A relative of mine posted this word on Facebook yesterday. That’s all, just the word. It’s not a word I’ve ever heard or used.
I tried to figure out what it meant, and I thought of several possible definitions. Then, I decided this word would be a good candidate for that dictionary game where everyone makes up a possible meaning, except for one person who gives the actual definition. So which of these is the true meaning of galactagogue?
A. a substance that promotes lactation in humans and other animals. Asparagus is supposed to be a galactagogue.
B. the dictatorial ruler of a galaxy or galactic empire. The galactagogue in The Empire Strikes Back is the Emperor Palpatine.
C. a large and elaborate celebration; a gala. They planned a galactagogue for the heir’s twenty-first birthday.
D. a non-living statue or wooden figure that comes to life. Pinocchio was a galactagogue.
So, which one is it, folks? The first one to answer correctly gets a virtual blue ribbon for Word Wizard of the Day.
In 1913, the following significant works were published or were new and popular:
O Pioneers! by Willa Cather. I remember a long time ago reading this novel about a pioneer woman who struggles to hold onto the family’s land. I think it would be a good one to revisit, however, since I remember very little of the plot or characters.
Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The story of the jungle hero, Tarzan, has been filmed many times. The most fammous Tarzan movie was Tarzan the Ape Man (1932), starring Johnny Weissmuller, who went on to star in eleven other Tarzan films.
Sons and Lovers by D.H.Lawrence. I’ve never read anything by Lawrence, but this book sounds very Freudian and not very pleasant or edifying.
Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter. Pollyanna, on the other hand, is a little too edifying. However, each to his own, the book inspired eleven sequels and numerous movie adaptations.
Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw. This play provides the source material for the musical My Fair Lady, although the musical departs from Shaw’s script in several areas, especially the ending.
Principia Mathematica by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell. This three-volume work on the principles and origins of mathematics “is an attempt to derive all mathematical truths from a well-defined set of axioms and inference rules in symbolic logic.” (Wikipedia) Ummmmmmmm. . . . yeah.
Bertrand Russell: “A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.”
A Boy’s Will by Robert Frost. Frost’s first book of poetry was published while the American poet was living in Great Britain. My 20th century history and literature students will be reading Frost all year long, two or three poems a week. I think there is some value in immersing oneself in the poetry or art or music of one artist for a long period of time, and Frost is a good choice. I’m looking forward to exploring his poetry at a leisurely pace with my students.
May 30, 1913. Russian composer Igor Stravinsky’s new ballet, The Rite of Spring (Le sacre du printemps), premiered in Paris and caused a near-riot. The French audience booed Stravinsky’s dissonant and rhythmically complex music and Njinsky’s provocative and non-traditional choreography. The story is that there were fist fights in the aisles, and some concertgoers stormed out in disgust.
Then, in 1940 Disney’s Fantasia made the piece about, not primitive pagan rituals of spring, but rather the primitive pagan story of Evolution. It fits.
Also in 1913, silent film comedians Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle and Charlie Chaplin made their U.S. film debuts. Arbuckle was in two of the new Keystone Kops comedies, and Chaplin starred in a film called Making a Living.
On a much more somber note, Woyzeck is a stage play written by Georg Büchner which premiered in Munich in 1913. Oddly enough, Drama Daughter just told me that she is playing the female lead in this influential German play in a production this fall. She also says the play is sad and depressing.
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.
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.
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.
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 1900′s, 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.
January 1, 1912. The Republic of China is officially established. Emperor Pu Yi abdicates the throne.
March 27, 1912. The first of the famous cherry trees that beautify Washington D.C. were planted on this date in 1912 by First Lady Helen Taft and the Japanese ambassador’s wife, Viscountess Chinda.
April 15, 1912. RMS Titanic,a passenger liner, strikes an iceberg on her maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York City, and sank, resulting in the deaths of 1,517 people.
Pictures of the Titanic and of some of its passengers:
May, 1912. Italy and Turkey continue to make war, with Italy bombarding the Dardanelles and occupying the Greek island of Rhodes.
May, 1912. In the House of Commons, the British government passes a bill to grant Home Rule (semi-independence) to Ireland. Northern Ireland, also called Ulster, which is mostly Protestant doesn’t want to be a part of a mostly Catholic independent Ireland. The Home Rule bill will be put into effect in 1914, then suspended for the duration of the war (WW I), then reinstated in 1918 as a part of the British plan to draft more soldiers into the war from Ireland.
May, 1912. The first issue of the Bolshevik (Communist) newspaper Pravda is published in St. Petersburg, Russia. Pravda means “truth”.
June-September, 1912. Amateur scientist Charles Dawson and Arthur Smith Woodward of the British Museum gather fragments of a skull and jawbone from a gravel pit at Piltdown, East Sussex, England. A reconstruction of the fragments comes to be known as The Piltdown Man believed to be the skeleton of a primitive man 50,000 years old. In 1953 the Piltdown Man was finally exposed as a forgery consisting of the lower jawbone of an orangutan combined with the skull of a modern human.
September-December, 1912. The Balkan League—Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Montenegro–goes to war against Turkey (Ottoman Empire). This conflict is known as The First Balkan War.
October, 1912. Turkey, busy in the Balkans, signs a treaty to end its war with Italy.
November 5, 1919. Woodrow Wilson is elected the first Democratic president of the United States in more than twenty years. His rivals Taft, the Republican, and Teddy Roosevelt, running for his own Progressive (Bull Moose) party, split the Republican vote. Labor Union leader Eugene V. Debs is the nominee of the Socialist Party of America.
All year: The French and the Germans squabble over influence in Morocco. In November, the Germans finally agree to recognize French influence in Morocco in return for territory in the French Equatorial African colony of Middle Congo. The crisis leads to Britain and France making a naval agreement where the Royal Navy promises to protect the northern coast of France from German attack.
March, 1911. The British announce plans to build five more Dreadnought battleships for the Royal Navy in response to German naval expansion.
May 25, 1911. Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz is forced by the rebels to resign from office. Francisco Madero takes over as provisional president. Diaz leaves Mexico a few days later for exile in France. At the beginning of the year, President Taft sent forces to the Mexican border to guard the border territory from the unrest in Mexico, and in April U.S. troops entered Mexico to quell the rebellion.
July 24, 1911. Hiram Bingham rediscovers the ancient Inca city of Machu Picchu in the Andes Mountains in Peru.
August 22, 1911. The theft of the Mona Lisa is discovered in the Louvre. (It was two years before the real thief was discovered. Louvre employee Vincenzo Peruggia had stolen it by entering the building during regular hours, hiding in a broom closet and walking out with it hidden under his coat after the museum had closed.)
September, 1911. Italy declares war on Turkey (Ottoman Empire). In November, Italy annexes Tripoli and Cyrenaica and wins a decisive victory over Turkish forces in North Africa.
November 1, 1911. The world’s first combat aerial bombing mission takes place in Libya during the Italo-Turkish War. An Italian flier drops several small explosives.
December 14, 1911. Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and his party become the first men to reach the South Pole five weeks ahead of British Captain Robert F. Scott and his team who reach the South Pole in March, 1912. Tragically, Scott and his men do not survive the journey back to their base camp on the coast of Antarctica.
December, 1911. Scientist Marie Curie wins an unprecedented second Nobel Prize “in recognition of her services to the advancement of chemistry by the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element”.
December 29, 1911. Dr. Sun Yat-sen is elected president of the newly declared Republic of China. In October, Pu Yi, the five year old emperor of China, surrendered his power and agreed to grant a constitution.
Nonfiction: To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 by Adam Hochschild. Semicolon review here. Radical Together: Unleashing the People of God for the Purpose of God by David Platt. Interesting, but hardly radical.
I think I read more books than these in August, but these are the only ones I remember or have records of. Oh, well, out of sight, out of mind.
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 it’s a history mystery. Recommended.
A. a substance that promotes lactation in humans and other animals. Asparagus is supposed to be a galactagogue.
