History Sans Boredom...

Reading history books can be boring, even for professional historians. For people who dislike history anyway, it can be downright painful. One way to ease the pain, or even make history fun, is through the artistry of fiction, whether in the visual media or in book (or eBook) form. I've been looking for some good, written historical fiction during the past few weeks. My criteria are pretty simple. I want something fun to read – a page-turner – and not too long. Three hundred pages is about as long as I want to spend on a story. I do go longer for select authors – Steven King's Under the Dome is on my reading list – but I prefer shorter works. I also like historical fiction that has some semblance to reality as I know it. Historical romances don't hold much interest for me.

For my first effort I wanted to find something on ancient history. Using Google Search I found this website about Best Historical Fiction... http://www.goodreads.com/list/show/15.Best_Historical_Fiction I had to work a little to find something in that list that me my reading criteria and settled on a book by Nicholas Nicastro entitled Antigone's Wake. Antigone is the name of one of the seven extant plays of Greek playwright Sophocles. The book is NOT about the death of Antigone, but about a significant, though little known, event in the life of Sophocles, the siege of Samos. Samos was a Greek island and a member of the Delian League, a defense organization dominated by Athens. Samos rebelled against the high-handed tactics of Athens and against the taxes they imposed in return for protection. Athens responded by laying siege to Samos and ultimately bringing that delinquent group back into the fold.

Sophocles was (and is) one of the top playwrights in Athens during the period 400 to 500 BC, along with Aeschylus and Euripedes. The story takes place in a nine month period from 440 to 439 BC. Sophocles, though an artist, was expected to participate in military campaigns as needed. All Athenian males received military training from an early age. Sophocles, 55 years old, was considered a wise man. Pericles, the leading political and military mind, chose Sophocles to serve as one of his ten generals in the Samos campaign. Antigone's Wake is the name of his ship.

What I found interesting about this book is that in about 200 pages I learned a lot about daily life in Athens, how politics, theater, and the military worked, and about what it meant to be a citizen of Athens. I learned more about ancient Greek sex life than I really wanted to know. I also learned about a few other famous Greeks, including Pericles, Aeschylus, and Euripedes, the art of war, and what it meant to be an island kingdom, Samos, and a partner with Athens. Nicastro managed to keep me turning pages and informed.

Is the work authentic? It feels like it,and Nicastro's bio suggests he has the ability to do serious research. One reviewer, David Hollander, associate professor of ancient history at Iowa State University, attests to the reliability of the research and that the extrapolations about Sophocles were reasonable.
So, enjoy the book. I liked it well enough to download Nicastro's book, Empire of Ashes: A Novel of Alexander the Great to my Kindle. I also have in hand Ursula LeGuin's tale of ancient Rome, Lavinia. Look for more on those, later, here.

It’s Only Local History…

I belong to a local history group, the Faulkner County History Society (FCHS), and have been a member since the late 1970s. Shortly after joining I served a two year tour as editor of their quarterly journal, Faulkner Facts and Fiddlings. (Never mind that we never had the money to publish more than twice a year… it was called a quarterly – we just combined two issues in one…J). As editor, I read and published dozens of interesting stories. I remember one about Arkansas Holiness College, in Quitman, Arkansas, another about Hendrix College in Conway, and several about the University of Central Arkansas (UCA), aka Arkansas State Teacher’s College, also in Conway.

Clearly these articles were about local institutions. But, their stories were part of the national scene. They were part of something bigger. Hendrix and Arkansas Holiness College were part of a broader private college movement that dated to colonial days in the United States (ie. Harvard U or Princeton U). They had religious affiliations. One survives today, the other is long gone. But, there were many such colleges across Arkansas and our nation. Similarly, UCA was part of a broad effort, begun in the late 19th century, to improve teaching methods and to train qualified teachers for service across the nation.

In the early 1980s, in part because of my involvement in the FCHS, I decided to work on and complete an MA degree at UCA in history. I wanted to write so I chose the option of doing an MA thesis instead of simply taking two more courses. My advisor, Professor Waddy Moore, guided me to South Arkansas and an interesting lumber town named Crossett. It turned out that the town of seven thousand souls, more or less, was regional headquarters for Georgia-Pacific, a forest products company with operations and customers across the globe.

Georgia-Pacific had bought out a thriving, progressive private firm, the Crossett Lumber Company in the early 1960s. My paper focused on the company town of Crossett and its transition to private ownership when Georgia-Pacific stepped in. I studied both the community and the company and their complex interrelationships. I met and interviewed some great folks in Crossett: managers, foresters, publicists, and housewives included.

Crossett Lumber had pioneered sustained forestry, a practice tied to efforts by Yale University graduate foresters and Gifford Pinchot, noted for his work in establishing some of the earliest sustained forests on Biltmore lands near Ashville, North Carolina. Crossett forestry was also influenced by Leslie Pomeroy and Eugene P. Connor, whose early research took them to France, where sustained forestry had been practiced for centuries. In essence, sustained forestry, or managed forestry, treats the forest as a crop which can be harvested for various products and which can be renewed and sustained indefinitely. Sustained forestry was the primary reason the Crossett Lumber Company and its company town survived and produced for the first sixty years of the twentieth century, and why successor companies and the town continue to do so today.

So, my activity in a local history group took me across the state to a thriving community in the south part of the state, which existed because individuals with foresight made connections to professionals at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, who made connections with other foresters, who noticed managed forests I Europe while visiting shortly after World War I.

One day in this space I will explain how the lumber industry in Crossett is tied to Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, update New York, and Slovakia in Eastern Europe.

But it’s only local history…J