• getting overly defensive of your favourite historical / literary / classical figure
• suddenly remembering how much knowledge there is to acquire and getting stressed about the overwhelming amount of stuff you don’t know
• roman numerals: you either love them or you hate them
• when your teacher is obsessed with one bit of the course and teaches you that for weeks then breezes over the rest
• anachronisms
• you’ve listened to so many in our times that melvyn bragg is basically your internal monologue
• waking up in the morning with a desire to know everything about one specific thing that’s totally unrelated to everything you’re studying
• ‘ooo i know this word!’ she did not know that word
• muddling up the actual history, the fictionalised versions of the actual history, and the fanfictionalised versions of the fictionalised versions of the actual history
• ‘what can this cartoon / movie / song / art tell us about x’
• history students are over prepared for politics and classics students are over prepared for english lit
• reading aloud in terrible accents in english lit
• j s t o r

Here is the Blog of the Game of Thrones Costume Maker

There is so much going on in that crazy HBO show Game of Thrones that we rarely get to stop and appreciate the finer details that go into its creation. Michelle Carragher is the talented embroiderer and illustrator behind the lavish costumes worn by many of the characters, and her blog is like a se

www.messynessychic.com

“For Sansa’s wedding dress the designer Michele Clapton wanted to have an embroidered band that wrapped around which symbolistically told Sansa’s life from the Tully and Stark beginnings to the entanglement with the Lannisters,” says Michelle, “The dress colour was still very much Sansa Stark and the embroidery had pale golden tones but woven through the story are ripe red pomegranates, the red colour symbolising the growing Lannister influence over her.

The All-Female Big Bands That Made History During World War II

NPR's Audie Cornish talks with Christian McBride of Jazz Night in America about the forgotten all-female big bands that toured the United States during World War II.

www.npr.org

During World War II, with thousands of men shipping off to war, half a dozen all-female, instrumental big bands toured around America. It was a rarity in a musical world dominated by men and, for the most part, their stories have been erased or minimized in jazz history.

Jazz Night in America host Christian McBride has spent years tracing the history of some of these bands and notes that during this flourishing time for all-women groups, the 17-piece International Sweethearts of Rhythm had the most formidable level of popularity.

“They were probably the first all-female band taken seriously,” McBride says, explaining that the Sweethearts were boundary breakers in more ways than one. As an integrated ensemble, the Sweethearts often faced obstacles when touring the Deep South.

The Sweethearts began in the rural junction of Piney Woods, Miss., in 1937. Lawrence Jones had founded a vocational school there primarily for young black children and teens and wanted to raise money by forming a student swing band.

Jones’ daughter, Helen Jones Woods, was a member of the band and remembers the beginning. “My father was very interested in music,” recalls Woods, who says the idea for the Sweethearts was sparked by Phil Spitalny and His All-Girl Orchestra, a white ensemble working at the time. “My father heard the band over the radio one time and said, ‘I’ve got a lot of girls here. Maybe I could start myself an all-girl band.’ ”

One of the original members was Willie Mae Wong, whose Chinese ancestry helped give the band an “international” look, along with two young women from Hawaii and Mexico. Seen through the peculiar lens of 1940s Mississippi law, Wong wasn’t out of place in a largely black orchestra — her Chinese face was as nonwhite as a black one. For the moment, then, the Sweethearts were able to evade the social consequences of race mixing and the arm of Jim Crow.

In 1941, however, the Sweethearts turned pro. New talent was brought in, including two white players. One of them, saxophonist Rosalind Cron, says she was hardly noticed in cities like New York and Chicago — but in the Deep South her presence was criminal.

“We got to Baltimore and I asked Millie Jones, who was part American Indian, part black, if she’d like to go downtown on a bus with me to window shop,” recalls Cron. The two stopped into Woolworth’s for a soda, and found they couldn’t get service. “ I said to Millie, ‘I’m just going to stop this waitress and find out why she’s ignoring us,’ ” says Cron. “She got very excited and jumped up and ran up those stairs. She was really frightened.”

Later. the road manager explained the facts of life in the South. “They called me in and explained that Jim Crow was a series of rules and laws, and explained what life was going to be like from now on,” says Cron. The crew offered her the option of going home, but she resolved to stay the course. “After that Baltimore episode, I made up my mind then and there,” she says. “I wasn’t going to back down.”

White women enjoyed a privileged place in Southern values — to choose to work with blacks was to reject that privilege and the values it represented. In the code of Jim Crow, Cron was a traitor to her race. She survived the sheriff by keeping a low profile, and occasionally using makeup to pass as black. “I would either know, understand and learn how to live as a black girl, or I could go home,” says Cron. “Everybody knew this was dangerous territory.”

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