Women's Painted Furniture, 1790-1830: American Schoolgirl Art by Betsy Krieg Salm (University Press of New England, 2010) is a treasure and keepsake....moreWomen's Painted Furniture, 1790-1830: American Schoolgirl Art by Betsy Krieg Salm (University Press of New England, 2010) is a treasure and keepsake. Between the late 1700s and 1830 American Schoolgirls accomplished watercolor paintings on fine wooden pieces that are together valuable antiques and a pathway to our past. Discover the long lost art of painting on wood by American Schoolgirl Artisans in the earliest days of the nation. Emily Dickinson's paternal aunt Lucretia, Harriet and Catherine Beecher, and the daughters of some of New England's most famous families were artisans of women's painted furniture. This lost art and the history of its students and practitioners is an amazing untold tale of women's education. Abigail Adams' writings look less radical against the recovered history of women's education. The roots to America's rural Female Academies and Eastern seaboard Women's Colleges are bound together by its focus on this art and its instruction.
Betsy Krieg Salm is an artist who creates historical reproductions of these early American pieces. In her book she shares her recipes, techniques, historical sources and the provenance for the never-published-before photographed items, originals, and her reproductions.
This is a book to enjoy during the end of winter. It is filled with the whimsy of young girls' paintings filled with flowers and insects, animals and scenic summer views. It makes you want to go through it with your daughter just so she sees what young girls accomplished under instruction more than 200 years ago. See if you can cultivate the artist in a young woman today: share this book and celebrate the contributions to history of women worldwide.(less)
Mars is far. Kessler's ability to make astrophysics comprehensible to an eighth grade girl and get her to giggle is the geek appeal. Spending a summer...moreMars is far. Kessler's ability to make astrophysics comprehensible to an eighth grade girl and get her to giggle is the geek appeal. Spending a summer inside mission control in Tucson brings home the fact that Mars is truly distant.
A sol is a Martian day. It's a couple hours and some minutes longer than a day on Earth. Hence the plot of sleep deprivation and science stirred together and shaken. Kessler's own experiences with time-shifting and its physiological, emotional and professional impact are documented in a way Hunter Thompson might admire.
Digging for Regolith, the word for Martian dirt, is part of the mission. The objective is to determine whether Mars has water. The execution of these tasks by teams of NASA scientists is about as action packed as watching paint dry on the wall. Kessler keeps the reader turning the page nonetheless with his wacky way of connecting the reader to the science in pursuit of a discovery. Arcade games, household cleaning products, even anti-freeze are ways in which Kessler demystifies the discovery of water on Mars.
In the process of sharing his fly-on-the-wall observations, the scientists become humans and a few heroes; all of them characters you grow to know and care about. It's the best evidence NASA presents for continued funding of the US Space Program. (less)
For anyone who has ever turned their eyes to the sky and pondered, this story of the 1807 Weston Fall offers a full and fasincating account of how ear...moreFor anyone who has ever turned their eyes to the sky and pondered, this story of the 1807 Weston Fall offers a full and fasincating account of how early Americans reacted to a magnificent meteorite. The responses and reactions of those who witnessed this event are chronicled by Cathryn Prince in this meticulously researched book. Across time and culture, Prince reports on humans' responses and rationalizations to meteorites -- thunder stones -- and offers the kind of contextualization needed to make sense of the national controversy which ensued in 1807.
The Professor is Benjamin Silliman, with a calling to become Yale's missionary for American Science. The President is Thomas Jefferson who mocks the Yankee who would consider the meteor anything less than an act of God. You can see through the array of factual evidence, the seeds for the split between south and north that brought the nation into civil war 40 years later. The "you are there" feel to the story makes it a joy to read as history comes back to life; the specificity and details of everyday life in 1807 give depth to the characters and actions. Science, in its origins, began with space exploration and this historical connection is compelling.
Robert Grede’s first novel has all the makings of a rollicking good story. Based on the life of Sergeant George Van Norman, Grede’s great-great-grandf...moreRobert Grede’s first novel has all the makings of a rollicking good story. Based on the life of Sergeant George Van Norman, Grede’s great-great-grandfather, The Spur & The Sash seamlessly combines fiction and fact. The facts, Grede tells us, are these: “Sergeant George Van Norman, a Yankee, was wounded in one of the last battles of the American Civil War, at Nashville (December 15th and 16th, 1864). Left behind to recover when the armies marched on, he was ordered to guard a local plantation from January to July, 1865, where he fell in love with the owner’s daughter.”
George arrives at Elm Grove, the plantation, unsettled and awkward around Southern mannerisms. When the house servant asks him, “Whom may I say is calling?” George cannot believe the formality (bordering on the ridiculous, to him) of the question. He keeps replaying the scene in his head – “Whom! Whom!” – with great wonder and amusement. Luckily, George gradually falls into the good graces of the plantation owner, a fair-minded and intelligent Judge Wilson, over talk of good soil and drinking of good whiskies.
From then on, George begins to build a new life. He falls in love with Eva, Judge Wilson’s daughter, and she with him. This alone is an immeasurable comfort, but he also befriends the Judge’s son, the main servant, Eb, and even reconnects by chance with a former Confederate soldier, Noah Turner, whom George had once released as a prisoner. Also populating the story is a villainous character named Slive, who kills, steals, and double-crosses as easily as breathing. Is it really a coincidence that his name is an anagram of “evils”? I’d guess not. Slive is responsible for truly horrific deeds, but there is also a fantastic scene in the book where he decides the best method of scaring off “squatters” is to create a monster called “Swamp Wampus” – which involves Slive running around in a sheet, his dirty work boots showing underneath, yelling “Behold the holy specter of doom!”
But not everything in the story is gunfire, horse thieves, and wandering through dark swamps. The story hinges on two main emotions: love and displacement. The first of these, of course, revolves around Eva. Eva is part Scarlett O’Hara, part Emily Dickinson. Wasp-waisted and clad in “spruce-blue velvet,” Eva spends her introductory chapters literally hidden in the attic of her father’s house, safe from unsavory soldiers and carpetbaggers. To pass the time and seek some outlet for her unsettled thoughts, Eva writes letters to her dead mother. The letters are so intimate in their honesty and admittance of fear and doubt that reading them makes you feel slightly guilty, as if you had happened upon a church and overheard someone else’s confession.
What George and Eva both see in the other is virtue, something that seems to be distinctly lacking in their world of carpetbaggers, wounded men, and utter social and political chaos. George muses, “Her beauty had not blinded him to her shortcomings, but perhaps it had to her virtues.” When their first love scene finally occurs, it is as dramatic as could be expected – “the sky opened, and the angels sighed.”
Despite the romance anchoring him to Elm Grove, George naturally struggles with the feelings of a stranger in a strange land. Ironically, he finds his answer in Judge Wilson’s words, who tells him: “Beauty is as you find it, Sergeant, a matter of philosophy and geography.” When George returns again and again to the question of “Home? What is home?”, he tells himself that perhaps, after all, it is truly “a matter of philosophy and geography.” George finds his philosophy through Eva, through Noah, through the Judge, through his own memories of his home in Wisconsin and his memories of the war. He finds his geography through breathing life back into the once grand Elm Grove, through crumbling the rich soil between his fingers and seeing the wall around the plantation grow “by rock and yard.” With this newfound sense of place, both emotional and tangible, George is able to find peace.
Grede is fond of patterns: the scenes that open on a train are sure to use the phrase “kick-kack, kick-kack” to describe the sounds of the journey. George sees the familiar soldier’s pattern of “Load-hand-tear-charge-draw-ram-return-prime-hup!” mirrored in the bending and straightening rhythm of the farmhands planting seeds. The shifting pattern of Eva’s letter-writing shows the changes in Eva herself, as she leaves behind her insular existence to join George in an unfamiliar world. The first few times we see Eva writing to her mother, she “folded the letter carefully to put away in her drawer with the others.” After she first mentions George in a letter, “she gently dabbed her quill in her ink rag and set aside her writing kit.” Further along, she hurriedly shoves a letter into the desk, “its deepening stack of letters rustling softly as she slammed the drawer.” And lastly, after Eva writes a love letter to George, she takes the stack of letters to her mother and burns them in the yard. This seems less of a violent gesture than a gentle laying-to-rest of a solace that Eva no longer needs.
Like the kick-kack of the trains, Grede’s prose rolls richly along throughout the book, carrying the story to its somewhat bewildering end. The Spur & The Sash is an utterly satisfying read, though the factual story of George and Eva ends in a less-than-satisfactory manner. Truly a masterful effort for a first novel, Grede shows complete command over his subject and his craft. Steeped in philosophy and geography, The Spur & The Sash is a memorable contribution to the sesquicentennial of the Civil War.(less)
Retired teacher and native son of Homer, New York, Martin Sweeney has written a captivating account of three other native sons who played pivotal role...moreRetired teacher and native son of Homer, New York, Martin Sweeney has written a captivating account of three other native sons who played pivotal roles in Abraham Lincoln’s presidency and the United States’ history. Just released from McFarland & Company is Lincoln’s Gift from Homer, New York: A Painter, an Editor and a Detective.
The painter, Francis Carpenter, brushed “The First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation before the Cabinet”—the iconic image of Lincoln with sunken eyes and sharp jaw line which hangs today in the U.S. Capitol Building. The editor, William Stoddard, served as the president’s personal assistant secretary. He penned the first copy of the Emancipation Proclamation from Lincoln’s notes and later published the seminal Life of Abraham Lincoln, which Lincoln historians and enthusiasts consult today. The detective, Eli De Voe, who had been tracking a virulently anti-Lincoln cell in Baltimore, unearthed (and thus foiled) a plot to kill the president en route to his first inauguration in February 1861.
That three men so closely linked to preserving Lincoln’s life and legacy should all hail from Homer, New York is a remarkable coincidence. Yet, for those of us who know and love upstate New York, there is nothing coincidental about this convergence of great leadership, especially in the Civil War era. Seneca Falls is home to the Women’s Rights National Historic Park where the first women’s rights convention was held. Here Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass, and other greats gathered to rally for women’s suffrage and abolition. The house of Harriet Tubman, “conductor” of the Underground Railroad, is a national historical park in Auburn, New York. It sits next to the house of William Seward, the Union Secretary of State celebrated in Doris Kearn Goodwin’s excellent Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (2005).
Founded in 1791, Homer today has a population of roughly 3200—not a huge increase from the 2000 souls who inhabited it in the early 1830s when Carpenter, Stoddard, and DeVoe were born. Situated on the banks of the Tioughnioga River in Cortland County, Homer birthed another famous son, Andrew White, Cornell University’s first president whose unfulfilled mission was to admit women to the university. Homer also delivered daughter Amelia Jenks Bloomer, inventor of “bloomers”—the combination of baggy pants over knee-high skirts that was designed to provide women and girls greater safety and freedom of movement.
While wondering how so much greatness can come from such a small community, I’m reminded of Nathaniel asking Phillip in John 1:46: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Phillip answers: “Come and see.” Even Sweeney’s title—Lincoln’s Gift from Homer, New York—seems to resonate with biblical allusion. The painter, the editor, and the detective—were they the magi bearing three gifts?
The release of Sweeney’s new book is well-timed as we honor the Civil War sesquicentennial this year. Yet, Lincoln’s Gift from Homer, New York will be worth reading next year and the next by history buffs and general readers alike. This is a mature, scholarly work that brings a compelling story to life in dramatic, at moments, cinematic fashion. The scenes I found most intriguing involved Stoddard handling Mary Todd, the unpopular first lady from the south, along with an endless parade of beseechers requesting hearings and favors from the president. The patronage system was alive and well. Hate mail and death threats were commonplace. Stoddard, the gatekeeper, protected his president.
Reading Sweeney’s book makes me appreciate how men of humble origins can belong to a larger national zeitgeist. It is a testimony to the relevance of local history to the challenges our nation and community face today. It gives me hope that individuals can still blaze trails with earnestness, vision, and conviction.(less)
"A novel, biography, and memoir, all/three going at once.” This is how Kirsten Wasson describes her mother’s voracious literary appetite in the poem “...more"A novel, biography, and memoir, all/three going at once.” This is how Kirsten Wasson describes her mother’s voracious literary appetite in the poem “One Way to Read.” The two lines, however, could well have been written to describe the author’s new collection of poems, Almost Everything Takes Forever, published by Antrim House Books. It is a lush, lithe, witty, emotionally frank series of postcards from the author’s life.
The book is divided into four sections: Season’s End, Otherworldliness Amused Her, The Long Dive, and Town at the End of Time. Each section focuses on a particular person: the first and last, the author; the second, her mother; the third, her son. The bookends, “Season’s End” and “Town at the End of Time”, are mainly about the inner landscapes of the speaker. Many of the poems take place in the space that lingers after an event: a journey, a conversation, or a dream.
“Otherworldliness Amused Her” is devoted to the author’s mother (Audrey Curley), the her in the section heading. Wasson conjures a fully-formed character, not unlike the one revealed to us in the first and last sections of the book. The subject of these poems is a traveler, a gourmand, and a packrat, who is at once maternal, independent, and ever so slightly lost. One of the most unusual poems in the collection, titled “Grocery List,” beautifully synthesizes the intimate and the mundane. With just a few ingredients, Wasson sketches a portrait whose clarity would usually take paragraphs to achieve: “BRIE, DIJON, CILANTRO”; “Only a child/could have eaten hot dogs in that kitchen where/for Thanksgiving we had paella.”
The role of the child mentioned in “Grocery List” takes center stage in “The Long Dive.” The author’s voice remains introspective, but takes on a new awareness, as in this stanza from “At The Park”:
Now I’m pushing: a mother among fathers finding solace in sprinklers turned on before the heat, the communion of what we came for and how long we can stay.
In the poem “Evolution” we see the fullest description of the son, tracing the fault lines from infant to “almost-manliness,” sometimes burdensome, full of love, hyper-aware of the world around him. The voice in this group of poems conveys thicker-than-water closeness without alienating the reader. “His Long Dive” touches only briefly on the loneliness that comes with this kind of closeness. “My eyes fix/on dark water, a glimpse or two through the long dive.”
The book returns to the first person perspective in “Town at the End of Time.” As mentioned previously, the first and last sections are very similar in theme and outlook. At the same time, there is a mellowed, rounded sense to the writing in “Town at the End of Time” that was sharper and more anxious in “Season’s End.” Death and life bump elbows amicably, and nowhere more brilliantly than in “Hurricane Mortality.” Opening with a quote from The Inferno, the poem describes a gaudy, plastic afterlife through a visit to a Key West graveyard, where “practically/naked souls flip-flop around houses/where shingles fall, gargantuan pink hibiscus gloat.”
“Savannah Graveyard” is another study of death’s strange bedfellows, through the strange intersection of a Southern graveyard and a bridal-themed photoshoot (pictured on the cover, as photographed by the author). Wasson writes, “Then I’m close enough/to see my apparition. Satin flounces and blonde hair./A bride, not a ghost.” It is purposefully difficult to tell whether this is “my apparition” in the sense of ownership or self-recognition. This veiled self-awareness is also a new facet of “Town at the End of Time” as opposed to “Season’s End.” The final poem in the section, “Dunio: Last Day”, rings out like an amber-colored bell tone, clear and sweet. “At dinner under an olive tree, I consider/what I cannot keep: my suitcase says/there is too much to take home.” Yet Wasson does manage to keep everything she’s collected on her travels, scattered throughout the pages of Almost Everything Takes Forever.
The last sentence on the “About The Author” page reads: “She [Wasson] lives in Ithaca, New York, and another location yet to be determined.” This purposefully open-ended identity is especially poignant and humorous when lined up next to a stanza from “Plate Tectonics,” one of the first section’s poems.
Why travel to have confirmed what you always suspected: buried landscapes show us the heart divides, not in half, but close enough.
This particular sentiment in Wasson’s writing calls to mind a modern Elizabeth Bishop (think “Questions of Travel”), another well-traveled, savvy, wryly ironic poet who also suffered from fernweh; “an ache for the distance.” Farsickness. Almost Everything Takes Forever really does take place in “another location yet to be determined,” whether it’s in a town at the end of time, or another otherworldly place.
Wasson’s poems are shaped carefully, but with abandon. Perhaps the lesson learned in “One Way to Read” (“irony/is the only saving grace”) allows her to write with such impressive control. Wherever a poem finds itself, one gets the sense that Wasson will be amused: at herself, at the place, at how otherworldliness remains “green and glistening,” and most of all, at how almost everything takes forever.
Kirsten Wasson grew up in central Illinois and earned degrees from Wesleyan University, Suny-Binghamton, and the University of Wisconsin. She teaches Multicultural American Literature at Ithaca College. In addition to being a widely published poet, she writes non-fiction, which has appeared in Ascent Magazine (on line) and The Ithaca Times. She lives in Ithaca, New York, and another location yet to be determined.
To order additional copies of this book or other Antrim House titles, contact the publisher at: AntrimHouse@comcast.net or the house website.(less)
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