Steve Goddard's History Wire

Book Alert / Havana Salsa -- Stories & Recipes

Havana Salsa -- Stories & Recipes by Viviana Carballo, Atria Books '06, $24, 266 pages, ISBN #0-7432-8516-6. Index, bibiography, no source notes, dozens of recipes sprinkled through text.

If you, like I, enjoy food as much as history, you face a treat in reading Havana Salsa, written by a woman who fled Havana for America, practically penniless in 1961, only to become a world-famous chef and food critic in Miami. Her approach to this book is particularly enticing, uniting her childhood memories with Cuban recipes.

So take a mini-vacation, make yourself a Mojito (You don't know how? The recipe's on page 174),  and follow Carballo as she lives with a possible German spy during the Second World War and cruises Havana's streets after a hurricane, relating each experience to a favorite Cuban delicacy. Before you're done, you'll know how to make tostones (fried green plantains), pastelitos de Guayaba (Guava pastries), and Enchilado de Jaibas (blue crabs in Sofrito).

As Julia Child taught us in another international language, Bon Appetit!

Book Alert / A Great and Godly Adventure

A Great and Godly Adventure -- The Pilgrims and the Myth of the First Thanksgiving by Godfrey Hodgson, Public Affairs '06, $24.95, 212 pages, ISBN #1-58648-373-0. Index, source notes, no bibliography, b&w illustrations sprinkled through text.

To say that the Pilgrims' first Thanksgiving featured no turkey, pumpkin pie and cranberry sauce is like suggesting that lots of Grandmas poisoned their vaunted apple pies! How much can Americans (and particularly New Englanders) take? For Godfrey Hodgson leads a parade of recent writers who chortle while we wince, as they burst one bubble after another.

And after throwing the ingredients out the window (eastern MA had no turkeys in 1620, firearms were too primitive to bring down a fast-moving turkey, and colonies had no butter with which to make pumpkin pie), Hodgson lays the final unthinkable on us -- that the first Thanksgiving meal didn't occur until 1621.

But this is only the tip of the iceberg. The authors strip many more of our settled understandings away, from religion to relations with Indians, seemingly without remorse. And then the author, under dark of night no doubt, retreated to Britain before we could burn him at the stake!

PBS Relates Yellow Fever's History Monday at 9 P.M.

The Orlando (FL) Sentinel:

"Just in time for Halloween, PBS is telling a true American horror story, one that lasted 200 years. This epic saga ends in 1905, yet feels strangely modern with its focus on epidemics, the nation's safety, and besieged New Orleans. The Great Fever, premiering at 9 p.m. Monday, recounts the mystery of yellow fever and three determined men who helped unravel it. This hourlong program is another stirring example of how PBS' American Experience brings history to life in smart, cinematic terms.

"Chief credit for The Great Fever goes to Adriana Bosch, who wrote, produced and co-directed (with Michael Chin). Bosch stamps this work with an admirable mix of poignancy and pizazz. Vital contributions come from composer Michael Whalen and narrator Linda Hunt. Hunt is an Oscar-winner with that rare gift of speaking in wise tones.

"Bosch glides over yellow fever's long history in the United States. She notes that it arrived in Boston in 1693, then she quickly jumps to 1878. In that pivotal year, an outbreak infected 120,000, killed 20,000, bankrupted the city of Memphis and forced the federal government to act to help Southern states. All the way, Bosch keeps this history personal. In Cuba, Dr. Carlos Finlay was investigating yellow fever. At a scientific conference in 1881, he offered the theory that mosquitoes spread the disease -- an idea that was quickly dismissed."

Red Auerbach Dies; Coached Russell, Cousy, and Havlicek

USA Today:

"The sports world lost a giant on Saturday evening when legendary Boston Celtics coach Red Auerbach died in his Washington, D.C., home at 89. USA TODAY looks back at the Hall of Famer’s life with an obituary, a photo gallery and an audio remembrance.

"Auerbach may have been the greatest coach in the history of American sports. He won nine championships with the Celtics, including eight straight between 1959-1966. He retired with 938 wins, a record that stood until Lenny Wilkens passed him during the 1994-1995 season.

"Scores of players who went on to become Hall of Famers benefited from Auerbach’s tutelage. He ushered Bill Russell, Bob Cousy, Tom Heinsohn, K.C. Jones, Larry Bird, John Havliceck, Kevin McHale and Robert Parish into Celtics green and then into gold championship rings."

Over 500 Year Period, Gender is a Fluid Thing

University of North Carolina Press:

"In a sweeping synthesis of American history, Mary Ryan demonstrates how the meaning of male and female has evolved, changed, and varied over a span of 500 years and across major social and ethnic boundaries. She traces how, at select moments in history, perceptions of sex difference were translated into complex and mutable patterns for differentiating women and men. How those distinctions were drawn and redrawn affected the course of American history more generally.

"Ryan recounts the construction of a modern gender regime that sharply divided male from female and created modes of exclusion and inequity. The divide between male and female blurred in the twentieth century, as women entered the public domain, massed in the labor force, and revolutionized private life. This transformation in gender history serves as a backdrop for seven chronological chapters, each of which presents a different problem in American history as a quandary of sex. Ryan's bold analysis raises the possibility that perhaps, if understood in their variety and mutability, the differences of sex might lose the sting of inequality."

Book Alert / The Moment of Seeing

The Moment of Seeing -- Minor White at the California School of Fine Arts by Stephanie Comer et al, Chronicle Books '06, $40, 208 pages, ISBN #0-8118-5468-X. Abundant photo credits, dozens and dozens of glossy b&w and full-color images on robust paper.

You're starting what you hope will be a national-class school of architecture and you want an iconic figure to be known as its founder. Could you make a better choice than Ansel Adams? In 1946, Adams was the actual, rather than symbolic, founder of the California School of Fine Arts, which had the good fortune to have as its director Minor White, with such notables as Imogen Cunningham on its staff.

Like trying to eat one potato chip, you can't pick up The Moment of Seeing for five minutes. It's too lush and expressive, starting with the full-page portrait of young, balding, bearded Ansel Adams, displaying a still life of a hard-boiled egg. There's plenty of narrative, and frankly, a bit too much inside baseball for me -- telegrams, letters, news clippings of particular significance to the founders -- yielding to dazzling photographs by the Institute staff over the decades.

Eyewitness To Siege of Yorktown

TheHistoryNet:

"Wilhelm Graf von Schwerin did not attempt to write a history of the Revolutionary War in America, nor did he try to portray the people living there. Unlike his more famous counterparts such as Swedish Baron Ludwig von Closen, he had no literary ambitions or even skills. He was simply a young German sous-lieutenant in a grenadier company, keeping his family abreast of his whereabouts and his military experiences.

"Wilhelm (Guillaume in French) Graf von Schwerin left us with only 10 letters. Yet among them is a particularly important letter of October 21, 1781--one of but three known eyewitness descriptions of the French storming the British-held Redoubt No. 9, a decisive event of the siege of Yorktown, Va. While serving as a member of the Royal Deux-Ponts Regiment of Germans in French pay under Marshal Jean Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau, he wrote all 10 between August 1, 1780, and December 20, 1781.

"His letters are also fascinating social history, as he compares prices and wages demanded in Williamsburg and elsewhere. Meanwhile, noblesse oblige forced him to live beyond his means in a country where even his former family servants had immigrated and become rich. Taken as a whole, Schwerin's correspondence offers numerous rare insights of Revolutionary-era America.

"Wilhelm Heinrich Florus Graf von Schwerin was born on July 31, 1754, in Dierdorf, Germany. His father, Leopold Ferdinand, had served as a lieutenant in the Prussian army. In November 1757 Leopold died at age 41, and the task of providing for young Wilhelm fell to his widow's brother, Reingard Graf zu Wied (the uncle to whom the letters were written). Twenty years later, in August 1777, Wilhelm entered the Royal Deux-Ponts as a sub-lieutenant in the grenadiers, followed by his subsequent service at Yorktown. After Yorktown he served variously in France until 1792, when he retired to his mother's ancestral home in Dierdorf, where he died childless on November 18, 1828."

Earp Brothers Were Wimps Next to Nellie Cashman

TheHistoryNet:

"Gold rushes, stampedes, and boom towns attracted hundreds of thousands of people--and hundreds of different personality types--to the American West. Many of these stampeders were gamblers, men of the green cloth; some were lawyers and officers of the law; and others were dreamers, teachers, speculators, clergymen, merchants, or women of easy virtue.

"The Earp brothers rushed to Deadwood, Tombstone, Nome, and Goldfield. E. J. 'Lucky' Baldwin, Tex Rickard, Dave Neagle, Rex Beach, Jack London, and 'Arizona Charlie' Meadows were in the forefront of Western mining rushes. But these people and their ilk were pikers, short-timers, compared to the Irish immigrant named Nellie Cashman.

"Equally at home in the Nevada desert, San Francisco, British Columbia, Baja California, the Klondike of the Canadian Yukon, and north of the Arctic Circle in Alaska, Nellie began her stampede days in 1872 and did not end them until she died 53 years later. Few who followed the lure of precious metals in the West could match Nellie's enthusiasm and optimism, and no other earned such glowing praise from fellow prospectors and miners."

Afro-American Dispute Roils Temple University

The Philadelphia Tribune: "Philadelphia, PA -- Students, scholars and activists rallied Wednesday outside Temple University’s Sullivan Hall decrying speculative plans to relocate the Blockson Afro-American Collection after revered historian and curator Charles Blockson steps down at the end of the year. "The rally came on the heels of Temple University President Ann Weaver Hart’s appointment of a national search committee for a successor to replace Blockson, who on June 1 announced his retirement, effective Dec. 31. When she announced the search committee on Oct. 20, Hart also announced the formation of the Blockson Collection Endowment Committee, to be co-chaired by trustee James S. White and interim provost Richard Englert.

Englert and White would be responsible for raising funds for the preservation and dissemination of Blockson’s collection." Hart’s office began the fundraising process with a gift of $100,000. But neither Blockson nor his supporters, who include professors, researchers, historians, undergraduate and graduate students and community leaders, want the sacred collection moved from Sullivan Hall."

Book Alert / Stalin -- And the Soviet Science Wars

Stalin -- And the Soviet Science Wars by Ethan Pollock, Princeton UP '06, 269 pages, ISBN #0-691-12467-1. Index, biographical notes, source notes, b&w illustrations sprinkled through text.

The years 1945-53 were geopolitical nailbiters, as the post-World War II world sought  to gain its equipoise. Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union was, of course, a major player in the era of postwar reconstruction. What many in the West may not have known are the time was that Stalin the scholar had come to the fore in the aftermath of the war, as he studied scientific disputes and dictated academic solutions.

Those who were aware of Stalin's incursions into philosophy, science and political economy decry it as the ravings of a megalomaniac. The author's contribution to the body of knowledge is to plumb the depths of an archive that describes the Soviet's leader's determination to demonstrate that science and Communist Party doctrine, in fact, reinforced each other. It helps to remember that socialism, in theory, was supposed to be scientific. Ethan Pollock is an assistant professor of history at Brown University.