theoddmentemporium:

Alexander Selkirk: The Real Robinson Crusoe

Alexander Selkirk was a Scottish sailor who spent four years as a castaway on an uninhabited island. An unruly youth Selkirk began buccaneering and in 1703 joined an expedition to the South Seas, sailing on the Cinque Ports. A year after leaving England the ship was brought to restock supplies on an uninhabited island off the coast of Chile.

Here Selkirk raised concerns about the seaworthiness of the vessel and requested to be left behind, counting on an impending visit by another ship. His wish granted, Selkirk promptly regretted it. He chased and called after the ship, but to no avail. Selkirk lived the next four years and four months without any human company. (Incidentally, Cinque Ports did later founder off the coast of Colombia).

Suffering all the while from loneliness, misery and remorse, Selkirk proved resourceful: he built huts out of pimento trees; used his musket to hunt goats and his knife to clean their carcasses; he read from the Bible, finding it a comfort and mainstay for his English. When his clothes wore out, he made new garments from goatskin using a nail for sewing. 

During this time two vessels came to anchor. Unfortunately for Selkirk, both were Spanish and as a Scotsman he risked a terrible fate if captured. Once, Selkirk was spotted and chased by a group of sailors from one of the ships. His Spanish pursuers urinated beneath the tree in which he was hiding, but failed to discover him. 

Selkirk’s long-awaited rescue came in 1709 by way of a passing ship. Selkirk was almost incoherent in his joy. They returned to England in 1711 and he earned a lot of money and small amount of celebrity from his ordeal. Robinson Crusoewas probably based in part on his story.

theoddmentemporium:

American Gothic with its models.

thesmithian:

One statistical method for analyzing the Supreme Court…finds that the current court is the most conservative since at least the 1930s.

more.

thesmithian:

Media suppression, corruption and the murder of political rivals have marked the regime of Vladimir Putin, who is running for his third term as president in Russia’s election next week. Despite mass demonstrations, he’s expected to win. How Putin rose to power is spelled out in Russian journalist Masha Gessen’s new book…

more.

theweekmagazine:

The first “War on Christmas” was waged almost 400 years ago by our Puritan forefathers. The Pilgrims who came to America in 1620 were outraged by Christmas, partially because it did not originate as a Christian holiday. The upper classes in ancient Rome celebrated Dec. 25 as the birthday of the sun god Mithra. Beyond that, the Puritans considered it historically inaccurate to place the Messiah’s arrival on Dec. 25. They thought Jesus had been born sometime in September. They felt so strongly about the holiday that in New England, they banned Christmas celebrations entirely. Christmas Day was only formally declared a federal holiday in 1870.

(via brooklynmutt)

findingsherlock:

FS says: <3

the-seed-of-europe:

Siegfried Sassoon, WWI veteran and poet with his lover - aristocratic socialite and Bright Young Thing Stephen Tennant.

  “…Small-scale, essentially confined to a tiny quarter of the metropolis, the Bright Young People, like the Modern Girl and the Modern Girl’s Brother, wielded an influence on the popular conception of ‘youth’ out of all proportion to their numbers. Coming only a few years after a devastating war that obliterated hundreds of thousands of young men the antagonism between youth and seniority that characterized the 1920s was of far greater significance than previous intergenerational disturbance. For all the enthusiasm for ‘youth,’ the talk of ‘new blood’ and the need to sweep away prewar stuffiness, the twenties, practically every commentator of the period agrees, was a difficult time to be a young man. Part of this difficulty lay in the simple fact of his existence. Orwell, a decade later, noted the tremendous feeling of guilt experienced by the young man born in the years after 1900 who, consequently, had managed to avoid military service. ‘The very fact of his being alive was against him,’ Balfour declared, ‘for he was thus prevented from standing level with ‘the boys who had died.” Whatever feats he accomplished, he would always be compared, and nearly always unfavorably, with the war generation lost in the Flanders mud.

           But there was more to these anxieties than a sense of generational inferiority. To a failure to emulate the achievements of those killed in the war could be added the insecurities of the new postwar landscape, where jobs were scarce and whole areas of employment seemed set aside for the jealous middle-aged. On the one hand the peculiarly charged atmosphere of the 1920s, with its promise of good times and limitless horizons, had raised expectations among the young; on the other the reality of its economic pressures had simultaneously let them down. Cyril Connolly noted the reluctance of his contemporaries to accept the routine compromises that had done for their fathers: ‘They could not settle down to boring jobs and unprofitable careers with prewar patience and their cleverness seemed a liability rather than an asset.’…”

-D.J. Taylor, Bright Young People: The Lost Generation of London’s Jazz Age.

Not a book directly related to the wars, but highly recommended reading all the same.

(via findingsherlock-deactivated2012)

sourcingsherlock:

Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction

William A. Cohen

Never has the Victorian novel appeared so perverse as it does in these pages—and never his its perversity seemed so fundamental to its accomplishment. Whether discussing George Eliot’s lesbian readers, Anthony Trollope’s whorish heroines, or Charles Dickens’s masturbating characters, William A. Cohen’s study explodes the decorum of mainstream nineteenth-century fiction. By viewing this fiction alongside the most alarming public scandals of the day, Cohen exposes both the scandalousness of this literature and its sexiness.

Scandal, then as now, makes public the secret indiscretions of prominent people, engrossing its audience in salacious details that violate the very code of propriety it aims to enforce. In narratives ranging from Great Expectations to the Boulton and Park sodomy scandal of 1870–71, from Eliot’s and Trollope’s novels about scandalous women to Oscar Wilde’s writing and his trials for homosexuality, Cohen shows how, in each instance, sexuality appears couched in coded terms. He identifies an assortment of cunning narrative techniques used to insinuate sex into Victorian writing, demonstrating that even as such narratives air the scandalous subject, they emphasize its unspeakable nature. 

Written with an eye toward the sex scandals that still whet the appetites of consumers of news and novels, this work is suggestive about our own modes of imagining sexuality today and how we arrived at them. Sex Scandal will appeal to scholars and general readers interested in Victorian literature, the history of sexuality, gender studies, nineteenth-century Britain, and gay, lesbian, and queer studies. 

whileothersreap:

“America has always done better in the role of the reluctant imperialist. The simple fact is that the world does not like its leading military power to be overly eager to intervene in foreign lands. In fact, until the Cold War, the U.S. had a very different image from European great powers precisely because it had few expansionist impulses. America entered World War I after three years of bloody fighting just in time to tip the balance. It entered World War II only after Japan attacked it and Hitler declared war. The U.S. had the capacity to be an imperial power but chose not to be one. Yet during the Cold War, Washington developed the habit of intervening early and often in far-flung places, worried about communist takeovers. As a result, America was seen in much of the Third World in the same light as the European colonial powers, forfeiting a crucial moral and political advantage.”

doodled this back in may when i first read the article.

(via bullywhipsareprotectingyou)