Repeating History: The Truth About Togas and Europe First

Welcome to our first Repeating History, the part of our blog where we fill you on what we learned in our history classes the previous week. We only had two periods of Ancient Rome and New Deal and WWII this week because we have them on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and Wednesday was Advising Day, so we had no classes. Well, here goes:


Ancient Rome:

Monday was actually not remotely interesting because we took our second exam of the semester. It was on the period of time between the tribunate of Gaius Grachus and the death of Julius Caesar. We had intended to have the exam the previous Friday, but, as Dr. Sorrentino said, "I really want to kill off Caesar before the exam," and we weren't going to do so until Friday. So, Caesar died and our exam got moved.

Yesterday, we watched the most amazing video I have ever seen in my life. It's called Let's Wrap and it was about Roman clothing. I don't think that I've laughed quite so hard in a long time. It was extra funny because the woman was completely serious. She had some pictures of getting fellow Ancient Rome scholars to dress up in her outfits at some conference in Rome and I seriously have to wonder how she managed to talk them into it.

Also, most of her models looked awkward. Often, after she'd dressed them up, they would try to awkwardly leave, but she'd grab their wrist and hold them there until the scene was over. It was kind of sad. I did however learn to dress myself like a Roman woman using nothing but a bed sheet. Naturally, I had to try it (which would not surprise any members of my immediate family), leading my roommate to walk in on me wearing my nice purple sheet pinned over my shoulders and tied around the waist, and she commented, "Nice toga."

Now let me get a few things straight. What I was wearing was not a toga. I was wearing a long, Greek-style woman's tunica (Latin for tunic). A toga is a long piece of cloth which is worn wrapped artistically around the body and was only worn by men. Only by citizens, to be exact. As I discovered from the reading which I did for class, if a woman wore a toga, it meant that she was a prostitute. I am not kidding you. Also, when wrapped properly, early, shorter togas created a fold called a sinus and the later togas, with longer fabric, made a fold called a umbo. What were these folds? Ancient Roman man purses. That's where they kept their scrolls or money bags.


New Deal and WWII:

We learned about the debate over where to focus first, Europe or the Pacific. A lot of former isolationists wanted to do Pacific First because it was the actions there that got us into the war. However, MacArthur and Eisenhower only wanted to have a holding action in the Pacific while concentrating on Europe. The problem was that the British did not want to rush into a cross-channel invasion, so the first move against the Nazis took place in the north of Africa.

However, Stalin desperately wanted the British and Americans to do a cross channel invasion so that Hitler would be torn between two fronts. One of FDR's conditions for agreeing to postpone the invasion was the Churchill would have to be the one to tell Stalin what was going on.

While this was going on, the Americans were losing in the Philippines, but they were fighting successful island battles to keep the Japanese from advancing any further.


Well, that was our week in history classes. We hope you found it as educational as we did.