This unit consist of three bedrooms, has open layout without partition wall between foyer, family room, and dining room so feel spacious. Main area surrounded by wide windows from floor until plafond so maximize view to sea.
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Appearing Luxurious Atmosphere
This unit consist of three bedrooms, has open layout without partition wall between foyer, family room, and dining room so feel spacious. Main area surrounded by wide windows from floor until plafond so maximize view to sea.
Monday, August 2, 2010
Decompressing
ps- This is so odd, but for the past 5-7 days or so, I haven't been able to type... I don't know what's up but it's worse than usual!! (I keep mixing up all the letters and leaving letters out.... ??hahaha .... ok only funny if it stops.)
1 year
today is my 1 year blogiversary!
starting this blog was one of the best things i could have ever done. i have met so many amazing people through blogging. i never thought that i would enjoy it near as much as i do, and i definitely never thought that blogging would open so many doors for me.
i am so thankful for all of my readers. i really enjoy hearing from each of you, whether by comment or by email. hearing that you’ve enjoyed a post makes my day, so THANK YOU so much!! i’m looking forward to another great year of blogging and i hope that all of you will stick around for it.
xo,
Cristi
Sunday, August 1, 2010
American Immigration in Historical Perspective
On Sunday, August 1, Peter O'Dowd reported on NPR that "Arizona's controversial immigration law went into effect this week, or at least parts of it." In a summary that looked at the reaction of church groups and religious leaders, O'Dowd noted "Despite significant support for the bill in the state, critics have been loud and organized." This comes on the heals of a Federal Judge's blocking of the more controversial aspects of the law last Wednesday. Judge Susan Bolton issued a preliminary injunction on sections of the law that called for law enforcement officers to check a person's immigration status or require suspects to prove they were in the country legally.
Like abortion, gay marriage, or taxes, little divides Americans like the issue of immigration. And this historic conflict keeps repeating itself.
Unlike a variety of European nations, the US has had relatively open policies on citizenship. (Naturalization rates, as well, have remained high in Canada, the US, and Sweden.) Through much of the 19th century the new nation needed laborers and settlers. Still, the question of just who was or was not an American tended to exercise the masses and energize politicians. Sometimes the matter stirred up intense feelings.
Numerous Easterners in the 1850s and 1860s worried about the "wild Irish hordes" that descended on coastal cities. Millions would have agreed with English essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle, who wrote, "Ireland is like a half-starved rat that crosses the path of an elephant. What must the elephant do? Squelch it--by heavens--squelch it." Nativism and the Know-Nothing Party made great political hay of the "Papist Menace." Samuel F. B. Morse--who helped invent the telegraph and a code for transmitting words over vast distances and also crafted his own brand of virulent xenophobia--was particularly adamant on the subject. In 1835 he wrote: "O there is no danger to the Democracy; for those most devoted to the Pope, the Roman Catholics, especially the Irish Catholics, are all on the side of Democracy. Yes; to be sure they are on the side of Democracy. They are just where I should look for them. Judas Iscariot joined with the true disciples. . . . They feel themselves so strong, as to organize themselves even as foreigners into foreign bands, and this for the purpose of influencing our elections. . . . That they are men who having professed to become Americans, by accepting our terms of naturalization, do yet, in direct contradiction to their professions, clan together as a separate interest, and retain their foreign appellation."
In the 1880s anti-Chinese legislation gained wide support in the American West and fueled the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The law read, in part: "That the master of any vessel who shall knowingly bring within the United States on such vessel, and land or permit to be landed, any Chinese laborer, from any foreign port or place, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and on conviction thereof shall be punished by a fine of not more than five hundred dollars for each and every such Chinese laborer so brought, and maybe also imprisoned for a term not exceeding one year."
Most famously, though, the Immigration Act of 1924 raised the bar so that undesirable immigrants would have a difficult time entering the country. One stipulation ensured that old-stock white immigrants would receive special preference. "The annual quota of any nationality shall be 2 per centum of the number of foreign-born individuals of such nationality resident in continental United States as determined by the Untied States census of 1890, but the minimum quota of any nationality shall be 100."
Many of the exclusionary policies were changed for good when President Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, supported heavily by the late Senator Ted Kennedy. That landmark legislation did not end the debate or the ongoing contest over immigration.
The Arizona Law may or may by like or unlike earlier immigration laws. But it certainly lends itself to significant historical questions of legal matters, national identity, ethnicity, class, and more. Plenty for the general public and for students of history to consider.
For more on the history of immigration and the changing shape of the law, see the following helpful sites:
On the Arizona Law
John Davis, "History Repeated: Arizona Immigration Law No Different from the Past," Texas Tech Today, June 4, 2010.
Chris Bray, "Light Tea, Heavy on the Milk," Cliopatria: A Group Blog, April 29, 2010.
Larry McMurtry, "The Trouble with Arizona," NYR Blog, June 24, 2010.
Immigration: General History, Legal History, Etc
United States Historical Census Browser, University of Virginia Library.
Immigration Law: An Overview. Cornell University Law School.
Milestones: 1921-1936. The Office of the Historian, US State Department.
Immigration Legislation On-line, University of Washington-Bothell.
Who Was Shut Out?: Immigration Quotas, 1925-1927. History Matters, George Mason University.
Friday, July 30, 2010
June Issue of Historically Speaking On-line
The June issue of Historically Speaking is now up at Project Muse. (We couldn't be more pleased with the terrific work the Muse people are doing. Readers can finally consistently read HS on-line. Scanning back issues is now in the works.)
The June issue includes a lively forum on Charles Joyner's classic Down by the Riverside. It also contains interviews and the usual fare of insightful essays.
In "The Art of History" popular historian Ian Mortimer throws down the gauntlet. Academic historians, in his estimation, don't care all that much about writing, narrating, and dramatic story telling. "Most professional historians do not understand the art of history," he asserts. "Quite what constitutes the 'art' seems to be the problem. Is it originality of thought, a distinct literary voice, innovative writing, sensitivity to public perceptions and assumptions about the past, or clarity of expression? Or something else entirely? Whatever the answer, these suggestions by themselves indicate that some of the activities associated with the 'art' do not figure prominently in university departments. Literary skill is almost always downgraded by academics to a supplementary role—supporting an analytical process but always subordinate to it. Originality is surprisingly rarely valued in academic circles: when it is most clearly displayed, it often proves to be the catalyst for its protagonist to be declared a 'maverick.' No historical departments (as far as I know) encourage their members to be sensitive to public perceptions and assumptions. Few historians have actively explored what drama, suspense, and literary conceits can add to a narrative. Creative writing is never discussed in historical journals, even though it is implicit in the very act of writing something new. All in all, historians seem generally oblivious to the basic fact that when expressing ideas about the past, the way one writes is as important as what one writes."
I disagree with Mortimer about some of these assumptions. Seems too broad a generalization, I think. Still I find it an interesting, provocative take. See Donald A. Yerxa's interview with Mortimer in the June issue for more on the subject.
Historically Speaking (June 2010)
"Two Historians on Defeat in War and Its Causes"
Peter Paret
"U.S. Expansion and the Woman Question, 1870-1929"
Allison Sneider
"Ian Mortimer: Making History More Meaningful to Society"
"The Art of History"
Ian Mortimer
"In Search of New Narrative Frameworks: An Interview with Ian Mortimer"
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa
"Creolization in and Beyond Charles Joyner’s Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community A Panel Discussion"
"Introduction"
David Moltke-Hansen
"Learning from Charles Joyner"
David Hackett Fischer
"The Influence of Down by the Riverside"
Sylvia R. Frey
"Two Journeys: Honoring Charles Joyner"
James Peacock
"Creolization, Decreolization, and Being 'at Home' in the Diaspora"
Stephanie J. Shaw
"Response"
Charles Joyner
"Writing Historical Crime Novels: An Interview with Jenny White"
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa
"Prince Henry of Portugal and the Sea Route to India"
Anthony Disney
"Faith and the Founding of Virginia"
Lorri Glover
"Letters"
Stanley Sandlar
Vivian R. Gruder
"In Grateful Memory of Max Palevsky, 1924-2010"
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Sneakity Peek: Rugs for Pure Style Home!
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
my dream kitchen
if i could build my dream kitchen i would build one with very few or no upper cabinets. i like the look of shelving but think i could do without them completely. while i was browsing through my kitchen inspiration files i realized how many kitchens i have saved that don’t have upper cabinets.
{meg ryan’s home in elle decor}
i love the task lights above the sink in this kitchen.
so pretty. this one is neck and neck with my favorite one.
{lonny}
{living etc}
{unknown}
{unknown}
and my favorite…
{ellen pompeo’s home in elle decor}
History Book Reviews Reviewed, July/August 2010 edition
What follows is the first installment of a semi-regular update on historical reviews in the London Review of Books, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and other places that we bothered to look.
Jeffrey Rosen, “Why Brandeis Matters: The Constitution and the Crash” (TNR, July 22)
Writing admiringly of both book and subject, Rosen says that Urofsky’s “definitive,” “masterful” biography of the great supreme court justice is timely given Elena Kagan’s nomination to Brandeis’s Supreme Court seat and the rediscovery by progressives of “the virtues of judicial restraint.” Rosen is confident that Brandeis “would have predicted the crash of 2008.” (The bearish justice would have no doubt still preferred bonds, as he did in the 1920s, rather than credit default swaps on mortgage backed securities.) Rosen details Brandeis’s long-standing critique of concentrated financial power (“the curse of bigness”), his commitment to judicial restraint on most matters but “judicial vigilance” on the especially urgent matter of civil liberties, and his support for Zionism as both a complement to nationalism and a source of intra-national cultural vitality. The 2008 financial crisis figures centrally in this piece and Rosen builds on a distinction of Paul Krugman’s, positing the existence of two historically-informed schools of thought on financial reform: “the Jeffersonian-Brandeisians, who want to break up the big banks and prevent them from engaging in risky behavior, and the Hamiltonian neo-New Dealers, who prefer top-down government regulation.” Rosen suggests that the Jeffersonian-Brandeisians (like Paul Volcker) have gotten it right, but the Hamiltonian-New Dealers (like Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner) have gotten the votes. Urofsky’s biography is itself quite big. Given its hefty 955 page count, you might want to read Rosen’s longish review before taking the plunge. Or maybe even wait for Rosen’s own forthcoming book on Brandeis.
Anthony Grafton, “A Jewel of a Thousand Facets” (NYRB, June 24)
The two books reviewed here might be a good complement to Stephen Prothero’s hot-selling God is Not One (not mentioned by Grafton). Prothero’s conclusion that the world’s religion’s do not much converge is today’s contrarian position. That wasn’t the case in Bernard and Picart’s time. Grafton observes that the emphasis on the similarity of the world’s faiths was a subversive stance in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Also subversive in that period: dense, weighty compilations of global knowledge like Religious Ceremonies of the World, and chatty, “ironic” footnote commentary on “orthodox inanities.” By detailing (in both print and image) the nuances of religions across the globe and by comparing the common forces underlying their different practices, Bernard and Picart injected sociological and anthropological substance into enlightened appeals for toleration. Though wondering what contemporary readers thought of Bernard and Picart’s Religious Ceremonies, Grafton is impressed by the collaborative, interdisciplinary effort that went into this two-volume project. He concludes that the authors “have done justice to a great work of eighteenth-century humanistic learning. And they have shown us some of the directions in which humanistic scholarship should move in generations to come: not only away from older narratives of intellectual change, but toward new models in which books and digital media, grand accounts and detailed inquiries shed light on one another.”
Bee Wilson, “Stuck with Your Own Face” (LRB, July 8)
Beauty trends may rise and fall, but the beauty industry only rises. In 1916, roughly “four fifths of Americans used neither toothpaste nor shampoo, never mind mosturiser or deodorant, lipstick or hair gel.” Today, “[c]onsumers around the world spend ‘$330 billion a year on fragrances, cosmetics and toiletries’.” Scent was the first sense to be addressed by the broadly conceived category of beauty products. Salvaging the body from early modern street odors was not an easy job. Perfume helped. By the mid-nineteenth century, this early beauty product was sold in mass, factory-produced quantities, along with “‘the first factory-made, non-toxic mascara’.” Over time, manufacturers moved away from beauty products that poisoned their users and toward products adapted to the visual revelations of electric light. They also went global with products, such as skin-lightening creams, that changed or reinforced prevailing conceptions of race and personal attractiveness. The greatest of the beauty industry’s innovations, according to Wilson, may have been lipstick. It’s legitimation “over just a few decades [in the twentieth century] must have brought about one of the biggest changes to the appearance of the Western female body in history.” Wilson is generally pleased with the data that Jones offers. She is less impressed with his grasp of the “artifice” that has gone into the sale of these high-margin products with often questionable claims to effectiveness.
The Tempel Lipizzan Legacy
If you're still in the mood for horse-inspired interiors, definitely check out these 2 posts full of equestrian eye candy: (so gorgeous!!!)
Chic Equestrian Style in Home Decor by Simplified Bee
Equestrian Chic by La Dolce Vita