This is the most
provocative book I’ve read in my adult life. It’s about prisoners of war
who could have lived an Enlightenment fantasy….
Read the full post on my new website:
Showing posts with label World history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label World history. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 16, 2016
Monday, October 10, 2016
The Revolutionary War didn't end at Yorktown
If you’re interested in early American history you probably recall that the British surrendered to George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette at Yorktown on October 19, 1781.
Hold it. The Revolutionary War didn’t end there.
In the two years following Yorktown, there were hundreds of skirmishes and combat encounters, largely in the American South, between soldiers of the Continental and British armies, and among pro-American and pro-British militias and many American Indian warriors.
King George III didn’t get around to issuing his Proclamation of Cessation of Hostilities until February 3, 1783.
On the high seas, after Yorktown, there were continuing naval encounters involving privateers and both Continental Navy and Royal Navy vessels as late as March 1783.
The war ended officially when the Treaty of Paris was finally signed on September 3, 1783.
News traveled slowly in those days. The last contingent of British troops in North America left New York City on November 26, 1783.
Read this review of Don Glickstein’s book After Yorktown: The Final Struggle for American Independence:
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.
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….
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016
All rights reserved.
Friday, August 12, 2016
Let’s get serious about Olympic records
Gold
medals, gold shmedals….
I
admit it, I’m not watching the Olympic games, I might try to tune in when
they’re running the middle distance races, but then again, maybe not….
The
Olympics have been deadened for me by too much media hype, too much “up close
and personal stuff” about people I really don’t want to be up close to, too
much dreary, frenzied media fixation on asking world-class athletes “exactly how rotten
did you feel when you only won the silver medal in your event?” C’mon, that’s
second best in the dadburn world, I’d feel fantastic for about 20 years if I
would step up (in my dreams!) to get the silver medal….
So,
anyway, let’s get serious for a minute, here’s an Olympic tidbit I love to pass
on: Michael Phelps won gold—his 13th individual gold!!—in the
200-meter individual medley swimming event, and he broke a 2,168-year-old Olympic
record. Seriously.
You
must remember that Leonidas of Rhodes was the last guy to win 12 individual events
in the Olympic games, so Mike is in really rarefied company. Leonidas was a
superstar in the 152 B.C. games when he notched his 12th individual
win, and that record was on the books until yesterday.
Now,
Leonidas was a runner, not a swimmer. In 152 B.C. he competed in events like
running twice the length of the stadium carrying a shield and wearing a helmet
and armor weighing more than 50 pounds. Now, that’s manly.
So,
I’d like to lay down a challenge to Phelps: try doing the 200-meter butterfly
carrying a bag of cement.
I’d like to see how that works out.
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016
All rights reserved.
Sunday, July 3, 2016
Elie Wiesel, R. I. P.
Eliezer “Elie” Wiesel (1928-2016)
Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace
Prize winner
Elie Wiesel’s life is a powerful
reminder that when good men do nothing, evil will triumph.
Wiesel survived three concentration
camps during World War II, and spent his life fighting to sustain our memory of
the Holocaust and to champion the causes of peace as he understood them. He was
not inclined to be bashful about provoking strong feelings.
I saw and heard Wiesel in the mid-1960s
when I was a college freshman at Lehigh University. At that time, early in his
career, he was relentlessly taking the story of the Holocaust to venues all
over the world. I recall that he said many German concentration camp guards
were well educated, and my livid memory is his explanation that SS troopers who
were intellectually committed to the Nazi cause were the most reliable
instruments of the Final Solution.
 |
| Elie Wiesel, second row from bottom , seventh from left next to post |
His 1996 film, “Elie Wiesel Goes Home,”
is close to unbearably candid about the pathos of his life. The documentary
follows his return to his birthplace in Sighet, Romania, and his conversations with
other survivors about the fates of their families and friends when Germans sent
all the Jews in the village to Auschwitz-Birkenau in May 1944.
Wiesel never stopped remembering the
horror of the camps. He never stopped looking at the number “A-7713” tattooed
on his left arm. He helped me to understand why it’s important that we never
forget.
Elie Wiesel, requiescat in pace.
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.
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.
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016
All rights reserved.
Tuesday, May 10, 2016
Book review: American Crisis
Book review:
William M. Fowler, Jr., American
Crisis: George Washington and the Dangerous Two Years After Yorktown, 1781-1783
(New York: Walker and Company, 2011)
340 pages
American Crisis offers many
teaching moments to students of American Revolutionary history.
 |
| Washington enters Boston, 1783 |
The war didn’t end at Yorktown. British troops finally left New York City more
than two years later.
Some might speculate that the war effectively ended before that
dramatic capitulation at Yorktown in October 1781, because the British never
allocated the land and naval forces that were needed to force the colonials to
give up. Certainly, the hostilities did not end when Cornwallis threw in the
towel.
Fowler weaves military, political and diplomatic details together in
describing “the dangerous two years” between Yorktown and the official signing
of the peace treaty in 1783.
 |
| Parliament during Revolutionary War |
It’s difficult for us in modern times, so accustomed to light-speed
communications, to understand the frustration and limitations faced by military
commanders, Congress, king and Parliament in the late 18th century.
A round trip across the Atlantic could easily take two months or more.
Washington could communicate with his officers and Congress only as fast as a
horse could travel. British commanders in America were largely on their own in
making tactical and strategic decisions. Parliament, the king and American
diplomats negotiating peace had to act in perpetual ignorance of recent
military actions in North America.
The feckless sloth and impotence of the Second Continental Congress,
and (after 1781) the Congress of the Confederation, is a central theme in
Fowler’s account. American troops went unfed, unclothed and unpaid for long
months and years. The troops committed technically mutinous disobedience about
50 times, and Washington’s officers pushed close indeed to open revolt in their
largely unsuccessful efforts to get paid as the end of the war draw closer.
The principal obstacle to forthright action in the congress was its
inability to raise money: national taxes needed unanimous consent of the 13 states,
which mostly never happened, and the individual states mostly refused to pony
up funds from their own resources to support the army. Thus, “the dangerous two
years”—if the British had had the military capability to defeat Washington’s
army, likely it could have done so. Luckily for us, the king and his ministers
never beefed up their army and navy enough to win the war in North America.
In effect, Washington held them off until they gave up.
Fowler says it much better than I can.
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.
Friday, April 22, 2016
It’s official, again.
The arrival of European explorers and colonists in the Americas in the
16th 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 13th
century, a Mississippi River “mound” culture had its center at Cahokia, a city
that was bigger than Paris at the time.
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.
Wednesday, April 20, 2016
World domination, circa 1914
“World domination” is a concept we don’t mention too often in casual
conversation these days, but 100 years ago it was an ordinary frame of
reference.
In 1800, at the beginning of the 19th century, European
powers controlled about one-third of the world’s land mass. By 1914—before the
start of World War I—those Western powers could claim domination of about 84 percent of the planet.
It wasn’t a stretch to acknowledge that “the sun never sets on the
British Empire.”
Margaret Macmillan, in The War
That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914, says
"Europe's countries dominated
much of the earth's surface whether through their formal empires or by informal
control of much of the rest through their economic, financial and technological
strength. Railways, ports, telegraph cables, steamship lines, factories around
the world were built using European know-how and money and were usually run by
European companies.”
"The march of knowledge throughout the nineteenth century, in so
many fields from geology to politics, had, it was widely assumed, brought much
greater rationality in human affairs. The more humans knew, whether about
themselves, society, or the natural world, the more they would make decisions
based on the facts rather than on emotion.”
As we sadly know now, such self-serving and blithely ignorant claptrap
was brutally exposed when the “guns of August” commenced firing in 1914 after
the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
Copyright
© Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.
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 11th 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.
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016
All rights reserved.
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:
Thursday, December 31, 2015
The year in pictures….
It’s time for the ever popular “Year In Review” in pictures.
Let’s try words, instead.
The Sunday New York Times offered “Year In Pictures” in its
December 27 Sunday Review section.
All of 17 pages invested in 41 full-color photos of the
stuff that happened around the globe in the momentous (every year is momentous)
year that ends today.
Here’s the thing that bites: 34 of those pictures depicted
people who were dead or dying or starving or in danger, people who were desperately
fleeing their homelands to avoid danger, discrimination, starvation or death,
children who were crying, afraid, lost, in pain, dead….
It’s hard to remember what the other seven pictures were….
2015 is going into the history books.
These words already are ashes on my lips.
Here’s hoping for a happier New Year.
We’ve got a lot of work to do.
Copyright ©
Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.
Tuesday, December 29, 2015
Let’s all sing “Purple Haze”
Let’s all think about singing “Purple Haze,” or not, as the
case may be.
I think you can’t forget the first time you heard Jimi sing
it.
If you have lost track of that memory, you might as well
stop reading here because the rest of this little homage isn’t going to make
much sense to you.
Hendrix wrote it before he was popular in the United States,
on December 26, 1966, in his dressing room backstage at the Uppercut Club in
London.
After trying to become a solo artist for two unremarkable
years in New York, Hendrix was discovered by a British producer and he moved to
England, where he formed The Jimi Hendrix Experience and had a UK hit in the
form of “Hey Joe.” A few days after it was released, he wrote “Purple Haze” and
you know the story after that.
The PH lyrics really don’t set my mind on fire, but that’s
not important because Jimi was burning every time he sang it. Here’s an early version in 1967 and here’s his Woodstock rendition in 1969.
Try to read all the way to the end of the lyrics, and keep
in mind that Rolling Stone kissed “Purple Haze” with a No. 17 ranking on its
2004 listing of “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.”
Yeah, I know, me too, “…blowing my mind…”....
Purple Haze
Purple haze, all in my brain
Lately things they don't seem the same
Actin' funny, but I don't know why
Lately things they don't seem the same
Actin' funny, but I don't know why
Purple haze, all around
Don't know if I'm comin' up or down
Am I happy or in misery?
What ever it is, that girl put a spell on me
Don't know if I'm comin' up or down
Am I happy or in misery?
What ever it is, that girl put a spell on me
Help me
Help me baby
Oh no, Oh no
Help me baby
Oh no, Oh no
Ooo, ahhh
Ooo, ahhh
Ooo, ahhh
Ooo, ahhh, yeah!
Ooo, ahhh
Ooo, ahhh
Ooo, ahhh, yeah!
Purple haze all in my eyes
Don't know if it's day or night
You got me blowin', blowin' my mind
Is it tomorrow, or just the end of time?
Don't know if it's day or night
You got me blowin', blowin' my mind
Is it tomorrow, or just the end of time?
Ooo
Help me
Ahh, yea-yeah, purple haze
Oh, no, oh
Oh, help me
Tell me, tell me, purple haze
I can't go on like this
Purple haze
You're makin' me blow my mind
Purple haze, n-no, nooo
Help me
Ahh, yea-yeah, purple haze
Oh, no, oh
Oh, help me
Tell me, tell me, purple haze
I can't go on like this
Purple haze
You're makin' me blow my mind
Purple haze, n-no, nooo
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.
Friday, December 18, 2015
First flight—unbelievable
For many people around the world, it was literally
unbelievable.
On December 17, 1903, Orville Wright cranked up the biplane
that he and his brother had built in the back room of their Ohio bike shop, and
did what no man had done before: he traveled through the air, perched on a
machine.
 |
| One short flight for man |
The first flight wasn't much to write home about: 120 feet,
lasting 12 seconds. Orville and Wilbur flew four times that day, and Wilbur
handled the last, spectacular feat: he traveled 852 feet in 59 seconds.
A lot of folks thought it was impossible, or at least
impossible for two Dayton bicycle mechanics to pull it off.
The Wright brothers were deliberate in their efforts to
develop and patent their airplane, so they didn’t talk it up much. The
world-wide press was not largely impressed in the early years. Five years after
the first flight, Orville and Wilbur went to France and did the first highly
publicized demonstrations of their heavier-than-air craft. The world went
nuts.
 |
| da Vinci's flying machine |
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (1452-1519) had the idea for
a flying machine back in the 16th century, but he couldn’t get the
thing to work.
Link to the David McCullough book on the Wright brothers
Copyright © Richard
Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.
Saturday, December 5, 2015
Productivity: a late-blooming concept in human society
Before the invention of at least conceptually
accurate clocks (mid-13th century in Europe) and the subsequent
advent of modern timekeeping, the notion of productivity in terms of work per
unit of time was mostly unknown.
David Landes, in Revolution in Time: Clocks and
the Making of the Modern World,
points out that in the late medieval period, “the great virtue was
busyness—unremitting diligence in one’s tasks.”
In today’s
workplace, “keeping busy” is most definitely not the acceptable definition of
doing good work and being productive. As anyone who’s read “Dilbert” recently
knows, it’s possible to stay busy without actually doing anything.
 |
| Medieval clock tower |
When workers and bosses could
accurately keep track of time, they created an inescapable transformation of
workplace culture. If Hans made six shoes while Jakob made five shoes and
Gretel (with six hungry kids) made four shoes, and Hans could do this
repeatedly during measured time periods that everyone acknowledged, then it was
obvious who was doing more work and thus who was more productive.
That is to say, it was obvious if each of them had the same training, and each of them had the same access to raw materials and similar tools, and each of them had the same working conditions, and if…..
Source:
David Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of
the Modern World (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 1983), 25 and passim.
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.
Saturday, November 7, 2015
Mr. Grumpy (235 years ago)
William Pitt the Younger
had nothing nice to say about the American Revolutionary War.
This post has been moved to my website:
Wednesday, September 23, 2015
Surprise!
You thought the guillotine is ancient French history, right?
Well, here’s a shocker:
The guillotine was the legal method of execution in France
until 1981, when capital punishment was abolished.
The iconic terror of the French Revolution was last used in
1977 to publicly behead a murderer named Hamida Djandoubi.
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.
Sunday, September 20, 2015
You can call him Quake
About 2,885 years ago, a man was born in Mesoamerica, in
what we now call Mexico. We know only two things about him: he died about 750
B. C., fighting against the Zapotec empire; his name was 1-Earthquake.
Among the tens of millions who lived in ancient times in the American hemisphere, 1-Earthquake is the earliest whose name we know.
 |
| 1-Earthquake |
It is apparent that the name was carved as two glyphs in the stone threshold of a temple in San José Mogote, near the city of Oaxaca. This is the earliest known writing in North or South America that can be accurately dated: 750 B.C.
 |
| Urban site in Zapotec empire |
Note the date.. At about the same time as Rome was founded (753 B. C.), when the early Greeks were emerging from their own Dark Ages, and when much of Europe was populated by the “barbarian” Germanic and Celtic tribes, there were civilizations in the Americas like the Zapotec and the earlier Olmec, that had sophisticated cities, governments, organized religion, art, agriculture, commerce, astronomy and mathematics.
Source: Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the
Americas Before Columbus (New York: Vintage Books, 2006), 243.
Thursday, September 10, 2015
Words, words, words
I was intrigued by a passage on early transliteration of key
words in the New Testament, in a most fascinating book about the history of the
English language. Ooops, you yawned. Give me a chance.
Owen Barfield, in History
in English Words, explains that “passionate Hebrew meanings were gradually
imported into the cold and clear-cut Greek words” during the centuries, before
the life of Jesus, when Egyptian Jewish scholars translated Hebrew scriptures
in the Greek (Koine Greek) language to create what is known as the Septuagint.
The meanings of words change continuously, with changes in
knowledge and social interaction, evolving cultural milieu, travel and other
environmental factors. This has been happening since humankind started talking.
Barfield relates what happened in plain talk: “Seeking for
words to convey such notions as ‘sin,’ ‘righteousness,’ ‘defilement,’
‘abomination,’ ‘ungodly,’ the Jewish translators had to do the best they could
with noises which to Heraclitus and Plato had implied something more like
‘folly,’ ‘integrity,’ ‘dirt,’ ‘objectionable practice,’ ‘ignorant.’
The Greek version of the scriptures was known in the
synagogues of Palestine. It’s possible that Jesus
read it.
I wonder what Jesus thought the words meant.
Source:
Owen Barfield, History in English Words (Hudson, NY:
The Lindisfarne Press, 1953), 114-15.
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.
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