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1919: Events and Inventions

Oct2

January, 1919. British scientist Ernest Rutherford is the first scientist to split the atom.

'Benito Mussolini, 1927 / photographer V. Laviosa, Rome' photo (c) 1927, State Library of New South Wales - license: http://www.flickr.com/commons/usage/January 11-15, 1919. An uprising by German communists calling themselves the “Spartacists”is crushed by the German government. Karl Leibknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the leaders of the revolt, are murdered and their bodies thrown into a canal in Berlin.

March, 1919. Italian socialist Benito Mussolini founds a new political party in Italy called the Fasci d’Italiani di Combattimento.

April 13, 1919. At least 500 people are killed and 1500 injured in the Jallianwala Bagh public garden when British troops open fire on demonstrators in the northern Indian city of Amritsar. All over India people have been protesting the harsh security laws (Rowlatt Act) forced on the Indian people by their British rulers.

June 28, 1919. German delegates sign an official peace treaty with the Allies–France, Britain, and the U.S.—at the Palace of Versailles outside Paris, France. The French believe that the terms of the treaty are too lenient; the Germans believe them to be far too punitive and harsh. British prime minister fears that the terms of the treaty will eventually cause another war. SOme of the treaty’s provisions were:

The following land was taken away from Germany.
Alsace-Lorraine (given to France)
Eupen and Malmedy (given to Belgium)
Northern Schleswig (given to Denmark)
Hultschin (given to Czechoslovakia)
West Prussia, Posen and Upper Silesia (given to Poland)
The League of Nations also took control of Germany’s overseas colonies.
Germany had to return to Russia land taken in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Some of this land was made into new states : Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia. An enlarged Poland also received some of this land. Map of Europe after 1919’s Treaty of Versailles.

The Germans also had to admit that they were responsible for starting the war, and they had to pay reparations to France for damages caused by the war. Germany was to have no air force, no submarines, only six naval ships, and an army of no more than 100,000 men.

The Treaty of Versailles also formed the League of Nations, a new organization meant to keep the peace among nations and prevent a world war from ever happening again.

Children’s nonfiction set in 1919: The Great Molasses Flood: Boston, 1919 by Deborah Kops. Reviewed at Wrappend in Foil.

1918: Events and Inventions

Oct1

March, 1918. Russia signs the Treaty of Brest-Livosk with Germany and Austria-Hungary, leaving World War 1. Under the terms of the peace treaty, Germany and Turkey gain large regions of western and southern Russia.

March 31, 1918. The Germans launch a massive offensive on the Western Front, and the Allies retreat in confusion toward Paris.

June, 1918-1921. The Red Army of the Bolsheviks in Russia fight a civil war with the White Russians, a loosely organized group of anti-communists who are supported to some extent by the British and other Allied countries.

July 17, 1918. Czar Nicholas II of Russia and his family are murdered in their prison house in the Ural Mountains.

August 8, 1918. Twenty Allied divisions including British, Canadian, Australian, U.S. and French troops go on the attack near Amiens, France and push the Germans back five miles to the lines they occupied before German victory earlier in the spring.

September, 1918. Spanish influenza sweeps through Europe killing millions and crippling the war effort on both sides. Between 50 and 100 million people will die from the influenza between 1918 and 1920 as it travels across the world, making it possibly the most deadly epidemic in history. The flu epidemic kills far more people, soldiers and civilians, than the war, in spite of the horrible casualty rate of World War I.

October 1, 1918. Arab forces led by Prince Feisal and advised by British Major T.E. Lawrence capture the Syrian city of Damascus from the Turkish Ottomans. Most of the Arab Middle East, including Palestine and the city of Jerusalem, is now free of Turkish rule.

'Traffic lights, Grand Rapids' photo (c) 2009, Andrew Hill - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/October, 1918. The Austro-Hungarian Empire begins to break up as Czechoslovakia declares its independence.

November 11, 1918. At 11 a.m. on the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the year 1918 the armistice between the Allies—France, Britain, the United States, and Italy–and the German Empire takes effect. It is estimated that more than ten million people have died in the war, more than in other war in the history of mankind.

December, 1918. The world’s first three-color traffic lights are introduced in New York CIty.

1918: Books and Literature

Oct1

American author Willa Cather published her novel, My Antonia, in 1918. It’s a story about the life of a Bohemian immigrant girl who lives on the prairie in a town called Black Hawk, Nebraska.

His Family by Ernest Poole won the first Pulitzer Prize for the novel in 1918.

Booth Tarkington continued to be a popular and prolific author, publishing his novel of the midwest, The Magnificent Ambersons in 1918. I wrote about The Magnificent Ambersons here. Orson Welles made a movie based on Tarkington’s book that I plan to watch someday.

And last but not least, professor William Strunk, Jr. wrote a little book called The Elements of Style, and he published it himself privately for use in his teaching at Cornell University. It was a writing style guide with eight rules of usage and ten principles of composition, and it greatly influenced a young student and writer named E.B. White (author of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little); so much so, that White later found the little book, wrote a newspaper story about it, and revised it for publication by Macmillan Publishers in 1959. (Professor Strunk was, by this time, deceased.)

The little book, known informally as Strunk and White, became a best seller, and its influence on the writing habits and style of academic writers and common journalists has been incalculable. You can listen to an NPR story on the history of Strunk and White:

Reading about the Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919

Sep30

Hero Over Here by Kathleen Kudlinski. Theodore’s father and brothers are heroes —fighting the enemy during World War I. Theo learns his own lesson about heroism when he must take care of his entire family, mother and sisters, during the deadly flu epidemic of 1918.

A Time of Angels by Karen Hesse. Hannah flees Boston to escape the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, but she must battle both influenza and prejudice in Battleboro, Vermont where she makes a new life for herself.

Listening for Lions by Gloria Whelan. When Rachel’s missionary parents die in an influenza epidemic in 1919 in Kenya, she is sent by scheming neighbors to England to pose as their daughter for a rich grandfather who may leave his estate to his fake granddaughter if she can endear herself to him.

Winnie’s War by Jennie Moss. Winnie has her courage tested when the influenza attacks her small Texas town of Coward’s Creek. The fun thing about this novel is that Coward’s Creek is a pseudonym for the town of Friendswood, Texas just down the road from our home in southeast Houston.

Reading about the Romanovs

Sep30

On the night of July 16, 1918, the Romanov royal family was awakened around 2:00 am, told to dress, and led down into a half-basement room at the back of the house where they were imprisoned. There they were executed by Bolshevik soldiers who feared that the family would soon be rescued by monarchists with the White Russian army.

Many have wondered for a long time what happened to Princess Anastasia and her brother Prince Alexei, children of Czar Nicholas II of Russia who was murdered along with his wife and at least three of their five children on July 17, 1918. Nicholas and Alexandra: An Intimate Account of the Last of the Romanovs and the Fall of Imperial Russia is an excellent 1967 biography of the last royal family of Russia by historian Robert K. Massie, but it doesn’t deal with the mystery of the disappearance of two of the Czar’s children, possibly Anastasia and Alexei. From time to time impostors have shown up claiming to be Princess Anastasia or Prince Alexei. The bodies of the royal family were exhumed in 1998, and it was then that it was discovered that two of the children’s bodies were indeed missing.

However two more bodies were discovered in 2007. DNA tests proved that these were the bodies of Prince Alexei and Princess Maria. If you’d like to read more about the Romanovs (wrapped in a fictional speculation), check out these books.

Children’s Books:
Anastasia’s Album by Hugh Brewster. Reviewed at The Book Nosher.

Young Adult Fiction:
The Lost Crown by Sarah Miller. Reviewed at The Fourth Musketeer.
Anastasia’s Secret by Susanne Dunlop. Bloomsbury, 2010. Reviewed at The Fourth Musketeer.
Anastasia: The Last Grand Duchess by Carolyn Meyer. (Royal Diaries series) Scholastic, 2000.
The Curse of the Romanovs by Staton Rabin Margaret K. McElderry, 2007. This one’s mostly about Alexei, the Romanov brother,and about Rasputin, and it combines science fiction, horror, and teen historical fiction into a rather odd adventure story. Reviewed at Book Dweeb.
Dreaming Anastasia by Joy Preble. Reviewed at Whimpulsive.

Adult Fiction:
The Tsarina’s Daughter by Carolly Erickson. Reviewed at S. Krishna’s Books.
The Kitchen Boy by Robert Alexander. The kitchen servant boy tells the story of the downfall of the Romanov family from his point of view.
The Romanov Bride by Robert Alexander. A novel about the Russian Revolution and Grand Duchess Elisavayeta Feodorovna Romanov, wife of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich of Russia. Reviewed at Life and Times of a New Yorker.
Oksana by Susan May Warren and Susan K. Downs. Reviewed at The Friendly Book Nook.

1917: Events and Inventions

Sep29

February 1, 1917. Germany resumes unrestricted submarine warfare, announcing that any ships trading in Allied waters will be liable to be sunk without warning.

February 26, 1917. U.S. Congress, still reluctant to go to war with Germany, agrees that U.S. ships can be armed to counter German submarine attacks.

March, 1917. Food riots break out in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Czar Nicholas II is forced to resign and abdicate his throne. A provisional government takes control of Russia. Below is a picture of the czar’s Winter Palace.

'St. Petersburg - Winter Palace' photo (c) 1999, Roger Wollstadt - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

April 6, 1917. The U.S. declares war on Germany. President Woodrow Wilson says that this war is a battle “to save democracy.”

April, 1917. Bolshevik (Communist) leader Vladimir Lenin returns to Russia from his exile in Switzerland, traveling with German assistance.

June 27, 1917. The first U.S. troops, called “doughboys”, arrive off the French coast under the command of Major General John “Black Jack” Pershing. U.S. troops will be sent to fight in northern France and in Belgium along the Western Front.

July, 1917. Lenin flees Russia after a Bolshevik uprising is crushed by the new Russian government led by Alexander Kerensky.

November 6, 1917. After months of fighting, the Allies capture what is left of the bomb-blasted village of Passchendale, Belgium.

November 9, 1917. British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour sends a letter to Jewish Zionist organizations promising the British government’s full support for Jewish homeland in Palestine. The British hope that the declaration will gain the full support of the Jews in Europe for the Allied war effort.

November 17, 1917. The Bolsheviks, led by Lenin who has returned to Russia, stage an armed coup in Petrograd. They capture all the bridges and public buildings and seize control of the Winter Palace. The Communists, now in power, organize the Red Army to defend the revolution and set about fulfilling their promise of “Peace, Bread, and Land!” through communism.

Anna’s Book by Barbara Vine

Sep28

Anna Westerby is a Danish wife living in London around the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. She is not a very nice person. Although conventionally moral, Anna dislikes her husband and only has a tempered affection for her two young sons. She can’t stand most of her neighbors, and her only happiness in life is the prospect that her expected third child will be a daughter, someone she can understand and love and share a life with.

We learn all of this information about Anna’s affections and distastes from excerpts of her journal, a journal that she keeps secretly from sometime in 1905 until an event in the 1950’s(?) causes her to stop writing. Anna does get her hoped-for daughter, and the two do share a special bond. The story moves back and forth between Anna’s early adult life, captured in her journals, and her old age and beyond, recounted by her granddaughter, Ann. There’s a mystery concerning Swanny, the beloved daughter, and whether or not Anna is an unreliable narrator or just a forgetful and somewhat incendiary old lady who enjoys conjuring up drama.

Barbara Vine is the pseudonymous “alter-ego” of mystery writer Ruth Rendell, and under the two names Ms. Rendell has written more than fifty published novels. Anna’s Book (originally published in the UK as Asta’s Book) is, like the others in her body of work, a suspense novel that majors on characterizations and psychological analysis. The book does a great job of picking apart the complicated psychological motives and inner workings of the various characters and then patiently putting them back together again, like Humpty Dumpty, to form a satisfying plot and a conclusion.

It’s not an action suspense thriller, but if you enjoy trying to figure people out and attempting to unravel historical mysteries, Anna’s Book might be just the ticket for a long winter’s night read.

More information on Barbara Vine and her books:
Fatal Inversions: A Barbara Vine Information Web(site)
Anna’s Book reviewed at Jenny’s Books.
Anna’s Book reviewed by Superfast Reader

The Foreshadowing by Marcus Sedgewick

Sep28

The Foreshadowing tells the story of a girl, Alexandra, who is a sort of Cassandra: she can foresee the imminent death of people with whom she comes into contact. But of course, no one wants to hear her predictions, and no one believes her.

I just read the following article at the BBC website, before reading Marcus Sedgewick’s story of World War One horror and supernatural intervention. And the essay definitely colored my reading of the book.

First the article: World War One: Misrepresentation of a Conflict by Dr Dan Todman. Dr. Todman asks the question: “Is the traditional tale of ‘stupid generals, pointless attacks and universal death’ a fair representation of a war celebrated in 1918 as a great national deliverance?”
His answer: “Sassoon and Wilfred Owen could be used to evoke an emotional reaction against war which engaged students and satisfied teachers, but which utterly misrepresented the feelings of most Britons who lived through the war years.”

If Dr. Todman is right, then Marcus Sedgewick’s book, The Foreshadowing, totally buys into that misrepresentation, as does most of the fiction I’ve read about World War One and its aftermath. The protagonist, Alexandra, who has disguised herself as a nurse in order to rescue her brother from her vatic vision of his impending death in battle, speculates about a Tommy she meets along the way: “Presumably he had killed at least one man. Maybe several. He was a friendly man, he seemed very ordinary, kind even, but he didn’t seem to be bothered by what he’s done. And when he got to the German trenches he must have met German soldiers, who would have killed him too, if they could. I wondered if either Englishman or German had the slightest idea what they were killing each other for.”

All of the characters in the book seem to have little or no motivation for going to war other than honor and the desire to “do my bit”. Alexandra’s father tells her brothers Edgar and Tom that they must”do their bit”. And Tom later tells Alexandra that he came to war to die, no purpose at all except slow suicide.

Alexandra is the only one with a purpose: to change the future that she has already seen in a vision and to save Tom’s life. She pursues that purpose with single-minded determination and with the help of a friend, Jack, who hares her gift/curse of prophetic vision. The picture of what World War One was really about and how the soldiers who fought there really experienced it may be flawed—apparently one can re-write the past–but the story about whether one can or should try to change the future is suspenseful and intriguing with a surprise ending that made me gasp and appreciate.

Recommended, but the pace is slow at first. And the chapters are very short, a page and a half or two, a device I found annoying. Others probably won’t notice. I did become impatient with Alexandra way before she became impatient with herself.

Lord of the Nutcracker Men by Iain Lawrence

Sep27

Yep. It’s all twentieth century history all the time here at Semicolon this year—except when it isn’t. Actually, I have so many irons in the fire with Texas Tuesday, and Wednesday’s Word of the Week and the Saturday Review and other stuff that just catches my interest that I think I should call myself an ADD reader—Attention Distracted Disorderly reader. Yes, there is method in my madness, but it’s sometimes buried deep in the chaos of what passes for an orderly mind.

And all of that verbiage was my introduction to Mr. Lawrence’s Lord of the Nutcracker Men, a young adult or middle grade fiction book set in the first year of World War One, 1914, in England. Ten year old Johnny has a set of “thirty soldiers carved from wood, dressed in helmets and tall black boots. They carried rifles tipped with silver bayonets. They had enormous mouths full of grinning teeth that sparkled in the sun.” Johnny’s dad made the soldiers and gave them to Johnny for his ninth birthday.

Now the world is at war, and Johnny’s toy soldiers look just like the German Kaiser’s army that is now storming through Belgium. And Johnny asks his father, “Can you make me some Frenchmen? Can you make me some Tommies” (British soldiers)? So Johnny’s dad makes him a little French soldier with a blue coat.

Soon, Johnny’s father volunteers for the army. He’s sent to the front, to the trenches, but he promises to be back by Christmas. And Johnny is sent to the country to live with his aunt since rumors of German Zeppelins flying over London are frightening his mother into sending him away for his own safety, “just until Christmas, of course. Just until the war is over.”

Most of the story takes place with Johnny in the country, playing with his toy soldiers,including the new ones that his dad sends him from the war front. And, then, there are letters in which dad tells Johnny what is happening in the war and what the front is like for him. The letters are quite graphic in describing the violence and the degradation that the soldiers endure, and although they’re realistic as far as I can tell, I think it’s highly unlikely that a father would send a ten year old letters that described war in such explicit terms. Nor do I believe Aunt Ivy would read them aloud without editing if dad did write them.

But this breakdown in the logic of the narrative can be ignored, especially if you decide that the book is a better fit for young adult readers rather than ten and eleven year olds. Johnny at first glorifies war and the military with his wooden toys and his imagination, but as his father’s letters become darker and full of gloom and discouragement, Johnny becomes fearful. He begins to imagine that the battles he stages with his toy armies are determining the outcome of real battles at the front and even the fate of his father, personified by one of the carved soldiers.

It’s a good story, and it ends on a hopeful note with a letter from Johnny’s dad at Christmas about the informal and undeclared Christmas truce of 1914, in which many soldiers on both sides of the war stopped fighting to celebrate Christmas together in no-man’s land.