misc links (& map samplers)

Huge historical archive of mail from captured ships to go online

The letters, found in mailbags, with many bearing wax seals and some still unopened, have so far yielded personal accounts, some heart-rending, and journals, sheet music, drawings, poems and a packet of 200-year-old seeds from South Africa.

I'm way behind the times on this, but oh my god. 160,000 letters seized by the British Navy between 1652 and 1815 will be opened for the first time and digitized.

Kate Winslet, Saoirse Ronan to Star in Fossil Hunter Movie ‘Ammonite’

The story is set in 1840s England, when Anning and a young woman sent to convalesce by the sea develop an intense relationship, altering both of their lives forever. Anning is credited with making key scientific discoveries in the Jurassic marine fossil beds in the cliffs along the English Channel.

More of me being behind the times, but I'm so excited; it's set to be directed by Francis Lee, as well, who did God's Own Country. Historic lesbian fossil hunters, my DREAM MOVIE.

(Let me also take this as an opportunity to revisit one of my all-time favorite Kate Beaton drawings.)

Has anyone heard of the upcoming ITV drama Beecham House? 1795 India, including Indian, British, and mixed-race characters. What I can find about it would lead me to be leery ("Downton Abbey in India"), except it's written by Gurinder Chadha (Bend it Like Beckham, Bride and Prejudice), so I have hope. The linked article is the most recent info I've found about it, so while Wikipedia says it'll air this month, it sounds like it'll actually be later in the year.

And a few, more recent, Hamilton-related things:

The Mixed Reception of the Hamilton Premiere in Puerto Rico

In a post on 80grados, a left-leaning journal, the activist Amárilis Pagán Jiménez asked in Spanish why San Juan should welcome a show that chronicles “the history of the same damn country that has us under an unworthy colonial state and that ended us with PROMESA.” The musical that had been celebrated for the revolutionary diversity of its cast was now being aligned with the American political establishment that Hamilton had tried to reimagine.

This is an interesting article dipping in to complexities of a subject I know little about, but the difficulties of what Hamilton presents and the message behind that is a subject I'm always fascinated by, and these are controversies that I haven't seen talked about as much.

Did ‘Hamilton’ Get the Story Wrong? One Playwright Thinks So

In “The Haunting,” there is a character named Lin-Manuel Miranda who is visited by ghosts. They help Mr. Reed accomplish his main goal, which he said in an interview was “to give the voices that were left out of the musical some speaking lines.”

This sounds interesting, if distinctly unsubtle. Certainly no one can fault the intent, however: Chernow vastly overstates Hamilton's anti-slavery sentiment (to the extent of calling him an abolitionist, which he certainly wasn't; the movement itself hardly existed at the time in the sense we think of it now), and LMM restates it with equally nonexistent foundation. I'm only surprised that the historian they interview didn't mention, or if he did the NYT didn't quote him mentioning, the fact that we have hard evidence that Hamilton bought and sold enslaved people: while you can argue that he did so for other people, which at least in some cases is certainly true, it's a pretty solid blow to the idea he had any particularly strong personal convictions on the matter.

(Also, a reminder to myself that there's a copy of Historians on Hamilton on my shelf that's just waiting to be read.)

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Plus, miscellaneous historical object I'm obsessed with this week: map samplers.

( Image below cut )

The one above was done by Ann Rhodes in 1780; while maps of England were very common among English girls, Irish girls embroidered Ireland, Scottish girls embroidered Scotland, American girls embroidered America (such as it was at the time), and so forth; some did maps of Europe, and some did the whole world. All the examples I've seen are from the late 1700s into the early 1800s, and they're usual simple to date, as the girls would embroider the year they finished them on the samplers themselves. (Along with their names, which I love; there are so few stitched pieces that are attributable to specific people.)

Some girls followed hand-drawn patterns (and some didn't seem to be following much of a pattern at all), but some followed either paper patterns or patterns printed directly onto linen or silk. (I also discovered that you can buy a cross-stitch kit to reproduce one of the English maps, which is both delightful and more or less historically accurate, in terms of how girls would've stitched them.)

I love them! I think they're delightful (look at the little ships embroidered in the English Channel!), and they seem to bridge the public/private, political/domestic divides that always seems so stark in this period. I've just linked to a smattering I've run into; they seem to be not uncommon in museum collections.