thing for a historian.
“He considered himself a “reactionary,” a mourner for the “civilisation and culture of the past 500 years, European and Western.” He saw decline in the worship of technological progress, the elevation of science to religion, and the rise of materialism. Drawing openly upon Alexis de Tocqueville’s warnings about a “tyranny of the majority”, Lukacs was especially wary of populism and was quoted by other historians as Donald Trump rose to the presidency. Lukacs feared that the public was too easily manipulated into committing terrible crimes.
“The kind of populist nationalism that Hitler incarnated has been and continues to be the most deadly of modern plagues,” he once wrote. He belonged to few academic or political organizations and was unafraid to challenge his peers, whether Arthur M Schlesinger Jr, Hannah Arendt or British historian David Irving. In The Hitler of History, published in 1997, Lukacs alleged that Irving was sympathetic to the Nazis, leading to threats of legal action from Irving and the removal of passages from the book in England. In recent years, Irving has been widely condemned because of his ties to Holocaust deniers.”
Have a read and see what you think.
Mr Kydd.
If you click here you can read a review of “Rival Queens” by Professor Williams in The Herald. The book suggests “that story needs re-tuning”, and would be excellent summer reading for Year Twelve historians.
“Mary crossed the Solway Firth to England in the hope her cousin Elizabeth I would help restore her to the Scottish throne, but instead Mary was kept a prisoner and eventually executed. It’s a story that has produced two of the strongest images in the history of these islands: Elizabeth as regina triumphant, the woman with the heart and stomach of a king, and Mary as the tragic sovereign, duped by men and unsupported by the woman she turned to for help.”
Below Professor Williams discusses her motivations for writing the book. I have a copy if anyone wants to borrow it.
Mr Kydd.
If you click here you will get to an excellent BBC article on Strange Fruit by Billie Holiday. It was recorded 80 years ago today. Have a look and see what you think.
On 20 April 1939, the jazz singer Billie Holiday stepped into a studio with an eight-piece band to record Strange Fruit. This jarring song about the horrors of lynching was not only Holiday’s biggest hit, but it would become one of the most influential protest songs of the 20th Century – continuing to speak to us about racial violence today.
It was named the song of the century by Time magazine in 1999, and the story of Strange Fruit’s conception has entered legend. Originally a poem called Bitter Fruit, it was written by the Jewish school teacher Abel Meeropol under the pseudonym Lewis Allen in response to lynching in US southern states. “I wrote Strange Fruit because I hate lynching, and I hate injustice, and I hate the people who perpetuate it,” Meeropol said in 1971.
I am not going to mention the B-work. However I thought the information in this survey link (from the Pew Research Center) makes fascinating reading. Views on the EU, Europe and it’s future vary from country to country, and by far more than I previously understood.
Have a look, and see what you think. Something for us to discuss in History Society perhaps…
Mr Kydd.
A couple enrichment opportunities here.
2. If you click here you will get to a BBC article which explores what happened to White Southerners who opposed segregation. It is an excellent article, and well worth a read. The image to the left is of Jonathan Daniels who was killed, aged 26, when he stepped in to protect a teenage black woman from a shotgun-wielding construction worker.
Enjoy,
Mr Kydd.
All,
Following on from today’s lesson, for prep I would like you to do the following.
Explore the following BBC web pages below.
Then post which view you agree with more (and why) below. One perfect paragraph please. A possible start to your paragraph might be…
I believe that Auschwitz should be allowed to crumble / be maintained because…
Develop your answer with evidence and connectives. Exemplar contrasting posts from Mr Padrick and Mr Towl are shown below. Please note, for your post to appear, I will need to approve it – so don’t worry it is does not show up straight away.
Mr Kydd.
