Steve Goddard's History Wire

A Brief History of the Bikini: How The Tiny Swimsuit Conquered America

Slate.com:

"Summer is upon us, which means that Americans are heading to the beach to slather on the sunscreen and slip out of their clothes. In honor of the season, we present a two-piece celebration of the two-piece: In 2006, on the swimsuit's 60^th birthday, Julia Turner chronicled the rise of the bikini in America. Click on the module above to launch that slide-show essay, 'A Brief History of the Bikini,' reintroduced below. For a Magnum photo gallery of the bikini, click here.

"Sixty years ago this week, the world's first bikini made its debut at a poolside fashion show in Paris. The swimsuit is now so ubiquitous that it's hard to comprehend how shocking people once found it.

"When the bikini first arrived, its revealing cut scandalized even the French fashion models who were supposed to wear it; they refused, and the original designer had to enlist a stripper instead. Click here to read a slide show that explains how the bikini slowly gained acceptance—first on the Riviera, then in the United States—and became a beachfront staple."

                                           (Click above link to read more)

Steve Martin -- "My Attempt At Moonwalking"

The New Yorker:

"As a dancer, Michael Jackson was great. He was like Fred Astaire. This video, a parody of the 'Billie Jean' video, was done for 'The New Show,' which was a prime-time NBC program that Lorne Michaels did in 1983-1984, when he wasn’t producing 'Saturday Night Live.' This was the opening—it was the first piece on the first episode of the show.

"Michael Jackson had recently done what I consider to be his life-changing performance on the Grammy Awards, where he did the Moonwalk and threw his hat offstage. He was just brilliant. Then the 'Billie Jean' video came out. And this was a parody of that.

"I’m not sure whose idea it was; it might have been Lorne’s. Pat Birch choreographed it. The hard move was that little leg twist that he did. You really have to throw your leg. I did it a thousand times in about three days. And a couple of weeks later I noticed—er, I have a pain here. The pain lasted about two years, then it went away on its own."

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Out in Paperback / Confronting the Bomb

Confronting The Bomb -- A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement by Lawrence S. Wittner. Stanford UP '09 paperback. 254 pages, ISBN #0804756317. Index, no bibliography, source notes or illustrations.

Wittner's sobering yet inspiring new book is the literary embodiment of Margaret Mead's oft-cited observation: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed individuals can change the world. In fact, it's the only thing that ever has."

Up against the most powerful and ruthless world leaders with nuclear annihilation at their command, a worldwide grassroots campaign not only challenged the great powers but defused their nuclear ambitions.

The SUNY Albany historian bases his narrative on research in the archives of peace and disarmament organizations, top-secret government records, and interviews with both government officials and antinuclear activists. And engagingly, he marches through his text some of the movers and shakers who brought or resisted change -- actors from Nikita Khrushchev to Albert Schweitzer, from Linus Pauling to Ronald Reagan.

40 Years Later, Still Second-Class Americans

The New York Times:

                                                      BY FRANK RICH

"Like all students caught up in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, I was riveted by the violent confrontations between the police and protestors in Selma, 1965, and Chicago, 1968. But I never heard about the several days of riots that rocked Greenwich Village after the police raided a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn in the wee hours of June 28, 1969 — 40 years ago today.

"Then again, I didn’t know a single person, student or teacher, male or female, in my entire Ivy League university who was openly identified as gay. And though my friends and I were obsessed with every iteration of the era’s political tumult, we somehow missed the Stonewall story. Not hard to do, really. The Times — which would not even permit the use of the word gay until 1987 — covered the riots in tiny, bowdlerized articles, one of them but three paragraphs long, buried successively on pages 33, 22 and 19.

"But if we had read them, would we have cared? It was typical of my generation, like others before and after, that the issue of gay civil rights wasn’t on our radar screen. Not least because gay people, fearful of harassment, violence and arrest, were often forced into the shadows. As David Carter writes in his book 'Stonewall,' at the end of the 1960s homosexual sex was still illegal in every state but Illinois. It was a crime punishable by castration in seven states. No laws — federal, state or local — protected gay people from being denied jobs or housing. If a homosexual character appeared in a movie, his life ended with either murder or suicide."

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Why The Fuss? Because He Was A Pearl Harbor Hero

The Los Angeles Times:

"Reporting from Pine Valley, Calif. -- In a clear, strong voice, John Finn told the group that gathered to honor him Saturday that he did not understand all the fuss being made about him.

"'I can't believe this,' Finn told the 500-plus people outside the La Posta Diner. 'All I ever was was an old swab jockey. . . . What I did I was being paid for.'

"What Finn did was take control of a .50-caliber machine gun at the Navy base at Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii, and fire at the Japanese attack planes that violent morning that changed the world, Dec. 7, 1941.

Wounded five times, he refused to be evacuated and kept firing at the planes that were strafing the base and its sailors. Watching Finn's courage, other sailors rallied to his side, manning other guns."

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Book Alert / American Passage

American Passage -- The History of Ellis Island by Vincent J. Cannato, Harper '09, $27.99, 487 pages, ISBN #0060742739. Index, source notes, no bibliography, grouping of b&w glossy images.

Few poems resonate within the American symphony more strongly than Emma Lazarus's "The New Colossus" (think "Give me your tired, your poor....") So it was striking, in perusing this new history of Ellis Island, to find not one index reference to Lazarus. In spite of the iconic significance of the immigrant's gateway to America, much treacly sentimentality has been wrung from tales of those Lazarus called "the wretched refuse of your teeming shores."

It was good, for a change, to come upon a dry-eyed account of the immigrant experience, although one not without emotion. UMass Boston historian Vincent J. Cannato's first chapter, for example, deals with the streams of newcomers passing through turnstiles during the Island's early days. Yet he focuses not on those who fall on their knees, having been accepted into the land of the free, but rather those who -- justly or unjustly -- were turned away and had to make the bitter return trip.

No greater influx of people have flooded a new land than the 12 million immigrants -- predominantly European -- who came to America, particularly in the years from 1892 to 1924. It fell to immigration officials and doctors, often ill trained to judge who would and wouldn't fit in, to turn thumbs up or thumbs down.

Hungarian Anna Segla, for example, was an 18-year-old hunchback dwarf, who had "always worked the hardest housework" yet was sent back to Europe, based only on her appearance. Yet Frank Woodhull, a woman who for years had lived as a man, was waved through by officials, who left her secret intact.

Cannato ably describes the history of Ellis Island from the days when it was used for pirate hangings, through the heyday of immigration, to its use during World War II to detain aliens. The author is also author of The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York.

Book Alert / The Housing Boom

The Housing Boom and Bust by Thomas Sowell, Basic Books '09, $24.95, 184 pages, ISBN #0465018807. Index, sources, unillustrated.

When the unprecedented national housing bubble burst last fall amid the collapse of America's financial sector, conventional wisdom developed that a prime cause of the lending debacle was too little regulation of the mortgage markets. Now Thomas Sowell, conservative economist and George Stigler disciple, argues precisely the reverse: that the housing debacle resulted largely from too much regulation.

Whether one views the economy from the left or the right, this slim volume is useful to read, largely because it's pithy if tendentious. Sowell sets forth his arguments straightforwardly in a way that allows readers to fairly quickly agree or disagree with him without throwing up their hands in frustration at convoluted or over-technical prose. Sowell divides his text into five chapters: The Economics of the Housing Boom,  The Politics of the Housing Boom, The Housing Bust, Housing Mystiques and Housing Mistakes, and The Past and the Future.

The tremendous inflation in housing prices during the past few years Sowell owes not to artificially low interest rates that allowed buyers to borrow more but from a restricted supply of housing, caused by such things as environmental regulation as to where housing could be built. And the massive growth in mortgage lending he ascribes not to such predatory practices as failing to require borrowers to disclose their income and assets but to such liberal laws as the Community Reinvestment Act, which pushed bankers to make more loans.

One hopes more accessible books like Sowell's will appear soon, so that voters can actually participate in the ongoing public policy debate over housing policy rather than simply watching from the sidelines. Sowell has been for many years a scholar in residence at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.

Book Alert / Stalin's Police

Stalin's Police -- Public Order and Mass Repression in the USSR, 1926-1941 by Paul Hagenloh, Woodrow Wilson Center Press & Johns Hopkins UPress '09, $45, 460 pages, ISBN #0801891825. Index, bibliography, source notes, no photographs, b&w images sprinkled through text.

Syracuse University history Prof. Paul Hagenloh maintains his new book is "the first to show how Stalin's peculiar brand of policing -- in which criminals, juvenile delinquents, and other marginalized population groups were seen increasingly as threats to the political and social order -- supplied the core mechanism of the Great Terror."

His first book demonstrates how professional policing in the Soviet Union developed from its pre-revolutionary origins through the late 1930s and early 1940s, arguing that those methods "were the culmination of a set of ideologically driven policies dating back to the previous decade."

Hagenloh is associate professor of history in Syracuse's Maxwell School.

Book Alert / "Execute Against Japan"

"Execute Against Japan" -- The U.S. Decision to Conduct Unrestricted Submarine Warfare by Joel Ira Holwitt, Texas A&M '09, $37.50, 245 pages, ISBN #1603440836. Index, bibliography, source notes, grouping of b&w images.

For centuries, the doctrine of "freedom of the seas" had protected ocean-going vessels from wartime attack, although such strategies as blockades -- used profitably by Britain and Germany in World War I -- had enabled combatants to achieve some partial control of seaways.

But, as Lt. Joel Ira Holwitt argues in his new book, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941 wiped out that hallowed doctrine in a matter of five hours. Once the U.S. Chief of Naval Operations ordered "Execute Against Japan unrestricted air and submarine warfare," "...the American war effort in the Pacific would target not only military assets, but all Japanese shipping: fishing trawlers, freighters, and tankers. This order would be supremely important in the outcome of the Pacific War....it was also illegal."

Holwitt argues that for U.S. naval leaders, abrogating the time-honored doctrine was the lesser of two evils, given "the terrifying specter of an Axis victory." Yet, he says, the decision -- obviously not debated or seriously thought through because of the abruptness of the Japanese attack -- has never been seriously examined before now.

Lt. Holwitt, who serves aboard the nuclear fast attack submarine USS Houston, has a PhD in history from Ohio State University.

Out in Paperback / Rembrandt -- The Painter at Work

Rembrandt -- The Painter at Work, Revised Edition, by Ernst Van De Wetering. UCal. Press '09 paperback. 340 pages, ISBN #0520258843. Index, bibliography, glossary, source notes, book printed in coffee table-format on glossy stock with color images sprinkled throughout.

Art lovers from genuine afficionados to weekend museum-goers will find plenty to attract them in this updated reprint of a work first published by University of Amsterdam Press in 1997. Revealingly, this book juxtaposes working black and white sketches of a masterwork next to the painting itself, allowing the reader to visualize hints of how the final product was put together. From the book's back cover:

"Rembrandt's intriguing painting technique stirred the imaginations of art lovers during his lifetime and has done so ever since. In this book -- now revised, updated, and with a new preface by the author -- Rembrandt's pictorial intentions and the variety of materials and techniques he applied to create his fascinating effects are unraveled in depth. At the same time, this 'archaeology' of Rembrandt's paintings yields information on many other levels and offers a view of his daily practice and artistic considerations, providing a multidimensional image of the historical artist."

Ernst van de Wetering is professor emeritus of art history at the University of Amsterdam.