Tag: memory

Tag: memory (Page 3 of 5)

Remembering the Bear Flag

On June 11, 2019

California state flag. (Source: http://www.library.ca.gov/california-history/state-symbols/, public domain.)

SONOMA, California, USA – The state flag of California, which flies over public buildings, schools, and some businesses and private homes—and not to mention baseball caps, t-shirts, and a huge variety of tourist kitsch—is a white banner featuring a grizzly bear on all fours, a red star, a red band, and the words “CALIFORNIA REPUBLIC.” California is a state, not an independent republic, so why does it say that?

California is indeed not an independent republic, and never really was, but in June 1846, rebellious Anglo-American settlers in Sonoma kidnapped the local Mexican official, General Vallejo, and raised the original Bear Flag in front of the barracks of this Mexican territorial outpost. The next month, the Bear Flag would be replaced by the Stars and Stripes, and the US annexation of Alta (Upper) California would be made official with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. California became a state just two years later, and the state flag design was adopted in 1911, using elements of the original Bear Flag but arranging them much more attractively. (It was remarked at the time that the original “bear” actually looked like a pig).

Replica of the original Bear Flag in the Sonoma Barracks. (The original flag was, like so much else, destroyed in the great San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906.)

This Sunday, Sonoma held its annual Bear Flag Celebration, timed to be near the anniversary of the raising in 1846. I headed over to investigate, as I have been wondering how the Bear Flag Revolt is commemorated in twenty-first-century California. It was a land-grab by Anglo settlers who thought they deserved to control California more than any Mexicans, but looking at it this way, it would be difficult to celebrate the event in a county and state with a significant Hispanic minority (27% for Sonoma County and 39% for California as a whole). So how is the revolt remembered?

The museum at the Sonoma Barracks hasn’t been of much help in my attempt to understand memory of the Bear Flag Revolt. The barracks were restored by the state of California in 1976-1980, and the museum displays appear not to have been updated since then. The introductory panel presents “Manifest Destiny” as a fact rather than a contested idea.

Having made several visits to the historic buildings in Sonoma, without gaining any insight into memory of the revolt, I thought I might have better luck at the Bear Flag Ceremony that kicked off the day’s festivities on Sunday.

Front cover of the program for the 2019 Bear Flag Celebration.

The ceremony was held in front of the vaguely socialist-realist Bear Flag Monument on the Sonoma Plaza opposite the barracks. Native Sons of the Golden West, a fraternal service organization founded in 1875, organized the event. (This is native as in “native-born,” not “Native American.” Judging from the event on Sunday, the membership of the organization seems to be largely but not exclusively Anglo.)

Scene from the Bear Flag Ceremony.

Detail of the Bear Flag Monument.

At first, the ceremony didn’t offer me much insight. There were a few reference to the “heroes” of the Bear Flag Revolt, without any explanation about what made them heroic. And there was plenty of generic patriotism (recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance and singing of the “Star-spangled Banner”).

A lineup of historic flags in at the Bear Flag Ceremony. States of the United States that were once ruled by either Mexico or France really like to commemorate this fact.

Things really got interesting with a speech by Dave Allen, Past Grand President of the NSGW and Chairman of the Historical Preservation Foundation. He explained how interpretations of historical facts can and often do change. “A situation that was generally accepted as fact can be reinterpreted by later historians as having an entirely different conclusion,” he said. As an example, he explained that the snow encountered by the Donner Party in 1846-47 was long presumed to be 22 feet deep, and for this reason the Pioneer Monument in Truckee has a base 22 feet high. But more recent research has shown that the snow was in fact 13 feet deep. PGP Allen spoke only about details like this, but I got the impression that he meant that broader interpretations could be changed as well—such as whether the participants in the Bear Flag Revolt were heroes or not.

Later in the program, Sonoma Mayor Amy Harrington remarked that the Bear Flag Revolt proves that a small group of people can make a big difference. (I suppose it helps if said people have the support of an imperialistic power nearby.) The NSGW gave Mayor Harrington a new state flag, which a color guard raised up a flagpole marking the approximate location where the original Bear Flag was flown. As the new flag was nearing the top of the flagpole, somebody behind me in the audience shouted, “Hip hip hooray!” and others nearby chuckled.

Lowering last year’s state flag on an overly-literal telephone pole that is supposed to mark the site of the original Bear Flag’s raising.

The ceremony concluded with a group singing of the state song, “I Love You California.” Although the words were printed on the back of the program, most people in the audience (your blogger included) didn’t know the tune and couldn’t sing along.

Later in the day, a planned reenactment of the Bear Flag Revolt failed to materialize, so I headed home. Although I would have liked to have seen a reenactment, I had gotten plenty of insight already. I had wondered if the interpretation and memory of the Bear Flag Revolt was constrained by the state or the Native Sons of the Golden West—as, for example, the Daughters of the Republic of Texas guards the historical interpretation of the Alamo. But it seems that this is not the case. NSGW Past Grand President Dave Allen is right: interpretation of the past can and does change. I find it heartening to know that the state of California and the Native Sons of the Golden West are open to new interpretations.

Medieval San Francisco

By Willy

On December 19, 2018

In Teaching, USA

In my first quarter teaching at Pacific Union College in Napa County, California, I got assigned an upper-division class about medieval Europe. PUC is close to a wide range of educational resources, as it is located within striking distance of San Francisco, Sacramento, the Pacific Coast, and the Sierra Nevadas. Had I been teaching California history, I might have considered taking my class to Mission Dolores in San Francisco, or perhaps the barracks at Sonoma. But when I was planning my class about the Middle Ages, it never crossed my mind that there might in fact be resources related to medieval Europe in the area as well.

Then, once the quarter was well underway, I discovered that San Francisco has its very own (neo-) Gothic cathedral, standing atop Nob Hill and looking at least a little like the great churches built in England, France, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe during the High Middle Ages. All of a sudden, it occurred to me that there might be other relics of the Middle Ages in San Francisco as well—whether authentic or, like this cathedral, mere imitations. It was much too late in the quarter to incorporate San Francisco into my curriculum, and at any rate, I didn’t have time to catch my breath while teaching three classes for the first time. But after the quarter finished, I set off to investigate whether San Francisco—a North American city founded in the eighteenth century—could teach me something about medieval Europe.

Grace Cathedral

The first stop on my medieval San Francisco tour was Grace Cathedral, the church on Nob Hill. Built in stages from 1927 to 1964, Grace Cathedral has a structure of steel and concrete that is designed to be earthquake-safe. The architecture is primarily based on French Gothic examples, although certain elements were taken from Spanish and English churches.

Facade of Grace Cathedral.

Looking up at the facade of Grace Cathedral.

Backside of Grace Cathedral.

Almost all signage at the cathedral is written in this quasi-medieval uncial script.

Although work on the church stopped in 1964, it has never really been finished—in much the same way that many medieval cathedrals were left incomplete. The vaults of the nave have not been filled in, and many of the wall and column surfaces are bare concrete. The parts of the church that have been completed look terrific; the rest, less so.

View from the completed choir back into the nave with its incomplete vaults.

The apse of Grace Cathedral. I’m not sure why that little bit of vault at the very top of the picture has been filled in while the rest has been left open.

The most impressive part of the cathedral for me was the Chapel of Grace, which has been completed in its entirety. It has an early-modern altarpiece.

Chapel of Grace (completed 1930).

Along the walls in the aisles are murals illustrating a variety of scenes, including the construction of the cathedral and the founding of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945.

Mural of the construction of the cathedral.

Mural of the founding of the UN (difficult to photograph because a Christmas tree was in the way).

The cathedral is full of art, ranging from an actual medieval Spanish crucifix to a triptych completed in 1990 by Keith Haring.

Thirteenth-century Spanish crucifix.

Copy of a window from Chartres Cathedral.

Some archaic musical notation mounted on the wall.

The Keith Haring triptych in the AIDS Memorial Chapel.

I was also surprised to discover that the cathedral has copies of the doors of the bapistry at the cathedral in Florence, a famous piece of art from the early Renaissance. The doors in San Francisco were made from casts of the originals taken during World War II.

The cathedral’s Ghiberti Doors.

Detail of the Jacob and Esau scene from the Ghiberti Doors.

Portal of Santa María Óvila

The next stop on my tour was the campus of the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit institution on the western side of the city near Golden Gate Park. An outdoor theater in the back of Kalmanovitz Hall has a portal from Santa María de Óvila, a Cistercian monastery built in Spain between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries. By the twentieth century, the monastery had fallen into disuse, and in the 1930s, newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst bought large parts of it and had the stones crated and shipped to San Francisco. Although he planned to rebuild the monastery on one of his estates, that never happened, and the disassembled stones spent decades in Golden Gate Park. The de Young Museum assembled just the monastery’s church portal in 1965, but this was transferred to USF after the museum opened a new, earthquake-safe facility.

Portal of Santa María de Óvila.

As a bonus, right inside Kalmanovitz Hall is another bit of medieval architecture, identified by a plaque on the wall as a “twelfth century Italian Romanesque portal.” It was gifted to USF by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (the Legion of Honor and the de Young Museum).

Portal from twelfth-century Italy.

Detail of the top of the portal.

By the way, the rest of the stones for Hearst’s monastery were eventually transferred to New Clairvaux, a working Cistercian monastery in the Sacramento Valley. The stones were made into a new chapter house, which opened in 2012.

Modern statues of medieval warriors at the Legion of Honor

The last stop on my medieval San Francisco tour was the Legion of Honor, an art museum on a hilltop overlooking the Golden Gate and the city.

In front of the museum are two modern statues of medieval warriors: Rodrigo Díaz and Jeanne d’Arc.

I was especially interested in the statue of Rodrigo Díaz a.k.a. El Cid, an eleventh-century soldier of fortune who was exiled from his native Castile and set up an independent principality in Valencia. In the first medieval history class I taught, I had my students read The Song of the Cid, a twelfth-century fictionalization of El Cid’s life and career.

Your blogger with El Cid and Babieca.

The Legion of Honor’s statue of El Cid astride his horse Babieca was sculpted by Anna Hyatt Huntington in 1921. This cast was made about six years later.

Every vein on Babieca’s huge bronze body is bulging.

Anna’s husband Archer had translated The Song of the Cid into English, and this sculpture seems to be based on the fictionalized character in the epic.

El Cid could see the Golden Gate Bridge if he would just turn his head.

The other statue, also by Anna Hyatt Huntington, is Jeanne d’Arc, better known in English as Joan of Arc, the French peasant who led her people to some morale-boosting victories against the English in the Hundred Years’ War. I’d had my students read Joan’s threatening letter to the English, and I had just watched the Luc Besson film The Messenger (1999), so Joan was on my mind too.

Joan of Arc is going to have trouble fighting the English without the blade of her sword. Just saying.

Pedestal of the Joan of Arc statue.

The design of Joan’s armor seems to be based on a fifteenth-century miniature painting of her.

Late medieval miniature of Joan of Arc in armor.

Real-life medieval artifacts inside the Legion of Honor

Inside the Legion of Honor museum, there is a gallery of actual medieval artifacts.

This Madonna with child is from thirteenth-century Lorraine.

Adam and Eve being confronted by God from fourteenth-century Spain.

Ceiling from the Palacio de Altamira, fifteenth-century Spain. This remarkable piece of architecture shows clear Moorish influence.

Thus ended my tour of medieval San Francisco. As it turns out, San Francisco does have something to tell me about the Middle Ages in Europe. Despite being a modern building, Grace Cathedral got me thinking about what it might have felt like to visit one of the great cathedrals during the High Middle Ages. Anna Hyatt Huntington’s statues of El Cid and Joan of Arc made me consider how we remember and make use of the medieval past. And at USF and the Legion of Honor, I got to see actual relics of the Middle Ages in Europe. These places made me think about the Middle Ages in different ways than I could have by just looking at books. They could inspire my students to think differently as well.

Collective memory and space movies

By Willy

On June 11, 2018

In Movies and TV

Not very many films have been made about real-life space travel. Flying a rocket into space is always dangerous, but it usually doesn’t make for good story material. Spaceflight is clinical, precise, and often boring. It offers filmmakers little in the way of conflict. Something goes wrong on every space mission, but the vast majority of them end happily. Fictional space films set in the near-future and using recognizable hardware usually over-compensate for the relative safety of space travel by killing off large numbers of astronauts in their stories. (Most recent example: Gravity [2013].)

Fictional movie astronauts all trained, suited up, and ready to die. (Touchstone Pictures)

Let’s take a look about two non-fiction space films that cover a similar subject from very different angles: The Right Stuff (1983) and Hidden Figures (2016). The Right Stuff is based on Tom Wolfe’s 1979 book by the same name. It is a long, sprawling epic about flight testing and the beginning of NASA’s space program in the 1960s. Although the book has a more serious, reflective tone, the movie Right Stuff is written almost like a cartoon, with the paparazzi and Vice President Johnson being especially over-the-top. There are many factual inaccuracies in the movie, but it is also quite fun to watch for the most part. The movie was hugely influential for developing the visual language of spaceflight and heroism in a high-tech era.

Seven of the masculine heroes of The Right Stuff. This corridor scene has been endlessly imitated and parodied. (Warner Home Video)

In the Right Stuff book, Tom Wolfe explored the masculine world of flight-testing and spaceflight, and tried to understand how and why the early astronauts were made into heroes. The movie is less self-aware, instead taking the astronauts’ heroism at face-value. It un-self-consciously portrays a sexist, racist time, and some parts are hard to watch now.

A completely different perspective is given by the recent Hidden Figures. While The Right Stuff wouldn’t even pass the Bechdel Test—and forget about portrayals of people of color in it—Hidden Figures is about three African-American women working at NASA Langley in Virginia in the early sixties. The characters (composites of actual women whose factual stories are explored in a book by the same name) perform the calculations that allow the first Americans to fly into space and return home safely.

The black computers of Hidden Figures in their work room. (20th Century Fox)

The human computers of Hidden Figures watching a space mission in their work room. (20th Century Fox)

Like The Right Stuff, Hidden Figures is very much a product of its time, when Americans are being more reflective about race and gender inequalities. The story of black human computers (as the characters of Hidden Figures were called) would never have been told in a major feature film in 1983, much less in the early sixties. The film’s approach to race is a little sentimental, but overall I thought the movie was very well written and a good watch.

Apart from portraying social dynamics very differently from each other, the films also diverge in their portrayals of the technology of early space travel itself. In this respect, the otherwise cartoonish Right Stuff is much more accurate than Hidden Figures. The Right Stuff had to be visually accurate because it portrayed events that were much more in living memory in 1983 than in 2016. More than half of Americans alive in the early eighties would have remembered the early sixties, but a much smaller portion of the population would have remembered back that far by the mid-2010s.

Living memory of the early space age, combined with strategic use of stock footage to save production costs, meant that The Right Stuff faithfully portrayed the Mercury spacecraft, pressure suits, buildings, and control equipment of the era.

The cast of The Right Stuff recreate early NASA publicity photographs.

The cast of The Right Stuff recreating an early NASA publicity photograph. (Warner Home Video)

The Mercury astronauts were introduced in a famous press conference, which was recreated in The Right Stuff. (Warner Home Video)

Hidden Figures didn’t need to be as faithful. Several times while watching it, I suppressed a groan in response to inaccurate set design or portrayal of some other aspect of the technology. (The launch gantry for the Mercury-Atlas rocket was especially unfaithful to the original.) The filmmakers even depended on their audience’s not knowing the technology. At the beginning of the movie, the flight of a CGI Russian rocket is intercut with NASA engineers at ground control. The audience is supposed to think that this is a NASA rocket, until at the end of the scene the rocket rolls and—surprise!—there is a big hammer-and-sickle on the other side. (The surprise was lost on me because I recognized it as a Russian rocket from the start. The filmmakers were depending on most of their viewers’ not having built model rockets of that design as kids.) In reality, the Soviet rockets of the time didn’t have such big hammer-and-sickles on them, but the filmmakers needed to add this detail so the audience would know what they were looking at.

The movie John Glenn (played by Glen Powell) neither looks nor acts like the real man. (20th Century Fox)

The further we get from historical events, the more our collective memory of them becomes fuzzy. The Right Stuff had to be visually accurate because the events it was portraying were more in living memory. Hidden Figures didn’t need to be that accurate, and it even needed to change some details in order to tell things to the audience that The Right Stuff’s audience would simply have known.

WillyLogan.com

Technology, History, and Place

Tag: memory (Page 3 of 5)

Remembering the Bear Flag

Medieval San Francisco

Grace Cathedral

Portal of Santa María Óvila

Modern statues of medieval warriors at the Legion of Honor

Real-life medieval artifacts inside the Legion of Honor

Collective memory and space movies

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