The Cundill History Prize

  Looking For A Good History Book or For Good News For History Majors?

The winner was just announced - she is Julia Lovell for Maoism: A Global History
"Julia Lovell’s Maoism: A Global History has won the Cundill History Prize. The nearly $100,000 prize ($75,000 U.S.), administered by McGill University, is awarded to the best English-language history writing.
Lovell is a British writer and translator and a professor on modern China at the University of London. In Maoism, she writes about the impact of the political ideology around the world and how it continues to influence China.
In his citation, historian Alan Taylor, the jury chair, called Maoism a “revelation” for the way in which it demonstrates the ideology’s influence on disparate societies including Peru, Indonesia, Europe, and the U.S."

A couple of years ago I called to your attention the Cundill Prize in my post, Christmas Shopping for Historians where I discussed the prize and some of the past winners. The winner for this year has just been announced. For more details about the prize and Mr. Cundill see this website at McGill University. Here are some data about the 2019 nominees.

THE LONGLIST FOR THE 2019 CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE

The 14 titles chosen were announced June 25, 2019. On Sept. 20, the nominees were reduced to 8. On October 17th it was revealed that the 3 finalists were all women: Mary Fulbrook, Jill Lepore and Julia Lovell.

Sunil Amrith
Unruly Waters: How Rains, Rivers, Coasts, and Seas Have Shaped Asia's History
Basic Books (US), Allen Lane (UK)
(Chosen as one of the top 8 on Sept. 20, 2019)

Helen Berry
Orphans of Empire: The Fate of London's Foundlings
Oxford University Press (UK)
(Chosen as one of the top 8 on Sept. 20, 2019)

David Blight
Frederick Douglass: American Prophet
Simon & Schuster (US)
(Chosen as one of the top 8 on Sept. 20, 2019)

Mary Fulbrook
Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice
Oxford University Press (UK)
(Chosen as one of the top 8 on Sept. 20, 2019)
"In Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest of Justice (Oxford University Press), the Professor of German History at UCL Mary Fulbrook explores the lives of both the victims and the perpetrators of the Holocaust. A lifetime achievement by one of the most renowned experts in the field, this encompassing work – which won the UK’s Wolfson History Prize earlier this year – expands our understanding of the Holocaust, and its lingering aftermath."

Jay Geller
The Scholems: A Story of the German-Jewish Bourgeoisie from Emancipation to Destruction
Cornell University Press (US)

Toby Green
A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution 
The University of Chicago Press (US), Allen Lane (UK)
(Chosen as one of the top 8 on Sept. 20, 2019)

Ramachandra Guha
Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914-1948 
Random House Canada (Canada), Allen Lane (UK), Penguin Random House (US), Penguin India (India)

Victoria Johnson
American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic
Liveright Publishing (US)
(Chosen as one of the top 8 on Sept. 20, 2019)

Jill Lepore
These Truths: A History of the United States 
W. W. Norton & Company (US)
(Chosen as one of the top 8 on Sept. 20, 2019)
"With These Truths: A History of the United States (W. W. Norton & Company), the Harvard Professor and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore delivers an ambitious one-volume history of the United States which places truth itself – a devotion to facts, proof, and evidence – at the centre of the nation’s history. Taking the reader up to the election of Donald Trump, this magisterial account is a reckoning with the beauty and tragedy of American history."

Julia Lovell
Maoism: A Global History 
The Bodley Head (UK), Knopf (US)
(Chosen as one of the top 8 on Sept. 20, 2019)
"From the tea plantations of north India to the sierras of the Andes, from Paris’s fifth arrondissement to the fields of Tanzania, Julia Lovell, Professor of Modern China at Birkbeck College, University of London, delivers a re-evaluation of Maoism as a significant global force in her sweeping Maoism: A Global History (The Bodley Head, Knopf). This landmark history arrives at a time when disagreements and conflicts between China and the West are on the rise, and the need to understand the political legacy of Maoism is urgent and growing."

Steve Luxenberg
Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America's Journey from Slavery to Segregation
W. W. Norton & Company (US)

Jonathan Phillips
The Life and Legend of the Sultan Saladin 
The Bodley Head (UK), Yale University Press (US)

Alexandra Popoff
Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century
Yale University Press (US)

Sue Prideaux
I am Dynamite! A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche 
Faber & Faber (UK), Tim Duggan Books (US)

The Dreaded N-Word

Bowdlerizers at the Barricades

    

    Up at the Odditorium (Western University) there was recently a horrific, terrible and traumatic incident in a classroom in the Arts & Humanities Department. An instructor uttered the “N-word” in a classroom.

   As an older white fellow I admit that I don’t quite understand what happened and am reluctant to write about it. I do so only because I am trying to come up with the answer to two questions: Was the magnitude of the crime that great and is there not anyone on campus who will come to the defence of the poor chap (I hope that word is okay) who uttered the word?

  I also don’t understand why the focus of the seminar, in which the word was mentioned, was on the TV show The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, but as an occasional reader of The Journal of Popular Culture, I will let that pass. But, if the instructor was, as he says, attempting to demonstrate “how a prime-time television sit-com achieved significant critiques of both class and race in America”, I find it difficult to believe that he spoke the word in a hateful way. Was his face painted black?

  If the unfortunate fellow (I hope that word is okay) has made it this far in University College, I doubt that he (if that word is okay) is likely to be a member of the Klan. I noticed that the guy (okay?) is also a part-time faculty member, which means that he is probably an adjunct, which suggests that he should have some awareness of the notion of servitude. He did apologize quickly and profusely and you can read his complete confession below. Let us hope that he is not punished further by having to teach a course next year on either Twain or Conrad.

   Perhaps the crime is greater than I thought since the President quickly appointed an anti-racism working group “reporting directly to him, after a professor’s use of the N-word in a lecture caught media attention and wide condemnation from major student groups at Western University.” 

   Some students have suggested that that is not enough.  “Western needs to be doing more. Screening speeches prior to convocation ceremonies or, in the most recent case, educating professors on what they can and cannot say in a classroom setting are preventative measures Western could, and should, be taking to ensure everyone feels comfortable on our campus.”

  

    It is likely that the working group will become a fully fledged task force requiring a new Vice President to police what professors say in seminars and that new counsellors will be required to deal with those students suffering from PTSD. 

   Judging from the student publication, The Gazette, Mr. Wenaus probably doesn’t feel very safe. As far as I can tell his fellow professors have been less than generous (one could have said niggardly) in offering support, but then the principle of tenure was not threatened and there was no need to come to his defence. 

   I gather that the student who initiated the complaints has received some obnoxious anonymous emails. Perhaps that is because those who might wish to discuss the incident openly don’t feel safe and comfortable in doing so. 

   Here is the complete apology. Decide for yourself.

          English Lecturer Issues Apology for Using Racist Language in Class

During a class earlier this week, Department of English lecturer Andrew Wenaus chose to use language that was offensive to those in attendance and not in keeping with Western’s values. Mr. Wenaus has expressed his regrets to the university and has requested that the following letter of apology be shared with the campus community. Any students who would like to discuss this further are encouraged to contact Michael Milde, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. 

Dear Western Community, 

On Wednesday 23 October, our class watched the first episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. The purpose of the lecture was to demonstrate how a prime-time television sit-com achieved significant critiques of both class and race in America. 

I wanted to demonstrate how the writing of the show is haunted by a history of exploitation, violence, and terror. Near the opening of the episode, Will Smith encounters Geoffrey the butler. Geoffrey customarily refers to Will as “Master William” which causes Will discomfort, reminding him of the history of plantations and slavery. Later in the episode, Will refers to Geoffrey as a “home butler.” Given Will’s discomfort with Geoffrey serving him and the reference to plantations earlier in the episode, I mentioned that, aside from a play on the term “homeboy”, he may be expressing an insult that historically instigated “class divisions” between slaves who worked the fields and slaves who worked in the house. In articulating this historical context that was used to refer to one of these two classes of slaves, I used the term “House N*****” to inform the students of the disturbing terminology that was used during slavery.  

While the term had been referred to as “N” when it came up in class prior, my use of the full term came spontaneously. I immediately regretted my words and there was some discussion of my choice in class, but I could have handled the situation more thoughtfully. After the class, I discussed the incident further with a couple students and I have since reached out to some other students as well to express my regret and apologize. 

I extend my sincerest apologies to all my students, the Department of English and Writing Studies, Western, and the London community. I recognize that my use of the word, regardless of context and intention, is unacceptable in all instances. 

I want my courses to be places where students feel respected, safe, and dignified. As such, I have reached out to services at Western to discuss how I might better handle sensitive and serious material in the classroom. I pledge to do better and I am committed to doing everything I can to regain the trust of my students. 

Sincerely, 

Andrew Wenaus

Sources:

“Prof's N-word Incident Sparks New Anti-racism Group under Shepard,” Emily Tayler, The Gazette, Nov 6, 2019

“Editorial: Days since Western's last Bigoted Incident? Zero.” The Gazette, Oct. 29, 2019.

Post Script:

Unquestioned and unqualified support for the forces of wokeness can be costly. If you don’t believe me, ask the administrators at Oberlin.

So far, those on the right who like to use egregious incidents such as this one to embarrass universities, appear not to have heard about the terrible Western University tragedy. Let us hope they do not find out. 

Georges Simenon

          Prolific Prodigious Promiscuous Prurience
   
    Those words come to mind when one reads about Georges Simenon. I knew nothing about him, but now know a little since I stumbled upon a recent essay written to mark the 30th anniversary of his death. Here is what I learned. You will be impressed.

He Wrote a Lot
   As someone who has been unable to deliver a daily post consisting of a few paragraphs, I am  impressed that Simenon would typically write 20,000 words per day and often ended up with 80 pages. He wrote hundreds of books across a variety of genres using many noms de plume. A publisher could count on a book every few weeks. It is reported that when someone rang up Simenon and was told that he was in the middle of a novel and could not be interrupted, the caller supposedly responded, “I’ll wait”. He produced almost 500 books. Many  have been translated into 50 languages and 600 million have been published worldwide. Penguin books is currently publishing 75 of his ‘Maigret’ books and the New York Review of Books has issued some of his classics. There are also the films and TV series.

He Moved Around a Lot
   Early in his career he lived on a boat and sailed on rivers and canals throughout Europe. He resided in Paris and had a mansion on Lake Geneva. He also lived in Florida and Arizona and, for a while, around Montreal where he apparently had time to not only write, but begin an affair with a much younger woman.

He Fooled Around a Lot
    And that brings me to the promiscuous and prurient part of this post. Perhaps it is more appropriate to say that you will be appalled rather than impressed by this next statistic. There is no need to incur the wrath of the #MeToo Movement by seeming to imply that one is envious of Simenon’s next ‘accomplishment’. I also hope I have no Incel readers since they might be triggered by the unfairness of the magnitude of the number about to be presented.
    In 1977 (when he was 74) Simenon said that he had slept with 10,000 women and it is estimated that about 8,000 were prostitutes.  Someone noted that he used prostitutes at the rate that Parisians smoked Gitanes. His wife thought the number closer to a modest 1,200. I am not sure what the score was for the remaining twelve years of his life.

Speaking of Scoring

    As soon as I saw 10,000 I was reminded of another great scorer, “Wilt the Stilt”. I knew that he had scored 100 points in a basketball game, but I could not remember his off court stats. I quickly found the number which is presented in his biography, A View From Above (a nice double entendre, don’t you think?). He claims to have slept with 20,000 DIFFERENT women.
    The arithmetic involved with such large numbers is beyond me. Someone did suggest that it is estimated that Simenon averaged 160 women over 60 years and more involved calculations are found in one of the sources listed. Luckily for you, someone has done a careful analysis for Wilt. See: “Did Wilt Chamberlain Really Sleep With 20,000 Women?”, Eddie Deezen, Feb. 6, 2018, MentalFloss.com. In any case, apparently both men “got lucky” many times even though Simenon was born on Friday the 13th and Wilt wore ‘13’ on his uniform.

Sources:
Apart from the Wikipedia entries see:
“It’s True, My Father Really Did Sleep With 10,000 Women,” Damian Whitworth, The Times, May 26, 2015.
“John Simon Interview: Maigret’s The Man My Father Wanted to Be,” Jake Kerridge, The Telegraph, August 31, 2019
“The Dilemma of Georges Simenon,” Joan Acocella, The New Yorker, Oct. 3, 2011
"We shouldn’t be too impressed by this.[the big number]. In 1968, Simenon, with his usual indiscretion, allowed himself to be interviewed by a panel of five doctors. One of them later said that the group was struck by his unromantic approach to sex. He told them that he limited the contact to two minutes. Reportedly, he also kept his clothes on (he just unzipped). One day, when Denyse was in her study conferring with one of her assistants, Joyce Aitken, Simenon entered the room, wanting to have sex. “You don’t have to leave, Aitken,” Denyse said, and she and Simenon got down, briefly, on the rug. If you followed such procedures, you, too, could have twelve hundred sexual partners.”
“The Unlikely Life of Belgium's Greatest Sex Machine," Michael Deacon, The Daily Telegraph, June 2, 2017.
"Still, if true, hats off to the man. All the same, you do have to wonder how he maintained such a gruelling schedule. Take the women. Simenon died aged 86. If he started at 16, he must have been sleeping with 142.8 women a year. Yet he had two marriages: the first when he was aged 20-47, the second when he was aged 47-61. Which means that, unless he was quite spectacularly unfaithful, he had only 29 years (when he was aged 16-20 and 61-86) in which to sleep with 9,998 women. That's 344.8 women a year. Almost one a day."

Post Script:
But What About Warren Beatty?      No Wonder He Is So Vain!
The number is 12,775 and one supposes that he stopped after he married Annette Bening in 1992. Review of: Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America by Peter Biskind by Euan Ferguson, The Guardian, Jan. 10, 2010.
Among his conquests: Natalie Wood, Leslie Caron, Julie Christie and Cher when she was 16.
“He’s So Vain", Vanessa Grigoriadis, New York Times, Feb. 5, 2010.

The Bonus:
Unsure about the exact meaning of "Incel", I looked it up and was surprised to learn that the term was coined by a Canadian woman! See the Wikipedia entry.
 

ANGLING BOOKS

 

      I suppose the title 'Angling Books' is slightly more alluring than 'Books About Fishing', and I am sure that the number of readers likely to be lured by either title is rather small. Given the 'long tail' principle, however, perhaps this post will be snagged by someone casting from way out there who is interested in the subject. Especially if I bait the post with words like 'piscatorial', 'ichthyology', 'salmon', 'whales', 'sharks' and throw in some additional chum by mentioning the movie 'Jaws'.
     Books about angling are often beautiful and very valuable and generally are pursued  more avidly by book collectors than by those who actually fish. Sometimes such collections are donated to libraries, much to the chagrin of the librarians and administrators of libraries who would rather have the money than the information such books contain. Just a few years ago, a collection valued at almost $2 million was given to Washington State University (see: "Classic Angling Books Featured in 1.8 Million Gift to WSU," Rich Landers, The Spokesman-Review, August 31, 2011).
     I will mention some major collections below which are held by university libraries and direct you to some information about them. My main purpose, however, is to introduce you to a collection about which not much is known. It is The Gregory Clark Piscatorial Collection located in the Archives and Special Collections at Western University.

Selected Piscatorial Collections

          

     Since this post is about the collection held at Western University and since the collections elsewhere are well-described this will be brief.

Harvard University

     Harvard has a whale of a collection and it even has a huge collection of bookplates about angling. The basis for the collection was a donation by Daniel B. Fearing back in 1918. It looks as though the collection has been dispersed and much is probably in storage. See: "Fearing Library Given to Harvard," Christian Science Monitor, July 19, 1918; "Harvard's 21, 800 Books About Fishing," Ronald Kriss, Boston Globe, Mar. 28, 1954 and "New Collection for Widener: D.B. Fearing '82 Willed His Entire Library to University, Harvard Crimson, Sept. 24, 1918. The Fearing Bookplates are found in the Houghton Library Bookplate Collection.

Princeton University
     For information about how Princeton became a "repository for one of the finest angling collections in the world" see: "Angling Books", J.I. Merritt, The Princeton University Library Chronicle, Vol.41, No.1, Autumn, 1979, p.30. (Available via JSTOR).

   In Canada, there are good collections at the University of Alberta and the University of British Columbia.

The University of Alberta 

Bruce P. Dancik Collection of Angling Books

“The Dancik Collection consists of more than 3,000 books and an equal number of ephemeral publications. Many are titles of extreme rarity, often illustrated with woodcuts, copper or steel engravings, chromolithographs, and photo engravings. Beyond documenting the history and practice of angling, the collection is a significant research resource for freshwater biologists, limnologists, and ichthyologists, and for the study of ecology and wildlife resource management.”

The collection was featured in an exhibition “A Contemplative Angler”.

A story about the award-winning catalogue for the exhibition is found in the University of Alberta publication Folio March 1, 2019 “Fish Stories: Rare Collection of Angling Lore Featured in Popular U of A Exhibit”.

The University of British Columbia

The Harry Hawthorn Foundation Collection

"The Library of the University of British Columbia has an excellent collection of books on angling and fly-fishing, known as the Harry Hawthorn Collection. At present it totals more than 2200 books, including many rare and valuable items. This Collection came about as the result of a fishing holiday in 1953 by eight UBC professors and Roderick Haig-Brown at Upper Campbell Lake."

See also: A Brief History of the Harry Hawthorn Foundation. A bibliography relating to this collection is found among the books in the Clark Collection described below. See the entry for: The Contemplative Man's Recreation....

   For additional angling collections see:  Backcasts: A Global History of Fly Fishing and Conservation, edited by Samuel Snyder, Bryon Borgelt, Elizabeth Tobey.
See the: "Appendix: Research Resources: A List of Libraries, Museums, and Collections Covering Sporting History, Especially Fly Fishing”. p.317. Additional details are available at the publisher, the University of Chicago Press.

The Gregory Clark Piscatorial Collection

   This collection of angling books is held in the Archives and Special Collections at Western University. At this time (c2019) there does not appear to be any information about the Gregory Collection provided by the Western Libraries (or I could not find any). My purpose here is to provide some. I have assembled the information and am alone responsible for it.

     For additional details, I have attached the following pdf file: The Gregory Clark Piscatorial Collection. (50+pp)