wednesday books
2 October 2024 22:19![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
landofnowherePrincess Napraxine, Ouida. Still reading along -- plot is progressing! Our title character is Having Feelings, even if these feeling are mostly her being upset that she is Having Feelings. See also lunabee34's plug for the fandom (linking to the tag rather than the original post so that it doesn't show spoilers).
Thomas Nast: the Father of Modern Political Cartoons, Fiona Deans Halloran. I was recently reminded that as a teenager I wrote a biographical essay on Nast for AP US History. I realize that non-US readers, and maybe some US readers may not be familiar with Thomas Nast: he was a illustrator and political cartoonist who was massively popular in the years after the Civil War, best known for calling out the corruption of the Tammany Hall political machine and introducing iconic imagery like the modern figure of Santa Claus and the Republican elephant. Teenage me was a political history nerd and enjoyed all this. The main source I used was the biography by Albert Bigelow Paine, written at the end of Nast's life and based on conversations with Nast -- it was what they had at the library.
Anyway, I was curious as to whether there were any modern scholarly biographies of Nast out there, and I found this one (which teenage me could not have accessed without a time machine). It's fascinating -- not just the stuff that I vaguely remembered reading and writing about as a teenager, but also the additional historical context of the New York City that Nast experienced as a young German immigrant. He's enjoyable to read about because you can tell that he possesses both a conscience and a sense of humor. He was anti-racist by the standards of his time, and in his Reconstruction-era work he always portrays Black Americans with human dignity -- on the other hand, he has some unappealing anti-Irish and anti-Catholic portrayals. I'm only partway through this, and will report more later.
lunabee34's plug for the fandom (linking to the tag rather than the original post so that it doesn't show spoilers).Thomas Nast: the Father of Modern Political Cartoons, Fiona Deans Halloran. I was recently reminded that as a teenager I wrote a biographical essay on Nast for AP US History. I realize that non-US readers, and maybe some US readers may not be familiar with Thomas Nast: he was a illustrator and political cartoonist who was massively popular in the years after the Civil War, best known for calling out the corruption of the Tammany Hall political machine and introducing iconic imagery like the modern figure of Santa Claus and the Republican elephant. Teenage me was a political history nerd and enjoyed all this. The main source I used was the biography by Albert Bigelow Paine, written at the end of Nast's life and based on conversations with Nast -- it was what they had at the library.
Anyway, I was curious as to whether there were any modern scholarly biographies of Nast out there, and I found this one (which teenage me could not have accessed without a time machine). It's fascinating -- not just the stuff that I vaguely remembered reading and writing about as a teenager, but also the additional historical context of the New York City that Nast experienced as a young German immigrant. He's enjoyable to read about because you can tell that he possesses both a conscience and a sense of humor. He was anti-racist by the standards of his time, and in his Reconstruction-era work he always portrays Black Americans with human dignity -- on the other hand, he has some unappealing anti-Irish and anti-Catholic portrayals. I'm only partway through this, and will report more later.