Jeanette Rankin was interested in architecture and furniture design. But those careers weren't open to women then, so when she left the University of Montana with a degree in biology she did work as a teacher, seamstress, and social worker. Having raised six younger siblings left her with marriage, not on the mind, never mind the many proposals. At age thirty she fought to get women the right to vote in Montana. Four years later in 1914, they did. Then she decided to try for a seat for herself--in Congress. No one thought she had a chance. A woman in Congress? But her sisters helped with the campaign and her well connected and wealthy brother Wellington was her manager and trusted advisor. She beat seven men, by 6,000 votes or more to win her seat as a Republican representing Montana. In Washington, she couldn't let petty problems such as a lack of women's restrooms or a man hitting on her get in her way. So she sat next to the oldest men there to avoid any improper behavior. She became one of fifty-one unpopular Congressmen who voted against World War I. On her sixth day in office she had found her passion. Pacifism. She didn't believe she could win her seat back in a Democratically controlled section of the state that had been drawn up and told she now represented so she ran for Senate. She narrowly came in second place for the Republican Primary but was accused of taking bribes by them. So she got good and pissed off enough to run for Senate in the national election as a third-party ticket just to prove her honesty. She came in third but made her point. She decided to continue her fight for World Peace. Then at the ripe old age of sixty, she won a seat in Congress again. When Franklin went to Congress a second time she beat three men to do it and demanded they declare war on Japan they voted 388-1. The one was Rankin who said, "As a woman I can't go to war and I refuse to send someone else." She was the only person to vote "No" against both World Wars. It cost her her career in politics. She spent the rest of her life traveling around lecturing on world peace and visiting India where she fell in love with Gandhi. She lived cheaply in rural Georgia and made friends of the children of the neighborhood with whom she shared the stories of her life. In 1968 she led a march on Washington of five thousand women dressed in black against the Vietnam War. She died peacefully at age ninety-two still thinking of a third term. She is best known for being the woman who introduced the Nineteenth Amendment in Congress and battled hard for it to be passed and then ratified and put into law on August 18, 1920.
The multifaceted global and interdisciplinary impact of a useful object
Emerging doctoral research on COVID-19, military model villages, children at risk, and more
Active citizens are humanists.
“A good place to be pleasantly surprised”
Brief life of a Black Harvard Law School graduate: 1849-1930
Cinematic Virtual Instrument for the Kontakt Engine - Mac/PC VST, Standalone, AAX Native, RTAS
Discover the collection of hand-dyed colours and colourways that we create on knitting yarn and spinning fibres.
As a general rule, we don't like to start our blogposts with the words, 'We are delighted to announce'. But there's always an exception, and this is it! We are delighted to announce that the British Library's amazing new exhibition, Harry Potter: A History of Magic is now officially open...
The multifaceted global and interdisciplinary impact of a useful object
The multifaceted global and interdisciplinary impact of a useful object
Acupuncture point Zu San Li (stomach 36) is commonly used for gastrointestinal discomfort, nausea and vomiting, and stress and fatigue.
Amiens - BM - ms. 0399 f.144v. Bartholomaeus Anglicus. Le livre des proprietes des choses. Paris (?), 1447. Phoenix rising from the ashes.
“A good place to be pleasantly surprised”
A changing of the guard, in Mass Hall and University Hall
OK, grab something...a cup of coffee, tea, bottle of alcohol...this is going to be a long, picture heavy one. Where to begin. Well there are previous posts about this quilt here (and somewhere else on my blog but I can't find it and it's not that important so on I go). It was a pattern that I have no idea why I bought at the time other than I thought 'I could do that'. Like a lot of things in life: clothes, shoes, boyfriends; I look back and think 'What on earth was I on at the time.' So this pattern got put to one side until a clear-out a few years ago, when I couldn't decide whether to chuck it or keep it. No idea why but I decided to keep it and slowly work my way through it. The plus side was it used up an awful lot of scraps, even the teeny weeny ones. The flip side was it was bone-crushingly boring but also slightly addictive. I wanted to throw the towel in soooo many times but I just couldn't. It would have meant giving up and I don't give up very easily. So I gave myself mental milestones. You're a third of the way there now Your're half-way now, it would be a waste of the fabric you've already used if you gave up It's a really good way to get rid of some of those everso not to your taste fabric remnants the mother-in-law gave you from way back when and you can still look her in the eye and say you used them Look, you're three quarters of the way there now...wasn't so tortuous was it? Now you've paper-pieced all the parts you just have to sew them together Really it's not so bad is it? These mental milestones were played out over two and a half years of on and off until I finally had this. It still took me a week though to remove all the paper from the back and I left little trails of it round the house and even sat at a meeting at work and then glanced down to see I had tiny bits of paper stuck to my trousers. While I was glad I had finished it, I felt completely deflated. I knew there would be another mountain to climb if I was going to quilt it with the justice I felt it deserved. I was so ambivalent towards it I would have shoved it under my sewing machine and mindless meandered all over it just to be done. So I did something I have never done before, I packed it off roughly 4,836 miles (I know that because I've just Googled it) to the amazingly talented long-arm quilter that is Krista where she worked her magic on it. It then hung in an exhibition of her work on Vashon Island...you can see it on her blog...before beginning its long journey back to me, where it arrived this week. I don't think there are enough superlatives for me to describe the outstandingly amazing job she has done on it. The texture that she has brought to the quilt is just jaw-droppingly drooling. She very politely described my quilt as 'an extreme fabric diary'... ...which is what it was. If I look at the shot above, I see the subtle star centres which is how I thought I was going to make the whole quilt, with lots of gentle, floral fabrics. I even recognise the blue floral as a Laura Ashley dress I wore to a wedding 20 years ago. But as time went on, I completely forgot what I should be doing with this quilt and my colour choices became more random. So that by the time I got to paper-piecing the fans (far right in the shot below) I was consumed by 'press-on-itus', only thought of value and not colour, such was the desire to just get to the finish. But for all my stop-start, what-am-I-doing meetings with this quilt, Krista has managed to marry it all together with her quilting. If you look at the back you can see how beautiful it is. It was pointed out to me that someone had pinned the quilt top on Pinterest with the comment "This is gorgeous, but all those sharp, precision-pieced points would show up even better against a background with more contrast, like solid gray, black, or white." Possibly true. But I didn't come to this quilt with a laid out plan that I carried through from beginning to end. I started this quilt the same reason I start every quilt I make: Because for so many reasons, I just love the whole process of quilting. Because I discover something new about myself and my love for quilting each time. Because I can always see the beginning but don't necessarily need to plan ahead for the ending. My quilts are all just an expression of who I am and the journey I took to get there. Linking up to Finish It Up Friday and At the End of the Hallway
As we continued to chant, our voices effortlessly weaved together to create an otherworldly mosaic of sound which, as it resonated off of the water, grew in power and became more than the sum of its parts.
Few things are more impressive than the aurora borealis, otherwise known as the northern lights. Hallgrimur P. Helgason, an Icelandic photographer, photographs the aurora in the hopes of finding animal shapes in the sky. "It's really a thrill shooting the aurora, especially when they are so playful like they were that night, he said. "I have to admit that I always get an Adrenalin kick when the lights burst out like that – that particular shot was the top one of the night." Related: A Giant Wolf Appeared In The Sky Over Sweden And This Photographer Captured It All Related: He Thought He Was Recording The Northern Lights, But Instead Captured THIS!
The multifaceted global and interdisciplinary impact of a useful object
Come and party like it’s 1520! At the extraordinary Field of Cloth of Gold. By Vivienne Brereton The Field of the Cloth of Gold, oil painting of circa 1545 in the Royal Collection at Hampton Court. Henry VIII on horseback approaches at bottom left. Wikipedia. How could I have known back in November, 2019, when I came up with this invitation to attract potential readers to my novel that not many months later I wouldn’t be able to party myself. Indeed, none of us would. Fact is often stranger than fiction! In the sixteenth century, periodic periods of sickness/plague were very normal and royalty spent quite a lot of time fleeing from one safe house/castle to another. Using social distancing to remove themselves from anyone remotely contagious. Now, in 2020, the nearest any of us can get to the five hundredth anniversary celebrations of The Field of Cloth of Gold near Calais, France, is online in virtual tributes being organized by various groups. And the nearest to anything resembling a masque is the one on our face. My own first encounter with the legendary Field, as far as I know, was on the cover of an ‘A’ level history book by Sir Geoffrey Elton (uncle of the comedian, Ben, considered the Sir David Starkey of his day) ‘England under the Tudors’. On the front cover of the book, first published in 1955 but periodically updated, is a colourful close-up of Henry VIII on his horse, wearing a doublet of bright red, shot through with exorbitantly expensive cloth of gold. He is surrounded by an army of noble followers, arriving at Calais in search of entertainment and pleasure - not in pursuit of war as in 1513. On the back cover of the book is a fountain spouting wine; the temporary English castle; the impromptu wrestling match between the Tudor King and the Valois King; and the magnificent tents of cloth of gold, or green and white striped ones: Tudor colours. That image must have buried itself deep into my subconscious because many years later, I found myself beginning a series of Tudor novels with the Field of Cloth of Gold as a rather splendid backdrop. ‘The House of the Red Duke’ is the result of extensive research and a very welcome reacquaintance with the mesmerizing Field of Gold. * * * Dr. Joycelyne Gledhill Russell wrote the definitive account of the twentieth century in her 1969 ‘The Field of Cloth of Gold’, not to be updated for forty years until Professor Glen Richardson published his excellent book of the same name in 2013, described by Suzannah Lipscomb as “a sparkling new account.” Dr Russell describes the historic meeting as: “an Olympic games: the jousts, tournaments, archery, wrestling. It was a musical and dramatic festival: the solemn music of royal choirs, the evenings’ minstrelsy, the masques. It was an architectural competition; the English raised a large temporary palace, the French a myriad tents and pavilions. It was a wine and food festival: the banquets, with every luxury in food and drink, and free wine for all. It was an international ‘concours d’elégance’ in dress and costume, in jewellery, and in caparisons for the choicest mounts.” It is generally agreed that the magnificent festival held just outside the English Pale of Calais, and the village of Ardres, in Picardy, France, was the brainchild of Thomas Wolsey, hot on the heels of his breathtakingly bold Treaty of London in 1518. Commissioned by both kings to arrange the festival, Henry VIII agreed to take six thousand of his subjects across what was then called the Narrow Sea to meet an equal number of the rival court of the French King, François I. In 1520, the political future of Europe was resting on the shoulders of the relatively inexperienced shoulders of three warlike young men: Charles of Habsburg, the twenty-year-old newly-elected Holy Roman Emperor; François of Valois, the twenty-five-year-old King of France; and Henry Tudor, at twenty-nine, the most senior of the three. The House of Tudor had been drawn into an enormous power struggle between the Houses of Habsburg and Valois so it is no surprise that the Festival was sandwiched in between a visit to England by Charles V and a second meeting between him and Henry straight after the end of the festivities. In the ever-shifting sands of European diplomacy, England was currently being courted by both French and Imperial representatives. In the centre of all this, stood Thomas Wolsey, relishing every moment of the courtship with as much delight as a desirable woman who has two suitors vying for her hand. * * * So, who was allowed to partake in this nod to our modern Olympic Games, Oscars, and Cannes Film Festival? Not the poor, that was for sure. Attracted by the idea of free food and wine, and the chance to see the rich and famous at play, François I issued a proclamation from Montreuil forbidding them to come within four leagues of his retinue, on pain of hanging. Having said that, the English chronicler, Edward Hall, makes reference to how: “vagabonds, ploughmen, labourers, waggoners, and beggars lay in drunken heaps” near two fountains: one of blue and gold and crowned with a statue of Bacchus, the god of wine; the other crowned with a statue of Cupid. It seems limitless quantities of red and white claret were dispensed to an eager crowd. Proper invitations to the summit were as valuable and rare as one of Willy Wonka’s golden tickets but they came at a very high price. It was not unheard of for some people to mortgage off their estates to pay for their clothes; in fact, many were so eager to attend, they were prepared to carry their mills, forests and meadows on their backs. So was it all worth it? It seems so. There were some very dramatic moments such as the first meeting between the two Kings on Thursday, June 7th, the Feast of Corpus Christi. For obvious reasons, suspicion was paramount on both sides, both fearing the meeting could be a flimsy excuse for an ambush. Professor Richardson describes what happened: “The music of trumpets, sackbuts, flutes and drums, which had accompanied the marches to this point, was stilled. A tense silence reigned, broken only, it is pleasant to imagine, by the whinnying of horses and the twittering of swifts in the late-afternoon sky above. After a short time Francis moved his horse a few steps forward…The trumpets and sackbuts sounded again. The two kings detached themselves from their attendants and now faced each other alone with only a short distance between them…they spurred their horses forward. To the orchestrated cheers of their respective sides, each man reached for his bonnet and doffed it to the other in salute.” This gives an idea of the excitement and trepidation, both very real. The two kings finally met, dismounted and embraced before going into a tent for talks. Another less successful meeting came at an impromptu wrestling match between the two of them. An over-confident Henry challenged François to a game and was dismayed to find himself instantly sprawled on his back, owing to a clever ‘tour de Bretagne’. He tried to insist on a rematch but was turned down. As Professor Robert Knecht put it so succinctly: “The English records are silent about this incident.” * * * There were thrills and spills too in the lists, with the competitors keeping the audience entertained, not least by their choice of costume. Beneath an enormous artificial Tree of Honour upon which hung the shields of the competitors, lances would be broken and points scored; horses compared and the most prized, from Naples or Mantua, for example, given as gifts. Costumes were decorated with puzzles to keep the crowd guessing; one day King Francois wore one of purple velvet with little books in white satin. This was meant to mean ‘libera me’ (‘deliver me’) This word play continued into the following days and ended up being a message to a would-be lover to deliver him from his bonds of love. All this proved to be very thirsty work, not to mention giving the competitors the appetite of a horse. With 160 tuns of French and Gascon wine and 560 tuns of beer, 340 cows, 800 calves, 80 hogs, plenty of fish, to mention just a few items, it is doubtful that anyone went hungry. It is not difficult to imagine the preening and point scoring that went on between both countries and both sexes. King Henry’s beautiful younger sister, Mary, formerly Queen of France, was more than happy to take her place once again in the spotlight. Queen Katherine must have a moment of anguish when she looked at the swollen belly of her French counterpart, Queen Claude, who had no problem delivering male heirs to her charming but faithless husband. And how did this unforgettable extravaganza end? Russell lets the acerbic tongue of the disapproving Bishop John Fisher have the last word. As he put it: “All wordely pleasures vanysshethe away, To day a man in golde, to morrow closyde in clay.” Richardson is more upbeat about the positive effect of the Festival and disagrees with Russell who described it as: “in fact merely an excuse for a party on a grand scale.” From the vantage point of a world in April 2020, to all intents and purposes closed down as a result of Coronavirus, Russell’s description sounds very appealing. To finish, I’d like to include a very short excerpt from The House of the Red Duke. It is before the start of the Festival and Thomas Howard, head of the mighty Howards, is imagining what the English and French are saying behind the scenes: “As I gazed at the Thames ahead, I considered how talk of the Festival was taking place not only on water but also on land; I recalled all the comments I’d heard: “By Saint George! How can you possibly need a gown of cloth of gold, as well as all the others?” “Will we find Frenchmen more charming than our own?” “Who’ll break more lances…us or them?” “Can their court really be that dissolute?” Across the Narrow Sea, I knew there was equal anticipation and excitement. Being very familiar with the French court, it didn’t take a huge leap of imagination to imagine what was being said there: “Dieu merci, they speak our tongue, not just their own heathen one!” “I’ve heard the women kiss on the mouth when greeting guests.” “Will their King be taller than ours?” “Perhaps I’ll find a wife amongst the English—”” A Phoenix Rising (The House of the Red Duke, #1) By Vivienne Brereton “If I have anything to do with it, we Howards will live forever.” Thomas Howard Charismatic head of one of the most powerful Houses in Tudor England. An indomitable old man approaching eighty: soldier, courtier, politician, a ‘phoenix’ rising from the ashes. After a calamitous period of disgrace, the Howards, renowned for their good looks and charm, are once more riding high at the court of Henry VIII. Set against the backdrop of the extraordinary 1520 ‘Field of Cloth of Gold’, it is a tale of ambition, love, and intrigue, with Thomas at the centre of this intricate tapestry Will Thomas’s bold vow be fulfilled? Danger stalks the corridors of the royal courts of Europe. Uneasy lies the head beneath a crown. Every other ruler - a fickle bedfellow…or sworn enemy. The action takes place in England, Scotland, and France. On either side of the Narrow Sea, four young lives are interwoven, partly unaware of each other, and certainly oblivious to what Dame Fortune has in store for them. “Nicolas de La Barre laid his lute to one side, hardly bothering to stifle a yawn of boredom. Nevertheless, he couldn’t escape the fact he’d agreed to take on a new wife….” Explosive family secrets are concealed behind the ancient walls of castles in three lands. But… “There are no secrets that time does not reveal.” Pick up your copy of A Phoenix Rising Amazon UK • Amazon US The Coffee Pot Book Club ★★★★★ Highly Recommended Read the full review HERE! Vivienne Brereton I’ve always loved the Tudor period, from a very early age, have a degree in medieval history. I’ve lived in six different countries in my life and soaked up the history in each one. I now live in France which made writing about three different countries and cultures easier for me. I’ve always worked with words wherever I’ve lived: teaching, editing, writing. I’m married with three sons so plenty of scope for Nicolas and Tristan! Anne Boleyn was the only character I found slightly elusive. All the others were so vivid, I had no problem getting into their heads. Of the kings, James was my favourite and after all my reading I hope I did him justice. All were brilliant men. Renaissance men, so cultured. What would they make of ours today? Harry could easily pass for Henry’s naughty little brother. Not sure Charles would make the grade. Connect with Vivienne: Website • Blog • Goodreads.
