Steve Goddard's History Wire

Walter Isaacson Recalls Classmate "Pinky" Bhutto At Harvard And Oxford

Time.com:

                                                             BY WALTER ISAACSON

"The most striking characteristic of Benazir Bhutto, back when she was a student in the 1970s, was the contrast between the intensity of her eyes and the warmth of her very large smile. It was one of countless contrasts that she embodied. She tended to wear blue jeans and baggy sweatshirts, fitting in with the dress code of the day, but she told me she dressed that way (never shorts, skirts, or t-shirts) also because it honored the Muslim custom of covering her body as a woman. Another contrast was between her nickname Pinky — she even typed some of her essays on pink paper — and her serious personality.

"When I first met her at Harvard, her father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had not yet been elected to office. Still, she stood out as a powerful figure in the dining hall of Elliot House, where she lived, and she displayed a passion for international politics that went beyond the antiwar rhetoric that passed for political discourse in those days. Later at Oxford, where we both ended up as grad students, she became even more intensely political. The summit of student politics there is the presidency of the Oxford Union, the venerable debating society, and she viewed it as her mission to become the first Asian woman in that post. She lost her first campaign for the post, but when her father was deposed and arrested the following year, we used that crisis as a reason to urge people to vote for her, and she won.

"Benazir Bhutto navigated through personal as well as political turmoils that were far more intense than most of us can imagine. Over the years, on those rare occasions when we’d meet and reminisce, I’d notice how the features of her face had hardened a bit, as had the intensity of her stare when she talked to you. But she never lost the warmth in that very big smile."

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18th Century French Aristocrats Went To The Movies -- They Did What??

The New York Times:

"Ah, boredom, the curse of the rich and idle in 18th-century France. So how did the aristocrats while away their leisure time on dreary winter days? The fortunate ones went to the movies.

"In a new book, 'Carmontelle’s Landscape Transparencies: Cinema of the Enlightenment,' the historian Laurence Chatel de Brancion steps back into prerevolutionary France to explore the pastimes created by Louis Carrogis, known as Carmontelle, in his role as resident entertainer at the court of the duke of Orléans.

"At the heart of the volume are Carmontelle’s experiments with light and moving images: rouleaux transparents, or 'rolled-up transparent drawings,' a precursor to modern cinema. The luminous scenes of verdant parks and splendidly attired people — between 12 and 19 inches deep and up to 138 feet long — were backlighted with natural daylight, wound between spindles and viewed in a boxlike precursor to the television, often accompanied by music or narrated by Carmontelle himself.

“'It’s the first time that you see complete action without interruption, with a light from behind and made for the pleasure of the public,' Ms. Chatel de Brancion said in a telephone interview from Paris. It’s enough to make Sofia Coppola swoon."

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Book Alert / Richard Avedon -- The Kennedys -- Portrait of a Family

Richard Avedon -- The Kennedys -- Portrait of a Family by Shannon Thomas Perich, Foreward by Robert Dallek, Smithsonian '07 coffee table-sized format, 126 pages, ISBN #0061138169. Bibliography, photo credits, scores of b&w images.

The razor-thin contest for president in 1960 may have turned on one televised debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon. Those listening to the debate on the radio told pollsters they believed Nixon had won while the larger audience watching on TV thought Kennedy had won. Such is the power of a visual image. Technology has galloped ahead in the 47 years since then, but no president has used television to any greater advantage than President John F. Kennedy.

Kennedy knew that Americans don't simply elect an individual to lead them, they elect a spouse (of 43 presidents, only one -- James Buchanan -- never married) and, usually, children, who collectively become the First Family. This awareness led the Kennedys to work with photographer Richard Avedon in compiling, for the ages, intimate studies of the Kennedy family.

In this handsome volume, Avedon not only displays separate sections of Caroline and Dad, Caroline and John-John, Jackie and John-John, Jackie alone, and Jackie and Jack, but we're taken inside his studio to study contact sheets of a dozen shots, with the one Avedon chose to use on the page opposite. As with our home albums, some shots are clearly outtakes -- someone closes his eyes or frowns.

But Avedon's photographic judgment is also on display as well. He could have used nearly any contact print of the uncannily attractive couple, posed seated, facing forward. The only exception is one in which Jackie turns to the left, showing a half-profile to the camera while gazing at her husband's profile, revealing a dynamic of their marriage that no other image achieved. For those who remember the era, this is as evocative as it comes.

Book Alert / The American Research University

The American Research University -- From World War II to World Wide Web -- Governments, the Private Sector, and the Emerging Meta-University by Charles M. Vest, UCal. Press '07, 127 pages, ISBN #0520252535.

This slim book is based on a series of lectures delivered in 2005 by Charles M. Vest, president emeritus of MIT, as the Clark Kerr Lecturer on the Role of Higher Education in Society. Vest blends personal reflections, history and analysis to reflect on the burning issues in today's academy.

International openness is vital to today's research universities, but Vest describes security concerns that challenge this principle. He describes the role of the Internet and World Wide Web in expanding the potential for the research university to share its findings and to collaborate with other institutions.

Remembering A Mao-Imposed 30-Year Family Separation

Newsweek:

"My eldest brother was 7 years old when the Communists seized power in China. Our parents, who named him Guangyuan—'Distant Light'—had entrusted him to relatives in Suzhou while they visited America in the 1940s. Papa and Mama expected to be gone only long enough to complete their university degrees, and they didn't want to uproot him. Perhaps they also didn't fully appreciate what was happening to their homeland. Then Mao Zedong marched into Beijing in October 1949, and the world changed. Returning to China became too dangerous.

"Guangyuan grew up in the care of our mother's parents in Suzhou, a city celebrated for its elegant gardens where emperors, courtesans and poets once dallied. I was born and raised in the American Midwest, along with two more brothers, and I dreamed of one day meeting the sibling the communists had stolen from our family.

"My chance finally came on Jan. 1, 1979, the day Washington and Beijing restored full diplomatic relations after 30 years of hostility. No one could be sure the honeymoon would last, so I wasted no time in getting a visa. On the evening of Feb. 20, I lugged a heavy suitcase (filled with gifts for long-lost relatives) aboard Train 119, heading south from Beijing. Through the gloom and swirling cigarette smoke of a no-frills 'hard sleeper' carriage, other passengers peered at me in wonderment. Many of them had never seen an American before. They carried their belongings in cheap travel bags and squares of worn, patched fabric. Some had only old-fashioned cloth slippers to protect their feet from the icy weather.

"A People's Liberation Army soldier lay snoring in a nearby berth, bundled up in a military greatcoat. It's funny, the things that stick with you; I remember he had sacked out without removing his mud-encrusted combat boots. 'Maybe he just got back from Vietnam,' someone joked. A border war had broken out less than a week earlier, and thousands of casualties were reported on both sides—tens of thousands would die before it was over—but no one in the carriage seemed to care. Everyone clamored to hear about life in America."

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From 1920s To Now, The New Yorker Celebrates The Holidays

The New Yorker:

"A collection of holiday-themed New Yorker covers, from the nineteen-twenties to today:"

Authentication Board Devotes Itself Exclusively To Andy Warhol

The Denver Post:

"In an art world abounding with fakes, forgeries and falsities of all kinds, determining what is real and not has been a challenge for decades. To that end, Christoph Heinrich, the Denver Art Museum's new curator of modern and contemporary art, is one of two new members of the prestigious, sometimes controversial Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board.

'The panel, which meets three times a year, was established in 1995 by the Andy Warhol Foundation to judge the authenticity of works by the famed pop artist who died in 1987. As chief curator of contemporary art, collections and exhibitions at the Hamburg Kunsthalle in Germany, he organized the major 1999 exhibition, 'Andy Warhol — Photography,' which traveled to the United States.

"Heinrich spoke to The Denver Post about Warhol and the authentication board:

"Q: Where do you place Andy Warhol in importance among 20th-century artists?

"A: He was probably one of the most important artists and, in a way, an island, because what he did went in so many directions. He was very inspiring for many artists, who left with his idea of multiplication, of reproduction. On one side, he did the icon of Marilyn Monroe. And on the other hand, this is an icon that can be reproduced endlessly. That is a comment on our age of reproduction, which won't become old stuff soon."

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Book Alert / Wallace Stegner's Salt Lake City

Wallace Stegner's Salt Lake City by Robert C. Steensma, Utah UP '07 oversized format, $29.95, 165 pages, ISBN #0874808987. Bibliography, notes, maps, no index, dozens of b&w images.

Writing of his adopted home of Hartford, the flamboyant Mark Twain wrote, "Of all the beautiful towns it has been my fortune to see, this is the chief....You do not know what beauty is if you have not been here." Perhaps reflecting his more restrained personality, Wallace Stegner waxed much less gushingly on Salt Lake City, the town in which he lived for 16 years, one in which he was educated, married and became a father:

"Having blown tumbleweed-fashion around the continent so that I am forced to select a hometown, I find myself selecting the City of the Saints, and for what seems to me cause. It has such a comfortable, old-clothes feel that it is a shock to see again how beautiful this town really is, quite as beautiful as the Chamber of Commerce says it is; how it lies under a bright clarity of light and how its outlines are clean and spacious, how it is dignified with monuments and steeped in sun tempered with shade, and how it lies protected behind its rampart mountains, insulated from the stormy physical and intellectual weather of both coasts.

"Serenely concerned with itself, is probably open to criticism as an ostrich city; its serenity may be possible only in a fool's paradise of isolationism and provincialism and smugness. But what is a hometown if it is not a place you feel secure in? I feel secure in Salt Lake City."

Retired University of Utah English Prof. Robert C. Steensma divides his book into two parts. Part I describes Salt Lake City as a crossroads of the West and describes what going to school in the city and at the state university was like for the man who would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize for the novel Angle of Repose. Part II of the book encompasses Stegner's writings on Salt Lake City, including "At Home in the Fields of the Lord" and 'It Is the Love of Books I Owe Them."

Book Alert / The Conservative Ascendancy

The Conservative Ascendancy -- How the GOP Right Made Political History by Donald T. Critchlow, Harvard UP '07, $27.95, 359 pages, ISBN #0-674-02620-9. Index, source notes, no bibliography or illustrations.

The right wing of the American Republican Party has fought two unending battles during the past half-century: against more moderate mainstream Republicanism and against the Democratic liberal welfare state. As St. Louis University historian Donald T. Critchlow writes, it has fared better in its internecine struggle than it has against the Democrats.

"The defining moment in the conservative movement," the author states, "came with the Republican nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964." The crushing Goldwater defeat drove the conservatives underground, only to resurface in 1968 with Richard Nixon, who soon left them feeling betrayed. Debate over the social issues of the '70s re-energized the right wing as it mobilized evangelical Christians, traditionalist Catholics and Mormons. In the wake of liberal Democratic policies, the Southern Republican party co-opted middle-class and upper-class whites and led to victories for Ronald Reagan and the GOP Congressional takeover in 1994.

While "George W. Bush's election in 2000 marked the triumph of the conservative ascendancy," writes Critchlow, the Bush presidency discovered just how entrenched the FDR/LBJ liberal welfare state was, as proposals to privatize Social Security and alter Medicare "fell on deaf ears or had little impact."

While many commentators bemoan the highly partisan polarization of the American Congress, Critchlow remains sanguine, saying "...we must remember that debate within a democracy often proves shrill, contention rancorous, and conflict seemingly irreconcilable; yet such is the vibrancy of a mature democracy."

Out in Paperback / Christians, Blasphemers and Witches

Christians, Blasphemers, and Witches -- Afro-Mexican Ritual Practice in the Seventeenth Century by Joan Cameron Bristol, UNew Mexico Press '07, 283 pages, ISBN #0826337996. Index, selected bibliography, glossary, source notes.

George Mason University historian Joan Cameron Bristol shines the spotlight in her new work on an ethnic group of which many are unaware -- "Afro-Mexicans," derived from some 200,000 Africans imported into Mexico during the slave trade to enhance the agricultural labor force depleted when native population declined in the wake of the Spanish conquest of New Spain in 1521.

Of the diversity they reflected, Bristol writes of, "Some were Christians who took communion, confessed, and celebrated Mass. Some were blasphemers who were denounced to the Inquisition. Still others were practitioners of mystical rites meant to cure illness, attract lovers, or control owners."