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truepennyUBC #23
Hawkins, Bruce R., and David B. Madsen. Excavation of the Donner-Reed Wagons: Historic Archaeology Along the Hastings Cutoff. 1990. Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 1999.
This is the write-up of a very small and relatively unprofitable (i.e., they found, essentially, some bits of wagon, some ox bones, and a lot of buttons) archaelogical excavation, undertaken because the sites were going to be flooded by lake control efforts.
I found it interesting for several reasons.
1. Archaeologists (as Calvin says in one Calvin and Hobbes strip) have the most mind-numbing job on the planet. The archaelogical team were working in horrible conditions (their carefully distanced, third-person, academic descriptions of the mud flats are worth the price of admission) for very little reward--but they're meticulous and professional, and you can tell that they still think this is all pretty darn cool.
2. I'm interested, in a sort of inchoate way, in the American pioneer movements of the nineteenth century, and the historical chapters on the Hastings Cutoff and the Donner-Reed party, and the survey mission of Captain Stansbury, are like a pinhole camera.
3. Also, because with the morbid and creepifying, I'm interested in the Donner party and its dreadful fate. This book is not about that, but the authors point out that the reason the group got stranded in the mountains was because they took the Hastings Cutoff (allegedly a short-cut) and it delayed them and decimated their animals. Also, the intraparty politics and psychodramas ... this makes it kind of clear that cannibalism was really the only logical conclusion to the Donner-Reed party's progress across the continent.
UBC #24
Vicinus, Martha, ed. Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973.
Yes, this book is thirty years old. Yes, scholarship on Victorian women has advanced in all kinds of ways since. However, comma, this isn't bad as a general introduction. It's very readable, and the essays are a broad spectrum of approaches. Governesses, W. S. Gilbert's female characters, menstruation, art, prostitution, working-class women, John Ruskin and J. S. Mill (Kate Millett, who is beautifully snarky), theories of evolution, sexual psychology, and then an annotated bibliography. I learned things I hadn't known, thought about things I had known in new ways. So, you know, the book did its job.
