Barley Literate: History

You are seeing this message because you are one of the generous, enlightened folks who have been following my blogs: Barley Literate, History: Bottom Lines, and Magister Librorum.

Thank you for taking an interest in my scribbling, I hope I have informed and entertained you now and then.

I have switched all of my blogging and commentary to my new website.

Please click this link http://richardsubber.com/worlds-whirling-waiting/

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Thanks again! Your feedback is always welcome.

Rick Subber

Saturday, November 26, 2016

Book review: An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America

The British wanted to win the Revolutionary War, but they had good reasons for not trying too hard….

Read the full post on my new website:

http://richardsubber.com/book-review-an-empire-on-the-edge/

Friday, November 18, 2016

Mr. Grumpy (235 years ago)

William Pitt the Younger had nothing nice to say about the American Revolutionary War.

Read the full post on my new website:

http://richardsubber.com/william-pitt-the-younger-aka-mr-grumpy/

Saturday, November 5, 2016

Book review: The Brothers by Janet M. Kovarik

The Brothers: good storytelling

I review The Brothers by Janet M. Kovarik, a dialogue-rich novel with believable characters set in the American Civil War.

Read the full post on my new website:

http://richardsubber.com/book-review-the-brothers/

Saturday, October 29, 2016

Rick Subber’s new website

Here’s a sneak preview of my new website, check it out here:

http://richardsubber.com/

It’s still under construction, but you can read samples of my poetry and my blog posts on books and book reviews, history, politics and some strange and wonderful stuff in the “Tidbits” category.

In the near future I will say goodbye to my three longstanding blogs—Barley Literate, History: Bottom Lines, and Magister Librorum—and do all of my daily posting on the website, where everything will be conveniently accessible from a single landing page.

I will manage the new website in tandem with my dedicated Facebook page, click here to take a look at it—and please “Like” the new Facebook page if you care to, I need 25 “Likes” to get access to some advanced Facebook audience measurements (all aggregate stuff, no personal or private information about individual persons, not even a little bit, not ever).

With appropriate humility and excessive excitement, I mention that in the near future I will publish my first poetry chapbook. Stay tuned!

Thanks again for your kind consideration in reading my daily scribblings. I try to write something worth reading every day.

Words, words, words—they can say so much if we choose them carefully, and if we choose to listen....

Rick

Thursday, October 20, 2016

Eight-year-old kids go on strike

The abuses of child labor are no longer a big issue in America. Child labor was a big deal in the latter part of the 19^th century.

The Industrial Revolution came to America as early as 1813, when the first water-powered textile mill opened in Waltham, MA. Within a few decades, mills and factories were sprouting along waterways everywhere, and workers streamed off the farms to join immigrants who were employed at low wages.

The ongoing abuses of child laborers were condemned (by unionized adults) as early as the 1830s. In the following decades, regulation of the working conditions for kids occurred piece-meal, state by state. By the end of the 19^th century, 28 states had enacted laws governing (but not outlawing) the working hours and conditions for children. Work by youngsters was finally outlawed in America when the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed in 1938.

In 1881 eight-year-old textile workers in Maine—some of them working for eight cents a day— started a strike when they discovered that kids their age at another mill were making a penny more per day. The three-day strike was partly successful.

Mill owners and factory owners and other 19^th century capitalists were forced, over time, to cease exploitation of poor kids on the shop floor.

Imagine that you work in a 19th century mill making textile products. Imagine that you take your eight-year-old son to work with you every day, so he can work for 10-12 hours for pennies in grimy conditions with poor lighting, breathing air filled with cotton lint and climbing barefoot on the huge humming machinery so he can replace the empty spindles.

Imagine that you need his paltry income to keep food on the table for your family.

Saturday, October 15, 2016

"The past is a foreign country..."

Book review: The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley

"The past is a foreign country:

they do things differently there."

L. P. (Leslie Poles) Hartley (1895–1972)

This is the celebrated first line of The Go-Between, Hartley's novel of Victorian romance and deception published in London in 1953. It can mean whatever you make of it.

I take it as an admonition….one must try to be aware of the unique and partly (perhaps completely) inaccessible context that framed the actions and outlooks of those who did things we think we're interested in…you know, it's not easy to think and feel as the Romans did…

The 1970 movie with Julie Christie and Alan Bates is a genuinely throbbing, set-your-teeth-on-edge rendition of the book…give the book or the movie a try.

The Christie-Bates movie:

Thursday, September 29, 2016

Heard this one before?

Think back to the antebellum South, in 1850.

The census of that year shows that, of roughly 660,000 households in the southern states, the 1,000 leading households of the plantation elite received about $50 million in annual income.

The rest of the population earned only about $60 million annually.

Can you say “inequality”?

Any part of this sound familiar?

Source:

Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 1492-Present (1980; repr., New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2005), 236.

What happened to the cream?

Where it's at

"...the commotions in America..."

Book review: The Witches: Salem, 1692

Book review: A Farewell to Arms

"...inter librorum copias" redux

Sunday, September 18, 2016

Not exactly a beach book....

I am particularly strong on urging every single person to make a best effort every day to do what’s at the top of his or her TO DO list.

So when I found out that Dr. Toby Wilkinson, an Egyptologist at Clare College, Cambridge, has published a translation of Egyptian hieroglyphics intended for a mass audience, my first thought was “Go for it, Toby!”

Now I’m having second thoughts. Roughly a couple million books are published every year. The books in my personal collection are stacked higher than my head along a wall in the basement. I haven’t read all of them yet. I think I’m going to pass on Writings from Ancient Egypt.

Here are a few excerpts, courtesy of TheGuardian.com

Letters written by a farmer called Heqanakht date from 1930BC but reflect modern concerns, from land management to grain quality. He writes to his steward: “Be extra dutiful in cultivating. Watch out that my barley-seed is guarded.”

Turning to domestic matters, he sends greetings to his son Sneferu, his “pride and joy, a thousand times, a million times”, and urges the steward to stop the housemaid bullying his wife: “You are the one who lets her do bad things to my wife … Enough of it!”

Other texts include the Tempest Stela. While official inscriptions generally portray an ideal view of society, this records a cataclysmic thunderstorm: “It was dark in the west and the sky was filled with storm clouds without [end and thunder] more than the noise of a crowd … The irrigated land had been deluged, the buildings cast down, the chapels destroyed … total destruction.”

from kingscrossexpress.wordpress.com

If you were thinking maybe it would be something like “Downton Abbey,” or maybe Fifty Shades of Grey, or maybe “The Simpsons” with cats and pyramids, think again….

...I digress

The words

Excesses of love

Let's put one more thing in context....

Chautauqua, revisited....

Book review: The Witches: Salem, 1692

Before comic books there were....

The other boondoggler....

Play time

Sunday, June 5, 2016

Down Under is big!

Australia outline superimposed on Europe

Yeah, I was surprised when I looked at this map overlay. Australia is way bigger than England or France or Germany, bigger than Europe.

In fact, Australia—2.97 million square miles—is just about exactly the same size as the continental United States. Who knew?

Mollweide projection with true proportional land areas

By the way, “down under” is a colloquial nickname for Australia and New Zealand because those countries are below the equator, and thus cartographically “under” the western European countries, like Great Britain that colonized both Australia and New Zealand in the 1770s.

Notice that I didn’t say “discovered” Australia and New Zealand….the Maori peoples settled in New Zealand more than 1,000 years before the British arrived, and the Australian Aborigines have the oldest continuous human culture in the world.

Remember "speed dating"?

Washington Monument hanky-panky

That tolerance thing

The cod in "Cape Cod"

It wasn't the good old days....

Did the British really try to win?

Tuesday, May 17, 2016

The cod in “Cape Cod”

Some readers may know this, but I didn’t: Cape Cod was named by an English explorer, Bartholomew Gosnold, in 1602. Yup, 18 years before the Mayflower and that Plymouth Rock stuff. His visit is the first recorded European exploration of the Cape Cod area. He also helped settled the Jamestown colony a few years later in Virginia.

Gosnold (1571-1607)

In 1602 Gosnold and his men intended to set up a trading post in what hadn’t yet been named “New England.” After landing on the tip of the peninsula, at what is now Provincetown, the explorers started checking out the bay area. The sailors caught so many codfish in the bay that they reportedly had to throw some back in the water. Gosnold named the place “Cape Cod.”

Later, after scouting down the Atlantic shore of the peninsula, he landed on an island with abundant grapes, raspberries, gooseberries, and huckleberries, and named it “Martha’s Vineyard” in memory of his deceased daughter.

Gosnold and his crew met and did some trading with some Native Americans. Ultimately, they abandoned the plan to build an outpost for trade.

By the way, there’s not much cod fishing in the bay these days. The fish stock is sharply reduced due

to overfishing and environmental constraints, and the quotas for legal fishing are quite small.

Gosnold’s crewmen wouldn’t recognize the place.

It wasn't the good old days....

Did the British really try to win?

The "Bill of Rights" wasn't

It's official, again.

World domination, circa 1914

Monday, May 16, 2016

They don’t make movies like this one anymore

Action! Aerial daredevilry! Romance! Intrigue!

You wanna see how the heat builds when two American flyboys head to France to give their all in World War I, and leave behind the gal that both of them ardently desire?

You gotta watch Wings, the $2 million extravaganza that pulled in the crowds and grabbed the first Oscar for Best Picture—in 1929.

Wings also won the first Academy Award for Best Engineering Effects. I imagine that was for the stunningly obvious jerky "dogfighting" of crude model planes dangling around each other in front of a not-too-convincing “sky” backdrop.

You probably want to know these names: Richard Arlen and Charles “Buddy” Rogers played the two air aces, and Clara Bow was the lady in question—she was in love with Arlen, but, sadly, committed to Rogers. These things happen in war.

You have to watch the movie to find out which one of the sky jockeys went down in flames.

So. About 250 people turned out for the awards ceremony. The winners were announced prior to the event (the sealed envelope surprises didn’t start until 1942). Of course, it wasn’t televised, because television hadn’t arrived yet. There was no standup comedian emcee, and I’m just guessing that there was no Beyoncé-style entertainment, and probably not too many daring necklines….

Oh yeah, one other thing: Wings is a silent movie. The Jazz Singer, one of the first “talkies,” had already made its debut, but “talkies” weren’t allowed in the 1929 Oscar competition.

You make your own decision about whether all this was the good old days.

p.s. Gary Cooper appeared in Wings as Cadet White, it was one of his early films

Movie review: Hard Times

"Dead Poets" lives on!

Thelma & Louise, R. I. P.

Bonnie and Clyde, redux

The Graduate....once is enough

Oh Baby, Baby, Baby....

You need to watch "Jane Eyre" again

Friday, April 22, 2016

It’s official, again.

The arrival of European explorers and colonists in the Americas in the 16^th century caused the devastating collapse of the indigenous populations—tens of millions of people died within a generation or two.

A comparison of ancient and modern DNA starkly shows that “none of the genetic lineages we found in almost 100 ancient humans were present, or showed evidence of descendants, in today’s Indigenous populations,” according to the lead author of the study published recently.

Basically, the ancient lineages in North and South America “went extinct with the arrival of Spanish [and other] colonists.”

The study of DNA from 92 pre-Columbian skeletons and from living residents of both continents was conducted by the University of Adelaide’s Australian Centre for Ancient DNA.

No one knows for sure how many indigenous peoples were alive in North and South America in 1492, but the estimates run up to 100 million. Almost all of those people died—mostly as a result of disease—during the decades following the first voyage of Columbus.

Cahokia c. 1250

p.s. The DNA study also confirmed that the first Americans arrived on the North Pacific coast about 16,000 years ago. They quickly spread and prospered throughout both continents in less than 1,500 years. These First Peoples created several sophisticated civilizations. For example, in the 13^th century, a Mississippi River “mound” culture had its center at Cahokia, a city that was bigger than Paris at the time.

World domination, circa 1914

It started out as a "bachelor's" degree....

"Mannish Boy"....hold that thought

Book review: 1491, by Charles Mann

"...two foolish children..."

Friday, April 15, 2016

It started out as a “bachelor’s” degree….

There’s a plain Jane reason why that four-year sheepskin is called a “bachelor’s degree.”

In the 11^th century, the men who went to college for their first degree attained a respectable mastery of knowledge, but it wasn’t enough to set them up for good jobs.

Hence, they were generally unable to support a family, and thus remained bachelors until they went further in their studies.

In common parlance, they earned the “bachelor’s” degree.

Seal of University of Bologna

The first Western university was the University of Bologna in Italy, established in 1088. The University of Paris opened its doors about 60 years later, and the University of Oxford was created in 1167.

1644 sketch of Harvard's first seal

There is some high-toned dispute about the founding date of the first American “university.” Harvard, without a doubt, was established in 1636 as the first “institution of higher learning” in the English colonies.

DelanceyPlace.com cites Kevin Madigan’s Medieval Christianity in explaining the impact of universities on the development of Western civilization, starting about the mid-point of the Middle Ages.

By the way, the academic powerhouse we think of as a “university” was originally an outgrowth of the medieval guilds, and the name “university” is shorthand for universitas magistrorum et scholarium, that is, a "community of teachers and scholars.”

Sometimes a university is more than that, and sometimes, less. That’s a story for another time.

Let's stop pretending about grade inflation

Homework....think again....

Get crazy! Let your kids go outside and play

Maybe your kid shouldn't go to college

What it doesn't say....

Book review: Dead Wake

Okay, it’s “O. K.”—OK?

Monday, April 4, 2016

Word-proof

The Florence Nightingale story is well known, at least in broad strokes, and her reputation as a doer of good is well deserved.

It seems she also was a poet, perhaps despite herself.

You may know of her path-breaking work in nursing during the Crimean War (1853-56). She was a notable champion of high-quality nursing and medical care. Almost three-quarters of eight British regiments died from disease during a six-month period during the war. Nightingale learned that in peacetime British soldiers had a mortality rate 100 percent higher than that of civilians. Hygiene and sanitation wasn’t the best part of being a Tommy in the 19^th century. Some folks in high places didn’t want to hear that particular story.

Nightingale was a prodigious writer, and she broke new ground by working closely with a statistician to prepare an 830-page report on the Army Medical Department for Queen Victoria. She created some graphic representation of data to heighten its clarity and impact for the queen.

Nightingale wrote that her resort to graphic “visualization” was intended to affect “thro’ the Eyes what we fail to convey to the public through their word-proof ears.”

“…word-proof ears” is a deliciously poetic way to describe the tendency of some folks to not hear what is new or not entirely welcome.

I suspect that those who enjoy poetry tend not to have “word-proof ears.”

Sadly, such ears are all too familiar among the attributes of the human condition.

Marrow stuff

No secret about good writing....

"...centuried rust..."

"...they tend to joy..."

"...surely it will"

Writing: I can tell you this....

Sunday, March 27, 2016

The sinking of the Lusitania

Book review: Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

My review of this Larson thriller, the consistent tension that makes it a page-turner….

This post has been moved to my website:

http://richardsubber.com/book-review-dead-wake-the-last-crossing-of-the-lusitania/

Friday, March 25, 2016

Okay, it’s “O. K.”—OK?

Probably you know that languages evolve, and words and patterns of speech and even pronunciations change over time, sometimes rapidly….

Sometime when you’re in a full body cast you can read up on The Great Vowel Shift in the English language in England (roughly 1350-1600).

Today’s lesson is a bit less formidable: raise your hand if you know when “O.K.” became part of American English.

Okay, here’s the answer:

In the 1830s, some young folks with a bit of education thought it was groovy to misspell words and then use the resulting abbreviations as slang (guess who probably didn’t quite know what the kids were talking about….). Such as “OW” meaning “all right” (the misspelled form was “oll wright”) and “KG” for “No go” (“Know go”). Cool, right? Know, really.

So, “O.K.” showed up….that is, “oll korrect” derived from “all correct.” Wicked.

It first appeared in print—as part of a joke—on March 23, 1839, in The Boston Morning Post. You gotta believe that early 19^th century journalists had the same awesome sense of humor that pervades the news media today.

So, like, our constantly changing language, GP, y’know?

(“go phigure.” You knew that, right? Cool.)