A Book for the Ages

Jill Lepore's Book of Ages is a great way to end the semester.  Lepore brings Jane Franklin to life before the reader's very eyes.  Lepore does a fantastic job of looking at Franklin's personal life and the way that she is caught up in a web of forces much larger than herself, such as the growing influence of paper currency.  Lepore doesn't just use Franklin's life as a starting block to jump into another contemporaneous event, but goes to show the way these forces affected the person central to this microhistory's keyhole, Jane Franklin.  One not only learns about the societal customs that affected all aspects of women's life, especially education, but one gets to see these customs at work on the ground level, influencing people in the flesh.  Reading this book has really influenced the way in which I want to take my own paper.  Lepore's style not only brings the Franklins to life, but also entices the reader by portraying the setting in which our characters are found as both exciting and troubling.  One example of Lepore's writing that I intend to use as inspiration for my own project is the way in which she looks at Jane's surroundings and analyzes the role that debt played in the changing economy.  War veterans were being brought to court over debts that they hadn't paid.  Nadezhda Mandelstam, the central figure in my own microhistory, discusses the way that Stalin's decision to enforce collectivization led to dearth when it came to food throughout the Soviet Union.  I hope to be able to look at the relationship between my own central figure and the larger forces at work with at least some small degree of the success that Lepore has put on display.