Continuum History

Merry Christmas from the Continuum history team!

Wishing all of our readers a very merry Christmas and a happy new year!

 

Obituary: Professor Patrick Collinson

We were saddened to learn this week of the passing of Continuum author Professor Patrick Collinson at the end of September, aged 82.

He wrote several books for Hambledon Continuum, including From Cranmer to Sancroft and Elizabethans.

As History Today write in their obituary, he was "one of the finest historians of early modern England". A large obituary has also been published in The Times.

The Continuum History team out and about - Anglo-American Conference and IMC 2011

It's officially, as is apparent by all the rain, summer in the UK and so begins our conference season!

The Continuum History team, including myself, will be out and about with stands at both the Anglo-American Conference in London next week and also the International Medieval Congress in Leeds in early July. If you're planning on attending either, do stop by our stand and say hello!

And now for a word from my colleague Rhodri:

From 11th – 14th July we'll be at the International Medieval Congress (organised by the Institute for Medieval Studies at Leeds University) selling books and speaking to people about new commissioning ideas.

We will be based, along with other the publishers, in Bodington Hall and will be more than happy to talk with anyone who would like to stop by and discuss book proposals, Continuum and its Medieval history list or indeed anything book-related. Alternatively if you’d like to make an appointment to come and see us at a specific  time, feel free to contact either Michael Greenwood (Commissioning Editor) at mgreenwood@continuumbooks.com or myself at rmogford@continuumbooks.com.

Look forward to seeing as many of you there as possible.

 

Charlotte Hoare (Marketing Executive UK) and Rhodri Mogford (Assistant Editor)

Thor the Movie: Politics with a Hammer - A guest post by Martin Arnold, author of Thor: Myth to Marvel

Judging solely from box office receipts in excess of $360 million by mid-May, more than double what it cost to make, Kenneth Branagh’s Thor is a resounding success, easily good enough for the Paramount/Marvel Studios team to justify the sequel hinted at in the film’s closing scene. For the vast majority of film-goers, seeking their fix of CGI-ed thrills and spills, Thor will have delivered. Two other camps, however, may be less than awed. Firstly, there will be the Old Norse mythology pedants who will mutter through clenched teeth that Thor is a travesty of the Icelandic eddas. Secondly, there will be the die-hard fans of Marvel’s The Mighty Thor, who will have noted a good number of deviations from Marvel’s comic-book plot history, as it has somewhat messily evolved over the last fifty years. As regards the eddic pedants, no-one will listen or care, for such nit-picking is beside the point, and, in any case, Marvel’s relationship with mythological niceties was only ever an opportunistic one. As regards the die-hards (the geeks, that is), they have a point. Sort of.  

 

As a superhero, Thor presented problems from the outset. The intention of the creators of The Mighty Thor, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, was clearly to capitalise on the Superman dual or hidden identity formula. So, the outcast god is Don Blake on Earth, a half-crippled medic who has taken a shine to his nurse assistant, Jane Foster, an attraction that his alter-ego is more successful is pursuing. While this worked fine for Superman, in Thor’s case it simply could not, for Thor has another life in Asgard, which simply cannot be reconciled with his Earthbound selves. Aware of this awkwardness, Marvel’s solution was to write Jane out of the series, so that Thor can be with his actual mythological wife, Sif, and gradually to drop the Don Blake device. Thor thus became Thor on earth as he is in heaven. One consequence of this was that Thor-the-protector-of-mankind (his unique role in the eddas, by the way, so no problem for the pedants there) had a rather limited role on Earth. Of course, the fallout from the family drama in Asgard, notably involving his dad, Odin, and his jealous sibling, Loki, provided a fair amount of Earthly tribulations but inevitably ones that soon exhausted themselves. Rule number one of the comic book is that the storyline must constantly reinvent itself and the chances of doing this with Thor lay in the cosmos not on Earth, which has also featured less and less in Thor’s comic-book adventures.  

 

Fully aware of all this, the movie’s scriptwriters have gone back to the drawing board and started again. The fundamental scheme of the film is the two worlds scenario of all fantasy fiction, in which the hero moves from one world to another and in so doing learns some fundamental truth about him/herself and life in general.  This is the ‘maturation fable’ whose roots in folktale are as old as the hills. Usually, this learning process entails a shift from a banal world (typically home) to a hyperbolic world (everything home is not) of mind-boggling beings; for example, Luke Skywalker leaves the farm and discovers the galaxy, or Bilbo/Frodo Baggins quits the Shire and undergoes world-changing adventures in Middle Earth. In Thor, somewhat ingeniously, it’s the other way round, for it is on Earth, without recourse to magic weaponry or any superpowers, other than those possessed by a body-building kung-fu fighter, that Thor gets in touch with his inner self and so finds a more subtle response to events, rather than just bashing people with his hammer. Thanks for this are due solely to his chance encounter and subsequent embroilment with a radical astrophysicist, a certain Jane Foster (an ex, she says at one point, of Don Blake).

 

Yet, while Thor, the exiled god, slowly comes to see that the common ground between high politics (for which read both his dysfunctional family in Asgard and the looming threat of the Frost Giants) and love (for which read the starry-eyed Jane) is duty and responsibility,   Thor, the movie, hints at a much wider concern than mere personal salvation. In this case, the issue is national salvation or, to put it another way, the problems of twenty-first century American foreign policy.

 

The premise of the film is that the Frost Giants, once vanquished in 965 AD (for some reason) when they tried to conquer Earth, are set on reviving their ambitions for cosmic domination. For this they need the Casket of Ancient Winters, an ecological Pandora’s Box currently housed in the vaults of Asgard. At the very moment that Odin is about relinquish the throne to Thor, a handful of them enter Asgard in an attempt to retrieve it. They fail but, despite Odin’s caution, Thor and his chums decide to take the war to the Giants. They fail too but the consequence is that the gods who ‘brought peace to the universe’ have now brought war to it. It may be fatuous to spell this out but I’ll risk it: the most powerful realm around is violated by its ancient enemies and then launches an ill-advised war, one, it seems, that it cannot win. And so the trouble starts, not so much with the Frost Giants, whose leader, Laufey, lives in a cave in a faraway place, but inside Asgard.  What should be done? How can this be settled? Odin favours diplomacy. Loki, the enemy within, whose double dealing is only explained in Oedipal terms, favours cunning. Thor, who peaked too early with the wrong answer, is packed off to Earth to learn the lessons of good governance. This, in a place where the national context is Iraq and Afghanistan, which are mentioned several times, and homeland security, or S.H.I.E.LD., is very nervous of people and things that clearly aren’t normal, like Thor, his hammer and meddlesome astrophysicists.

 

It doesn’t pay to push the analogies too far, although they are clearly meant, especially in the vexed case of Loki, for whom the accommodating strategies of multiculturalism would not go amiss, suggests Odin and, eventually, the more dovish Thor.  Yet whatever all this navel-gazing about the role of being top dog might signify, the film resists any gung-ho or feelgood solutions. The Giants may be thwarted for now but the cost, it seems, is a deeply uncomfortable isolationism, particularly so for the future prospects of Thor and Jane. The course of high politics - like families, like sexual passion – does not run smooth. In this respect, Thor is an honest film. Just how much fun it is has already been decided by the queues at the box office.

-- Martin Arnold, May 2011

Centenary of International Women’s Day and St. Patrick's Day - a guest post from Continuum author Louise Raw

On 19th March it will be exactly 100 years since the rather wonderful Clara Zetkin (pro-woman, anti-racist, and later anti-Nazi German politician) proposed an international day to celebrate women and their struggle for equality. Two days before it, March 17th is, of course, St Patrick’s Day. Both events would have meant something to the East London matchwomen who worked for Bryant & May, and whose strike against appalling conditions and management bullying changed history - but is still under-valued.

I’m delighted to be reading about them from my new paperback, Striking a Light, at Bookmarks bookshop on St Patrick’s night.

When 1400 matchwomen walked out of their Bow factory in the summer of 1888, in a protest about conditions and management bullying, as far as polite Victorian society was concerned they were already beyond the pale. They were ‘factory girls’, and the very idea of them both titillated and appalled their ‘betters’. All manner of ills, from child mortality to drunken husbands, were laid at the door of poor working women - a handy distraction from the poverty and appalling inequality that were the real culprits.

If that wasn’t enough the matchwomen also had the cheek to come, as their employer poetically put it, ‘from the Emerald Isle’. Anti-Irish prejudice is a generally, if recently, deceased phenomenon, but the London Irish experienced it every day. Forced abroad by oppression at home, Irish migrants had little choice but to take the worst jobs and housing. Commentator Charles Booth showed the anti-Irish feeling of the time, but also the Irish community’s solidarity, when writing about Gale Street in the East End:

 This block sends more police to hospital than any other in London. ‘Men are not human’,
they are wild beasts. You take a man or a woman, a rescue is always organised. They
fling bricks, iron, anything they can lay their hands on. All are Irish cockneys. Not an
Englishman or Scotchman would live among them.

The matchwomen, then, were at the bottom of the heap. The only way they could have joined the respectable poor would have been to work hard and uncomplainingly, keep quiet about their starvation wages, respect their employers and know their place. They blew it spectacularly on this front, too.

A few of the women blew the whistle on the appalling conditions and hazards of life inside the match factory to Annie Besant, a Fabian journalist. The worst of these was a disease they called ‘phossy jaw’ caused by the white phosphorus in match tips. Grandchildren of those who lived near the factory told me that after each shift, the routes home of the matchwomen were marked by piles of fluorescing vomit. Full-blown phosphorus necrosis led to suppurating abscesses, the decay of the jawbone, and sometimes agonising death. 

When management threatened the women after Besant revealed these ugly truths in an article, and they downed tools, nobody expected them to win. They had no trade union backing - unions in those days were generally for the elite of male manufacturing workers - so no strike pay, and were likely to be instantly dismissed for their temerity. Instead, the strike became a cause célèbre, and their victory inspired numerous other groups of workers. It triggered a movement, New Unionism, which was the birth of the modern labour movement and independent Labour Party.

As we approach the centenary of International Women’s Day things are, of course, different for women… and yet, the matchwomen’s achievement is still dismissed by some historians, who seem unable to believe uneducated ‘factory girls’ could have acted on their own initiative, let alone influenced other workers. Because of this, there are numerous books about Annie Besant and (male) New Unionists, but - until mine - none solely devoted to the matchwomen. I’ve found a wealth of evidence showing that the matchwomen were in fact seasoned strikers, and no strangers to politics, attending the huge demonstrations on Irish affairs that were a feature of East End life in the 1880s. Their Irishness was probably an important component to their defiance of the English gentlemen who employed them.

In 1940 Ernest Bevin wrote to surviving New Unionist dock strikers:

"virtually a revolution against poverty, tyranny and intolerable conditions. You little thought during those weeks…that you were laying the foundation of a great Industrial Movement."

Join me at Bookmarks to raise a glass on St Patrick’s night to the remarkable matchwomen, who are equally deserving of this tribute, and to remember their courage.

- Louise Raw, March 2011

Thu 17 Mar - 18:30

Striking A Light
The Bryant and May Matchwomen and their Place in History
At Bookmarks, 1 Bloomsbury Street, London, WC1B 3QE
FREE ENTRY
Call 020 7637 1848 or email events@bookmarks.uk.com to reserve your place.

Louise Raw will be reading from and signing copies of her book.

OTHER AUTHOR EVENTS :

March 16th 7.30pm

 
Striking a Light - How the Bryant & May matchwomen changed the world
Second in a series of three talks celebrating International Women's Month
Museum of St Albans,
9A Hatfield Rd,
St Albans,
AL1 3PR
Cost £6.00 (£5.00 Museum Friends) – includes tea/coffee & biscuits
Book at Museum or phone 01727 819340

March 23rd: 7pm

BOOK LAUNCH/TALK
‘The London matchwomen’s strike of 1888’
£3, redeemable against any purchase

Housmans Bookshop
5 Caledonian Road
King's Cross ,
London N1 9DX,
UK
Tel 020 7837 4473
www.housmans.com

May 18th 7pm

The Women's Library
London Metropolitan University
25 Old Castle Street
London E1 7NT
Tel: (0)20 7320 2222
www.londonmet.ac.uk/thewomenslibrary

Thursday June 23rd 2pm

‘The First East End Girls’
Guildhall Library
Aldermanbury,
London,
EC2V 7HH
www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/Corporation/LGN

International Women's Day and Louise Raw

Whilst my colleagues who work on our religious lists here at Continuum are pre-occupied with Shrove Tuesday today, my mind has been more on International Women's Day.

As a day celebrating the economic, political and social achievements of women past, present and future, it is apt then that Louise Raw's Striking a Light is released in paperback this week.

In July 1888, fourteen hundred women and girls employed by the matchmakers Bryant & May walked out of their East End factory in protest against their poor working conditions, low pay and long hours. Louise Raw gives us a challenging new interpretation of events proving that the women themselves, not celebrity socialists like Annie Besant, began it. She provides unequivocal evidence to show that the matchwomen greatly influenced the Dock Strike of 1889, which until now was thought to be the key event of new unionism, and repositions them as the mothers of the modern labour movement. Returning to the stories of the women themselves, and by interviewing their relatives today, Raw is able to construct a new history which challenges existing accounts of the strike itself and radically alters the accepted history of the labour movement in Britain.

In the words of Terry McCarthy, former director of the National Museum of Labour History, the book is "a major contribution to Labour and Social history... an absolute must for serious historians."

An inspirational study of female empowerment, click on the preview for more information. You might also want to check out Louise's website, www.louiseraw.co.uk, for details on her upcoming talks and events.

Finally, if you're taking part in any International Women's Day events this week then the very best of luck from all of us here.

 

Charlotte

Marketing Executive

Thor: Myth to Marvel - and now to Branagh!

Yesterday saw the release of the latest trailer for Kenneth Branagh's screen adaptation of Marvel Comic's Thor. Check it out below:

 

 

If that's whet your appetite to know more about the Norse god of thunder, then you might want to take a look at our forthcoming book Thor: Myth to Marvel. It's due out in May as well and explores how the legend has been adopted, adapted and transformed through history.

 

Charlotte

Marketing Executive

150th anniversary of the birth of Fridtjof Nansen - a guest post from Continuum author Roland Huntford

Continuing with our series of guest posts from Continuum authors, author of Two Planks and a Passion and the recent Race for the South Pole Roland Huntford shares his thoughts on Fridtjof Nansen, pioneer of modern polar exploration and 150 years old this October.

This year is the centenary of Roald Amundsen's triumph in the race for the South Pole. What may not be so well-known is that it is also the 150th anniversary of the birth of Fridtjof Nansen. By his attainment of the last great terrestrial goal, Amundsen sealed the latter-day Scandinavian ascendancy in high latitudes. Nansen, a fellow Norwegian, established it. He pioneered modern polar exploration.

In 1888, Nansen made the first crossing of Greenland. It was not so much his exploit that made history, but the way he did it. A leading skier from the country that invented modern skiing, he skied over the ice cap, becoming the first man to use skis in the completion of a major polar journey. By thus introducing the ski, and making snow travel easy and economical of effort, Nansen revolutionised polar exploration. In the process, he demythologised the polar environment by showing that it was subject to rational treatment, which abolished the need for heroic suffering. On the same expedition, he also shaped polar travel for the next century by inventing a new kind of flexible sledge with broad ski-like runners, based on a pattern used by Norwegian farmers and some Siberian tribes.

Almost by accident, Nansen made the critical innovation in polar travel during his second Arctic expedition of 1893-96. This was an attempt to reach the North Pole by freezing a specially built ship, the Fram, into the polar pack ice, and letting her drift with the current. On the crossing of the Greenland, Nansen had been tortured by man hauling his sledges, and swore never to do so again. He took dogs on the Fram. One day, practising around the ship, he made the momentous discovery that the speed of dogs before a loaded sledge was that of a cross-country skier moving at his natural pace. They followed each other with ease.

Nansen soon put this discovery into practice. The interplay of dogs and skis was the technique he used when, having grasped that the Fram would not reach a high enough latitude, he left the ship and struck out across the pack ice to reach the North Pole. He failed in the attempt, only reaching a latitude of 86º14'. It was a new record for the furthest north, but it was not the Pole. Nonetheless Nansen had devised the system of polar travel that lasted until the advent of mechanised transport in the snows. It was the system that took Amundsen and his companions to the South Pole and back without undue inconvenience. Without Nansen there would have been no Amundsen.

In a familiar way, both Amundsen and Nansen owed a historic debt to a lesser known but great precursor. He was Baron Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld, a Finnish-born Swede. In 1883, Nordenskiöld had tried to cross Greenland. He also saw the possibility of skis. However, being no skier himself - he was a long-distance skater on the Baltic sea ice - he took two Swedish Lapps. Traditionally Lapps were accomplished skiers, but these ones could not complete the crossing either. Nonetheless their presence on Nordenskiöld's expedition was the impulse that drove Nansen successfully to use skis on Greenland. As auxiliaries, incidentally, Nansen took two Lapps as well.

Nordenskiöld was best known for his traverse of the North-East Passage in 1878-79. It made him a hero of his times. The North-East Passage was the fabled short cut to the East along the Arctic coast of Siberia. It had been attempted by the British since Elizabethan times, but Nordenskiöld, the Swede, was the first successfully to complete it. This is the story of the classic age of polar exploration in a nutshell.

Nordenskiöld had explored the Arctic since 1858. He virtually invented the polar expedition as a scientific enterprise. For example, he had visited Greenland in 1870 to 'see an ice age in being', as he put it.

What Nordenskiöld, Nansen and Amundsen had in common was a rational attitude to the polar environment. They were free of heroic ideals, and simply wanted conspicuous achievement with the least possible discomfort. So in celebrating Amundsen's deceptively unadventurous triumph, spare a thought for the man who started it all. In the background, the looming shadow of Nordenskiöld deserves a share of the centenary celebrations.

 

Roland Huntford, 2011

Some thoughts ahead of Holocaust Memorial Day from Dr Tim Cole

Ahead of this year's Holocaust Memorial Day Dr Tim Cole, Senior Lecturer in Social History at the University of Bristol, reflects upon untold stories and untold journeys. He considers the tangible experiences of the individual as he seeks to further understand the Holocaust and its devastation. Dr Cole's forthcoming book, Traces of the Holocaust, gives significant coverage to this and other aspects of the Holocaust. It will be published in June and can be pre-ordered online now.

I was interested to read that the theme chosen this year for Holocaust Memorial Day – on 27th January, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz – is 'Untold Stories'. It's a theme intended to draw attention away from the overwhelming and depersonalized statistics of genocide, to the more approachable scale of the individual. As the theme paper puts it, the victims of Nazi Germany 'were not a statistic. They were individuals. Somebody's friend. A mother. A father. A child. A colleague. A neighbour.' In many ways such an approach of personalizing genocide is widely adopted in memorial practice: think only of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum where visitors receive the ID card of a victim who accompanies them through the exhibition that tells the continent-wide story of the unrolling of the Nazi persecution of Jews and other victims during the Second World War.

In my latest book – Traces of the Holocaust – I've been interested in thinking about what that kind of personalizing, or telling the stories of named individuals, might contribute to histories of the Holocaust. In large part that approach was first sparked, as is so often the case, by a document that grabbed my attention in the archives. It was a letter, from a local official in the town of Vasvár in western Hungary, himself responding to a letter from a man writing from Budapest, János M. János's 11 year old son, György András M. was spending the summer in the village of Csehimindszent. However in the middle of May 1944, he was taken along with other Jews from the village to the ghetto established in Vasvár. Somehow, his father found out about this and wrote to the local authorities with the request that his son be allowed to come home. Surprising though it seems, this request was granted. That was the piece of paper that grabbed my attention – the letter from the chief constable of Vasvár authorising a local lawyer to accompany György András back to Budapest.

Chancing upon this single story in the archives I wanted to know more. In particular, did György András make it back to Budapest, and if he did, did he survive the war. On the shelf in my office I had a copy of a city-wide survey of Jewish survivors living in Budapest in 1946, so I turned to the pages with names beginning with M. There he was - György András M. was listed living with his mother Margit Magdolna Sz. and his maternal grandmother, Lujza on Dohány utca just a few doors down from the main synagogue in the capital in 1946. Missing was his father, the letter writing János, who set the whole chain of events into action.

György András' counter-journey – a journey out of the ghetto – was one that it seemed a number of other Jews took in Hungary in 1944 for a variety of reasons. Counter journeys such as his and a number of others that I discovered were the exception rather than the norm. For most Hungarian Jews – and it is their journeys that dominate the book – the summer of 1944 was a time when they were taken into urban ghettos, from there to local train stations, and then on through entrainment centres to Auschwitz. But while telling if you like the story, I also wanted to see what those other stories – untold stories such as that of György András M. – might suggest about this event that continues to surprise in its complexity.

Tim Cole

Culture in Retrospect? - a guest post from Continuum author, Charles Kirke

Dr Charles Kirke has kindly taken the time to give some thought to the place of the memoir in the study of History. It would be interesting to see what people think about some of the issues Dr Kirke raises so please feel free to comment. We will then post Dr Kirke's own take on the value and pitfalls of the memoir. Dr Kirke's book, Red Coat, Green Machine: Continuity in Change in the British Army 1700 to 2000, was recently shortlisted for the Longman/History Today Book of the Year award and it is available to buy on our website now.

As Michael Lieven wrote in 'A Victorian Genre: Military Memoirs and the Anglo-Zulu War', (Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, 77 (1999), pp 106-121), 'For most people, life unfolds in a patternless way bewildering to its subject. By contrast, the autobiography is typically written by someone looking to find a sense and pattern as life nears its end. It is a crafted work of art seeking to give meaning to a life, even to "create" it.'(page 107). How much use to historians, therefore, are memoirs which, by their very nature, are written in retrospect? As first hand eyewitness accounts they are precious, but as personal constructions are they trustworthy? By the same token, how trustworthy are the sound recordings of elderly people remembering for posterity the times of their youth?

As a researcher in British Army culture I have had to wrestle with this issue because memoirs comprise a significant proportion of first hand sources for my work. Should they be discounted because they are constructed in retrospect? Should the only sources for the study be material written 'in vivo' at the time? But then, soldiers' letters are so often devoid of information about the organizational culture of their authors because they are written for an audience that knows nothing of it. Why add detail that is remote from the experience of the intended reader?

Are we left, then, only with diaries for an understanding of culture?

Dr Charles Kirke

Cranfield University, UK