A Good Read

I have just finished reading “Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America” by Eric Rauchway.

Published in 2003, it uses the assassination of President McKinley by Leon Czolgosz in 1901, and the subsequent trial and examination of the assassin’s mental state, as the key to understanding Teddy Roosevelt’s Presidency and the birth of progressivism in the United States.

The period and the material presented is fascinating, made even more so by Rauchway’s brilliant story-telling. As one of the blurbs says, it is “a compact masterpiece that explains more about the late nineteenth century than most historians know and yet is readable enough to take on an airplane.”

Well recommended.

Image: Star Grazer

5

Mood and Emotion: The History of Blue

French historian Michel Pastoureau has written Blue: The History of a Color. The Claremont Review of Books published a review that describes the work as:

“an exhilarating and richly informing book on how the European peoples from the Iron Age until today have decorated themselves and their cultural artefacts with the color blue.”

Early Mediterranean civilizations had little use for blue:

Homer’s sea was “wine dark”; blue would not be used as water’s color until the seventeenth century .. [T]he Romans associated blue with the savage Celtae and Germani, who used the woad herb’s rich leaves for their blue pigments.

And this remained the state of affairs going into the Middle Ages.  However:

“Artisans employed by the mysterious twelfth century Abbot Suger of St. Dennis Abbey developed what would become known as “St. Denis Blue.” Its beauty inspired Christians to adopt it as fitting for heaven, nobility, and the Virgin Mary, who had traditionally been shown in dark clothes highlighting her suffering.”

Pastoureau’s book carries the history of blue (and often green and red and black, too) through the medieval period, the introduction  of indigo in the 1640s, of Prussian blue in the 1700s, the adoption of blue by the Romantics, the French Revolutionary militias, the Napoleonic army, Levi Strauss, and on into today.

“For Pastoureau, color schemes are the essential building blocks of our conceptualization of the world … The introduction of blue, yellow, and other colors in the Western palate reflected not simply a broadening of the easel, but a broadening of consciousness, which entertained increasingly new ideas.”

The effect of colour on culture and society is a fascinating subject and I can thoroughly recommend the review.

For related material, I wrote about the strange history of Prussian Blue some time ago, and about a new blue.