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Setting: Turn of the Century, 1900-1909

Sep2

Historical fiction is a great way to learn about history. In fact, I learned a lot of my history facts from novels. I’m often moved by a fiction book to go look up the story behind the story, to see if the author got her facts right. Here are a few adult fiction titles set in or around the turn of the century—nineteenth to twentieth, that is. No, I haven’t read all of these, but I have tried to give you a link to a review written by someone who has for each book listed. If you have reviewed any of these, leave a link in the comments, and I’ll add your review to the list. Or if you have read another book set in the early 1900’s that you liked, please share.

The Tale of Hilltop Farm by Susan Wittig Albert. Author Beatrix Potter solves mysteries in this book and the ones the follow in the series when she moves to Hill Top Farm after the death of her fiance. Reviewed by Allison at On My Bookshelf.

City of Tranquil Light by Bo Caldwell. Highly recommended. A young Mennonite missionary in China meets and marries a fellow missionary and lives through the turmoil of civil war. Semicolon review here.

Anna’s Book by Barbara Vine. Mystery and suspense in early twentieth century London. Reviewed by Superfast Reader.

Arthur and George by Julian Barnes. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle attempts to exonerate a falsely imprisoned man named George.

Beautiful Dreamer by Joan Naper. Chicago, 1900. Reviewed by Sarah Johnson at Reading the Past.

The Birth House by Ami McKay. A midwife in a Nova Scotia fishing village. Reviewed at Maw Books Blog..

Empire by Gore Vidal. Caroline Sanford runs a newspaper dynasty during the years 1898-1907–with insights into the Spanish-American War, the Hearst newspaper conglomerate, and the presidencies of William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, among other historical events and persons.

A Flickering Light by Jane Kirkpatrick. In 1907, a fifteen year old girl dreams of a career in photography, a dangerous job reserved for men. Reviewd by Tracy at Relz Reviewz.

Jack London: Sailor on Horseback by Irving Stone. Biographical novel about the eponymous author.

Lake of Fire by Linda Jacobs. Romance blossoms in Yellowstone National Park, June, 1900. Reviewed by Sarah Johnson at Reading the Past.

Cold Sassy Tree by Olive Ann Burns. Highly recommended. Will’s grandfather elopes with a woman half his age three weeks after his wife dies in 1906, causing a scandal in their small Georgia town. Cold Sassy Tree is on my list of the 100 Best Novels of All Time.

City of Light by Lauren Belfer. 1901 in Buffalo, New York as Niagara Falls is being harnessed for electricity.

The Outlander by Gil Adamson. Idaho and Montana, 1903. A nineteen year old woman murders her abusive husband and then runs away from his brothers who are thirsty for revenge.

The Quickening by Michelle Hoover. American Midwest in the early 1900’s. Reviewed by Caribousmom.

Painted Ladies by Siobhan Parkinson. A community of artists in Skagen, a fishing village in the north of Denmark, live a Bohemian lifestyle while producing great works of art. Reviewed by Sarah Johnson at Reading the Past.

For more historical novels of the twentieth century, look at HistoricalNovels.info.

1909: Books and Literature

Aug31

Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton Porter was published in August, 1909. It tells the story of Elnora Comstock who lives with her widowed mother Katherine on the edge of the Limberlost, a marshland in Indiana where Elnora plans to catch moths and other nature specimens to sell to collectors to finance her continued high school education.

Elnora and her mother have a troubled relationship. Katherine Comstock blames Elnora for the death of her husband, Elnora’s father, in the swamp many years before. A young man, Phillip, comes to the Limberlost, and he and Elnora become friends and work together to explore and to gather Elnora’s moths.

Nature lovers should enjoy this lovely story in spite of the somewhat high-flown and archaic language. In fact, what with the modern environmental movement, I would think A Girl of the Limberlost is poised to make a comeback. Maybe as a movie or a simplified or updated ebook? It’s in the public domain, and you can download it to your favorite ereader here. The movie’s been done a few times, but I’ve not seen any of the versions. Any recommendations?

Selma Lagerlof, a Swedish novelist, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1909. Her most famous novel, Jerusalem, tells the story of a group of Swedish Christians who went to Jerusalem to join The American Colony, a Christian religious community whose members believed that if they were to do acts of service to humanity (feeding the hungry, caring for orphans, etc.) in Jerusalem it would hasten the day of Christ’s return. The leader of this community (before the Swedish Christians came to join) was Horation Spafford, the man who wrote the much beloved hymn, It Is Well with My Soul.

1909: Events and Inventions

Aug30

January, 1909. William Howard Taft is inaugurated president of the United States, and Teddy Roosevelt goes off on a safari to Africa to let the new president get to work out of his shadow. (Unfortunately, Teddy casts a big shadow, and even from Africa he begins to realize that he doesn’t like what Taft is doing as president.)

March 31, 1909. French film producers Emile and Charles Pathe begin to film the news. The brothers have sent cameramen to every continent to look for news stories of interest to the general public, and the resulting films, called newsreels, will be shown all over the world.

April 6, 1909. Robert E. Peary reaches the North Pole along with his assistant, Matthew Henson, and four Eskimo guides. Henson and two of the guides were actually the first to reach the Pole, and Peary arrived forty-five minutes later and confirmed that they were in the right place. Read more at Who Discoverd the North Pole at Smithsonian.com.

April 27, 1909. The Young Turks overthrow the sultan of Turkey, Abdulhamid II, and replace him with his brother who takes the title of Mohammed V. Abdulhamid II ruled the Ottoman Empire as an absolute monarch, but the Young Turks demand reforms and a constitutional government which begins to be implemented as Mohammed V becomes a constitutional monarch with very little real power.

May 1909. German bacteriologist Paul Ehrlich produces the first successful drug to treat for syphilis.

July 25, 1909. Frenchman Louis Bleriot becomes the first man to pilot an aircraft 21 miles across the English Channel from Calais, France to Dover in England. You can read more about Bleriot and his adventures in flight in the picture book, The Glorious Flight: Across the Channel with Louis Bleriot, written and illustrated by Alice and Martin Provenson. And Scholastic has some teaching suggestions for using The Glorious Flight in the classroom.

July, 1909. Mohammed Ali, Shah of Persia, flees to Russia as forces favoring a constitutional government replace him with his twelve year old son, Ahmad Mirza. Persia (Iran) becomes somewhat more free with democratic reforms implemented, or at least suggested, by the Grand Majiles, Persia’s parliament.

October 26, 1909. Prince Hirobumi Ito of Japan is assassinated by An Jung-geun, a Korean nationalist opposed to the annexation of Korea by Japan. Prince Ito had been the Japanese Resident-General of Korea, and the Japanese used the assassination as an excuse to take total control of Korea and try to absorb it into the Japanese empire.

December, 1909. U.S. chemist Leo Baekeland prepares to market his newly invented plastic which he calls “Bakelite.”

1908: Events and Inventions

Aug28

February 1, 1908. Anarchists assassinate King Carlos I and his heir Prince Luis Filipe as the royl family are traveling in an open carriage in Lisbon, Portugal. This event is usually called The Lisbon Regicide. A shocked King Edward VII of England, a friend of King Carlos, said of the assassination, “They murdered two gentlemen of the Order of the Garter in the street like dogs and in their own country no one cares!”

May 16, 1908. Oil discovery at Masjid Sulaiman in southwest Iran (Persia). A British army officer sends a coded message to the British government telling them the news: “See Psalm 104 Verse 15 Third Sentence and Psalm 114 verse 8 second sentence.” Un-coded, the telegram read: “That he may bring out of the earth oil to make him a cheerful countenance … the flint stone into a springing well.”

April-July, 1908. The Young Turks, a group of reform-minded nationalists, force Sultan Abdul Hamid of the Ottoman Empire to restore the parliament and the constitution which had been suspended by the Sultan in 1878. This revolution is the beginning of the end for the Ottoman Empire. Map of the expansion and decline of the Ottoman Empire. I would like to read A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East by David Fromkin, which gives the history of the continuing decline of the Ottoman Empire and tells how the changing borders and power adjustments made during and after World War II continue to affect the situation in the MIddle East today.

August 12, 1908. The first Model T Ford goes on sale for $850. Automaker Henry Ford has promised to “build a car for the multitude,” and he hopes by using the assembly line technique to produce 18,000 cars a year. Take a brief look at Henry Ford, the businessman and the man, in this post by blogger Aarti Nagaraju.

August 19, 1908. King Leopold of Belgium hands over government of the Congo Free State (Zaire, Democratic Republic of the Congo) to the Belgian government after thirty years of brutal dictatorial rule of the African colony by Leopold alone.

September, 1908. German mathematician Hermann Minkowski is the first person to define time as the fourth dimension. (LOST connection, anyone?)

October, 1908. Austria-Hungary takes over the Balkan states of Bosnia and Herzegovina by decree and with the help and approval of Russia.

October 5, 1908. Ferdinand I of Austria declares Bulgaria a fully independent kingdom, with himself as Tsar.

December 2, 1908. The two year old Prince Pu Yi ascends to the imperial throne of China, according to the wishes of Tsu-Hsi (Cixi), the Empress Dowager of China who recently died under suspicious circumstances. Emperor Pu Yi’s father, Prince Chun, will rule as regent in his son’s place for the time being. The movie The Last Emperor tells the story of Pu Yi’s life in a somewhat fictionalized, but fairly accurate, version.

December 28, 1908. The city of Messina, Italy is struck early in the morning by the most violent earthquake ever recorded in Europe. Estimates put the death toll at at least 75,000 people.

Movies Set In the First Decade of the Twentieth Century: 1900-1909

Aug27

Lagaan (2001). Bollywood movie actually set in 1893, but it shows the cultural mileau of India under British rule. Warning: it’s long, with subtitles, but well worth the time.

Finding Neverland stars Johnny Depp as playwright James Barrie. I wrote about my initial impressions of the movie here. I would like to see the move again, and I think it might make a better impression the second time around.

Miss Potter (2006). Fictionalized biography of authoress Beatrix Potter.

Meet Me in St. Louis (1944). Musical set in St. Louis, Missouri during the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904.

Fiddler on the Roof (1971). Another classic musical set in Tsarist Russia in 1905.

How Green Was My Valley. Based on a 1939 novel by Richard Llewellyn, this film features a Welsh family and the mining community in which they live around the turn of the century. the movie won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1941.

Yankee Doodle Dandy. Biopic about American songwriter and composer George M. Cohan, starring James Cagney as Cohan. The song “Yankee Doodle Boy” was Cohan’s signature piece as a composer and as a song-and-dance man himself who performed his own work. The film came out in 1942, and production began on it just a few days before the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. So the movie was purposefully patriotic to the max in order to lift the spirits of an American audience headed into war.

The Winslow Boy. We just watched this movie, set in Britain and based on a true story, yesterday. Well, I watched, and the urchins fell asleep. It’s not an exciting or fast-moving plot-driven picture. However, the script and the setting are intriguing. The story is about an upper middle class family who sacrifice everything—their savings, the daughter’s upcoming marriage, the older son’s career—to defend the honor of the younger son who is accused of stealing a five shilling postal order and is expelled from military school. The boy, Ronnie, says he didn’t do it, and the family honor is at stake. Such a different world, different values. You can read more about the movie, the play by Terrence Rattigan, and the historical incident that Rattigan mined for his play at Wikipedia.

My twentieth century history students are supposed to choose one of these movies set in the first decade of the century to watch and then write a reflection paper (kind of like a blog post, at least like my blog posts) about the movie. Which one would you suggest to them if they asked your advice? Do you have any other suggestions for movies set in this time period?

1908: Music and Art

Aug27

Sergei Rachmaninoff composed his Symphony No. 2 in E minor, Op. 27 in 1906–07. The premiere was conducted by the composer himself in St. Petersburg on 8 February 1908.

Will the Circle Be Unbroken? was a popular hymn, published in 1908, writen by Ada R. Habershon and Charles H. Gabriel.

And here’s an entire playlist of popular music from the first decade of the twentieth century. Please listen, especially if you’re in my class, and tell me what you think. Any favorites? (You may have to have a free Spotify account to listen, but I have Spotify invitations to give away if you want one.)

What about the art? Favorites, anyone? Or comments?

1908: Books and Literature

Aug26

The Nobel Prize for Literature in 1908 was awarded to Rudolf Eucken, a German idealist philosopher.

Two children’s classics were published in 1908: Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery and The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. Anne of Green Gables is THE classic girls’ fiction book, along with Little Women. I can’t imagine any girl growing up without reading or listening to or, at the very least, watching, Anne’s adventures on Prince Edward Island at Green Gables.

A.A. Milne said of Grahame’s book:

“For the last ten or twelve years I have been recommending it. Usually I speak about at my first meeting with a stranger. It is my opening remark, just as yours is something futile about the weather. If I don’t get it in at the beginning, I squeeze it in at the end. The stranger has got to have it sometime. One does not argue about The Wind in the Willows. The young man gives it to the girl with whom he is in love, and, if she does not like it, asks her to return his letters. The older man tries it on his nephew, and alters his will accordingly. The book is a test of character. We can’t criticize it, because it is criticizing us. But I must give you one word of warning. When you sit down to it, don’t be so ridiculous as to suppose that you are sitting in judgment on my taste, or on the art of Kenneth Grahame. You are merely sitting in judgment on yourself. You may be worthy: I don’t know, But it is you who are on trial.”

I think I pass the test. I love Toad’s antics and Mole’s homely good natured love of all things domestic. And Rat’s “messing about in boats.”

Other Books Critically Acclaimed and Historically significant:
Vladimir Lenin, Materialism and Empirico-Criticism
E. M. Forster, A Room with a View
Mohandas Gandhi, Hind Swaraj
G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday. Chesterton takes on anarchy and wins with humor.
Mary Roberts Rinehart, The Circular Staircase. Read more about Ms. Rinehart’s early attempt at murder mystery.
Maurice Maeterlinck, The Bluebird.

1907: Music and Art

Aug24

Mariachi is a style of Mexican music that originated in the State of Jalisco, in Western Mexico. The story is that in 1907 General Porfirio Diaz ordered a mariachi band to play for visiting U.S. Secretary of State Elihu Root, and the general told them to wear charro suits, which became the traditional dress of the mariachi bands. After the Revolution of 1910 mariachi music became more and more identified with Mexican nationalism and patriotism.

With his painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso shocks the Paris art scene in 1907. The painting was presented on an eight foot square canvas at his studio. The painter Derain said “One day we shall find Pablo has hanged himself behind his great canvas.” Matisse was outraged by the painting because he thought it was a joke, an attempt to make fun of the Fauvists and of his paintings in particular. You can read more about this revolutionary work of art at Wikipedia.

'Les demoiselles d'Avignon, Pablo Picasso' photo (c) 2010, Gautier Poupeau - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Scholastic free art lesson in the style of Picasso (cubism).

1907: Events and Inventions

Aug22

January, 1907. At a lavish ceremony, Mohammed Ali Mirza is crowned Shah of Persia in the Royal Palace of Tehran.

February 13, 1907. Suffragettes storm the Houses of Parliament in London to hand a petition to the British government asking them to extend the right to vote to women. Emmeline Pankhurst, founder of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WPSU), and her four daughters are leaders in the women’s suffrage movement in Britain.

March 22, 1907. Indian-born lawyer Mohandas Ghandi begins protest movement in South Africa against the Transvaal government’s Asiatic Law Amendment Ordinance Bill, a law which would require all Indian resident in South Africa register with the police and get a certificate that would have to be carried with them at all times.

June 1907. The Lumiere brothers in Paris, France claim a breakthrough in developing color photography.

June, 1907. In Russia, the Czar dissolves the second Duma or parliament, accusing some representatives of treason.

'[Speidergutt] / [Boy Scout]' photo (c) 2011, Nasjonalbiblioteket - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/June-October, 1907. The Second Hague Peace Conference meets to try to limit arms and establish rules for just warfare.

July 19, 1907. Riots break out in Seoul, Korea when the Japanese, who call Korea their “Protectorate”, force Korean Emperor Gojong to give up his imperial authority and appoint the Crown Prince as regent. The Japan–Korea Treaty of 1907, signed on July 24, 1907, forces Korea and its government to obey the appointed Japanese resident general.

July 29, 1907. Boer War veteran Sir Robert Baden-Powell officially sets up the Boy Scout organization in London for the purpose of introducing British boys to the disciplines and skill that he learned in the army.

September 6, 1907. The British ocean liner, Lusitania, makes her maiden voyage from Ireland to New Jersey, the fastest ever crossing of the Atlantic in five days and fifty-four minutes.

September 26, 1907. New Zealand becomes an independent Dominion within the British Empire. In 1893, while still under British rule, New Zealand was the first country in the world to give women the right to vote.

1907: Books and Literature

Aug21

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1907 was awarded to Rudyard Kipling “in consideration of the power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration which characterize the creations of this world-famous author.”

I love Kipling. I’ve posted poems by Kipling: Recessional, By Oak, and Ash, and Thorn, L’envoi (When Earth’s Last Picture Is Painted). And, of course, Kipling’s Jungle Book is a lovely set of stories about Mowgli and Bagheera and Shere Khan and the other inhabitants of the Indian jungle. “If” is probably Kipling’s most famous poem:

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

The Shepherd of the Hills is a book written in 1907 by author Harold Bell Wright. The setting is the Ozark mountains of Missouri, and the book was one of those that appeared on a list of required reading for my Advanced Reading Survey class in college. It’s fairly old-fashioned and sentimental, but not a bad read.

Songs of a Sourdough is a book of poetry published in 1907 by Canadian poet Robert W. Service. Two particularly popular ballads in the collection are “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” and “The Cremation of Sam McGee.” (Click on the title to either poem to read or listen to the story.)