beatrice_otter | Entries tagged with history

So I was reading a Batman fic (that I have read before, this was not my first reading) and something snagged my attention that I had just ... never noticed before.

And that is that it mentions a coat closet.

And I thought, Wayne Manor was built back in the days when people had armies of servants. Why would they have a coat closet? You would be greeted by a servant, who would take your coat and whisk it away until you were ready to leave.

I checked the plans of the Carnegie Mansion in New York (which I analyzed before), and sure enough, it does not have a coat closet. Separate Waiting Room and Receiving Room, but no coat closet.

Then I found the plans for the Biltmore Estate, which is out in the country (and so not constrained by the city around it) and of the same era and opulence, but even more ginormous than the Carnegie Mansion. It's the largest private residence ever built in North America, and it's 175k square feet--it's got a TON more guest rooms and also its own gym, swimming pool, bowling alley, etc. You know what it doesn't have? A coat closet. (And closets are marked on these plans.) The servants' areas are either downstairs or way the heck and gone on the opposite corner of the building, so the servants would have to schlepp those garments a long ways to get them out of sight. Ugh. This place is a lot less well-thought-out than the Carnegie mansion; the servant areas especially are not as well-thought-out, but also, just in general, there's a lot that I look at and go "that is so inconvenient, why would you do it that way" which is not a thought I've ever had with the Carnegie mansion.

One of the things that caught my eye about the Biltmore Estate is the Bachelor's wing. I assume that's what it's called, because it's a very self-contained part of the building with very little description, but in the ground/first floor there's a room called the "Bachelor's Wing Hall." Above that is two floors that are just filled with rooms called "Chamber"--obviously guest rooms, but smaller and without special names like the rest of the guest rooms. And, notably, it doesn't connect very well to the rest of the house. On the ground/main/first floor, you can get from there to the rest of the house without going outside. On the second floor (where the chambers start), you can get from those bedrooms to the rest of the house by either going downstairs to the main floor or walking across an outside balcony that takes you over to the master bedroom suite. And if you are given a bedroom on the third floor, you don't even have the outside balcony--you either stay in that wing, or you go down to the first/ground floor and go into the public rooms, or you go down to the second floor and take that outside balcony.

I knew that at least in English Stately Homes, they often had bachelor quarters that were purposefully separated from the main residential part of the building so that the ladies' virtue would be protected from even a hint of scandal, but that is ... very separated. (Also, married men are no less likely to be predators than unmarried men.) I find it funny that not only are the bachelors quarantined, but in order to get into the area where the ladies and couples are staying, they have to go past the host and hostess' rooms. (Or, of course, they could go downstairs, walk to the other side of the building, and go up the main stairs, which will bring them to the area where the female guests would be staying, not even on the same corridor as the master bedrooms.) The regular guest rooms are obviously much swankier than the bachelor's rooms, and they have a living hall on their own floor, whereas the bachelors have to go downstairs if they want to hang out somewhere other than their room.

Also, like the Carnegie Mansion, the Biltmore Estate has not one but two basements. So figure that into your plans of the Batcave and Wayne Manor.

(HOW has that thing not fallen into the caves beneath? Like, even if you posit (as I do) that the batcave is adjacent to Wayne Manor rather than directly below it, so the Manor's foundations are on rock ... rock next to big open caverns is a lot less stable than rock that's solid for a long ways, and that is one really big house.)

I have long been a fan of Project Gutenberg, which scans books that are in the public domain, OCRs them, proofreads them, formats them, and puts them up for free as ebooks. That is a lot of labor, that a lot of people do for free, and in fact I have done some of that labor; I started proofreading for them through Distributed Proofreaders back in 2003. (I've been on there so long that my user name there is "Beatrice" and not Beatrice_Otter.") Now, over the course of that time there have been many years where I didn't do any proofreading at all; but I keep circling back to it. When I want to do something that is useful, and which has a concrete result where I can see exactly what I've accomplished, and which I can do from my computer, PGDP is great.

However, I've often bemoaned that when there's a tricky passage, I never know if I got it right, because I can't check and see if the next proofreader or formatter corrected things (they do three rounds of proofreading and two rounds of formatting per work, for quality control). I knew there had to be a way to do it! But I couldn't find it. I could find lists of pages I'd worked on, but nothing that would show me what the pages looked like after the next round of proofing or formatting was done. It's a bit frustrating!

But I have finally, after 22 years of working there, found the page that will SHOW ME what changes more senior proofers and/or formatters made, so I can see what I need to do differently. If you go to the "My Projects" page there is a link in the corner that says "Review Work" that will take you to a page that will show you links to every change that got made to work you did. I am linking the page here so that if I ever forget how to get to that page, I will have a link to it.

That particular frustration aside, I do recommend PGDP, they have a very slick system, it's great. And obviously, if you're looking for ebooks of works that should be in the public domain, Project Gutenberg is the place to start.

Or at least, that's what I thought until recently! Someone on the Yuletide discord mentioned Standard Ebooks, which is a group that takes Project Gutenberg ebooks and formats them nicely, to the standards of a major publishing company, and then puts them up for free. They are much nicer than PG ebooks; PG ebooks can best be described as "serviceable." They are very accurate! ... just not always nice to look at, and the formatting guidelines were created back in the early 2000s and are bare-bones at best. However, Standard is a much newer group, and also, they're smaller; PG has over 75k ebooks and Standard has 1200. (On the other hand, since Standard has focused on the great classics, the sorts of books that are most likely to be still in demand today, and PGDP has all the classics plus a lot of other stuff, chances are that Standard will have what you're looking for.) So now my advice for older books would be to check out Standard first, and if they don't have it, go to Gutenberg.

Another great resource for public domain ebooks is Librivox. They do crowdsourced audiobooks of public domain books, and I have thought about volunteering there because I do have a recording setup, but also, recording an entire book is a LOT more of a time commitment than proofreading a few pages, and also, the books that I would be most interested in already have versions available on Librivox.

And if you, too, are interested in doing crowdsourced data work and bringing old things to a more usable form, but if Gutenberg isn't speaking to you, check out the Smithsonian! The Smithsonian has a website where people can transcribe old records in the collections of a wide variety of museums. And they have things sorted by theme so you can choose to work with materials related to the African American experience, women's experience, Native American experience, art and design, natural history, and a variety of other categories. Although for most of the stuff here you need to be able to read bad cursive handwriting. (Anyone who tells you that everybody in the 19th Century had good handwriting is a filthy liar.)

Most people (at least most Americans) have never been in a grand Stately Home of the scale Wayne Manor is supposed to be. We just don't know much about what they're like. There was a very brief era (the Gilded/Robber Baron age) where they were built. Rich people now who build grand piles tend to just do McMansions on steroids, and those are different than the earlier mansions, in a lot of ways.

The major difference is that building a house that big actually had a purpose in the pre-20th-Century era, so the layout of the house is going to make sense, and the rooms will be smaller, because they're built for purposes and not just "look at me, I'm fuck-off huge!"

( Historical mansions vs. McMansions. )

( Carnegie Mansion in New York: an example )

( Here's some considerations when thinking about Wayne Manor: )

This is something that comes up a lot in Goblin Emperor fiction, so it's not just historical fiction, but my complaint is based on real-life history, so we'll fit it into this series of posts.

In the modern era, secretaries are seen as a very low-level, bottom-rank job, with no prestige, which is why they're changing the name to "administrative assistant." But this is a modern phenomena and is the result of the job being devalued when women entered it. Prior to the flood of female secretaries in the early 20th Century, a secretary was a very prestigious job.

Here's the thing: until the mid-19th-Century, the amount of literacy needed to become a secretary was pretty rare. Literacy and numeracy varied wildly in different times and places, but to be a secretary you don't just need to know your letters and your numbers and be able to sign your name and do basic things like that. A secretary has to be able to read and write fluently--often in multiple languages. They're the ones keeping the written records; they're the ones writing letters and handling their employer's correspondence; they're the ones who have to be able to take the information in the records and letters and summarize it for their employer's convenience. It was not unusual for the secretary to be better educated than their employer was!

( And not only are they highly skilled, they also have a lot of de-facto power. )

On the subject of the size of Longbourn and the Bennet's income, there is a book called A General View of the Agriculture of Hertfordshire, published in 1804, which has been scanned into the Internet Archive. It says:

PROPERTY in Hertfordshire is much divided; the vicinity of the capital; the goodness of the air and roads and the beauty of the country, have much contributed to this circumstance, by making this county a favourite residence, and by attradling great numbers of wealthy persons to purchase land for building villas: this has multiplied estates in a manner unknown in the more distant counties. About 7000I. a-year is the largest estate in the county: there are six or seven from 3 to 4000I.; more of about 2000I.; and below that sum, of everv value.

So! There were probably fewer than ten wealthier families in the entire county. (However, estates in this county are smaller than in other parts of England, so having a large estate for Hertfordshire is not saying much compared to Darbyshire or Kent or other places.)

There is also an essay by Bethany Delleman, "Could Mr. Bennet have Saved Enough for Decent Fortunes on his Income?" which has scans of a book from 1823, A System of Practical Domestic Economy. It lays out a proposed budget for a family of five in 1823 (two parents + three children), and assumes that they will be able to live well and have a large household (ten servants, five horses, a carriage and a chaise) on 1800/year, while saving 10% (200 pounds) for emergencies and savings. Now, this is not directly comparable to the Bennets, as it comes from at least a decade after P&P, and maybe over two decades (depending on whether you think it is set when Austen wrote it in the late 1790s, or when it was published in the 1810s). Still it gives us something to go on, at least. And it's not as if the proposed 10% savings would actually go into savings every year; emergencies happen. But saving a significant chunk every year is seen as a normal thing for a family of the Bennet's wealth to do, or at least something they ought to do. And the Bennets ... haven't.

There's a post about time travel going around tumblr, and somebody tagged that they would kill Mary before the birth of Jesus, so that Christianity wouldn't exist.

Problem is, while that might indeed kill Christianity, it would probably just mean that Constantine would slot Mithraism into his Imperial domination schemes instead.

In the late 200s AD there were two mostly-underground monotheistic mystery cults rapidly gaining adherents in the Roman Empire. There were a lot of similarities between the two, at least superficially. For example, there was a lot of emphasis on communal ritual meals. One was Christianity. The other was Mithraism. Constantine was intrigued by both. We know he was involved in Mithraism in his youth.

But what Constantine really liked the idea of using religion to unify the Roman Empire. By the 300s, the Roman Empire was beginning to fragment, with regular civil wars. Constantine came to power in one of those civil wars. He thought that if everyone worshiped the same god (instead of different gods worshiped in different places, with the Roman pantheon and emperors as a thin veneer of unity), it would help keep the whole ramshackle edifice together. (Spoiler alert: it did not.) So he picked one of the two monotheistic religions that was rapidly gaining in popularity, and encouraged people to convert to it, heaping power and wealth on (some of) them. And that's how Christianity became an imperial religion.

Christianity changed rapidly in response to that. Major parts of the religion were changed or dropped entirely. For example, until Constantine, the vast majority of Christians were strict pacifists. In most communities, soldiers were required to leave the army and find a new trade before they could be baptized. Obviously, this was unacceptable if Christianity was going to become the religion of the Roman Empire. In a straight-up choice between pacifism and Imperial power, the Christian church as a whole dropped the pacifism like a hot potato. 100 years after Constantine you have St. Augustine laying out the "Just War" theory where war is fine as long as you have a good reason for it. That's a complete 180 from everything the early Christians believed. There are many other examples of things that got dropped or changed in Christianity to make it more palatable to Imperial might.

There are a lot of toxic things in Christianity as we know it. But the thing is ... many of them come from this process of adapting their beliefs and practices to fit what Constantine (and later Emperors, and the entire power structure of the Empire) wanted Christianity to be. Namely, something tame that affirmed and enforced the existing Imperial power structure. And Christianity has been a partner and tool of the power structures of the dominant culture ever since. This is one of the reasons there's so much difference between Jesus' teachings and Christian teachings, in so many cases. In a straight-up choice between faithfulness and power ... a majority of Christians in the last two thousand years have most often chosen power.

But here's the thing. If Christianity didn't exist, that doesn't mean none of this would have happened. It just means that Constantine would probably have chosen Mithraism instead. Do you think the Mithraists would have been any less willing to take the power and wealth on offer to them, in exchange for becoming a lackey of empire? Do you think Christianity was uniquely corruptible? I don't.

There’s a lot of discourse around this every year, and many of the assumptions people have about the origins of Christmas and many Christmas traditions are either flat-out untrue or have no evidence behind them, and others have truth in them but are misleading.

First is the claim that the date of Christmas is pagan in origin, that it was a co-opting of a Roman pagan holiday. This claim was made up in the 20th Century when people noticed that a) there were actually two different Roman holidays that overlapped with December 25th (Saturnalia and the Feast of the Unconquered Sun) and b) the accounts of feasting and partying for Saturnalia (we don’t have good records about the Feast of the Unconquered Sun, it was from one of the secretive mystery cults) sound a lot like the feasting and partying we do today for Christmas. There’s no evidence for this claim beyond “this sounds like it would make sense.” And there are significant problems with it.

Christmas was the last of the major holidays to be added to the Christian calendar, in the 4th Century BC; it’s not in the New Testament (unlike Easter and Pentecost, the two most theologically important holy days in the Christian calendar). We have the contemporary account of how they chose the date, which is not about pagan holidays but rather about numerology. They might have been lying, of course; but just because ancient numerology doesn’t make sense to modern people that doesn’t mean that they were lying about it. If you’re curious, here’s the story of how the calculations were made: at that time, they believed that Jesus had died on March 25. Jesus was perfect, therefore Jesus must have had a perfect life in numerological terms as well as everything else, therefore he must have died on the anniversary of his conception. (This is why Catholics celebrate the Annunciation–the day the angel came to Mary–as March 25th.) If Jesus was conceived on March 25th and had a perfect nine-month pregnancy, that puts his birth at December 25th.

As for the partying, Christmas was a time of fasting in the early church, not a time of partying. Solemn prayer and hymn-singing. No meat. Long worship services. If the date was chosen in relation to either Saturnalia or the Feast of the Unconquered Sun, the purpose was not to co-opt the pagan partying and say “hey, you can still have your midwinter parties in the Christian church!” but rather to contrast the drunken debauchery of the pagans with the sober piety of the Christians.

Christmas just wasn’t that important a date until Christianity started moving north (it shared prominence with Epiphany in the middle of winter, and was much less important than Easter). Up north, where the days are very short and everything is cold and dark, celebrating something in the middle of winter is very important to keep spirits up. And yes, the Germanic tribes and the Nordic peoples and the Slavs all had major festivals in midwinter, and many of the traditions associated with those festivals got attached to Christmas. (Trees, burning the Yule log, etc., etc.) But even up in the North where Christmas was much more important than it was in southern Europe, Christmas didn’t become The Biggest Celebration Of The Christian Year until the Victorians in the 19th Century.

Back to those pagan Germanic customs. Christian missionaries did not take those elements and incorporate them into Christmas celebrations. In fact, Christian missionaries and priests spent centuries trying to stamp those pagan elements out! They spent centuries telling people they were going to hell for still practicing paganism if they celebrated Christmas in a pagan way. For every priest who accepted or encouraged those pagan traditions, there were ten more trying diligently to stamp them out. Until eventually they gave up.

The pagan customs–trees, holly, etc.–have not survived because Christian priests co-opted and appropriated them. They have survived because the people who first practiced those customs kept them after converting, despite centuries of Christian authorities trying to stamp them out.

Rebloggable on tumblr.

Occasionally, I will come across a fic in which a female character (usually Elizabeth Bennet) in an Age of Sail or Victorian canon will decide that she needs to help out the family finances by becoming a governess!

Me: uh, no.

I get why people do this! Family needs money, and so we think, obviously the solution is for someone to work, and the only job that was respectable and ordinary for a gentlewoman to do in that era was be a governess or a lady's companion, so that's the job we'll give Our Heroine so she can improve the family fortune!

The problem with this is that it ... didn't actually work that way. A governess or paid companion made barely enough to live on. She would get room and board (by living in her employer's house) and a small stipend that would be enough to cover other basic expenses such as clothing. She might be able to save a handful of pounds a year, which would not be enough to make much difference in the living situation of the rest of her family. About the only circumstances in which it would make financial sense for a gentlewoman to become a governess or a paid companion was if her family's finances were in such dire straits that not having to pay for her food and clothes would be a relief. And, you know, that happened! To a lot of women! But usually that's not what such fanfics are talking about. They're talking about "she'll be sending home money" and, just, no.

Being a governess was hard work, you were on duty 24/7 (except for your half-day off), and you had a very odd and vulnerable position in the household. You weren't a servant--you were above the servants, class-wise--so you couldn't socialize with them, and they wouldn't want to socialize with you. But you weren't equal to your employer, even if you would have been equals by class before becoming a governess. You wouldn't get chummy with your employer. And you didn't have time to go out and spend time with anybody else (usually only a half day off per week) so you would likely not have many friends at all. If you were lucky, and your employer lived in a city, and your charges were young, you might take them to the park where other children were playing, and then you could gossip with your fellow governesses, but that wasn't possible if your employer lived in the country. Even if you genuinely like young people, and you have good employers who treated you well and didn't sexually harass you, it's not a fun life.

The other thing we have to talk about is marriage. A governess had very few opportunities to meet suitable men and be courted by them, and she was also supposed to be setting a very high moral example for her charge(s) or she could be sacked. So very few governesses married. Which means, since they didn't have family able/willing to take them in, they effectively were trapped in that job for the rest of their life, once they took it up, moving from one employer to the next. Now, if their employer was a widower who was attracted to them, they might get him to marry them; but trying for that was just as likely to get them sacked with a bad character reference, which meant no more jobs as a governess ever, which is a pretty bad thing if that's your only means of supporting yourself.

The other thing about being a governess is what it meant for your social status, and that of your family. You were still a gentleman's daughter! but only barely, and any gentlemen or ladies you encountered would take precedence over you. It was a perfectly respectable job, but the fact that you had to take it would tell everyone that your family might be of gentle breeding but they were poor. So having a sister as a governess would make marriages harder to find for any siblings still at home, because it was saying plain as day "these people are poor, they have no connections who can help, they are holding onto their class status by the skin of their teeth."

Now, being a paid companion was a little better. Since it meant you were attending an adult, you would go with them into society. You had a very precarious position making about what a governess would, but you had the opportunity to sit and talk with people and make friends and possibly marry. Mrs. Annesley and Mrs. Jenkins in Pride and Prejudice are paid companions, as is Mrs. Clay in Persuasion. You will note that all three are widows; this is because they are companions to young, unmarried ladies. Therefore, they would act as chaperone when the young lady went out in public. (An unmarried woman could not serve as a chaperone.) So while being a companion was a better gig than being a governess, most governesses couldn't aspire to that role because they'd need to be widowed, which would necessitate getting married first, which they were unlikely to do.

Unmarried women could act as paid companions, but only when the woman they were employed by was herself a widow and/or past the age of marrying, and thus not in need of a chaperone. In this case, however, the most likely companion would be a poor relative of the woman in need of a companion, who would usually hope to inherit at least part of her employer's fortune. Obviously, anyone with enough money to pay someone to sit and talk with them all day and run their errands is going to have money, and a woman with children of her own to leave her fortune to wouldn't usually need a companion, so "keep me company in my old age, and I will leave you my money" was a fairly common arrangement. Because of this, a young unmarried lady becoming a companion to an elderly aunt or whatever was not a sign the family was in dire straits. Especially if the family had more than one daughter. It was just good sense--you have to keep all that lovely money in the family, after all, and taking care of elderly relations is a good thing.

If a woman somehow got a bit of money, she might open a business; there were businesswomen in those days, rare though they were, but that would mean a slight step down, class-wise. But if you're looking to have her realistically doing something to support the family, that's a better option than becoming a governess, in that if it was a successful business she'd actually make money at it. But in order to start a business you usually have to have resources, which a gentlewoman in dire straits probably wouldn't have.

So if your character is in the gentry and looking for a way to better her family fortunes ... there's really only two ways. Marrying well, or inheriting from a distant relation. Being a governess or a paid companion isn't going to do it.

Welcome to my next installment of the Period Fic Primer, where I talk about stuff that period fic often gets wrong! Today we're going to talk about how people think about marriage. Because about 90% of the time, when I read a period fic with a romance in it, it's pretty obviously modern people with modern ideas about love who just happen to be wearing funny clothing. And, I mean, if that's what floats your boat, go for it! But if you want to write something with characters who feel they might actually come from the time period the story is set in, here are some things to think about.

Stop me if you've read this fic/watched this movie: Our hero and heroine are In Love. But there is a problem! There is a class difference! Their families have other ideas of who they should marry! The hero and heroine don't understand how anyone can stand in the way of True Love! What kind of monsters could want someone to marry without being in love with their new spouse?

( That reaction is extremely modern. )

Yuletide signups opened early today! ... and then had to close again due to technical difficulties. I'm the one who found the bug, actually; you're only supposed to be able to offer ten fandoms (one of which may be a bucket offer, in which you can lump mulitple fandoms into one offer). And it was letting you add more than ten offers (and requests, it later turned out) than was allowed. So they've closed so the coders can poke around and figure out what the problem is.

The reason they have a limit of ten offers (one of which can be a bucket offer, so you can offer more than ten fandoms) has something to do with the way the code works on the back end and the way matching works, and apparently Bad Things happen if you try to have more than ten offers. IDEK. But there is a reason for it, it's not just random, so if it's not working the way it's supposed to they have to go in and figure out what's wrong. They'll contact those of us who signed up in the initial open period if our signups have to be deleted after they fix the problem.

When they announced on the YT Discord that signups were going to have to close while they figured it out, Bonster remarked that "it's officially yuletide if the coders have to get to work!"

Yuletide, being fricking HUGE (both in the size of the tag set and the number of people participating) regularly pushes the archive software to its limits, so if bugs in the exchange part of the software are going to show up anywhere, they tend to do it in Yuletide, alas. I don't grumble because I remember Yuletide pre-AO3, on the OLD archive, back in dinosaur days.

For all you young whippersnappers too young to have done Yuletide pre-2009, or who were simply in other corners of fandom, the old archive was a NIGHTMARE. It was old and creaky and buggy and simply wasn't up to handling the strain of a thousand people trying to upload stories at the deadline. So it would regularly crash on the day of the deadline, especially when it was getting down to the wire, which always made uploading your story really nail-biting. Would it go through? Would the site crash? Would the site crash mean you didn't get it submitted in time?!? And then, of course, you couldn't edit the fic yourself. It had to be finished/in its final form when you uploaded it ... and if you found an error that needed to be fixed you had to go grovelling to

astolat and ask her to manually edit the file. She was nice about it the couple of times I needed it, but still. Not something you wanted to be doing. And then, when the archive opened, there was no "anon comment period" where you could comment and your name wouldn't show. And comments weren't public. So you had to save the email with a comment in it to keep the reply link until after the anon period was over, and if you accidentally deleted or lost the email with the link in it, well, that sucked but you weren't going to get to reply. And I'm sure I've forgotten lots of fun bugs and quirks. Given the state of internet technology, the number of users, and the tiny number of people working behind the scenes to run the ficathon and keep the archive up and running, I'm not complaining! It was amazing it was as good as it was! I'm just saying, I love the AO3 and we should all be grateful to the wonderful volunteers who do everything.

First, the good news. The other Campbell Award (Yes, for forty years there have been TWO major awards named after that fucker, and yes, it has always been confusing) is also getting its name changed. When the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas decides what name they want their award formerly known as the "John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best science-fiction novel of the year" to be known as, they will announce it. They have already renamed their yearly conference from the Campbell Conference to the Gunn Center Conference.

John Scalzi has some interesting comments on the whole thing, and I think this is the most notable and important bit of his post:

Campbell is and will always be part of science fiction’s history. But history isn’t static, even if the facts of history stay the same. Anyone notable enough to be part of the historical record will find themselves the subject of reassessment, for however long they grace history’s record. It is, weirdly, a privilege not many people get. Campbell was never guaranteed a pedestal, or an award, or a conference in his name, even if he got them for a while. He was never guaranteed to keep them. No one is.

On to the Bad News.

The Tiptree Award is remaining the Tiptree Award, at least for now.

James Tiptree, Jr. was the pen name of Alice Sheldon, one of the greatest female SF/F writers of the early 20th Century. More than a pen name, Tiptree was a persona. Besides writing many great classics, Sheldon was an active participant in the SF/F community for decades, as James. Sheldon carried on many friendships entirely via letter, and was by the 1970s one of the Great Old Men of the genre. (Unsurprisingly, most of Tiptree's work explored gender and the social construction of identity.) It was a huge shock when, in the 1970s, it was revealed that James was Alice. Given both Tiptree's body of work and double life, it was an appropriate name for an award encouraging the exploration and expansion of gender.

The problem is that Sheldon/Tiptree killed both her disabled husband and herself in a murder-suicide in 1987. Everyone who knew them believed it was a mutual decision, and yet, it was still a pretty terrible thing to do. Especially because "well, he's disabled and old and if she can't care for him he'd be better off dead" seems to have been a large part of why they finally did it after a decade of talking and thinking about it. After some deliberation, the Tiptree Motherboard has decided to keep the name as it is, at least for now. They lay out their reasons, many of which I agree with, here. (Warnings for talk about suicide, depression, and some ableism.) File 770 also has some interesting discussion in the comments, including by at least one person who was fairly close with Alice.

And I'm torn. Because on the one hand, Tiptree's writing explored and foregrounded themes that almost nobody else was exploring at the time (certainly nobody else with such focus and consistency). And (unlike Campbell's fascism, which had a DIRECT and OBVIOUS affect on both his work and the genre as a whole), Sheldon's last horrifying act was not directly connected with Tiptree's art, except insofar as the sense of having been trapped with no way out led both to the murder/suicide and shaped Tiptree's work. Tiptree's writings are not notably more ableist than the genre as a whole, nor do they glorify or advocate for the sort of act which was Sheldon's last. It is possible to separate out the work from the evil, because the work did not advocate for or position the evil as good; the evil was, by and large, not present in the work. This is in direct contrast to Campbell, who actively used his work and his position to advocate for all of the evil in his head. You can't separate out Campbell's evil from his work because he made them intertwine so deeply--he did that, he chose that. Tiptree/Sheldon made a different choice, and so it is possible to make a separation between the work and the evil they did.

But how great a separation do we want to make? How much is good or reasonable? Do we want to name this award after a murderer? The Tiptree Motherboard make a case that it wasn't murder because Huntington Sheldon, Alice's husband, wanted to die, so that makes everything alright enough to keep the name. Here's my response, which I emailed to them:

As a person with a disability, there is one aspect of your understanding of Huntington's last days that is a gigantic, glaring problem, for two reasons, neither of which you seem to have considered. And the aspect is this: did he, or did he not, wish to die? For you, this is an important point (and you may well be correct on it). I don't believe that it matters, for two reasons.

First, a desire to die is not rational. It is a mental illness. It is part of depression. If a healthy person desires to die, we get them help. If they kill themselves, it is seen as a great tragedy. But when a disabled person is depressed, oh, of course, what could be more natural! Of course they want to kill themselves! Of course they need help ... but we are quicker to offer help to end their life than we are to offer assistance towards a better quality of life and the sort of therapy and medication that might help them be happy. Why is a disabled person's life less worthy than an abled person's? You may have considered this, but your statement certainly doesn't reflect any such consideration. He wanted to die, so his wife can be excused for making it happen. It fits so well into the common narrative of disability and death. It's even used in cases where we know for a certainty that the murder victim did not want to die ... because even in cases where the victim left a ton of evidence that they were happy and wanted to live, people will ignore it because they believe that disabled people must and should be miserable. Of course they must have wanted to die. So therefore the murderer can be excused for having killed them. Regardless of what resources were available to help the couple in 1987 (or in the decade leading up to that during which everybody seems to have known they were depressed and possibly suicidal and nobody did much), we live now in a world with much greater resources to help and yet people still kill disabled people using this as the reasoning. Regardless of whether or not you rename the award, PLEASE reframe the discussion so that you are not contributing to this perception of depression and disability.

Second, let us assume for the sake of argument that he genuinely did wish to die. How did he come to have such a wish? When someone is completely dependent on another person, as Huntington was on Alice, it is incredibly easy for the dependent person to adopt their caretaker's opinions. It is a psychological defense tactic, and it is the same mechanism that produces Stockholm Syndrome. This extends even to suicide. If the "caretaker" wishes the dependent person to be dead, the dependent person will often passively accept their "caretaker's" wishes. (I use scare quotes here because if someone wants you dead or believes you would be better off dead, the level of care is often ... minimal, if not actively neglectful or abusive.) If they can get to someplace safer, though, where they are not told through word and actions that they should be dead and would be better off dead, their opinions on the subject often change DRAMATICALLY. Even staying with the same primary caregiver but having more social contact with the wider world can be enough to work such change.

So the idea that Huntington was suicidal himself is not the mitigating factor you imagine it to be.

I really don't know what the answer is.

I learned an AMAAZING new fact today, about the anti-abortion movement in the US. I already knew that up through the 70s, Catholics were the only religious group in the US to be coherently anti-abortion, and even for them, it was not a huge issue. I already knew that it was Evangelical and Fundamentalist leaders' desire for power and influence that caused their segment of Christians in America to dive head-first into politics for the first time ever, and why they changed abortion rights for something most US Protestants either supported or didn't care about, to The Most Evil Thing Ever And The Greatest Unforgiveable Sin (and oh, by the way, a great megaphone to whip up their supporters with and a great club to beat their opponents over the head with).

But what I didn't know was why they chose to go for politics as their route to power and fame, instead of the old tried-and-true Evangelical method of hosting lots of revivals and bringing people to Jesus. I mean, there had been people trying to whip up the more conservative branches of American Christianity into political fervor to make them a voting block, and the response had always been that evangelicals focused on salvation and bringing people to Jesus, not temporal matters like politics.

So what changed? What brought around the 180 on political engagement? Oh, friends, it's a doozy. Thank you to Kindreds Podcast for bringing this to my attention, it's not the main theme of their episode on abortion, but they mentioned it and it led me to investigate the details. Politico has a great article about it.

Roe V. Wade in 1973 was a great big "meh" in Christian circles. Catholics didn't like it, but Protestants mostly approved. Nobody but Catholics believed life began at conception. Or, rather, most Christians would have said that a fetus is alive, but it's not really a person until it's born and can live separate from its mother. This is including Evangelicals and fundamentalists, by the way; the head of the Southern Baptist Convention at the time, a fundamentalist named W. A. Criswell, said exactly that on the record and nobody really cared. And those who did care largely didn't go around making political hay over it.

Then the IRS went after Bob Jones University (Jerry Falwell's darling school) for not admitting black students. Private schools which explicitly excluded students of color lost their tax-exempt status, and BJU tried to claim that it could discriminate because it was a religious institution. Religious institutions are allowed to discriminate on religious grounds; so, for example, a Christian church can say they'll only hire Christians to play the organ/be custodian/whatever, and feminist Catholics can't sue the Roman Catholic church for not ordaining female priests. But the thing is, in order for that discrimination to be legal, it has to be related to longstanding doctrine of the church. And BJU couldn't prove that racism was a longstanding doctrine of Christianity in general or Evangelicalism in particular. And they lost their tax exempt status in 1976.

That was a much bigger problem to White Evangelical and fundamentalist leaders in the late 1970s than abortion was. They couched in terms of "The government is infringing on our religious freedom!" but the problem wasn't religious freedom, it was racism. All of a sudden, they needed political clout. And since by that point naked racism was a non-starter in securing the moral high ground (dog-whistling was fine; outright saying it was not), they couldn't use "but we don't want to integrate!" as their call to action.

And so all of a sudden, they started preaching sermons and writing articles on how evil abortion was, and how that had always been the Evangelical position (even though it hadn't been) and it was a sign of America's moral decay that it was allowed now and anybody with any morals at all (certainly any Christian) would agree with them because it was the only moral and faithful position, and how Christians had to involve themselves in politics to overturn Roe v. Wade. And by 1979, they were firmly supporting Reagan over Carter.

If the issue were truly abortion, supporting Reagan made no sense. Carter had worked as president to reduce the number of abortions (mostly through social programs that would eliminate some of the need for them); he was wishy-washy on the subject politically, but on a moral level, he didn't like abortion. (Very much a centrist who thought abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.) Reagan, on the other hand, signed the most liberal abortion bill in the country in 1967 when he was governor of California.

You know what Reagan had that Carter didn't? Dog-whistle politics. On the issue of race, Carter was a mid-century Democrat generally in favor of civil rights. Reagan took Nixon's idea of dog-whistling (using coded language so you could enact racist policies without actually saying you hated Black people) to a whole new level. Reagan was the king of finding fig-leaves so that he could enact racist policies but claiming that the negative impact on the Black community was just a side effect (or denying that it existed at all). And he also had the kind of ethics that would allow him to reverse his position on key issues if that would get him elected. Carter was a man of principle. Whether you liked his principles or not, he generally stuck to them.

Reagan was racist enough for them, and would give them both what they actually wanted (ways to keep Black people out without actually saying stuff most of their parishioners would notice as racist) and what they needed as an excuse to have the political power to bargain with (explicit anti-abortion policies).

The Smithsonian has this website where they post scans of handwritten notes from the 19th Century and people online can transcribe them so that they can be searched and stuff, making them far more useful to scholars. I've been doing this recently a little bit at a time with their collection of Freedmen's Bureau papers. (I think maybe the Library of Congress or National Archives or something has a similar program?)

Anyway, it's been interesting, and here are my thoughts.

1) Wow, this is disorganized. I've been occasionally swinging by Distributed Proofreaders for decades (the website that handles scanning, proofreading, formatting, and so on, for Project Gutenberg), and their guidelines are extremely clear and specific, with lots of examples so there are VERY few times when you are unsure of what to do. The Smithsonian has guidelines, but there are quite a number of times where I've had a question that the rules don't answer, so I just shrug and make my best guess. Which means that things aren't standard, which means that whoever's finalizing stuff has a lot more to do than if they gave more detailed guidelines. OTOH, they have an actual paid staff, not just a cadre of loyal and committed volunteers, so maybe that affects things?

2) Related, there doesn't seem to be any vetting for who reviews transcribed documents? Like, all you need is an account which takes about 5 minutes to set up. You don't need a certain amount of experience with the project or anything. It's not like you need to have experience with the project or the way the Smithsonian wants things done or anything. So if there's a document where there's something atypical and the transcriber didn't know how to handle it, chances are the reviewer won't either. Which does not strike me as ideal.

3) My cursive-reading skills are a lot worse than I thought. Also, people in the 19th Century had worse handwriting than I've assumed they did.

4) I don't get people who finish transcribing a document and then press the "save" button but not the "mark completed" button.

5) It's interesting to go through things and see all these primary sources, and it is very satisfying to know you are helping the preservation and accessibility of history.

Over on the Yultide discord (which, by the way, goes year-round, and so does the hippo pool, if you need help finding a beta)

raininshadows asked for help with economic/labor worldbuilding, and since worldbuilding is my jam, I ended up writing a LOT of stuff, which I have cleaned up and presented here. (I sometimes write stories as an excuse to share my worldbuilding with people. I'm the person sitting in the theater going "wait, that makes NO SENSE." Unless I am busy, I will pretty much always be up for infodumping about worldbuilding. I may not know anything about what canon you're looking at, but I can usually at least give some pointers about things to think about, feel free to ask.) (Well. I don't really like dystopias, but aside from that.)

Before I begin, if SFFnal worldbuilding is something you want to build chops in long-term, the best thing to do is to read social histories from all over the world (i.e. the stuff that focuses on ordinary people, not Great Men) and watch for both overall patterns and interesting details that you can crib from. The more you know about "how different groups of people have thought, acted, and handled things over long periods of time" the greater your toolkit is.

When I want to do worldbuilding, especially with fanfic where I'm taking existing canon and extending it, I always start by asking a lot of questions about the world of the text and thinking about possible ways to answer those questions, and everything flows from there. Figuring out what questions to ask (and what the range of possible answers are) is easier the more you know about how various cultures handle such questions today and how they've handled them in the past and how things changed over time, which is where studying history comes in, but even with a relatively limited knowlege base, asking questions and coming up with a variety of answers to the questions is probably going to yield interesting results.

Rain wanted to know about how to build a realistic worker safety history, and especially how to do that in a theocratic society. I'm going to start with worker safety, and branch out into the larger economic picture and the eternal tug of war between classes, and then finish up with some things to think about when dealing with a theocracy.

( Worker safety and economic power )

( General economic questions )

( General pointers on how theocracies work in practice (as opposed to how they think they work) )

Please feel free to comment and ask questions!

Lo these many years ago, American History was one of my special interests. My undergrad degree was in it (well, not technically, but like 90% of my classes--including Historical Methods and stuff like that--focused on US history). I still love it, but I'm not focused enough on it to call it a special interest any more.

But you guys, there is SO MUCH interesting stuff about early American history that, if it were taught properly, would REALLY change peoples' perspectives on the "brave, gallant, noble" men of the Confederacy. And I'm not talking just the racism stuff, like 90% of them were whiny pissbabies and THAT is why the Civil War even existed in the first place. I shit you not. The modern Conservative Christian persecution complex has NOTHING on the antebellum Southern elite. Sure, a lot of those guys were personally brave in battle. But on a political or moral level, they were ... most five-year-olds are more mature. (I'm simplifying things a lot here and painting with a really broad brush, but it's not inaccurate.)

This meta is going to take as read that slavery=EVIL and that there is no such thing as a "good" slaveowner and that racism is horribly, horribly evil and nothing good can ever come of it and white supremacy twists and mutilates everything good it comes in contact with. You all know that, or you should, and you can find lots of places talking about that with a quick google search. Also, Blacks and poor Whites had vibrant cultures during this time period that I'm going to largely ignore because while all that is awesome, I want you to truly understand ALL the reasons why it's stupid and pathetic to glamorize the Southern elite, which means focusing on them. The South was (and is!) REALLY AWFUL AND SCREWED UP and racism is part of that but not the only part. But we will start a bit by talking about racism, because it's the root of so much other evil.

I'm sure you've heard that "race is a social construct!" Let's look at how that construct got constructed, shall we?

( How Black And White People Came To Be )

( Economic Differences And Political Boondoggles, or, How The South Learns That Temper Tantrums Are A Viable Political tool. )

( The South's Persecution Complex vs. the North's Manifest Destiny )

( Taking Their Marbles And Going Home, Then They'll Be Sorry: Civil War Edition )

( More Delusions Of Grandeur: The Whole Lost Cause Romantic Bullshit )

And I look at this and shake my head at the triumph of propaganda over reality, and also at the fact that ANYBODY, even a racist, could POSSIBLY think that those idiotic inbred delusional cretinous whiny pissbabies were cool or worthy of adoration.
white woman side eying someone.

Rebloggable on tumblr

Lost recordings made just after World War II of Holocaust survivors singing songs have been rediscovered at the University of Akron. These recordings were part of a project by Dr. David Boder, a Latvian Jewish psychologist who had settled in the United States in the 1920s and quickly made a name for himself in academia and as a clinician. He became an American citizen in 1932, but he traveled regularly to Europe and kept in touch with his family until the war disrupted movement and communications.

In May of 1945, just days after the Allies accepted Germany’s unconditional surrender, Boder got the idea to interview displaced persons, Holocaust survivors, victims of the dislocations and horrors of World War II. His aim was first to get a record of victims’ experiences while it was all still painfully fresh.

Some of the recordings were lost, some they just didn't have a way to listen to anymore, but they are now all safely digitized. You can read more here.

Title: From Castle to Palace
Fandom: Beauty and the Beast (1991)
Author:

beatrice_otter
Rating: Gen
Length: 17,645 words
Betaed By:

arithanas
Written for:

eida in

yuletide 2016
Summary: The curse is broken. Belle and her Beast would be happy to just live quietly together in the curse-free castle. Unfortunately, the rest of France has other ideas …

AN: This supposedly takes place in France, but Adam is not a very French name. So, since I don’t know that that name is ever used in the animated movie (and if so, it is only very briefly), I am taking the liberty of changing his name in this story to Louis.

AN2: Also, as I was reading up on the French court of the Ancien Régime, I came across a LOVELY way to slip the Beast into actualfax French Royal Family and French history. This then sparked an idea that ate my brain. The historical details and personalities are as accurate as Wikipedia would let me get.

At AO3

( The rest of that day was chaos. )

As someone who knows a bit about history, there are a few things that most historical fiction (pro or fan) gets wrong ALL THE TIME, and it really drives me batty. So I will be writing a few primers about basic details that people get wrong a lot, on an irregular basis. It will not be a systematic "everything you need to know" basis, but rather "these are the things that bug me the most." Unless otherwise specified, all these primers will refer to European and European-American culture and history. (So, for example, your standard Regency AU.)

My first primer was on Corsets and Undergarments.

Today we're going to talk about class, titles, and formal modes of address!

You've all read this scene. It's set in a different time period with really significant class differences. Our Hero is a noble/really rich, and talking with a servant/lower class person, and the servant uses their rank or title, and Our Hero feels uncomfortable! It's so stuffy and formal and weird! And so they tell the servant/lower class person to just call them by their first name. This is how you know that they are Egalitarian and therefore Good. (Often the villain, if there is one, is very insistent on maintaining the visible elements of the class structure.) And when the Good Egalitarian Aristocrat/Rich Person tells the Low Class Person to call them by their first name and treat them like they're friends and equals, the Low Class Person is happy with this and they become fast friends.

( This is what we call projecting modern views on history. )

Now, if you want to completely ignore all this and have your Regency AU just be modern people in weird clothes, that's cool. But if you actually want it to matter that they're in the past for anything more than "oh, fancy parties, cool," please keep this in mind.

As someone who knows a bit about history, there are a few things that most historical fiction (pro or fan) gets wrong ALL THE TIME, and it really drives me batty. So I will be writing a few primers about basic details that people get wrong a lot, on an irregular basis. It will not be a systematic "everything you need to know" basis, but rather "these are the things that are most glaring to me." Unless otherwise specified, all these primers will refer to European and European-American culture and history. (So, for example, your standard Regency AU.)

And period clothing and fashion are things I know a bit about, given that a) I find it fascinating and b) I used to work in the costume shop of a theater, so that's the subject of my first post.

One of the most common clothing gaffes I see is, well, ANYTHING related to corsets. We get that SOOOOOO WRONG. The myths, they are strong with this one. So I'm going to define what a corset is, and then bust some myths about them.

( What a Corset Is and What it Looks Like )

( Corset Myths )

( General Undergarment Information, for Pre-20th Century Europe and America (both men and women) )

tl;dr most corsets weren't uncomfortable, unless you're going for high-fashion in the Victorian or Edwardian eras. Most women could do anything up to and including play sports and do hard physical labor in their corset without a problem. If you have a European or American woman of the corset-wearing era dropped into modern life, she's not going to think ditching her corset for a bra is the most awesome thing ever, although she may think the idea of getting to wear trousers when she wants to is. A modern woman put into a corset-wearing era will probably adapt to the corset itself fairly easily, more easily than she would adjust to other aspects of the fashion (the skirts, and the things that held the skirts in whatever ridiculous fashion was popular in that era). But the lower-class she's going for, the less elaborate they were--a working-class woman would wear simpler stays, and skirts with no under structure. And a woman in a corset-wearing period, staying in her own era, probably isn't going to think about wearing corsets one way or the other, it just is.

And everybody was wearing two layers of clothing, and only the under layer would get washed unless there was a stain on the outer garment.

So a couple of weeks ago I posted my thoughts on Hamilton the musical from a historical POV (no, Hamilton was NOT a great progressive role model any more than Jefferson was), but as usual,

melannen has a much better and more in-depth post on it now! So go read it, it's really good.

Like. The arguments in the Cabinet Battles basically come down to TJ saying "Hey, Hamilton, your 'political policy' is based on making you and your friends rich and consolidating power at everyone else's expense" and A. Ham going "Yeah? Well you're a fucking slaveowner."

Which ADMITTEDLY is a valid burn but doesn't actually do anything to convince me that A. Ham's political policies are any good. Specially since (at least in the soundtrack) we don't see him trying to actually do anything about slavery except burn TJ with it.

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Page Summary

Wayne Manor, redux
Crowdsourcing Public Domain Ebooks
How Big Is Wayne Manor, and how is it arranged?
Historical Fiction Pet Peeves: Secretaries
Pride and Prejudice background information: the Bennet finances
Time Travel, killing Jesus, and the religion of empire
Is Christmas Pagan?
Historical Fiction Pet Peeves: The Governess
Period Fic Primer: Mawwiage is what Bwings Us Togethah Today
"it's officially yuletide if the coders have to get to work!"
Good News and Bad News in the world of SF/F legacies
The Racist Roots of the Anti-Abortion movement
Transcribing Smithsonian Stuff
How to worldbuild: Labor relations, economics, and theocracy
Slavery, Racism, The Civil War, and America: Or, Why Does Anybody Care About Those Whiny Idiots?!?
Lost Songs of Holocaust Survivors Found
Fic: From Castle to Palace
Period Fic Primer: "Oh, don't call me 'my Lady,' call me Sue!" On formality, titles, and class
Period Fic Primer: Clothing: Corsets and Undergarments
Hamilton and Historicity, part II

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Otter's Rock

Entries tagged with history

Wayne Manor, redux

Crowdsourcing Public Domain Ebooks

How Big Is Wayne Manor, and how is it arranged?

Historical Fiction Pet Peeves: Secretaries

Pride and Prejudice background information: the Bennet finances

Time Travel, killing Jesus, and the religion of empire

Is Christmas Pagan?

Historical Fiction Pet Peeves: The Governess

Period Fic Primer: Mawwiage is what Bwings Us Togethah Today

"it's officially yuletide if the coders have to get to work!"

Good News and Bad News in the world of SF/F legacies

The Racist Roots of the Anti-Abortion movement

Transcribing Smithsonian Stuff

How to worldbuild: Labor relations, economics, and theocracy

Slavery, Racism, The Civil War, and America: Or, Why Does Anybody Care About Those Whiny Idiots?!?

Lost Songs of Holocaust Survivors Found

Fic: From Castle to Palace

Period Fic Primer: "Oh, don't call me 'my Lady,' call me Sue!" On formality, titles, and class

Period Fic Primer: Clothing: Corsets and Undergarments

Hamilton and Historicity, part II