When You Are An Historian

You are never bored.

Where ever you are revelations will appear.

By golly in Norfolk, Hampton Roads, Portsmouth, New Port News.

Even when you are staying in a hotel in the center of the re-development zone that hopes to become the regional NYC Broadway.

Considering how successfully the state of VA has been since the Constitution at getting federal support for its grand plans, from the Navy, the Army, the Marines, and everything in-between, including the presidency, this may succeed.  The beer and and food are -- well, maybe not world class (though a lot of the beers are, and in a few places they manage to stay local as opposed to the overwhelming number of franchises), damned good -- when local and not chains.

The light though -- oh it's too bad that the construction of everything is so frackin' ugly.  What a place this small intimate region must have been before the concrete and the immense cranes. But -- it's still a port, both military navy and mercantile, which it always has been.

Think of how many slaves were shipped out of here from the Old South down to the New South, tens of thousands every decade for decades.

At the start of the day we managed Yorktown. I knew so much about the siege and the surrender, thanks to my time at the Fraunces Tavern Museum, where I  began in many ways to actually learn my nation's history.  We both got good and sunburned, but there too were revelations. (It was also funny how all these middle-aged and elderly men were shocked at how much I knew -- girls aren't supposed to, but they knew nothing -- including they didn't know that water over there? That wasn't the Atlantic Ocean, but the York River.)

But seeing it all -- it wasn't at all as I'd imagined Yorktown to be -- which was a lot more interesting as a town -- a Port -- than I quite realized.  Additionally, this is George Washington Land, not T. Jefferson's fiefdom (he who ran away from the Brits so fast -- all the way to PARIS! -- and never saw a battle in his life, much less participated in one).

 And o my ghoddessa, I have a much more instinctive sense now of the immensity of the Chesapeake System -- that we're destroying this is a criminal act and a sin.  Goddessas, I love this environment -- paradise it was.

Except like a satellite screwed GPS, my brain processing is getting my wars and my battlefields and eras all mixed up: French and Indian War, Bacon's Rebellion, Nat Turner, the War of 1812, the War for Independence.  One of the best things though, is that the siege of Yorktown is a battlefield I can understand and see.  Got some great photos.

Also: Historic Yorktown is a beach resort.  Who knew?  Shoe crab soup for lunch, with a view of college kids almost naked all over the place.  :)

Virginia still smells great.  The food just gets better and better.

Tomorrow, North Carolina.

Virginia Smells Good

Virginia's air is perfumed.

Often overcast, humid and since Sunday afternoon, warm, often raining, the air is oxygen rich.

Since C'town, we've visited significant sites on the Historic Bancroft Slave Breeding and Trading Industry Tour in Alexandria, Richmond, on the James River plantations and Monticello. Bancroft's Slave Breeding and the Slave Trade in the Old South  (1931), the classic work of stats breaking out year-by-year, decade-by-decade, state-by-state, the natural increase and the de-population of the upper south and the un-natural increase of African Americans then in the lower and western south, has been serving as guidebook.  It still works ....

Today is our last in Virginia. We spent the night in a non-chain lovely old place called the English Inn in Charlottesville.  We had a ridiculous dinner with our historian friend who lives here.  Due the controversy around his Master of the Mountain, he was surprised to learn it's in the Monticello gift shop bookstore after all.  We are being taken on a tour of UVA in a short time.  Then we will hit the road, going along the James river to the founding site of Jamestown (where there isn't anything really, just the sight, then  Williamsburg -  William and Mary.

As another friend says, who builds the amplifiers for telescopes such as the Very Large Array, who grew up here too, "If it wasn't for the knucklehead, this would be paradise on earth."

O, and yes.  The cicadas are out at Monticello.

Headin' South

Chestertown! Friends!

The Flag Of Hampton Roads

Charlottesville - Monticello + Friends!

Historic Richmond - Tredegar Iron Works

William and Mary + Friends! + Williamsburg

Historic Charleston - Beaufort

Sea Islands

Historic Savannah

The castillo de san marcos, in the old town of St. Augustine, the oldest continuous settlement in the United States, founded by the Spanish, desired by the French and the English, but no one wanted the Spanish Floridas as much as Andrew Jackson and President Madison.  Jackson got it. It then became a bustling slave market port for product coming down from the Upper South, coffle-walked to the Black Belt, and even to Natchez, the second largest slave market after New Orleans

This is a story of farming in Vermont with Fjord horses as your field power.

The farmer featured is a former Benedictine monk and artist. He, his partner and their daughter are described as:

... part of the 60-member Cobb Hill co-housing community incorporated in 1998. It was the brainchild of Donella Meadows, the late environmental scientist and an author of “The Limits to Growth,” an influential 1972 book that used computer modeling to predict the future of the earth if the population continued to expand and consume limited resources.

It's a lot easier to farm this way when you don't need to depend solely on horse power, and it is your choice, not imposed because there is no other way. You can't farm this way on an agri-biz cash crop size operation, which is either good or bad, depending on your outlook on these matters.  But from my own hands-on farming background and the study of what happens to the land and all region where cash mono-cropping is the economic system, this kind of smaller, mixed use, mixed power kind of agriculture is better. It's sustainable, which cash mono-cropping is not.

It's sustainable because it doesn't destroy the regional environment which cotton and the steamboats did. Cotton demanded deforestation, and fueling the steamboats demanded the same. This deforestation, which sent mountains of silt into the Mississippi River is why the great flood for which the Mississippi is notable begin in the 1800's. This kind of flooding coincides with the Mississippi Valley's transformation into the Cotton Kingdom by deforesting the entire length of the MIssissippi and its vast tributary systems.

As Stephen Leslie put it:

"I wanted to be an organic farmer because I had this sense, even back in the early ’90s, that our society was hurtling toward a cliff in terms of the unsustainability of systems we’ve put in place,” Mr. Leslie said. “I wasn’t really an activist, but I’m an artist. I like to do things. There’s not that big a disjuncture between wanting to paint a canvas and wanting to work a piece of land."

We will be having dinner tomorrow night with a passel of people in Kent County, Maryland, who are also doing their own versions of what Leslie's cooperative is doing in Vermont.  They are all artists too.

The link is to the single 'page' version; it includes an informative slide show of the horses, the land, the place.  As Leslie is the first to say, this way of life isn't for everyone.  That isn't confined only to people who don't like, fear or can't handle horses either.

After the Quake: Music, Politics, and Spirituality in Haiti

The final program in el V's HipDeep series that investigates the historical, political, cultural and spiritual elements in Angola - old Kongo, and the diaspora into the New World has been created.

This program focues on San Domingue in the past, and Haiti, as it was called, after the slave revolution.  Though program is centered after the terrible earthquake, it is not about the quake or rebuilding, particularly.  It's a wild, high velocity, high energy, fast moving show dealing with vodou and the music and culture, and how these both bleed into the political situation and are repressed by it. Among other things you will learn what a real zombie is, what it signifies. You can hear it here.

For this exclusive Afropop Worldwide Hip Deep report, producer Ned Sublette travels to Port-au-Prince, where he checks in with bandleader Richard Morse of RAM, and with Lolo and Manzé Beaubrun of Boukman Eksperyans, both of whom produced hotly controversial carnival songs this year. In a country where the president, Michel Martelly, was formerly the Tags – 1 dance-music singer, the complexities of politics are felt in music. We'll look at how vodou and carnival interact to provide a vocabulary for political expression in the tense post-quake atmosphere. We’ll meet 95-year-old Emerante de Pradines Morse, who was the first singer to perform the songs of vodou as entertainment in Port-au-Prince; we’ll hear from historian Laurent Dubois, author of Haiti: The Aftershocks of History; and we’ll go crowd-surfing in the crush of carnival at Jakmel, the southern Haitian port city that was once a colonial cousin to New Orleans. Produced with support from a Knight Luce Fellowship for Reporting on Global Religion, a program of the University of Southern California's Knight Chair in Media and Religion.

This is long series in every way: long dreamed of;  long envisioned, long struggled to make possible; long in creation.  And here it is, fulled realized, created, and concluded!

Congratulations Mr. Sublette!

Time Travel From Rob Roy / Outlander, All Souls Trilogy to The River of No Return

As I think of recent popular time travel novels, first came Outlander (1992) by Diana Gabaldon. It was a romance novel, published as a romance novel, for romance readers, which drew in readers by the tens of thousands, across all genre boundaries: fantasy, hiistorical, novel, romance, adventure.  It spawned a very successful series.  I loved Outlander, but the following novels lacked the excitement of fresh exploration, instead were forumulaic, so I didn't bother with them. However,  I found that same excitement in the movie Rob Roy (1995), even though it was based on the novel by Sir Walter Scott (1817). Rob Roy had the parts I enjoyed particularly, and left out the parts that I skimmed in Outlander, i.e. 'the present' and the protagonist needing to learn her new world -- and the lovers were already married, they didn't need to court -- while very sexy and romantic. Plus a terrific music score. (I still like writing to the cd.)  At the end of last year it was announced that a television miniseries was in the works.

The Time Traveler's Wife (2003) by Audrey Niffenegger was both a literary and popular success (though the film (2009) didn't seem to carry the same impact at the box office as the novel did for readers).  Evidently the literary qualities that worked so beautifully on the page didn't translate to the screen. I enjoyed reading The Time Traveler's Wife very much -- but movie's scenes between the love interest when he was older and the wife was still a kid felt just a little weird, shall we say?

Then, along came Deborah Harkness in 2011 with Discovery of Witches, the first novel in the projected All Souls Trilogy ( followed by Shadow of Night in 2012 -- the trade which is out now, ahead of the third installment).  I fell into a passionate relationship with both these books in a way I seldom am able to to do with a novel these days.  I am so curious to see how Harkness, an historian no less, who specializes in the Elizabethan era to which we jump back in time, concludes what she's begun so colorfully.  I want to know the answers to the questions of biology, physics and life that are posed in these novels as much as the protagonists do.   There is a movie in the works for Discovery of Witches; Harkness announced in February a screenplay was finished.

And now there's a new time travel novel, The River of No Return (2013) by Bee Ridgway.  I've only gotten started with this one, but am liking it very much.  When I'm further along reading it may become more clear to me why I'm thinking it owes something to Harkness, besides Ridgway being, like Harkness, an academic at at prestigious institution.

In the meantime we have time travel on television.  Continuum, a Canadian production, is filled with the joys of the tech we are currently working on, as perfected in 2077, and dragged back into 2012.  My biggest criticism of the first season, which is the only one I've seen, was the mandatory shoot-em-up-beat-on-each-other scenes that run for a good five minutes or more -- at least so it seems -- in every episode.  I haven't figured out the politics of it yet either.  But it is kind of endearing to have the era of 2012, filled with toxic air, bank failures, corporate criminality too big to fail, etc., looking like a paradise to a 2077 time jumper.

Fox is putting up another time jump series this fall, Sleepy Hollow, which seems to have thrown together American history, past and present, into the same kind of non-historical, faux mystical chumble as a Dan Brown novel. Or, as Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter.  In any case it's Ichabod Crane as you've never seen him or imagined him before -- sexy, handsome, brave, effective, fighting in the American Revolution! And then zapped to the present to join fighting crime.

This probably isn't a trend, is it?  Or anything new, either.  It's all still about immortality one way or another -- i.e. vampires, whether they have two legs or are corporations.

Dracula + Crossbones, Coming on NBC

Dracula is billed as coming from the producers of Downton Abbey and the star of The Tudors.

Trailer for Dracula, starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers here.

What looks interesting is that Dracula appears in Victorian London as an American   entrepreneur peddling science and technology, while actually on a personal mission of vengeance against those who condemned him long ago to eternal life.

The other, Crossbones, premiering in July according to the Washington Post, stars John Malkovich as Blackbeard.  Such information as there is, can be found here.  This one might, perhaps, have some feature roles featuring characters of color?