1915: Events and Inventions

Sep24

February 4, 1915. In response to the British blockade of Germany, the Germans announce that they will begin to attack any vessels, neutral or not, sailing in the waters of the British Isles. Although the British navy controlled the ocean’s surface and the british were already searching for and confiscating any goods bound for Germany that could possibly be helpful in the war effort, German U-boats (submarines) and their policy of unrestricted submarine warfare would prove to be a valuable weapon for Germany.

April 22, 1915. The Germans introduce the use of poisoned gas as a weapon in the war in the Battle of Ypres on the Western Front. The first poisoned gas is not very effective, but the Germans promise that “more effective substances can be expected.” Anti-chlorine gas masks are issued to British troops.

April 30, 1915. Allied forces, mostly British, Australians, New Zealanders and French, land on the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey in an attempt to force an entrance through to the Black Sea and supply weapons and goods to Russia through her ports there.

May, 1915. In spite of a German warning that “a state of war exists between Germany and her allies and Great Britain and her allies”, the Lusitania leaves New York bound for Liverpool, England. The Germans advertise in the New York newspapers, “Vessels flying the flag of Great Britain, or any of her allies, are liable to destruction . . . travelers sailing in the war zone . . . do so at their own risk.” Passengers filled the ship anyway, and on May 7, just off the coast of Ireland, a German U-boat fired on the Lusitania and caused it to sink. 1,198 people died, and 128 of them were Americans. Many Americans advocate war against Germany, but President Woodrow Wilson continues to counsel and pursue peaceful negotiations with the Germans.

May 23, 1915. Italy leaves the Triple Alliance (Central Powers) and goes to war against Austria-Hungary, joining the side of Britain, France, Russia, and Serbia.

June, 1915. Armenians, a Christian minority in a mostly Muslim Turkey, are seen as traitors and potential rebels. So the Turkish government begins a program of deportation and secret genocide for the Armenians. The Road from Home by David Kherdian tells the story of the author’s mother, Veron Dumehjian, who was a 15 year old survivor of the Armenian holocaust. It’s an excellent book.

July 29, 1915. 400 U.S. Marines land in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to protect American lives and property as revolution and civil war rage throughout the small island country in the Caribbean.

September, 1915. Bulgaria enters the war on the side of Austria and Germany and moves its troops eastward toward Serbia.

November 14, 1915. Tomas Masaryk, a professor of philosophy exiled by the Austrians, calls for a free Czechoslavakia —combining the two parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire into one free country.

December 20, 1915. After eight months of fighting, Allied forces retreat from Gallipoli Peninsula leaving it in Turkish hands. Newspapers call the retreat the biggest setback of the war so far for the Allies.

December, 1915. German physicist Albert Einstein publishes his new Special Theory of Relativity.

1913: Events and Inventions

Sep13

January 8, 1913. Dalai Lama Thubten Gyatso declares Tibet independent from China. He has returned to Tibet from India following three years of exile.

January 31, 1913. Turkish revolutionaries, the Young Turks, overthrow the Ottoman government. Balkan peace negotiations are put in jeopardy.

February 23, 1913. Mexican President Madero is deposed and killed. General Victoriano Huerta takes over as president.

April, 1913. Swedish inventor Gideon Sundback patents a new fastener, the zipper.

May 30, 1913. End of the First Balkan War. Turkey and the members of the Balkan League sign a peace treaty agreeing to recognize a new country, Albania, in territory that once belonged to the Ottoman Empire and to divide the territory of Macedonia between Serbia and Bulgaria.

June 30, 1913. The Second Balkan War begins. Bulgaria attacks Greece and Serbia. Montenegro and Rumania will help the Greeks against the Bulgarians and Serbians.

August 10, 1913. Peace is agreed to in the Balkans, ending the Second Balkan War. All nations will withdraw to their pre-war borders, and Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland will establish frontier lines to keep the peace. Bulgaria must disperse its troops and give up most of its newly gained lands.

September 21, 1913. As the British Parliament passes the Third Irish Home Rule Bill, Dublin, Ireland is filled with strikers demanding Home Rule now (an independent, self-governing Ireland). Protestant Unionists in the north who oppose Home Rule begin to recruit their own army to keep Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom.

October 7, 1913. Henry Ford establishes the assembly line at his automobile plant to make cars more quickly and efficiently.

'panama canal' photo (c) 2005, dsasso - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

October 10, 1913. The Panama Canal opens.

November, 1913. Pancho Villa and his Villistas try to take over the government of Mexico. Some Americans, including writer Ambrose Bierce, come to join Pancho Villa’s revolutionaries. Some quotations form Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary. Bierce went missing, presumed killed, in December, 1913 while he was supposedly with Villa’s army, and neither he nor his body was ever found.

Reading About the Titanic

Sep12

On April 15, 1912 the luxury liner Titanic hit an iceberg and sank. 1595 passengers and crew died. Only 745 people were saved. For some reason, more than almost any other tragedy or shipwreck, the sinking of the Titanic has inspired dozens, maybe even hundreds, of books, movies, poems, and other media. Here’s a list of a few of the Titanic books for children and young adults:

Children’s fiction:
Tonight on the Titanic (Magic Treehouse Series, No. 17) by Mary Pope Osborne.
Dear America: Voyage on the Great Titanic, The Diary of Margaret Ann Brady, R.M.S. Titanic 1912 by Ellen Emerson White. 13-year old Margaret Ann, a London orphan, is hired as companion to accompany the rich American lady, Mrs. Carstairs, on the Titanic to America. Reviewed at Reading Junky’s Reading Roost.
I Survived the Sinking of the Titanic, 1912 by Lauren Tarshis. Reviewed by Becky at Young Readers.
Titanic by Gordon Korman. A series of three books about four young passengers and their adventures aboard the doomed ship. The titles are Unsinkable, Collision Course, and S.O.S. Reviewed at The Fourth Musketeer.
No Moon by Irene Watts. Louisa, a nursemaid, overcomes her fear of the ocean and sails with her charges to New York aboard the Titanic.
Back to the Titanic (Travelers Through Time) by Beatrice Gormley.

Young adult fiction:
Fateful by Claudia Gray. Paranormal romance with werewolves, danger, and the Titanic. Reviewed by Christa at Hooked on Books.
Amanda/Miranda by Richard Peck. This one has a prophecy/supernatural angle, too. It seems to go with the territory. Mistress Amanda and her maid, Miranda, are almost identical in appearance, and Amanda exploits the resemblance for her own ends. However, when the two young ladies board the Titanic for their journey to America for Amanda’s wedding, they are unaware of how much is about to change for both of them. Reviewed at The Shady Glade.
Titanic Crossing by Barbara Williams.
Distant Waves by Suzanne Weyn. Spiritualism and the Titanic. The Taylor sisters deal with their mom’s profession as a spiritualist, and in the process they meet up with many of the most famous characters of the age: Harry Houdini, Nicola Tesla, John John Astor, George Bernard Shaw, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Benjamin Guggenheim and others. Lots of discussion of supernatural communication with the dead and whether or not spiritualists are truly gifted or fraudulent. I read this one just a couple of weeks ago, and I find it has lodged itself in a place in my mind. I keep wanting to look up more about Tesla in particular.
SOS Titanic by Eve Bunting. Typical teen romance-type novel with good historical detail. There’s a steward who foresees the disaster because of his supernatural “gift.” And there’s an underlying theme of class war and class distinctions just as there was in the movie, Titanic.
Titanic: The Long Night by Diane Hoh. Scholastic, 1998. Two couples face their fates aboard the Titanic.
Remembering the Titanic by Diane Hoh. Sequel to Titanic: The Long Night.

Nonfiction:
The Heroine of the Titanic by Joan W. Blos. A picture book about the “unsinkable Molly Brown.” Reviewed by Sally at Whispers of Dawn.
The Titanic: Lost and Found (Step-Into-Reading, Step 4) by Judy Donnelly. We have a copy of this beginning reader, and it’s a good introduction to the subject.
The Titanic Coloring Book by Peter F. Copeland. A Dover Publications coloring book.
The Watch That Ends the Night: Voices from the Titanic by Allan Wolf. Due out October 11, 2011.
Titanic (DK Eyewitness Books) by Simon Adams.

April 15th of next year (2012) will mark the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. It’s quite likely that more books, both for adults and for children, will be making an appearance in commemoration of that tragic event. If you have any suggestions to add to the above list, please leave a comment.

1912: Books and Literature

Sep12

Gerhart Hauptmann, a German playwright, won the Nobel Prize for Literature. His most famous play was called The Weavers about workers struggling for their rights. I read the play a long time ago for a class in college, and thought it was forgettable. However, it is significant in that the play has no hero or central character. Hauptmann was attempting to dramatize “The Weavers” as a group who are suffering from poverty and oppression. You can read more about the play here.

Riders of the Purple Sage is Zane Grey’s best-known novel, originally published in 1912. The events in the novel take place in 1871; the book itself is an early and influential example of the Western fiction genre.

Tom Swift was the main character in a series of books, mostly popular with boys, that featured an intrepid and adventuresome boy who tires out all the latest gadgets and inventions. The first series of Tom Swift books began being published in 1910, and by 1912 you got exciting titles such as:
Tom Swift and His Air Glider
Tom Swift and His Great Searchlight
Tom Swift and His Wizard Camera
Tom Swift in Captivity
Tom Swift in the City of Gold
The books were published by Grossett and Dunlap, conceived by Edward Stratemeyer, and written by various writers hired to write “Tom Swift science adventures” from 1910 to 1941 (for the first series)–a total of forty volumes in all. Has anyone ever read one of these Tom Swift adventures?

Childrean’s and Young Adult books set in 1912 (but not including books about the Titanic):
Bread and Roses, Too by Katherine Paterson. About a strike in the early 1900â€²s, the early days of labor organizing. The girl who is the main character is afraid that her mother and older sister will be hurt or even killed as they participate in a strike.
The Tempering by Gloria Skurzynski. The Tempering tells the story of Karl Kerner who must choose between leaving school for a life in the steel mills or continuing with his education.
All-of-a-Kind Family by Sydney Taylor. Five young Jewish sisters-Ella, Henny, Sarah, Charlotte and Gertie–live with their family in New York’s Lower East side. Follow along as they search for hidden buttons while dusting Mama’s front parlor, or explore the basement warehouse of Papa’s peddler shop on rainy days. The five girls enjoy doing everything together, especially when it involves holidays and surprises.
The Good Master by Kate Seredy. Young Jancsi and his cousin Kate from Budapest race across the Hungarian plains on horseback, attend country fairs and festivals, and experience a dangerous run-in with gypsies. This children’s story is set in Hungary just before World War I.
Surviving Antarctica by Andrea White is actually set in 2083, but it’s the story of how some future young people who live in a media-driven culture take part in a contest to re-create Scott’s doomed 1911-1912 expedition to the South Pole.

Labor, and unions, and the proletariat, and ways of relieving poverty and the oppression of the working class were all big issues in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as you can see from the literature of and about the time period. But, as evidenced by Tom Swift and his ilk, many people were quite optimistic about science and invention and the natural tendency of mankind toward progress to alleviate these problems and usher man into a golden age of brotherhood and the end of poverty. That was before the Great War.

Reading about The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Sep10

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City on March 25, 1911 caused the deaths of 146 garment workers, who either died from the fire or jumped to their deaths. Most of the victims were recent Jewish and Italian immigrant women aged sixteen to twenty-three who generally who worked nine hours a day on weekdays plus seven hours on Saturdays. Many of the workers could not escape the fire because the managers and owners had locked the stairwells and emergency exits.

Here are a few fiction books that dramatize and memorialize this horrific tragedy:

For children:
Lieurance, Suzanne. The Locket: Surviving the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire (Historical Fiction Adventures).
Eleven-year-old Galena and her older sister, Anya, are Russian-Jewish immigrants living with their parents in a one-room tenement apartment in New York City. Six days a week the girls walk to work at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. Each morning Galena asks to see the pictures of family members inside the gold locket Anya wears around her neck before she and her sister part to work on different floors.
Littlefield, Holly. Fire at the Triangle Factory. (A Carolrhoda On My Own book).
In 1911 New York City, Jewish Minnie and Catholic Tessa can only be friends at the factory, but this friendship pays off when the famous and tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire takes the lives of many of their coworkers and threatens theirs.

For Young adults:
Auch, Mary Jane. Ashes of Roses.
Sixteen-year-old Rose Nolan and her family are grateful to have finally reached America, the great land of opportunity. Their happiness is shattered when part of their family is forced to return to Ireland. Rose wants to succeed and stays in New York with her younger sister Maureen. The sisters struggle to survive and barely do so by working at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.
Davies, Jacqueline. Lost.
Essie, 16, sews all day for pennies at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory to help feed her fatherless family and now to forget her little sister’s death. Then the fire happens.
Friesner, Esther. Threads and Flames.
Raisa has just traveled alone from a small Polish shtetl all the way to New York City. She finds work in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory sewing bodices on the popular shirtwaists. And she falls in love. But will she survive the fire?
Haddix, Margaret Peterson. Uprising.
Ms. Haddix gives the story a human face by making it the story of three girls: Bella, an immigrant from Southern Italy, Yetta, a Russian Jewish immigrant worker, and Jane, a poor little rich girl who becomes involved in the lives of the shirtwaist factory workers in spite of her rarified existence as a society girl. Semicolon review here.
Hopkinson, Deborah. Hear My Sorrow: The Diary of Angela Denoto, a Shirtwaist Worker, New York City 1909. (Dear America Series)
Angela and her family have arrived in New York City from their village in Italy to find themselves settled in a small tenement apartment on the Lower East Side. When her father is no longer able to work, Angela must leave school and work in a shirtwaist factory.

For adults:
Weber, Katherine. Triangle.
Not only about the famous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, this adult novel is also about music. And itâ€™s a history mystery. Recommended.

1910: Books and Literature

Sep7

Author Mark Twain died in on April 21, 1910. He was born in 1835 when the comet had last visited our solar system. Twain wrote in his autobiography: “I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year (1910), and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.'”

Important books of 1910:
Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House.
Sigmund Freud, Origins and Development of Psychoanalysis.
E. M. Forster, Howards End.

For children in 1910:
Maida’s Little Shop by Inez Haynes Irwin. One of Jen’s favorites: “Maida’s Little Shop was originally published in 1910, and was the first of a series of 15 books about the motherless daughter of a magnanimous tycoon, and her close-knit group of friends.”

Andrew Lang’s last fairy book, The Lilac Fairy Book, was published in 1910. In all, Andrew Lang published twelve fairy-tale collections, starting in 1889 with The Blue Fairy Book. You can listen to all of Lang’s fairy tale collection books at Librivox.

Also in 1910, American illustrator and author Rose O’Neill’s first childrenâ€™s book was published, The Kewpies and Dottie Darling. A few years later Kewpie dolls, based on Ms. O’Neill’s characters, became popular. There’s something about the Kewpie doll that I find disturbing. It’s supposed to be cute and innocent, but it seems . . . sort of sinister.

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.

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.

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.

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 Japanâ€“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.

Armistice, November 11, 1918

Aug21

“The Armistice was signed in Foch’s railway car at 5 A.M. on November 11, 1918, to go into effect six hours later. Senselessly, to no military or political purpose, Allied infantry and artillery attacks continued full steam through the morning. On this final half day of the war, after the peace was signed, 2738 men from both sides were killed and more than 8000 wounded. The first and last British soldiers to die in the war—16-year-old John Parr of Finchley, North London, a golf caddy who lied about his age to get into the army, and George Ellison a 40-year-old miner from Leeds who survived all but the last 90 minutes of fighting—were killed within a few miles of each other near Mons, Belgium. It was recently discovered that, by coincidence, they are buried beneath pine trees and rosebushes in the same cemetery, Saint-Symphorien, seven yards apart.” To End All Wars by Adam Hochschild, p. 341.

And what if one of those 2738 men who died after the peace was already signed were your son or husband or friend? I would be a pacifist for life.

Semicolon

Books we must have though we lack bread.

Archives