News from the 18th & 19th centuries

November 5, 2009 Loretta Chase

The Two Nerdy History Girls, Susan Holloway Scott & I, have returned from our latest junket to Colonial Williamsburg, and we're ready to Tell All. You can learn what we learned about 18th-19th c. coaches, clothes, dancing, and other delights. In case you were wondering, our sources' knowledge extends far beyond Colonial America. For one thing, in Colonial times, Americans viewed themselves as English subjects, and imported just about everything from England. For another, the CW interpreters' scholarship is wide-ranging. They're as comfortable talking about a Regency era carriage as an 18th C one, and the milliners and tailors make clothes for the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. We've got the pictures to prove it--detailed photos you won't find anywhere else. Intrigued? Just click on My Other Blog over there to your right or, if that's too far for you, right here.

Mystery vocabulary

September 23, 2009 Loretta Chase

I just finished re-reading (for about the sixth or tenth or eighteenth time) Dickens's The Pickwick Papers, and am once more overwhelmed by my ignorance. Yes, this was an edition with notes, but no, it was not a Norton Critical Edition (there isn't one, I discovered to my intense annoyance), and whoever wrote the notes took an excessively optimistic view of the average reader's knowledge of historical arcana. Being a Nerdy History Girl, I know weird, useless stuff, make it my business to know weird, useless stuff. But page after page, I was stumped. Here are a few mystery terms:

"plush shorts and cottons"
"Oxford-mixture trousers"
"bagman"

So I thought, if I'm puzzled, what about high school and college students? Then I remembered how tedious I found most of the 19th C "classics" I read back then. Would I be writing the kinds of stories I write now if a friend hadn't explained the joys of David Copperfield to me, sometime in the middle of my lengthy college career?