War and Peace

October 7, 2015 ~ russelld2 ~ 1 Comment

For my Google Ngram I chose very broad words, war and peace. I had a very hard time finding words that I wanted to compare. I settled on war and peace for a few reasons, I enjoy history, they are broad words, and I couldn’t really find anything else. After choosing the words I was not sure what the differences would be. From high school I only knew an overview of history from the 19th century, but after doing further research I discovered a lot of interesting material.
The 19th century was full of wars and battles all over the world. I decided to search up how many there were and was shocked to see some I have never even heard of. The list went on and on, battles for land, wars for independence, drug wars…etc. One of the biggest events and most know was the American Civil War, which happened from 1861-1865. Around 1850-1860 is when the word war started shooting up in the Ngram, while peace stated fairly stagnant. I would assume the use of the word war rose not only because of the Civil War, but because of the disputes between the British and Colonists leading up to it.
The words peace and war in the graph were fairly even until the 1850’s, which I thought was intriguing. I have always though as peace as an ideal and war as a reality, so when I saw that they were fairly even I was shocked What I mean by that is that war is something occurring in our lives all the time, while peace is something you only really see mentioned in a book. The Civil War definitely explains the spike, but what explains the evenness between them? I am sure if I needed to I could find the reason why, but for now I shall leave it a mystery.

Poetical Works of William Wordsworth – Book Traces

September 29, 2015 ~ russelld2

http://www.booktraces.org/book-submission-the-poetical-works-of-william-wordsworth-with-a-memoir/

While looking for books I found about eight from the mid to late 1800’s and only one with marginalia. I found The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth With A Memoir by William Wordsworth (1881). This book is the third out of a seven volume set. William Wordsworth was a major English romantic poet until his death in 1850. With the help of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, they launched the romantic age in English literature. At first glance there was not much marginalia though out the book, but with a second thorough look I found a few good pieces. The book overall has little bit of underlining and a few notes in the margins. The notes seem to be just comments by the reader. From what I read they don’t seem to be very analytical or scholarly. This leads me to believe that the book was read out of pleasure rather than for research. I also can guess that the person wasn’t a teacher or student trying to study the book, because of the lack of analysis and overall lack of notes. On p.317 the reader commented “excellent” on a passage that he had underlined. I laughed after reading this comment, because it was amusing to think that the reader was enjoying the book so much that he had to leave a comment. There was on instance where the reader seemed to analyzing the text, but it could easily have just been an observation. At the bottom of p. 139, the reader wrote the word cyclical next to an underlined sentence. The sentence he was referencing was about the multiple settings of the sun. On p. 281 there appears to be a signature across the top of the page. I am not too good at reading Spenserian script, so I could not make out what the signature actually says. I speculated that the name appeared to be “Dillon”, but I might just be hoping that’s what it’s said. I was hoping to find something more significant in my book, but am satisfied with the results I received. Even if it was only a little marginalia, it was still interesting to see what someone from over one hundred years ago was thinking.