Surgery Without Anesthesia

While browsing through a copy of Daniel J. Boorstein's Hidden History (Vintage Books), I came across this passage: "...the enterprising dentist William T. G. Morton introduced ether as an anesthetic. Surgeons had long performed amputations by wielding their saws on screaming patients." Reading that passage made me glad I live in the more medically and technologically advanced 21st century.

Like No Other Market?

The upscale Fairway supermarket chain (which has several New York area locations) bills itself as being "Like No Other Market." (Its trucks have an additional slogan: "The World's Greatest Food Store.") In some ways it's precisely like other markets: Checkout scanners that charge the wrong price, food on shelves past the expiration date, and cashiers who don't pack groceries properly.

Learning History Via Fiction

One goal of mine is to read all 21 volumes in the Cadfael mystery series. I've learned a lot about life inside and outside an 11th-century English monastery from reading these books. The series was written by Ellis Peters, a medieval scholar. The hero of the series is Cadfael, a soldier-turned-monk who is also a herbalist and an amateur sleuth.

Sometimes the best way to learn about history is through a work of fiction which can give you a you-are-there feeling.

A Rose Called Nigger Boy

There is a collection of correspondence between author Eudora Welty and New Yorker editor William Maxwell called What There Is to Say We Have Said (Houghton Mifflin/Harcourt, 2011). In it I read a letter he wrote to her in 1953 in which he mentioned several rose varieties. (They were avid rose growers.) One of them was called Nigger Boy. I was amazed that his use of the name did not bring any expression of embarrassment. If Welty had been a black woman would that have been the case? I think not.

A Cynic's View

"A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin."--H. L. Mencken, epigraph in Slugfest: A Dirty Business Mystery by Rosemary Harris (Minotaur Books/St. Martin's Press, 2011)

Banned Books Week At The New York Public Library

The 115th Street branch of the New York Public Library is observing Banned Books Week (Sept. 24-Oct. 1). To Kill a Mockingbird, The Color Purple, Native Son, and The Grapes of Wrath are among the books on display.

The Recovery of African-American History

"Other minorities have had to recover their past because it was neglected or considered unworthy of study, which was the case, for example, of African-American history until scholars set out to recover it in the mid-20th century."--Richard Schneider, Jr., Ph.D, editor-in-chief, The Gay & Lesbian Review (September/October 2011).

Schneider doesn't seem aware of the fact that the recovery of African and African-American history began long before the mid-20th century. Several names of scholars involved in that effort come to mind--Carter G. Woodson, J. A. Rogers, Arthur Schomburg, and Leo Hansberry, the late playwright Lorraine Hansberry's uncle.

In a 1979 issue of Freedomways magazine, devoted to the life and work of Lorraine Hansberry, historian Lerone Bennett, Jr. stated that Leo Hansberry was "the greatest pioneer in African history in this country."

Although scholars like Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Locke, and W.E.B. DuBois were not historians, what they said and wrote in their particular fields (anthropology, philosophy, and sociology respectively) influenced historians of the black experience, both black and white.