#bancroft

Soft OC asks | Always Accepting

Thank you for the ask!! No specified characters means I'm just gonna pull from whatever comes to me first.

4. What's an item that is deeply important and special to them? What makes it so special?

Sawyer doesn't have it anymore. It was confiscated when he was taken to Kinloch. But he used to have a posy ring he saved and saved and saved up to buy for his girl in that backwater Ferelden village the Templars burned down to find him. She's dead now, along with his parents and older brothers. She hadn't accepted the ring in the first place. She'd wanted to, but her father never approved of him, being that Sawyer was born a girl and all.

5. Do they have any collections?

You can see Syrion's life as a collection tbh. I talked about it a bit here in the lucky item section, but I liken Syrion to a magpie. He travels a lot, since he's possessed by a spirit of Adventure. Everywhere he goes, he tends to find a few things of interest. His entire person, then, becomes this eclectic presentation of where he's been and who's impacted him.

14. What's something they unashamedly adore?

Lantos fucking loves nugs. Not cooked, alive. He will genuinely get mad at someone for killing a nug in front of him. Back in Orzammar, he had little choice but to eat them, growing up in Dust Town - beggars can't be choosers after all - but now that he's topside, he's basically a vegetarian. He loves animals. To everyone's surprise.

16. Do they have a "lucky" item?

Just read another banger off the Bancroft Prize list.

This book was hard to finish. Only 266 pages but I was fighting for my life. Took me 2 months. The book consists of cases disputing land ownership, mills, and contracts between 1780-1890. His elevator pitch for this book is that: “one of the crucial choices made during the antebellum period was to promote economic growth primarily through the legal not tax system… which had major consequences for distribution of wealth and power in American society.” (pg. xv) 😱🫡

It was written in 1977 at a time when historians were arguing that the role of the government is to serve the public good. Horwitz, instead, asks “what even is the public✌️good✌️?”. The short and sweet is that courts who decided that “public good” meant economic progress. Chapters on the establishment of the lawyer profession, contracts, and others trace how British Law to benefit the merchant class business activity in the USA for private gain. It's a good read for understanding the birth of capitalism. One thing that i wish he spent more time on was the fact that these cases were happening during the rise of positivism and individualism. Both of these modes of thought factored in a great amount in the usa’s emerging conceptions of two arguably major foundations of contemporary capitalism, that is the modern contract and the market.

Very legal-jargon heavy. I was constantly taking out my phone to look up words I thought I knew but clearly know nothing about ("injury" and "property" and “futures,” etc.???). Reading this was like watching a time lapse of a plant growing leaves. Little by little, page by page, the reader starts to see a body of rules taking shape where they never exited before. He ends the book with discussing how this transformation gave way to legal formalism which set in stone business friendly laws that lock up wealth with only a few rather than redistribute wealth as the legal system was originally designed to do.

This book was helpful for me as a law librarian because understanding the origin of American law contextualizes the resources being put in my care.

But also for any informed citizen, I think this book is essential reading for action. If you are willing to entertain rabbit holes about feudalism and mercantilism while looking up concepts, it helps us understand that we can influence more than our politicians , but also our lawyers and the court system to make it work for fairness and for equitable provision of services to people. i highly recommend.

The author's writing style is interesting as it's got this repetitive pattern or flow to it. To sum it up:

He starts his argument by describing the facts of a certain legal case, then dives into how said case might have been interpreted under previous legal theories which he then goes on to compare to the legal theories emerging at the time of the case in question. Finally, he returns to the case in question and dives into how it was handled under the newly formed legal theories. The flow looks sorta like:

case facts > old legal theory vs. new legal theory > case outcome

This line of argument does a great job of revealing the thinking and gabbing that must have taken place in court rooms to literally invent American laws. Imagine putting this activity into words.

For its thoughtful treatment of a polemic subject, I can totally see this book being a Scorsese movie. What an important story it is.

The title of the new book Designing the Lush Dry Garden: Create a Climate-Resilient, Low-Water Paradise reveals much of what you need to know about what’s between the covers, but hearing the story behind it will tell you a lot more. Like every public garden, the legendary Ruth Bancroft Garden in Walnut Creek, CA, closed when the pandemic struck. Wanting to connect with gardeners during that time,…