CANNIBALISM HEADHUNTING and HUMAN SACRIFICE IN NORTH AMERICA by GEORGE FRANKLIN FELDMAN : THREE MILLION NORTH AMERICANS HAVE AN ANCESTOR WHO WAS ON BOARD THE SHIP

CANNIBALISM HEADHUNTING and HUMAN SACRIFICE IN NORTH AMERICA by GEORGE FRANKLIN FELDMAN

From Chapter 4:

"Curses on You, White Men!" Pilgrims and Indians page 50 "An examination of the invasion of North America by Europeans during the first 150 years after Columbus invites certain generalizations about the motivations and actions of the Spanish and French when compared to the English. The Spanish searched for gold, and cared little for the natives they met and showed them no mercy. The French were more interested in trade, and by the Indian's own accounts, were reasonably kind and tolerant. In a broad sense, during those early years, both the Spanish and the French came to the New World to find something of value to take home to the motherland. Not so, the English. They came to take the land. Some three million North Americans claim an ancestor who was aboard the MAYFLOWER when that ships' first few explorers came ashore at Cape Cod in November,1620, hundreds of miles from their intended destination.

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BEFORE and AFTER by JUDY CHRISTIE and LISA WINGATE : ANCESTRY WORSHIP BOOK REVIEW

BEFORE and AFTER by Judy Christie and Lisa Wingate

The Incredible Read Life Stories of Orphans Who Survived The Tennessee Children's Home Society.

Commentary:  Highly Recommended.

This book is about the children who were adopted through the Tennessee Children's Home Society, which was run by a woman named Georgia Tann, who owned TCHS and whose means for acquiring newborns and babies to be put up for adoption were questionably honorable and then became downright criminal.  These children searched for their birth parents and the news was bad. Georgia Tann died with criminal charges against her business pending.

It's a series of emotional stories by the adoptees and their families describing the situations in which mothers  gave up their babies to Tann. These birth mothers were in desperate circumstances, not unimaginable today, but during the years when social services in America were not in place, when abortion was always dangerous or illegal, and when open adoption was non-existent. Information about the origins of the baby and their parentage was edited by Tann. Adoptive parents were grateful to her and not always asking questions, so long as the baby was healthy. Money went into her pocket. Eventually many others who should have known better were lying to parents that meant to keep their babies that the baby had died in the night.  Instead these were stolen. So imagine if you found out that your parents had been lied to in this way and that you had started life out as a baby they intended to keep.

********

Years ago I had a friend who, with her husband, and after a bout of cancer in her 30's, wished to adopt.  They went through a living hell to qualify to adopt a child, even with the help of a sympathetic and honorable lawyer. Ads were placed in three states where abortion was looked down upon.  Birth mothers phoned long distance.  My friend and her husband had to turn over health and financial records.  The birth mothers who were doing the choosing. My friend and her husband owned a home and had a spare bedroom. 

Good thing because an adopted child had to have their own room. They paid out thousands for investigations and home inspections and interviews.  

They were told there were years long wait for babies born addicted to crack.  Insulting to me, though not personal, was that they also had to have twelve letters of recommendations by other married couples, so unmarried friend's recommendations or input were not sought. And they were told that if either of them hit the age of 40 without adopting it was hopeless.  NO WONDER SO MANY CHILDREN SPEND THEIR LIVES IN FOSTER CARE, where it is OK to be stacked up in bunk beds in shared rooms and people do not have to be homeowners or financially well off.

Her cancer seemed to be an obstacle and after many rejections by birth mothers who were opting for open adoptions, a roller coaster ride of hope and dejection, they never did succeed.

If two college educated people who have a hundred thousand in the bank and own a nice house, have no criminal background or addiction experiences can't get a baby, well, one must have to be really elite.  NO WONDER SO MANY PEOPLE ARE HAVING BABIES BY SURROGATE!

All that said, it seems some, if not many, adoptees do want to know how it is that they were adopted and this book's chapters reveal some of the stories discovered by those adopted out of Tann's business.

********

The following excerpts are so revealing about Tann's "toxic" adoption practices which went on for twenty-five years which ended about 1950 :

Prologue: "Tanns empire at the Tennessee Children;s Home Society - shortened to TCHS by those familiar with the operation - has been built with a combustible blend of desperate pregnant women shattered children, vulnerable poverty-stricken families, eager adoptive parents, powerful politicians, ego, and greed.   ...   The new Tennessee governor, Gordon Browing. appoints attorney Robert Taylor to ferret out the grisly truth of TCHS' Memphis operations.  He has already discovered damning evidence.  Only a small network of co- conspirators know the truth.  With the investigation under way, they flee into the crevasses of Memphis and disappear like rats running into the city's sewers. .... Governor Brown releases Taylor's shocking initial report, which details Tann's years of nefarious dealings in the adoption market.  She has, the governor reveals, made herself rich and completed an unknown number of horrendous deals involving flesh-and-blood products.  ... 

page 7 : Within days --- it is announced that she (Tann) has died. The orphanage is not mentioned. The Tennessee State Legislature quickly and quietly  seals the paperwork of thousands of TCHS children, which will leave adoptees desperately searching for decades to uncover the truth about their heritage. The investigation concludes that Tann profited from the operation of TCHS in Memphis in excess of five hundred thousand dollars in the last ten years of her life (she died age 59 of, interestingly, uterine cancer) in excess of five hundred thousand dollars - taking in today's equivalent of between five and ten million dollars. ....  During that period, the investigation found, she placed more than a thousand children for adoption outside the state of Tennessee, principally in New York and California, the exact number unknown....

************

NOTE: TENNESSEE LAW CHANGES and the records that have been maintained become available though an adoptee  has to pay fees and got though proving they are eligible for the research service.

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MUDLARK BY LARA MAIKLEM : ANCESTRY WORSHIP BOOK REVIEW

MUDLARK BY LARA MAIKLEM

This book was unexpectedly fascinating and satisfying so I'm recommending it for all of you who are interested in the history of England, London, the Thames River - or want to learn more about what mudlarking is all about.

Maiklem is a mudlark, a person who is obsessed with finding objects in the river mud as the Thames River's tides change and bits and pieces of history are embedded or washed ashore. Her knowledge must include a study of the river, it's history of changing route as well as what structures and events have occurred through time which influence where to look. There is so much treasure to find, especially as one hones their eye and their knowledge of the very antique, and as a citizen archeologist of sorts, Maiklem does find so much. Pipes, holy objects, hand made buttons, hairpins, and trading beads.  Bricks from Tudor buildings, a variety of bottles from wine and ale to witch.  Medieval weaponry, rings that can still be worn, and objects that Romans left behind.

And of course, besides the excitement of the find and the expert's declarations, what is most satisfying for Maiklem is that recognition that there is a person and a story attached to every item.  Some of these stories she must imagine but others, because of identifying information on the piece, can be attached to documented persons. (Perhaps most touching is her find of shoes that still have the impressions of the person who once wore them - their toes.

Page 81 Excerpt:  That week and the following one were busy, so it was some time before I got round to sorting and cleaning what I'd found that day, and it wasn't until I'd taken everything out of my finds bag that I remembered the little black ring, which was caught in a gritty seam at the bottom. I turned it in my fingers and held it up to the light. With my glasses on I could see more clearly and, on the inside, I could make out some letters.  The style of the engraving made me think the ring could be quite old after all.  I felt a tinge of excitement and grabbed a piece of paper and a pencil.  Some letters were completely tarnished over, but I wrote down the ones I could read; "H-PE X I - IV - IN'.  It was like solving an anagram, with missing letters, which wasn't easy, but slowly I worked out what was missing and rearranged the words so that they made sense" 'I LIVE IN HOPE X." A posy ring!

A posy ring is a ring inscribed with a short sentimental expression, or 'posy,' from the Middle English word for poetry.  They became popular around the fourteenth century and were given by either partner at any stage of the relati0onship and the inscriptions, both French and English, were usually concerning love, friendship, and loyalty: God Made Us Two One', In They Breast My Heart Doth Rest', "Love Never Dies Where Virtue Lies.' ....

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TYING THE KNOT by AMBER KEYSER : ANCESTRY WORSHIP BOOK REVIEW : ALMANACH DE GOTHA as MATCHMAKING BIBLE?

Excerpted from the book Tying the Knot - A World History of Marriage by Amber J. Keyser

EXCERPT:  OLD STYLE MATCH.COM

Between 1763 and 1944, European nobles looking for a marriage partner could consult a reference book called the Almanach de Gotha. Originated by a German chaplain in the city of Gotha, the book sorted and ranked all members of European noble families in great detail. Families used the book to determine which matches were acceptable.  Specifically, marriage partners were supposed to be of the same rank - that is, a duke was supposed to marry the daughter of a duke, not the daughter of a man of lower rank.  If a man did choose a lower-ranked wife, he entered into what was called a left hand marriage. During the wedding ceremony, he held the bride's right had with his left hand instead of the traditional right hand.

In 1998 a British company issued a new edition of the Almanach de Gotha, but critics noted that it was sloppily written.  And even though some Europeans still inherit titles of nobility, these titles are mostly symbolic,  For instance, the United Kingdom still has a queen, princes, dukes, earls, and other nobles, but they no longer run the country.  Instead, citizens of the United Kingdom vote for their leaders.  Since its no longer necessary to maintain power by marrying into another royal family, European noble no longer have reason to consult the Almanach de Gotha.

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GAVIN MENZIES : WHO DISCOVERED AMERICA? ANCESTRY WORSHIP BOOK REVIEW: DNA EVIDENCE OF NATIVE AMERICAN ASIAN ANCESTRY

GAVIN MENZIES - OFFICIAL SITE WITH LINKS TO ALL HIS WORKS

Gavin Menzies has written previous books, including the bestselling "1421  - How the Chinese discovered America."  He's considered controversial because of his theories - which he has enhanced with world travel and meeting with experts in many fields - importantly finding pre 1492 maps.  He currently bucks against academia and established theories of science.  For instance he is opposed to the Bering Straight - land bridge theory of how Native American people crossed into the Americas and is in favor of sea travel.  (Sea travel by the way figures in many tribal stories of how they got here.  I recall in one of my anthropology classes the Native American students got angry with the professor and marched out!)

Reading his "Who Discovered America" closely, there are a few assertions that I disagree with, but since DNA science is an essential part of proofing his theories that people were either shipwrecked or traveled the natural currents of the oceans to travel around the continents, I'm intrigued and open minded.

Page 245 ..."The currents in the North Pacific flow in a great lip, carrying boats north from China, past Japan, then swinging east past the Aleutian and Kuril Islands to Alaska, then south along the American coast to Central America.  So sea travelers from Asia to North and Central America have a free ride and food along the way and can sail so they are only out of sight of land for three days. This great clockwise, nearly rectangular, flow of water takes place all year round... It appears certain that man reached the Americas by sea at least forty thousand years ago..."

Does being controversial mean he's all wrong?

No, it doesn't. 

Over many works, he does have his fans.  For instance the New York Times magazine called his ideas revolutionary.  The New York Daily News called him a historical detective.  Like Jared Diamond, who is a professor in another field but writes his theories about man's evolution of culture and society such as "Guns, Germs, and Steel,"  or Elizabeth Caldwell Hirschman, another professor in a field outside genealogy, but who is combining genealogy and DNA studies of the  Melungeons, which suggests that they were Sephardic Jews, there is room for alternative theories.  There is room for those who are writing outside their specialty fields or who are simply smart and not educated formally.  At one time the World was thought to be flat and anyone who thought otherwise was considered a heretic. (And I suspect that some day science will catch up with reincarnation theories too.)

JARED DIAMOND OFFICIAL SITE

Pages 185-186 - Overview: Gavin Menzies and Ian Hudson in a chapter on North Carolina and the Virginias, is about some of the same territory that Elizabeth Caldwell Hirschman's researching.  He writes about a researcher named Jerry Warsing who is following a disease called Machado-Joseph as evidence of Chinese mariners in North America decades before Christopher Columbus.  The Melungoens of West Virginia have a high incidence of this disease which is prevalent in Yunnan Province, China as well as in the Aborigines of Australia and in Yemen.  The theory has been that the Portuguese spread this disease but Waring now believes it was the same huge Chinese fleets that Menzies wrote about in previous books who took the disease around the world.

He focused on the Native American tribe called the Mingo whose DNA has a high admixture of East Asian genes. The Mingos themselves said they were not Indian people but descendants of shipwrecked sailors.

Page 186  - Excerpt:

..."Further investigations led Warsing to the eventual conclusion that a fleet of some two hundred ships under the command of Zheng He had been wrecked in about 1432 on the coast between modern Southport, North Carolina, and the Norfolk, Virgina.  Confronted with the marshy inhospitable coast, they marched inland up the Cape Fear and Roanoke rivers and settled in the western foothills of the Appalachian Mountains between Salem and Asheville, North Carolina.  Some of them also settled in route in West Virginia, where they left a proliferation of stone buildings -  Warhing believed that they also left a selection of Chinese plants, pallowwaddy and rice, along the way.  He believes their survivors are among the tribes of the Ming Ho (Mingo), Wyo Ming,  Lyco Ming, Shawnee (name corrupted from Oceanye Ho), and Melungeons."

WHO DISCOVERED AMERICA
The Untold History of the Peopling of the Americas
by Gavin Menzies and Ian Hudson
is published by William Morrow - An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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AMERICAN TAPESTRY by RACHEL L. SWARNS ON AMERICAN SLAVES PETITIONING COURTS TO BE FREE

AMERICAN TAPESTRY : THE STORY OF THE BLACK WHITE AND MULTIRACIAL ANCESTORS OF MICHELLE OBAMA

EXCERPT: pages 251-251  in chapter 25 "Born Free" about the JUMPER FAMILY originating with Hagar Jumper on Dinwiddie County, Virginia.

Background : Hagar triumphed in court when she won her freedom - and that of her children and grandchildren - and soon appeared on lists of free blacks in the county. She had filed a lawsuit against her owner based on Indian (Native American) heritage.]

"Hagar was joining the nation's first communities of free blacks, which emerged after the American Revolution when some slaveholders embraced Democratic ideas.  One Maryland woman said she freed her slaves because holding black people in bondage contradicted "the inalienable Rights of Mankind."  That egalitarian spirit also inspired slaves, like Hagar, to take matters into their own hands and to fight for their liberty in the courts.  "Whole families," recalled one abolitionist, "were often liberated by a single verdict, the fate of one relative deciding the fate of many."  It is possible that Peter was descended from this line.  He and Dolly may have also been the children of slaves who were freed by their masters, or the progeny of white indentured servants or poor white women who had relationships and children with African slaves.  It was not uncommon for free blacks in Pittsylvania and Henry Counties, where the Jumpers lived, to report to the local courts that their mothers were white.  The petitions - filed by men and women hoping to gain their freedom through the courts - suggested that these mothers were close to their children and willing to testify on their behalf.

However they won their freedom, Dolly and Peter (Jumper) clearly joined the free black community at a time when It was growing at an unprecedented clip.  Between 1790 and 1810, the number of free blacks in the Unites States rose from 59, 466 - about 8 percent of all blacks - to 186,446 - about 13.5 percent of all blacks.  In Virginia, where the Jumpers lived, the free black population more than doubled during that time  By 1810, some 30, 570 African Americans - or 7.2 percent of the populations - were living free."

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THE SELFISH GENE by RICHARD DAWKINS : ANCESTRY WORSHIP GENEALOGY BOOK REVIEW

THE SELFISH GENE by RICHARD DAWKINS : ANCESTRY WORSHIP GENEALOGY BOOK REVIEW

This book, first published in 1989 and in it's third printing after selling million in 2006, is still relevant when it comes to asking questions about how genetics influences individuals and society and culture. Using examples from the animal kingdom, Dawkins moves to the realities of human life.

What does the author mean when he uses the word SELFISH which sounds like self-involved and mean? Why not use the term self preserving? Dawkins seems to be saying that animals show a self interest in preserving their own genetics in the way they organize their society or culture, in the ways they favor certain offspring, and that for humans using contraception may be the best way to preserve a family.

Does genetics explain why in nature, many fathers put in less effort to preserve offspring than mothers? In humans is this a matter of socialization or enculturation? I would say that in humans modern fathers seem to overall be putting in less effort to preserve offspring than the fathers of my father's era!

Do maternal uncles (your mother's brother really) have more interest in their neices and nephews than the paternal uncles, since they are more certain that there is a genetic link between themselves and the child?

Famine, plague and war have reduced populations, and so has birth control. Uncontrolled birth rates lead to uncontrolled death rates according to the author.

Using animals who are not human, the author says that many animals defend their territory, which includes defending the individuals who carry their genes.

Page 113 "In many cases females refuse to mate with males who do not possess a territory. Indeed it often happens that a female whose mate is defeated and his territory conquered promptly attached herself to the victor... No territory, no breeding. Automatic submission by lower ranking (individuals) is preferable to prolonged fights..."

Animal dominance. Indirect competition over females. Is this why in the old days parents quizzed a young woman's date about his ability to support her and the family before they would consent to allowing them to associate? How many young men would be able to mate at all if females refused to be available for dates until he could buy a house?

Also according to Dawkins, Individuals who have too many children are penalized, not because the whole population goes extinct but because fewer of their children survive.

(Page 117) ... "If a husband and wife have more children than they can feed, the state, which means the rest of the population, simply steps in and keeps the surplus children alive and healthy. But the welfare state is a very unnatural thing."

And so we go into politics without ever mentioning the word, or the coming Presidential election. With 26 million Americans now in need of government help to afford food, I would say that a great many are reproducing without being able to afford to, and that the state will become mom and dad to very many. Another notion of my father's era father was that God Will Provide, that When There's A Will There's a Way, and that There Is No Shame in an Honest Day's Work.

This book had me thinking beyond it!

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ANITA DIAMANT : THE RED TENT : A NOVEL SET IN THE BOOK OF GENESIS : ANCESTRY WORSHIP BOOK REVIEW

THE RED TENT by ANITA DIAMANT

Have you ever bought a book to give as a gift to someone else - something you thought they would like - and started reading it and been unable to put it down?

I bought Anita Diamant's "The Red Tent" for a friend of mine who is way more traditionally religious than me. But oh how I love this book so - good thing my friend had to cancel our plan to meet up for gift trading during the Christmas season - I'm keeping this one for me!

I realized that the book's appeal to me was quite like the appeal of Jean Auel's Earth Children series (Clan of the Cave Bear and on) because like Auel, who brings to life the time when humans worshiped cave bears and lived in mammoth bone huts, Diamant has brought to life once more the reality of women's lives in the middle east when a man, a patriarch like Jacob, took several wives. You may have heard of some of the children of Jacob; Reuben, Simon, Levi, Judah, Zebulun, Naphtali, Isschar, and Dinah.

The red tent is the tent in which only women of the tribe are allowed, where they have their periods and give birth with the help of other women. Through this book I became intensely aware of ancient women who lived around their biology and circumstances in life, how dependent they were on each other and how their status in the family had so much to do with their child bearing success, and what it might have been like to be a first, second, third, or fourth wife, to be loved and afforded or abused and sold.

The story is that of Dinah, the child of Jacob and his first wife, Leah, who is a fertile mother who has had all sons before this long wanted daughter. While this book is certainly an imaging of what these characters lives must have been, it is based on the bible, historical and cultural research, and the evidence of the life of Dinah which has been lost to us.

At the front of the book, there is a genealogy chart of the characters, which is helpful

This book focuses on the life of Dinah.

Picador USA is the publisher and the work is C 1997 Anita Diamant

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THE DEAT BEAT by MARILYN JOHNSON - THE WORLD OF OBITUARY WRITERS EXPOSED! BOOK EXCERPTS

THE DEAT BEAT by Marilyn Johnson
Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries

You're going to love this one because it is sad, funny, and true.
Marilyn Johnson explores the world of Obituary Writers, and here is an excerpt from page 117.

"What does it take to be a good obituary writer? Reporting skills, life experience, and something I can't quite pin down - an ability to weigh someone's life and accomplishments historically, in the context of the times. A good obit writer has to communicate the significance of a person, a place, an era. Sense of humor? It's a good survival skill, and it adds a lot to the pleasure we take in some writers' work, but I don't think it's essential. Neither is empathy. As for "style," that's also optional. What it takes to be a good obituary writer is an ability to write well, to capture a person with economy and grace, and work in the hurricane of emotion that swirls around the newly dead."

Examples of great obits that capture the imagination of the reader and bring the recently deceased to life one more time abound in this book. Examples come from Great Britain and the United States. More you get to meet some of the best obit writers - journalists dedicated to the research - interviewing - as well as turn of phrase. Jim Nicholson, who did plenty of newspaper work as an investigative reporter before he started writing obits says, "There aren't any boring people; there are just boring questions." He was once a broken-down journalist who learned how to get his scoops by scoping out the beat - mortuaries - neighbors.

Here's a funny one for you from page 49

"Selma Koch, a Manhattan store owner who earned a national reputation by helping women find the right bra size, mostly through a discerning glance and never with a tape measure, died Thursday at Mount Sinai Medical Center. She was 95 and a 34B."

And from page 159 from a writer named McKie, who ran an obit prematurely....

"I apologize unreservedly to our readers for having mislead them. More importantly, I apologize to Mrs. Ritter. I am genuinely delighted she is still with us - I came to like her a lot while preparing her obituary for the page.

She may even have the good luck to follow Cockie Hoogterp, whose premature obituary The Daily Telegraph published in 1938. After 50 years, during which she sent back all her bills with the word "Deceased" scrawled across them, it was referred to again in the newspaper. She then wrote in to say, "Mrs. Hoogsterp wishes it to be known that she has not yet been screwed into her coffin."

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PEONY IN LOVE by LISA SEE : ANCESTRY WORSHIP BOOK EXCERPT and REVIEW

PEONY IN LOVE by LISA SEE : ANCESTRY WORSHIP BOOK EXCERPT and REVIEW

Page 19

"I lit incense, knelt on a pillow, and looked up at the two large ancestor portrait scrolls that hung on the wall above the altar table. On the left was my grandfather, an imperial scholar who had brought great dignity, security, and wealth to our family. In the painting, he sat in his robes, his legs spread, a fan open in one hand. His face was stern, and the skin around his eyes was wrinkled from wisdom and worry. He died when I was four, and y memory of him was of a man who preferred silence from me and had little tolerance for my mother or for the other women in our household.

"To the right of the altar table in another long school was my father's mother. She also wore a severe expression. She had a position of great honor, in our family and in the country, as a martyr who'd died in the Cataclysm (note: this is the overthrow of the Ming dynasty by the Manchus). In the years leading up to her sacrifice, my grandfather had served as the Minister of Works in Hangzhou. My grandfather left the Chen Family Villa here in Hangzhou and traveled two days by boat and by palanquin to live with him in Yangzhou. Not realizing disaster was coming, my parents went to Yangzhou for a visit. Soon after they arrived, the Manchu marauders invaded..."


Page 112

"Forty-nine days after my death, my family crowded into our ancestral hall for the dotting of my ancestor tablet and final goodbye. Storytellers and a handful of singers gathered in the courtyard. Someone of great distinction - a scholar or member of the literati - is always given the honor of placing the final precious dot on the ancestor tablet. Once this was done, a third of my soul would be transferred to the tablet, where it would watch over my family. The dotting would allow me to be worshipped as an ancestor and give me a place to inhabit on earth for all eternity. My dotted ancestor tablet would also be the object through which my family would send their offerings to sustain me in the afterworld, make requests for my help, and provide comfort to me as a way of averting potential hostility In the future, when my family embarked on a new business venture, named a child, or considered a marriage proposal, they would consult me through my tablet..."

C 2007 by Lisa See
Random House Publishers

REVIEW: PEONY IN LOVE was a wonderful read as a novel. It is set in a turbulent time in which some Chinese women took advantage of a revolution to venture out of lives lived actually hobbled by foot binding and the seclusion expected of upper class women. These women became poets and writers, many writing of the suffering of love. It's also apparent that Lisa See did her research not only on the literary progress of women in China in the 17th century but also into the Chinese spiritual belief in hungry ghosts, those who died without having family to honor them. The excerpts above is from the early stages of the novel and in the voice of Peony who becomes a hungry ghost herself. I hope I've tantalized you into reading this novel!

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THE RED QUEEN by MATT RIDLEY : BOOK EXCERPT : THE SIX CIVILIZATIONS OF EARLY HISTORY and FERTILITY

THE RED QUEEN by MATT RIDLEY  

Page 198-199

"The six independent "civilizations" of early history - Babylon, Egypt, India, China, Aztec Mexico, and Inca Peru - were remarkable less for their civility than for their concentration of power. They were all ruled by men, one man at a time, whose power was arbitrary and absolute....WITHOUT EXCEPTION, the cast accumulation of power was always translated into prodigious sexual productivity.... The Babylon King Hammurabi had thousands of slave "wives" at his command. The Egyptian Pharaoh Akenaten procured 317 concubines and "droves" of consorts. The Aztec ruler Montezuma enjoyed 4,000 concubines. The Indian emperor Udayama preserved 16,000 consorts in apartments ringed with fire and guarded by eunuchs. The Chinese emperor Fei-ti had ten thousand women in his harem. The Inca Atahualpa... kept virgins on tap throughout the kingdom."

The women were kept to breed the emperor's children...

"Measures to enhance the fertility of the harem were common... Wet nurses, who allowed women to resume ovulation buy cutting short their breast-feeding periods, date from at least the code of Hammurabi in the eighteenth century B.C... The Tang dynasty emperors of China kept careful records of dates of menstruation and conception in the harem so as to be sure to copulate only with the most fertile concubines... These harems could hardly have been more carefully designed as breeding machines, dedicated to the spread of emperors genes.

C Matt Ridley 1993 HarperCollins was the publisher

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THE RED QUEEN by MATT RIDLEY : BOOK EXCERPT : COURTLY LOVE

THE RED QUEEN by MATT RIDLEY 
COURTLY LOVE
pages 218-219

"Human mating systems are greatly complicated by...inherited wealth... indeed in more stratified societies the poor often favor their daughters over their sons. But this is not because of certainly of paternity but because poor daughters are more likely to breed than poor sons. A feudal vassal's son had a good chance of remaining childless, while his sister was carted off to the local castle to be the fecund concubine of the resident lord... Sure enough, there is some evidence that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Bedforshire, peasants left more to their daughters than to their sons. In eighteenth-century Ostfriesland in Germany, farmers in stagnant populations had oddly female-biased families... It is hard to avoid the conclusion that third and fourth sons were a drain on the family unless there were new business opportunities....

"But at the top of society, the opposite prejudice prevailed. Medieval lords banished many of their daughters to nunneries... Through the world rich men have always favored their sons and often just one of them. A wealthy or powerful father, by leaving his status or the means to achieve it to his sons, is leaving them the wherewithal to become successful adulterers with many bastard sons. No such advantage could accrue to wealthy daughters... "

Harper Perennial is the publisher.
C 1993 by Matt Ridley

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DANCING at CIRO's by SHEILA WELLER : ANCESTRY WORSHIP BOOK REVIEW (LOS ANGELES IN THE 1940'S)

DANCING at CIRO'S by SHEILA WELLER

I love to read around the people I'm researching, who become characters in the great play of life. Sometimes you read a book and it brings a place and time alive again too. This is a wonderful excerpt from a wonderful writer, Sheila Weller. Her mother's brother owned the famous Ciro's restaurant which was something of a home to the Rat Pack when they weren't in Vegas... Christine

Page 84 and 85

"There was still an unfinished quality to the place. The whole Los Angles basin, from San Bernadino to Santa Monica, had, two centuries earlier, been a swamp-pocked plain where antelope and wild cattle grazed on patchy grass amid alder, willow, and sycamore; where cacti, manzanita, and buckthorn spouted, giving the ground a scrubby aspect. Into this abyss, several leather-jacketed Spaniards - members of a company led by Captain Don Caspar de Portola (the Spanish Governor of the Californias) and a gray - robed Franciscan friar named Juan Crespi had stumbled in August 1769. They encountered stocky aboriginals who "began to howl like wolves as they drew near to us," their diary reads, but they eventually agreed to barter. They explored and christened their new friends the Gabrieleno Indians.

"Priests, soldiers, and colonists made their way up from Mexico over the next fifty years. The city passed from Spanish to Mexican rule in 1822, and the 1841 Pre-emption Act allowed settlers to homestead for $1.25 an acre. After a trio of events - the Gold Rush of 1848, the cession of California to the United States that same year, and statehood in 1850, Hollywood and West Los Angeles attracted migrants who, over the next thirty years, built citrus orchards on acreage that would later become Melrose, Fairfax, and Fountain Avenues and miles of Wilshire, Santa Monica, and Sunset Boulevards.

"Danish sailor Christian Duen homesteaded 160 acres that squared Santa Monica, Normandie, Melrose, and Western. Kentucky miner John Bower worked a plot between Franklin and Sunset. A 1870's roster of Hollywood fruit farmers includes "a German cripple, a French sailor, a Basque sheep raiser, a Mexican war veteran, a Prussian Calvary officer." Eventually this ragtag lot would disappear, to be replaced by a civic culture so bland, it would lead H.L. Mencken to dismiss L.A. as "Double Dubuque." Yet something of this haphazard diversity lingered, making for a class system that upturned eastern caste rules. The Irish, scorned in Boston, became L.A.'s elite; the Mulhollands and the Dohenys were the young city's Astors and Rockefellers. In Los Angeles, Jews didn't try to "pass." People WANTED to be Jews; many who weren't born Jews later converted.'"

C 2003 Sheila Weller St Martins Press

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