JUSTICE FOR JEHANNE: The Tale of a Medieval Survivor, and thriver, and role model on top of all that

JUSTICE FOR JEHANNE: The Tale of a Medieval Survivor
SARA McDOUGALL
Princeton University Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$29.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.8* of five

The Publisher Says: A spellbinding narrative history that defies modern assumptions about women’s lives in the Middle Ages and informs contemporary debates about sexual violence and the limits of justice

In the winter of 1472, the city of Dijon, France, became the stage for a remarkable legal drama. On the mayor’s orders, an investigator named Jaques Borestel went door-to-door questioning his neighbors about an alleged sexual assault—and about the victim’s history and place in the community. At the center of Jaques’s inquiry was a woman named Jehanne, who took the unusual step of making a criminal complaint in an age when victims of sexual violence did so at their own peril. Justice for Jehanne follows Jaques’s investigation as he uncovers one woman’s story of resilience and survival.

Applying forensic analysis to witness testimony and Jaques’s case files, Sara McDougall finds in Jehanne a woman of many lives and many secrets. An outsider on her own in Dijon, Jehanne had every reason to distrust the local authorities, who regularly extorted money from the city’s most vulnerable residents. Separating facts from falsehoods, McDougall challenges preconceptions about the experiences of marginalized women in medieval France, showing how neighbors, clergy, and other residents aided Jehanne throughout her legal struggles—and how justice of a sort was exacted from her attackers.

Richly detailed and powerfully told, Justice for Jehanne paints an unforgettable portrait of a woman who mounted an extraordinary response to a crime that was so difficult to prosecute at the time, and of a community that gave her shelter, protection, and acceptance as she endeavored to survive on her own terms.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The idea that sexual assault is a death knell for a woman's reputation is *still* dying a slow, noisy death. It was my experience in my own lifetime that a woman pregnant and without some kind of man in her life to take the credit was a "slut" and never anything but; her reputation was set, her future decided, that was that. Many were the women who had abortions, fewer went away for "cures" and came back thinner; all were "fallen" ant thus tainted. This was the twentieth century pre-The Pill and well pre-Roe v Wade.

I thought that was just how it was, probably moreso in earlier times, but certainly not better.

Reading is very dangerous to one's ignorance.

A young woman arrived in Dijon, pregnant and alone, spouting some silly-sounding story about a husband visibly absent who...well, no one was buyin' it, but no one was really all that interested in it either because being pregnant was a very common and unavoidable hazard of being female in the world of men. Jehanne settled into a mundane life, making friends, doing work, being alive. All that came to a chaotic halt when mercenaries fighting some endless wars drifted through Dijon and...noticed...pretty, pregnant, manless Jehanne and bad things ensued.

So far it's a tale as old as time. But post-bad things, details not foregrounded (neither glossed over, just not dwelt on) in the text, Jehanne was not going to let herself be cowed into silence about the outrages she'd endured. One sees in this fact the root of her problem, and the reason she floated into Dijon instead of staying wherever she got pregnant in the first place. (Absent any details about this subject in the records, as Jehanne was not forthcoming, the author posits a possible reason for her landing in Dijon that I thought sounded very believable.) Seeking legal remedy for her violation was stunning in its effrontery, enduring the horrible humiliation of the trial, reliving the awful events, having deeply impertinent, invasive questions that can not be avoided asked, Jehanne showed amazing strength of character.

Her neighbors—including the very surprising man who conducted the investigation we still have documented—of fairly short duration, to my utter amazement, mostly had her back.

The records of the trial, the details of which are almost brain-meltingly boring...I deeply do not care about medieval tax-dodging schemes, but they were important to the witnesses' identities...made for what should have been a slog of an academic read. Author Sara, take your bow. Yes, I now know what people did for fun in 1470s Dijon, dreamt up ways to skive off paying taxes and damn do I wish I didn't, but this is leavened by Author Sara peppering the dough with interesting asides and details not strictly on topic. I will say that all those details added up to Jehanne's becoming a firmly embedded member of Dijon's community, a rough patch in the weave to be sure, but really part of a vibrant interesting bunch of folks.

It surprised me, it entertained me...yes, in spite of the stuff about who had what spurious tax exemption...and it gave me a ghost of gleeful recognition in getting to know Jehanne. She's someone I wish I'd known in the flesh.

Proof that academic, footnoted reads can be well worth reading for more than a degree.

THE GIRL IN THE MIDDLE: A Recovered History of the American West, the cost of Empire in focus

THE GIRL IN THE MIDDLE: A Recovered History of the American West
MARTHA A. SANDWEISS
Princeton University Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$32.00 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A haunting image of an unnamed Native child and a recovered story of the American West

In 1868, celebrated Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner traveled to Fort Laramie to document the federal government’s treaty negotiations with the Lakota and other tribes of the northern plains. Gardner, known for his iconic portrait of Abraham Lincoln and his visceral pictures of the Confederate dead at Antietam, posed six federal peace commissioners with a young Native girl wrapped in a blanket. The hand-labeled prints carefully name each of the men, but the girl is never identified. As The Girl in the Middle goes in search of her, it draws readers into the entangled lives of the photographer and his subjects.

Martha A. Sandweiss paints a riveting portrait of the turbulent age of Reconstruction and westward expansion. She follows Gardner from his birthplace in Scotland to the American frontier, as his dreams of a utopian future across the Atlantic fall to pieces. She recounts the lives of William S. Harney, a slave-owning Union general who earned the Lakota name “Woman Killer,” and Samuel F. Tappan, an abolitionist who led the investigation into the Sand Creek massacre. And she identifies Sophie Mousseau, the girl in Gardner’s photograph, whose life swerved in unexpected directions as American settlers pushed into Indian Country and the federal government confined Native peoples to reservations.

Spinning a spellbinding historical tale from a single enigmatic image, The Girl in the Middle reveals how the American nation grappled with what kind of country it would be as it expanded westward in the aftermath of the Civil War.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: One image, not typical of Alexander Gardner the Civil War photographer's work, sent Martha Sandweiss on an intense journey of genealogical and historical research. Author Sandweiss is an archive-divin' fool in this book. As you'd expect from this book coming out via Princeton University Press, the evidence is in the sixtyish pages of endnotes. Impressive recordkeeping, impressive intensity of trolling the census data, genealogy databases, newspaper morgues, Federal records of official actions...I'm very slightly overawed by the depth of Author Sandweiss' commitment to her search for one child's identity when, at the time, it's clear she was unimportant.

Yet she was there...why?

I could easily see the intrigue; I could not match the dogged pursuit of facts. In any lifetime. The revelation that there had ever been a Federal Peace Commission (made up of those white guys in the photo), tasked with meeting Native people from all groups, was news to me. That its mission was to determine the course that would bring about lasting and just peace shocked me...talk about honored in the breach not the observance! So the book expanded my knowledge about the injustice, the lies, and the chicanery that acquiring our empire necessitated.

Sophie Mousseau, the titular girl in the titular middle, serves as a lens for Author Sandweiss to bring the role of women, Native and settler, in the wars and peaces of that time and place into focus. It was all new information to me, so I enjoyed the whole experience...despite the expected violence against women, it was reported not detailed for titillation.

I'd rate the read a full five were it not for some...unusual...thoughts the author had about the nature of photography....

THE BOX, demystifying the invisible world-changing role of shipping

THE BOX: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger
MARC LEVINSON
Princeton University Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In April 1956, a refitted oil tanker carried fifty-eight shipping containers from Newark to Houston. From that modest beginning, container shipping developed into a huge industry that made the boom in global trade possible. "The Box" tells the dramatic story of the container's creation, the decade of struggle before it was widely adopted, and the sweeping economic consequences of the sharp fall in transportation costs that containerization brought about.

Published on the fiftieth anniversary of the first container voyage, this is the first comprehensive history of the shipping container. It recounts how the drive and imagination of an iconoclastic entrepreneur, Malcom McLean, turned containerization from an impractical idea into a massive industry that slashed the cost of transporting goods around the world and made the boom in global trade possible.

But the container didn't just happen. Its adoption required huge sums of money, both from private investors and from ports that aspired to be on the leading edge of a new technology. It required years of high-stakes bargaining with two of the titans of organized labor, Harry Bridges and Teddy Gleason, as well as delicate negotiations on standards that made it possible for almost any container to travel on any truck or train or ship. Ultimately, it took McLean's success in supplying U.S. forces in Vietnam to persuade the world of the container's potential.
Drawing on previously neglected sources, economist Marc Levinson shows how the container transformed economic geography, devastating traditional ports such as New York and London and fueling the growth of previously obscure ones, such as Oakland. By making shipping so cheap that industry could locate factories far from its customers, the container paved the way for Asia to become the world's workshop and brought consumers a previously unimaginable variety of low-cost products from around the globe.

Many thanks to the publisher for my ARC of the second edition

My Review: Technological disruptors play an immense role in human history. None more so than the humble shipping container, the subject of this four-hundred-page study by Economist and Author Levin. What began, I gather, as an interest in the life of Malcom McLean (no, I didn't misspell "Malcolm"), whose 1956 shipment of twenty-eight containers of his own design onto ships also modified to his design, to Houston, Texas, began the era of rapid globalization, turned into an economist's dream: a chance to study the economic and social and political impact of a disruptive technology before its fiftieth year of existence arrived. (2021 NOTE we are now in the sixty-fifth year of the container revolution, and even the pandemic can't stop the trains, ships, and trucks from rolling.)

It will surprise few that McLean's efforts to bring the container-shipping revolution to the world were opposed by the vested interests of the day, from the Interstate Commerce Commission to the International Longshoremen's Association. These behemoths, unstoppable and uncontrollable at the time, did their damnedest to impede, derail (!), and alter the disruptor into a new, toothless, challengeless arm of the status quo:

On domestic routes, government policy discouraged competition among ship lines. On international routes, rates for every commodity were fixed by conferences, a polite term for cartels, and the most important cargo, military freight, was handed out among U.S.-flag carriers without the nuisance of competitive bidding. Decisions about buying, building, or selling ships, about leasing terminals, and about sailing new routes all depended upon government directives.

So the bosses, the workers, and the government weren't on board with this containerization idea...but guess who was?

The United States Armed Forces.

As longshoremen collectively rolled over after an initial three-year contract negotiated in 1959, it was a signal of doom for The Labor Movement in US politics. The Armed Forces needed huge amounts of stuff, all kinds of stuff, in unprecedented mountains. And unlike World War II, there weren't strong backs everywhere glad to do it. But containers? Now, these babies would damned near do all the work that men used to do, and for a highly recoverable investment. SeaLand, as Malcom McLean had renamed his trucking outfit metastasized into a shipping conglomerate, stepped up to do the job. Cheaply, safely, efficiently.

That's a really exciting chapter in shipping history...followed by the urpsome evil profiteering regime we see today, unregulated shippers and deregulated producers of the poisons we're told we need to exist (and sadly enough, they're correct often enough to make re-regulation into a donnybrook the environment isn't likely to win). This is where reading Economist Levinson's American triumphalism become less pleasurable. While I wasn't old enough to fight in Vietnam, I was old enough to know I didn't like eating my dinner with Uncle Walter (Cronkite, for the younger crowd) intoning the number of dead boys rotting in a place I knew nothing much about and cared less for. The fact that they ate US-grown food and shot US-made bullets at an unprecedented rate was transparent to me then, and the subsequent use of that fact as a stick to bludgeon ever-more-pusillanimous "regulators" into loosening what protections are left for labor is illness-making.

As one would expect from a former editor of The Economist magazine, Author Levinson doesn't dawdle among the stylistic stargazer lilies. Also as one would expect from a book written by an economist, there are tables, equations, maps and graphs...all the accoutrements of learnèd academical case-making. But, and this is a key realization to learn, the author's sentences (while tending towards the sesquipedalian) are limpidly clear. He is tendentious, but not tedious, and this is a rare, delightful conjunction of traits.

Among this book's most merited accolades, according to his publisher's page for this title:

Winner of the 2007 Anderson Medal, Society for Nautical Research
Winner of the 2007 Bronze Medal in Finance/Investment/Economics, Independent Publisher Book Awards
Shortlisted for the 2006 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year
Honorable Mention for the 2006 John Lyman Book Award, Science and Technology category, North American Society for Ocean History
One of Financial Times (FT.com) Best Business Books of 2013 (chosen by guest critic Bill Gates, Chairman of Microsoft)