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Happy 21st zorrex!

LUCA

LUCA

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Enjoy Ian!


cheers2.gif
 
HBD whipping boy!
SURPRISE! there is no surprise party planned. :laugh:

Have a great day. Be careful, ok?
 
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Thanks guys :cool:. I'm about to leave my dorm to renew my license! I made sure to wait cuz I don't want a stupid vertical license anymore :nonono:. Then I'm going home to see my family.

It's too bad I won't be able to end the day well. I have to read over 200 pages of the most boring book ever, then write a short paper on an assigned topic :mad:.

I'll save the festivities for the weekend :laugh:
 
That sounds much like my 21st. The actual birthday sucks .. the ability to purchase alcohol is well worth it. Have fun!
 
Happy birthday!!

smart move on the license renewal, i did the same thing to avoid having "Under 21 Until" printed on my license
 
zorrex said:
The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh. History class.
Click to expand...

From the International Herald Tribune, the Global Edition of the New York Times:

The Ordeal Of Elizabeth Marsh A Woman in World History. By Linda Colley. Illustrated. 363 pages. $27.50, Pantheon Books; £25.00, HarperPress.

Most biographers work from the inside out. Diaries, private letters and interviews (when possible) provide the substance of a portrait that comes to life through a recounting of events that touched - or were touched off by - the person in question. The reader is invited to "know" the biographical subject and through his or her eyes take in the history of a particular time and place. Thus biography, with its preference for the interior life, is often defined in opposition to historical narrative. In the veteran biographer Kenneth Silverman's formulation, "History is what Napoleon did; biography is what it meant to him." But is it really so simple? In "The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh," Linda Colley has written a biography that tests all common notions about the genre. Almost 40 pages go by before she gives us even one word from her subject, an obscure 18th-century travel writer whose single published work appears to survive only as a lone copy in the British Library. And even when Elizabeth Marsh is finally on stage, Colley repeatedly reminds us how little we can know for certain about her "obliterated life." Marsh was born in 1735 to a British shipwright father and a Jamaican mother whose identity cannot be verified but whose name closely resembles those of two women Colley traced through island records, one almost certainly the daughter of a slave and her master. Was Elizabeth Marsh biracial? No images or physical descriptions survive: we cannot know. When Marsh left her husband to travel for 18 months in eastern and southern India, had there been a rift in the marriage, or was Marsh simply indulging her wanderlust? No confession in her travel diary, no letter to the abandoned husband gives a clue. Again, we will never know.
Yet rather than frustrate, such admissions of ignorance point up the fullness of Colley's account of the people and places Marsh visited and the global forces that came to bear on her story. One of the many intriguing aspects of Marsh's tale is that the "erratic, independent course" she pursued on that East Indian excursion came to an end in July 1776, just as Britain's American colonies declared their own independence. The American Revolution, which Colley convincingly portrays as a "world war," led, in part, to the loss of Marsh's husband's job in far-off Dhaka. Thereafter, Marsh's travels would be limited to "grimly functional rather than revelatory voyages." As Colley writes in her introduction, inverting the usual biographical priorities, "this book charts a world in a life and a life in the world." "The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh" is a dazzling performance of historical scholarship that reveals just enough of what Colley describes in her acknowledgments as "the ordeal of tracking Elizabeth Marsh" to allow readers the sense that they too are on the trail of this compulsively itinerant woman. Conceived in Jamaica and born in Portsmouth, England, Marsh was, as Colley puts it, "in motion for most of her life." She spent significant amounts of time in a half-dozen cities and towns, from London to Madras, following her parents, her husband and, at times, her own whim - leading, as often as not, to mishap and misery. Three months spent as a hostage in Morocco became the subject of her 1769 travel memoir, "The Female Captive." Colley provides the historical equivalent of a Google map to each location, including such details as the number and style of buildings; the population by gender, race, ethnicity and occupation; and glimpses of significant recent events, like contagions, earthquakes or wars.
Colley has the historian's time-honored gift for narrating a battle scene, but she does just as well with Marsh's entry under armed guard into Marrakesh, hatless and riding a donkey, through a "landscape of scattered, quadrangular minarets," past a jeering mob, to her audience with Sidi Muhammad, the 30-something sultan who will hold her hostage "until Britain agrees to establish a proper Consul in Morocco." Colley tells us that Marsh's discomfort and fear, even before Muhammad twice presses her to join his harem, will have been accentuated by her familiarity with the "rough music processions" still common in European country towns, in which adulterers were made to ride hatless past crowds of "vengeful villagers" as a means of public shaming. It is just one of many moments when, by bringing West and East together in one image, Colley succeeds in drawing "the world" into Marsh's life.

Can Elizabeth Marsh - "an almost impossibly picaresque figure," in Colley's view, at once ignorant and enterprising, curious and prejudiced, socially insecure and selfish - bear the weight of this world on her shoulders? If so, it is largely thanks to a supporting cast of friends, family members and even paramours, whose lives Colley has researched with the same meticulous and wide-ranging attention she gave to Marsh.
When Marsh's husband loses his job as a salt agent with the East India Company in April 1777, Colley has no direct evidence of his reaction. To fill the gap, she cleverly supplies the comment of a senior company official, written that same year and now archived in the India Office Library in London: to be caught "without an appointment" as a white European on the Indian subcontinent was "a woeful extremity. It gives me a shivering to think that. . . a man should be reduced to it." It gave me "a shivering" to think of Colley's ability to put her hand on this document.
Colley has sought her quarry on more continents than Marsh visited. Marsh's East Indian travel journal had itself traveled all the way to a California library, and Colley tracked Marsh family connections to Spain, Italy, Central America, coastal China, New South Wales, Java and the Philippines.
She credits the Internet with enabling a new style of research, but the World Wide Web is only as good as its users. Like the best historians of any era, Colley had new questions to ask. Her answers have brought us a world in a book.

Megan Marshall is the author of "The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism."

Or, if you prefer the really brief version, this is from the New Yorker:

Elizabeth Marsh, the daughter of a shipwright, was conceived in Jamaica, was born in England in 1735, and died in Calcutta in 1785. Marsh’s extraordinarily peripatetic life illuminates not only the vast global changes of that period, both for the British Empire and for private citizens, but also the almost limitless resources of her own indomitable spirit. Colley shows how Marsh’s ties, through a prosperous uncle, to the Royal Navy, were essential to her travels but did not always protect her. At twenty, as the sole female aboard a merchant ship bound for Lisbon, she was captured by Barbary pirates and taken to Morocco. To escape she pretended to be married to her sailing companion, James Crisp. They did eventually wed, but Marsh later spent more than a year travelling through India with another man. Marsh, as evoked in this vivid account, seems an embodiment of the insatiable Empire that created her.
 
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