I’ve been super busy these last few months working on a project for work, but now that it’s done I am finding I have more time to blog, read, and play video games. To celebrate being done with my project (mostly) I figured I’d write about what has been occupying my time these last 7 months. Thankfully I got a new job in January with the Nixon Library. Immediately upon being hired I was told that my main focus for the first 6-7 months was to create an online exhibit. As someone who has never curated an exhibit before I was necessarily a bit worried. How the hell was I going to accomplish this? Where do I start? Will I be able to even complete this in the time frame that was allotted to me? Those are the types of questions that swirled and twittered around my brain for pretty much the entire 7 months. Some how I did complete it and somehow I managed to exceed expectations, even my own, and produce something that has now been deemed “The first of many”.
So what exactly goes into an online exhibit?
Well good thing you asked because here are the ingredients for this particular exhibit:
15+ Books (monographs, memoirs, biographies, and US History)
50+ hours of design, photo editing, entering metadata etc.
8 videos digitized and then edited
Learning how to code a website
8, 000+ lines of HTML & CSS code
Many hours of work at home at night and on the weekends
Checking
Rechecking
Obsessing
Rechecking again
Too many new gray hairs to count
Write a Tumblr teaser
Create a Tumblr graphic
Stress & wrinkles galore
One last revision
One more rechecking
And when you put that all together it comes out as an online exhibit that 5 people may click through–hopefully more though. Anyways stay tuned as Memoirs v. Tapes: President Nixon & the December Bombing goes live on Thursday.
This year I was lucky enough to receive a Kindle for my birthday (thanks pheebs). I’ve been in love with it since then and have already bought a ton of books. I’ve found myself reading during virtually all my free time now, which I like. The first book I finished was Once There Was a War by John Steinbeck. Steinbeck is one of my all-time favorite authors and I feel like pretty much everything he does is phenomenal. He is always at his best, however, when he is describing the average man. This book is a compilation of his war correspondence during WWII. It’s a book I’ve always wanted to read but I could never find it in a book store and I’ve always been too lazy to order.
The book follows him as he arrives in England, then to Africa, and finally to Italy. Throughout he describes, in a way only Steinbeck can, the life of a soldier. He doesn’t concern himself with Generals and grand strategies but instead what it’s like living, training and then fighting, throughout the beginning of the war. Steinbeck even throws in some fake humorous stories that would’ve made Mark Twain proud. If you like history, journalism, or Steinbeck then this short book is worth the read.
One of the cool things about living in DC is all of the monuments. The Lincoln Monument is probably my favorite. There’s just something about it that’s awe-inspiring, especially at night. (Although I have to say I find it hard to settle on just one monument as my favorite. For instance, when it’s snowing at night the Korean War Memorial is absolutely majestic and you feel that the statues are real. At sunset when the mall is empty the Vietnam War Memorial is beautiful and ominous. For right now though I’ll stick with the Lincoln Memorial.) Now back to Lincoln.
If you are a nerd you will know that three weekends ago was the anniversary of the Lincoln assassination. So two Saturday’s ago we went on a Ford’s Theatre Walking Tour that I had stumbled upon earlier this month. I have been seriously excited for it (because I am a huuuge nerd) but I wasn’t sure if it would live up to my expectations. Thankfully it not only lived up to them but it surpassed my expectations. The tour–if you’re too lazy to click the link above and read the short description–places you in the role of a deputy police officer reviewing the leads that the police followed in the hours and days that followed the assassination. What makes it great–besides learning and getting to see the city in a new way–is that the historical actor played the inspector, and all the other roles. Through out the tour he would assume various other people–men and women–who were witness to the various parts of the assassination. For each one he had a unique accent and personality. It added another layer of fun/nerdiness to the tour. The tour takes you from Ford’s Theatre to the White House and along the way you visit various sites around the city where important events took place. Living and working in this city it’s easy to forget the amount of history that happened all over the place. I visit Chinatown all the time and didn’t know that half of the places we visited and that I walk by all the time were the sites for many of these pivotal events.
On Sunday we went back to Ford’s Theatre to take a tour of it and to check out the box where it all happened–unfortunately you can go in or even walk by it. Afterwards we went to see The Conspirator, which turned out to be a good movie despite the bad reviews it has been getting. Me thinks that the reviewers aren’t much into historical court room dramas. Next up I’ll be taking some time out from novels to check out Eric Foner’s newest book The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery.
I have usually had enough of yelling, screaming children and dumb tourists at work which is one of the pitfalls of working at a museum on a daily basis. Usually the last thing I want to do is go to a museum on my day off. This is unfortunate because DC has a plethora of museums and I haven’t seen really any of them in the last year that I’ve lived here. One of the museums I have been wanting to check out though has been the Newseum. Add a $20.00 fee to screaming children plus dumb tourists and well my desire to see it was never great enough to actually get me to go see it.
Luckily, the other day I was able to score some free tickets so I was able to check it out yesterday on my day off (it also gave me the opportunity to try out the HDR photo setting on my iPhone). My initial reaction to viewing the museum is that would have been totally worth the entry fee. There are a ton of different exhibits with outstanding artifacts that really make it worth its while.
I started out on the bottom floor checking out the Berlin Wall Gallery. The fall of the wall is one of my earliest memories. I remember learning about it, I remember Reagan’s “Tear down this wall” speech, and I remember watching the East and West Germans start breaking down the wall. I thought it was cool as a kid and didn’t really understand the significance of it until later, but I did know that for some reason it was a big deal.
Next up was the G-Men and Journalists Exhibit. I honestly didn’t expect much from this one but I was pleasantly surprised by the artifacts that they had in here. The exhibit is in honor of the FBI’s 100th anniversary so they had some of the biggest cases from the last century including: John Dillinger, Donnie Brasco, the KKK, the Unabomber, Oklahoma City, and the DC Sniper. Lots of cool stuff from all those cases but seeing the Unabombers shack was pretty surreal. From here I went up to the 6th floor to check out the Katrina exhibit and to check out the view from their balcony.
While I wasn’t particularly interested in the Katrina exhibit I came away after going through it with a new found appreciation for everyone who went through the hurricane and those that stayed around to report on the events as they happened. One of my favorite exhibits, since I am a huge history nerd, was the News History Gallery.
I have some big changes coming up in my life over the next few months and I have been planning it all out trying to make sure that my transition from school to the job market goes as smoothly as possible in this crazy economic climate. However, things are quickly unraveling. Today, for example, was my big comprehensive final that I need to pass in order to graduate. Well I did a little research found out all the ins & outs and created a strategy. I decided to pick the three classes that went together–Colonial America 1600-1690, Colonial America 1690-1765, and American Revolution. I figured I would study for those three classes write one enormous essay split it into three parts and then BAM! I’d be pretty much done. Sounds like a good idea right? Nope total fail. You see even though they told me I would have a choice from all the classes I had taken they lied. They threw me a nasty 12-6 curve ball and gave me a partial list of classes. Once I read the questions and saw that my plan had gone awry my mind went blank and I stared at the computer blinking for the next 10 minutes. I then looked to see if any of my current classes were on there since they were still fresh in my mind–negative on that point too. (Funny thing was that the other person from the history department that took the test at the same time had all three of the questions that we had studied for plus questions from all his current classes.) In anguish I looked over the list of questions again and saw that there were two questions I had studied for and the rest I hadn’t. Most of the remaining questions were terrible and way too ambitious–on the teachers part–for me to answer cogently in an essay with the limited time I had. So I decided to answer the Civil War question even though I really don’t remember much from the class. Well to make a long story less long I somehow grinded out an essay (not very good ones mind you) for each question. Some of you may say well that’s your fault for not studying for all of your classes, but while that may be true, I had a good strategy and the thought of studying for 10 classes over the last 2 years didn’t sound very appealing or a productive use of my time. I figured better to know a few really well than all of them not very well at all. Oh well I’ll find out soon enough it I scraped by. So that was the first plan that went wrong.
My next plan was to spend this next week holed up in my hovel working on homework in an attempt to get ahead on my semesters workload–I have three research essays that I don’t have topics for never mind the books. Novel idea for me since I always procrastinate and end up slammed at the end of the semester and well that is starting to get really old. Besides along with my regular workload I have extra research work to do for teachers, I have to find a job, and a new place to live. So it would definitely be a good idea to take this break to get ahead on everything so I’m not living in a box in a few months. Well as luck would have it JetBlue was having some kind of blow out on tickets to Vegas. I found a round trip ticket for $225 (how crazy cheap is that?) and decided to take advantage of it. So there goes my plan of not procrastinating and putting my nose to the grindstone and getting some much needed work done. Now I guess I can look forward to a long stressful last couple months of this semester. I’m sure this will be an epic week in Vegas, and it’s a break that I do need, but keep your fingers crossed that it all works out and you don’t see me teaming up with a midget and dancing to Thriller in the subway.
I recently finished Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book Team of Rivals and it is an incredibly good read. The book begins on May 18, 1860, the day when the Republican Party was set to select their Presidential candidate, and shows the demeanor of the four potentials: William Seward, Salmon Chase, Edward Bates, and Abraham Lincoln. After this chapter ends she begins a multiple biography detailing the lives of the the four main rivals. For the next ten chapters she deftly details these men’s lives from their beginnings all the way until the election of Lincoln. Throughout she also sprinkles in the lives of other notable people: Mary Todd, Stephen Douglas, Edwin Stanton et. al. She does this by focusing each chapter on a period of time and then splitting the chapter into four pieces. Although it may sound awkward it works well and the reader is carefully guided through with her strong narrative. To further help the casual reader she has removed all footnotes and instead has opted for extensive end notes (while the historian in me misses the footnotes the end notes are extensive enough that most people won’t miss them but will probably be glad that they are gone). Her prose is clear and concise and she deftly weaves multiple story lines together so that the reader can follow along easily.
She tries her best to get to the facts about who Lincoln was and what he believed, and she does this by using, not only his words and actions, but those of his rivals. One of the main strengths of this book is that you can see how all of these men’s opinions about Lincoln changed as they got to know and appreciate his talents. One person in particular, Edwin Stanton, dismisses Lincoln as a “long armed ape” upon his initial meeting with him; but years later, after working with Lincoln through the Civil War, he becomes so distraught at his assassination that he has trouble functioning. This happens time and again throughout the book, and even more stunning than their changes of opinion is that Lincoln took all of these slights without bearing any animosity towards these people. One of the worst characters was Salmon Chase (I really grew to dislike him) who was way too sanctimonious and kept working against Lincoln, even while he was on the cabinet. However, Lincoln kept taking the high road because Chase’s talents were needed for the war.
I finished A Farewell to Arms today–it was a really quick read–and this will be the last time I ever go from a Steinbeck novel to a Hemingway novel. Their styles are so different that I think I don’t like A Farewell to Arms as much as I may have. One reason for this is because, if you know anything about Hemingway, you know that his prose is short and succinct. Where Steinbeck gives the reader an epic description of a sunset, the tilled earth, and a grasshopper Hemingway tells the reader that it is cold and muddy. And it works it really does there is something about his sparse style that is really gripping and leaves you wanting more. He gives you the bare essentials and then moves on; it’s almost like watching a chase movie where you have to watch it a few times before you catch everything. Since this is one of Hemingway’s earlier novels, however, it is also not as strong or polished as his later works and it is easy to tell that he is still trying to perfect his style. All that would be forgivable if it wasn’t for the fact that the I hated the characters.
A Farewell to Arms is a love story set in World War I betwixt Lieutenant Fredric Henry, an American serving with the Italian army, and Catherine Barkley–a British nurse. There are a lot of good elements in this story and some very good scenes, but the crux of the story depends on the love affair between the two protagonists, and that element fails. I never for a second believe in or care about these two characters. Catherine Barkley seems like a precursor to the babbling bitches from The Hills that infect our airwaves on a daily basis. The dialog between the two is mind-numbingly terrible and reminds me of the high school couple that would argue about who is going to hang up first. Bleeetch. Henry doesn’t fair much better. He is developed a bit better than Catherine, and instead of being one-dimensional he is one and a half dimensional. They basically become two characters who I don’t care much about and I tend to root against instead of for. Their first few meetings are cringe worthy and I totally don’t buy their summer love-affair, but that’s just me maybe I’m just a cynical Grinch. Lucky for me it’s a Hemingway novel so you know that it isn’t going to have some crappy Disney fairy book ending. For me the last thirty pages made up for the first 300. If you have read For Whom the Bells Toll then you know what Hemingway is capable of. The relationship between Robert Jordan and Maria is so much more compelling. By that time Hemingway’s style was set, his dialogue was great, the story was amazing so I think that maybe I was expecting a bit too much out of this one.
There is still a lot to like about this book despite the fact that it’s never going to be, for me, one of those epic books. Even in this early stage Hemingway’s sentence construction is fascinating, and there is really no one else that does it like him. He will go from a regular sentence, to a long sentence, to a three or four word sentence that concludes his point succinctly. Most of his sentences though are brief. He also has this habit where he will overuse ‘and’ in one sentence and then not use it in the next sentence in an obvious situation. Like I mentioned above his descriptive prose left a lot to be desired but the more I read of it the more I liked the sparse descriptions. It works especially well when the characters are in life or death scenarios and instead of plodding through these he briskly describes them and then moves on quickly giving the reader a sense of immediacy that would not come as easily with long plodding prose. If I want pointers on how to write a brief concise sentence Hemingway is the man. It’s not as easy as it sounds especially for people who like to write and who like to be as thorough as possible in all of their sentences. Sometimes it is easy to forget how much can be said with just a few words. If this book was a movie I would say wait for the DVD. It’s worth reading if you’re a fan of Hemingway, but don’t buy it just check it out from the public library. I will refrain from leaving an excerpt this time too as the only part I would like to excerpt might spoil it for those of you who haven’t read it and want to read it. Tomorrow I will start Team of Rivals and hopefully I can finish that before school starts.
After reading this book I can now say that I finally get this song. I really don’t know why it took me so long to get around and read this book. Unfortunately, I think I let some idiot’s opinion–dry, long, boring–influence me waaay back in high school. The sad thing is that if I would have read this in high school I would have enjoyed it, but I don’t think I would have appreciated it as much as I do now.
So what’s the book about, you’re saying, what are these grapes and why are they so wrathful. First, however, I’d like to say that I think that this book and Oil! should be companion pieces as they are two sides of the same coin. One dealing with the greed and corruption of corporations and the other deal with the consequences, for the normal have-nots, of said greed and corruption. What make it even more compelling is that even though it is a work of fiction it is describing real events and could easily be used in a history class to give events a more personal feeling without losing sense of the scope of what was happening during this period.
Steinbeck accomplishes this duality by splitting up the book into alternating chapters that shift from a macro to a micro perspective. One part deals with the nameless, faceless everyman who is moving west in an attempt to scratch out an existence. These chapters are short (5-6 pages) and they serve a couple purpose. One is to remind the reader that there are literally hundreds of thousands of people in the same situation as the Joads. It also serves to help progress the story as he uses these chapters to introduce the next stage in their journey and heighten the conflict in the story. These chapters although short are masterfully done, and are some of the best chapters in the entire book. It’s in these chapters where Steinbeck’s descriptive prose is nothing short of amazing. There are a lot of great writers and a lot of great books, but then there are those–books and authors–that are just on a higher echelon than the others. This is one of those books and is easily the best Steinbeck novel I’ve read. Steinbeck really knows how to transport you into the story. His descriptions of the land is so earthy and real that it gets into your pores, you can almost feel the dust and the dirt on you. In his descriptions of these nameless people you can see the worry in their eyes and feel the pain and desperation in their hearts. It is in these chapters where I realized just how good Steinbeck is.
Some things are just meant to be together, like peanut butter & jelly or peanut butter & chocolate (damn why is peanut butter so darn good). I have always been a big fan of drinking profusely and I have always been a big fan of history, and even though at times I have mixed the two, I have never actually thought of recording said conversations. So a big thank you to Sara for texting me to inform me of these skits, which combine two of my favorite things, and also fits in perfectly with the theme of this blog. This is just one more great combo in life that was meant to be. Maybe one of these days I’ll get my own episode and I’ll give them a drunken lecture on some random historical event (seriously Pacificus/Helvidius debates are still fresh in my mind and I could wax about it drunk no problem). Now enjoy Drunk History.
It has been a long time since I wrote the first great stories post, which can be found here. I didn’t have any ideas for a new one for the longest time until the other day, as I was in the midst of procrastinating by watching TV, a Jericho promo came on the channel I was watching. I’ve never seen the show so I wasn’t really paying attention until in one section of the commercial there was some kind of battle going down, and the villain told Skeet that he was surrounded and there was no hope. Ol’ Skeet put on his best tough guy face, and yelled Nuts into the walkie-talkie. When I heard this I started laughing because here was yet another great real life story that Hollywood was appropriating and ruining.
Bastonge Surrounded
Our story begins in Europe in December 1944. Five months after D-Day the Allies had been slowly pushing the German forces back. Hitler sought to turn the tide with a counteroffensive in the Ardennes–even though he was advised against it by his Generals–the battle would come be known as the Battle of the Bulge. The plan was for the Germans to slice through the American and British forces–cutting them off from each other and valuable supply lines–and to recapture the port of Antwerp. It was hoped this move would allow the Germans to either negotiate a more favorable peace treaty with each nation separately or it would allow German time to recoup their losses and continue the war with a new generation of military technologies–like jets and rockets. The offensive began on December 16, 1944 and the Germans made swift advances, in part, because bad weather grounded Allied planes which allowed them to move quickly. However, after some quick gains the Germans met stiff resistance and their momentum slowed.
One of those areas of stiff resistance was Bastogne, Belgium. The importance of Bastonge was that it was a crossroads near the German border. These roads would be needed to quickly move tanks and other supplies overland to the front. By December 18 the Germans were outside of Bastogne engaged in a fierce fight with the American troops. For the next three days the Germans were repulsed by the American forces that were defending Bastonge, and the weather continued to worsen. The masterly use of small-arms fire, artillery, and some tanks allowed the American forces to hold their ground. Because of their slow progress two Panzer divisions were told to bypass the town, and were subsequently destroyed near Dinant–making the roads held in Bastogne even more important.
