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Laddar... The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History (2018)av Kassia St Clair
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Gå med i LibraryThing för att få reda på om du skulle tycka om den här boken. Det finns inga diskussioner på LibraryThing om den här boken. The Golden Thread How Fabric Changed History Karisa St. Clair John Murray Pub. 2018 The threads that create fabric have profoundly shaped our history. This book tells engaging tales about them. Roughly organized around fibers - bast, linen, silk, wool and cotton - with subsequent chapters covering arctic/everest, competitive sport, space, synthetic and spider silk fabrics, I’m amazed at the amount of fascinating information she’s managed to pack into this medium size book. Factual data is footnoted - this isn’t just one woman’s opinion. An introductory chapter presents women-centered themes with anecdotes. They include: reasons why textile work has been undervalued in recorded history; cotton created and sustained the industrial revolution; and incredibly, Sigmund Freud preached that women wove because of (seriously) a “genital deficiency”. St. Clair then embarks on a fascinating tour of the male-dominated archaeology of early humans. Much textile evidence was discarded as irrelevant to the history of our species. What fragments remain show that the earliest weavers of bast fibers worked between 32,000 and 19,000 years ago. They wove with 8 colors including pink and blue-violet. Weirdly, the genetics of head lice have shown that we first wore cloth between 72,000 and 42,000 years ago. Indian subcontinent finds show that one pound of cotton was spun into thread 200 miles long during that time. And we call these folks “primitive”. Then on to Egypt, linen and mummies. King Tut was swathed in 16 layers of linen, most of which were discarded by the discoverers. Other mummies had 28 pounds of linen wrappings; one had 50 meters of inscribed bandages. The author demonstrates how linen was essential to preservation of the bodies. China and silk. I can’t begin to summarize the 5,000 year history she reviews in 40 pages. Some factoids: one thread from a cocoon is 30 microns wide, half the width of a human hair; silk fabric was used as currency for thousands of years; the Silk Road was perhaps the biggest transmitter of culture the world has known; King John of England had 185 silk shirts in 1216, all carried across the Silk Road; in classical Rome, prostitutes were the early adopters of silk fabric and noble women eventually adopted it, whereupon the philosophers condemned it as immoral and indecent, and passed laws forbidding men from wearing it; a silkworm goddess was worshiped through the 19th century in Shanghai textile factories. And that’s just the historical background. Vikings had wool. Lots and lots of wool. It took around 200 kilos (440 lbs.) of wool and the equivalent of 10 years labor to outfit one Viking ship. One sheep yielded 500 grams of wool suitable for sails, so roughly 400 sheep equaled one ship’s fitting out. Some historians think that a major reason for the Vikings’ raids on England was that England had even more sheep. Thanks to all those sheep, England became the wool fabric producer of the western world. Their craftspeople became extremely skilled in breeding white and high quality fleece animals, which led to a thriving export business. The fabric was made using warp-weighted and later harness looms in cottages - as we know, a slow process. As cotton became available, imported from the colonies, the flying shuttle and then the spinning jenny were invented and the industrial revolution began. The chapter on cotton focuses initially on its effect on slavery. St. Clair delves deeply into the uses of fabric in the control and rebellion of slaves over the history of the US south. Using advertisements which searched for escaped slaves in contemporary newspapers, she analyzes the clothing that they wore and took with them. The results are fascinating. Remaining chapters deal with a kaleidoscope of fabrics. She discusses the fur and skins that polar, antarctic and Everest expeditions wore (and froze in) along with cyclical fashions in underwear fabrics - wool/synthetics/wool. Rayon and its lethal carbon disulphide problem show up along with nylon and the frenzy to get “nylons” (remember those horrible things?). Space suit fabrics, heated controversies about innovative swimsuits, sports bras (duct tape was featured) and spider silk end the book. A really fascinating read. Reviewed by Pat Zimmerman
Most of us don’t expend much mental energy thinking about fabric, beyond appreciating the cool touch of soft cotton when our heads touch the pillow at night, or worrying if our bag of donated clothes is destined for a landfill. But reading journalist Kassia St. Clair’s “The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History,” it’s likely you’ll never look at cloth the same way again. “The Golden Thread” offers an eclectic take on how humans have developed fabric, from the first known flax fibers found in a cave in Georgia, spun from the insides of plants and dating at around 32,000 years ago, to the spacesuits made from synthetic materials created in the past 100 years. “Clothing,” St. Clair notes, “would have been one of a suite of skills — including the ability to make shelter and fire — that humans would have needed to thrive in diverse regions.” However, because cloth is harder to preserve, archaeologists have paid less attention to its significance in ancient cultures than to other, less perishable objects such as bronze or iron. Explorers studying Egyptian mummies, for example, hurriedly sliced away the outer wrappings to get to the bodies and treasures inside. “This is unfortunate,” St. Clair writes, because for the ancient Egyptians, “linen was imbued with powerful, even magical, meaning: linen was what made mummies sacred.” Throughout history, the task of cloth production has frequently fallen to women, who supplemented household incomes or paid taxes through their labor. Women cared for silkworms in China, probably created the Bayeux Tapestry in 11th-century England and today toil by the millions in the garment factories of Bangladesh. St. Clair suggests that because it’s women’s work, the creation of textiles has been devalued, even though cloth is essential to human survival and progress. Sails, for example, whose early development has been traced to sites in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Qatar in the sixth millennia BC, allowed the Vikings to travel long distances. “While it has been estimated that it would take two skilled shipwrights a fortnight to make a longboat,” St. Clair writes, “creating a sail would take two equally skilled women a full year or more, depending on the size required.” Uppmärksammade listor
All textiles begin with a twist. From colourful 30,000-year old threads found on the floor of a Georgian cave to what the linen wrappings of Tutankhamun's mummy actually meant; from the Silk Roads to the woollen sails that helped the Vikings reach America 700 years before Columbus; from the lace ruffs that infuriated the puritans to the Indian calicoes and chintzes that powered the Industrial Revolution, our continuing reinvention of cloth tells fascinating stories of human ingenuity. When we talk of lives hanging by a thread, being interwoven, or part of the social fabric, we are part of a tradition that stretches back many thousands of years. Fabric has allowed us to achieve extraordinary things and survive in unlikely places, and this book shows you how; and why. With a cast that includes Chinese empresses, Richard the Lionheart and Bing Crosby, Kassia St Clair takes us on the run with escaped slaves, climbing the slopes of Everest and moonwalking with astronauts. Running like a bright line through history, The Golden Thread offers an unforgettable adventure through our past, present and future. Inga biblioteksbeskrivningar kunde hittas. |
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The part I've most quoted concerns how the NASA space suit contract was won by Playtex (bras and girdles) and the difficulty NASA engineers had working with the highly skilled seamstresses who had the skill to layer the suits so accurately.
This is an enthralling book that gets more and more interesting.
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