The History of White People Read Online Free PDF

the cubist Georges Braque.
     
     

† Chardin uses the Turkish form, Cherkes , of Circassian.
     
     

* Chardin gives the prices in ecus (crowns) worth about £3 silver each. Thus pretty young girls and livestock cost about the same per head.
     
     

* The great European scholarly societies were a product of the seventeenth century, with the Royal Society of London founded in 1660; the most prestigious of all, the Parisian Académie Royale des Sciences, founded in 1666; and the Berlin Akademie der Wissenschaften founded in 1700. However, women were not admitted to these gatekeepers of knowledge until the mid-twentieth century: to the Royal Society in 1945, the Berlin Academie der Wissenschaften in 1949, and the Académie des Sciences in 1979. Women were long the subjects of scientific knowledge, but not acknowledged as creators of knowledge.
     
     

* The Crimea is the Ukrainian peninsula between the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea.
     
     

* William Short, so good a young friend that Thomas Jefferson called him his “adoptive son,” wrote Jefferson that amalgamation would ultimately resolve American race problems, for many mixed-race women were very beautiful. Sally Hemings—Jefferson’s enslaved, long-term consort—her mother, and her daughter with Jefferson were all reputed to be very beautiful. Jefferson never replied to Short’s letter.
     
     

* That slavery still exists in the present day is chronicled in works such as Kevin Bales’s Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (1999), Understanding Global Slavery (2005), and Ending Slavery: How We Free Today’s Slaves (2007). The odalisque has not disappeared entirely, however, as twenty-first century artists use Orientalist iconography ironically. In 2005 the American artist Ellen Gallagher created one example, in which she arranges herself as one of Matisse’s odalisques from the 1920s and places Sigmund Freud in front of her with a sketchpad.
     
     

* In 1873, Walter Pater maintained that Winckelmann’s admiration of the bodies depicted in ancient Greek statuary “was not merely intellectual…. Winckelmann’s romantic, fervent friendships with young men [brought] him into contact with the pride of the human form.” Winckelmann disdained art depicting women, for he considered the “supreme beauty” of Greek art “rather male than female.”
     
     

* The white marble ideal seduced just about everybody, especially race-minded experts such as the most prominent academic painter in England, Sir Frederick Leighton. In 1880 Leighton painted his self-portrait with uncolored Parthenon statuary in the background, presumably according to the plaster casts in his studio. Even Winckelmann probably realized his ancient Greeks may have painted and gilded sculpture, but he kept that suspicion to himself.
     
     

† White plaster casts of ancient Greek statuary still figured as examples of the best in art in New York City in the 1920s and 1930s. Artists like Arshile Gorky and George McNeil worked from Greek casts in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and such plaster casts served as decoration in a coffeehouse catering to artists.
     
     

* Goethe compared Winckelmann to Christopher Columbus and concluded, “One learns nothing when one reads him, but one becomes something.” Winckelmann’s birthday (9 December) has been celebrated as a holiday in Berlin since 1828 and in Rome since 1829. Inspired by Goethe, the English intellectual Walter Pater included an essay on Winckelmann in The Renaissance (1867).
     
     

* Faust and the Helen episode of act 3 caused Goethe great difficulty and took him more than a quarter of a century to write. Its achievement signaled Goethe’s realization that Winckelmann was wrong: Germans could not re-create the beauties of ancient Greece, no matter how fine their poetry. Goethe did not invent the Helen episode in the Faust myth. He was reworking older Germanic themes and Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus .