This Day In History

Today is "National Mincemeat Day", so get out your chopping block and implements. Here's a nice little recipe from the Sixteenth Century:

Pyes of mutton or beif must be fyne mynced & seasoned with pepper and salte and a lytel saffron to colour it / suet or marrow a good quantitie / a lytell vynegre / pruynes / great reasons / and dates / take the fattest of the broath of powdred beefe. And if you will have paest royall / take butter and yolkes of egges & so to temper the floure to make the paest. (Pie filling of mutton or beef must be finely minced and seasoned with pepper and salt and a little saffron to colour it. [Add] a good quantity of suet or marrow, a little vinegar, prunes, raisins and dates. [Put in] the fattest of the broth of salted beef. And, if you want Royal pastry, take butter and egg yolks and [combine them with] flour to make the paste. )^[1]

Source: Wikipedia.

On this day in 1682 William Penn gained clear title to land along the Delaware River. He decided to call it New Wales, then changed his mind and called it "Sylvania", but King Charles changed the name to "Pennsylvania" to honor Penn's father, the Admiral William Penn. So Billy Penn is not the guy the State is named after -- it's his father, and Penn didn't do the naming.

On this day in 1774 the First Continental Congress adjourned at Carpenters Hall in Philadelphia. It had drawn up a formal protest against the "Intolerable Acts", couching its objections in terms of the rights of Englishmen, it had proposed a restructuring of the relations between Britain and her colonies [an "Act of Union"], it had organized a continental boycott of British goods to apply economic pressure to the mother country, and it called for a second Congress of all the continental colonies [including Florida and Canada] for the following year.

Not bad.

And on this day in 1825 the Erie Canal opens for business. Huge advantage to New York in its continuing rivalry with Philadelphia.

And on this day in 1881 the "Gunfight at the OK Corral" took place between the Earps [and Doc Holliday] and the Clantons in Tombstone, Arizona Territory. It was the most famous, if not the most lethal shootout in the history of the "Wild West". Here is a decent online source if you want to go through the details of the encounter. Here's a good link to several of the primary sources. There have been a number of attempts by serious historians to place the gunfight in a cultural, political or social context [my favorite, just for the laughs, is an explanation that the Earps were agents of Republican oppressors of the people, and the Clantons were freedom-loving Democrats] and, of course, there have been numerous books and movies based on the incident. My personal favorite is "Tombstone" [that's the one with Val Kilmer] although Kevin Costner's "Wyatt Earp" is in many ways more interesting. Rent either one and enjoy. And, if you want to see a great filmic shootout, rent "Open Range". The gunfight there is legendary even if tere aren't any Earps involved. If you were wondering why Wyatt Earp became so famous consider this. In his old age he moved to Hollywood and made friends with lots of actors, including William Hart and young Marion Morrison [you know him as "John Wayne"].

And on this day in 1911 Philadelphia defeats New York in the World Series, 4 games to 2. Don't get excited -- it was the Athletics who beat the Giants.

And on this day in 1942 the Battle of Guadalcanal was raging on both land and sea. The eventual American victory there was, in the minds of many, the turning point of the War in the Pacific. Yes, I know about Midway, but it was Guadalcanal that convinced President Roosevelt to switch from defense to offensive operations in that theater. There are several good online sources on the battle. I would recommend this one by the Army as a good starting point.

And on this day in 1954 Walt Disney's "Disneyland" premiered on ABC TV.

And on this date in 1962 Nikita Khrushchev offered to withdraw nuclear missiles from Cuba if JFK removed them from Turkey and guaranteed never to invade Cuba. This was the deal that finally resolved the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kennedy and Khrushchev went eyeball to eyeball and JFK blinked and accepted Russia's terms. The US backed down, but the administration kept all the negotiations secret for fear of looking weak and instead published self-serving accounts of how Kennedy had stood up successfully to the Communists and to his own advisors. The truth didn't come out until two decades later.

And on this day in 1982 Philly Steve Carlton won his fourth Cy Young award, the first pitcher to do so.

Happy Birthday Hillary [1947] and to John Cardinal Krol [1910], former Archbishop of Philadelphia, and to the Minute Men [1774]. Also born on this day, Leon Trotsky [1879], one of the most loathsome figures of the Twentieth Century; Lauren "LoveBoat" Tewes [1954, the Pride of Braddock, PA]; Shah Reza Palavi [CIA stooge who used to run Iran before the Mullahs took over]; and Desideratus Erasmus [1466], one of my favorite Renaissance characters.

Artsy Stuff

Baltimore's culture season is in full swing and we are taking advantage of it. Last week we attended a concert by the Belcea String Quartet at Shriver Hall. Quite good they are. Here's a sample of their work.



They are enormously versatile and the program we heard showed it. They started with Hayden, followed by Shostakovich, and finished with Beethoven. Dmitri's by no means my favorite composer [to say the least], but they made even him sound pretty good.

This week was devoted to the visual arts. We started with lunch at the Lebanese Taverna then on to the Walters Gallery where my brother and I spent some time studying their small, but interesting, collection of Middle Eastern art and armor. He was more interested in the art, but I spent more time with the weaponry on display. Stuff like this:



We then toured a new exhibit on Gods and Heroes of Ancient Greece and watched a short amateur dance recital, neither of which I found particularly interesting.

Then we headed up to the BMA for a preview party for an exhibit of Matisse prints. The Cone Collection has long boasted a major holding of Matisse's work. Recently that was augmented by a contribution from the artist's children, and yesterday highlights of the combined collection of more than 600 works were on display.



What fascinated me was that the sheer number of works allowed us to see Matisse refining his style, developing ideas over time, and transferring images from one medium to another over the course of the career. The suspicion remains, though, that the high proportion of female nudes among the prints represent a convenient way of getting the wives and girlfriends of his friends and colleagues to take their clothes off for him.

Then it was home after a long day and evening. Fortunately today was Sunday and we could sleep in.

Revisiting and Revising Agincourt

In keeping with my theme, oft expressed, that the "lessons of history" are many, varied, contradictory, and in a constant state of revision rather than being a repository of authoritative wisdom, I note the following piece in today's New York Times:

Historians Reassess Battle of Agincourt

Agincourt’s status as perhaps the greatest victory against overwhelming odds in military history — and a keystone of the English self-image — has been called into doubt by a group of historians in Britain and France who have painstakingly combed an array of military and tax records from that time and now take a skeptical view of the figures handed down by medieval chroniclers.

Read it here.

The article notes that some military historians now argue that Henry V had more troops, and the French far fewer, than traditional accounts would credit, that these revised figures are strongly disputed, and that a composite biography of the British troops infers that they had long been a cohesive fighting unit [almost literally a "band of brothers"] that had a strong corporate identity.

Most importantly, the article also notes that even when the facts of the battle are not in dispute, they have been reinterpreted in the light of current concerns. Rather than placing it within the context of a century-long conflict between British and French royal lines, revisionists now see Agincourt as an episode in a long English intervention in an ongoing French Civil War in which the English, whatever their victories on the battlefield, lost the confidence and support of their French allies by failing to protect them. The outcome of the Hundred Years War, in their view, was simply the result of the English being unable to implement a successful counterinsurgency strategy. The analogy to ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan is obvious.

And so it goes. New information, new ways of organizing information, new perspectives, and most of all new contemporary concerns shape, reshape, and constantly revise historical understanding and the "lessons" that can be drawn from it.

You are There -- The Fall of Troy

So cool -- I used to listen to this when I was a kid.

You can find other podcasts here.

More Pennsylvania Pictures -- Realms of Gold

It's that time of year again, when the trees show us just what they are capable of. This year is not quite up to the standard of some recent years, and the weather turned bad just as the trees peaked, but even so Fall splendor in the gorgeous commonwealth is a joy to behold.

Fukuyama, Twenty Years After

Twenty years ago Francis Fukuyama set off an immense wave of controversy with the publication in "The National Interest" of an essay titled The End of History? He followed this up with a small book The End of History and the Last Man.

What Fukuyama argued was that two centuries of experience since the French Revolution have shown conclusively that liberal democracy is the best of all forms of government and that the evolution of societies will inevitably tend toward that best form. The collapse of the Soviet empire shortly after the publication of his initial essay seemed to dramatically confirm his predictions as did an impressive wave of democratization that followed in its aftermath. Since then the rise of theocratic Islamism and a socialist backlash against democratic liberalism have called his thesis into question. What does Fukuyama think now? Read this interview in the Christian Science Monitor and find out.

RELATED:

Michael Moynihan has a nice essay over at Reason.com on the continuing historical debate over the end of the Soviet empire.

Twenty years ago this month... the Berlin Wall, that monument to the barbarism of the Soviet experiment, was finally breached. The countries held captive by Moscow began their long road to economic and cultural recovery, and to reunification with liberal Europe. But in the West, where Cold War divisions defined politics and society for 40 years, the moment was not greeted as a welcome opportunity for intellectual reconciliation, for fact-checking decades of exaggerations and misperceptions. Instead, then as now, despite the overwhelming volume of new data and the exhilaration of hundreds of millions finding freedom, the battle to control the Cold War narrative raged on unabated. Reagan haters and Reagan hagiographers, Sovietophiles and anti-communists, isolationists and Atlanticists, digested this massive moment in history, then carried on as if nothing much had changed....

And the debate continues today, and probably will indefinitely. I have often asserted that those who look to history as the final judge on the meaning of our experience will be frustrated. There is no such thing as an objective authority and that goes for historians as much as for contemporary pundits who write the "first draft" of history. All historical accounts, no matter how scholarly, are the products of ideology, expediency, and bias and history, rather than being an impartial judge or teacher of truth, is a continuing dialogue in which nothing is finally settled.

Orwell's 5 Rules for Effective Writing

From "Politics and the English Language". Read it here.

The short version:

1. Avoid cliches.

2. Use short words.

3. Cut out words you don't need.

4. Use active, not passive, verbs.

5. Avoid foreign words and jargon.

6. Feel free to break these rules.

Read a slightly longer version here.

Great rules if you are a telegrapher or a modernist author. Post-modernists use rule 6.

This Day In History

Happy Mole Day! No, I'm not referring to the little critters that drive gardeners crazy, but to the chemical term. It refers to a standard unit for measuring the amount of a pure substance.

The mole is defined as the amount of substance of a system that contains as many "elementary entities" (e.g. atoms, molecules, ions, electrons) as there are atoms in 12 g of carbon-12 (¹²C).^[1]. A mole has 6.0221415×10^23[6] atoms or molecules of the pure substance being measured. A mole will possess mass exactly equal to the substance's molecular/atomic weight in grams. Because of this, one can measure the number of moles in a pure substance by weighing it and comparing the result to its molecular/atomic weight.

From Wikipedia [here].

It's been a long, long time since I took chemistry [although I do recognize Avagadro's number in that mess] so I'm not sure just how to celebrate National Mole Day. It's something that chemists dreamed up. I suppose I'll just go out this evening and imbibe some chemicals. I urge you all to do the same.

And a very happy birthday to the World. According to Bishop James Ussher the world was created on this very day in 4004 BC, at precisely 9:oo in the morning.

And on this day in 1641 Felim O'Neill led a rebellion in Ulster that resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands [estimates range between 40,000 and 100,000] Protestants. People in Northern Ireland still remember him, some of them fondly. That's scary, but true.

And on this day in 1862 President Abraham Lincoln tramples civil liberties underfoot by suspending the writ of habeas corpus in the District of Columbia for any matters relating to military activities.

And on this day in 1956 the people of Hungary rose spontaneously in revolt against their Stalinst government. Throughout the country people formed militia units and attacked government officials. Many of those officials were killed, others imprisoned. At the same time political prisoners were released and a new political leadership promised free elections and withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. By the end of the month it seemed that Hungary had gained its freedom. It didn't last long, though. The Soviet Union invaded Hungary and crushed the revolt. Despite desperate pleas for assistance from the Hungarian patriots the Eisenhower administration, NATO and the United Nations did nothing. This was not, to say the least, America's finest hour.

Today is also the anniversary of the Marine Barracks bombing in Beirut, Lebanon. 237 U. S. Marines were killed in the blast and another 80 injured. President Ronald Reagan ordered the withdrawal of American forces from Lebanon, which only reinforced the conviction among Islamist radicals that America was, indeed, a weak horse. Another not-so-shining moment in our national history.

Happy Birthday to Michael Crichton [1942] and Johnny Carson [1925] two men who provided me and many millions of other people with lots of thrills, chills and laughter.

Back to the Savanna?

The recent spectacular publication in Science of data on Ardipithecus has shaken up the field of evolutionary anthropology and forced reconsideration of what was considered to be settled scientific consensus [see discussion here]. The last time that happened was about fifteen years ago when palaeobotanists disproved the, to that point, universally accepted "savanna theory" which argued that human bipedalism and associated traits resulted from movement out of the forests and into grassland environments [here]. Now two studies are published that restore the savanna hypothesis to some, if not all, of its earlier prominence.

Artifacts found in southeast Kenya show that hominins were living in savanna environments 2 mya, long after the emergence of obligate bipeds but possibly before the development of many associated traits like hairlessness which might represent adaptations to the grasslands environment [here]. No sooner had this emerged than another team reported that close analysis of wear marks on Australopithicene teeth showed that grasses formed a large part of their diets [here]. That would seem to suggest that early bipeds inhabited an environment in which grass was common.

So we apparently cannot completely dismiss the possibility that much of what makes us different from other closely related species is due to life on the savanna after all. All the nice neat models lie in shambles and things are getting really messy. That's good science.

This Day In History

Today is "National Nut Day". There is absolutely no reason to believe that it refers to you. Really! So quit acting that way. I mean it! Stop that!

On this day in 741 AD, Charles "The Hammer" Martel, hero of the Battle of Tours dies. He served as Mayor of the Palace under the Merovingian Kings of the Franks and was, at his death, the de facto ruler of France. He was one of the greatest military leaders of all time. During his life he revolutionized western warfare, conquered much of Western Europe, began the Reconquista, and established the foundation for the Carolingian Empire. His son was Pepin the Short, his grandson Charlemagne. Quite a legacy!

And on this day in 1746 the "College of New Jersey" was founded. We know it better as Princeton University. Currently it is 0-2 in league competition and 1-4 overall. Heck of a job, Tigers.

And on this day in 1836 Sam Houston, one of the most fascinating figures in our early history, was sworn in as the first President of the Republic of Texas.

Born in Virginia, Houston as a boy had moved to Tennessee and lived for a while among the Cherokee. Later he returned to White society and was in the process of setting himself up as a schoolteacher in Tennessee [despite being basically uneducated himself] when the War of 1812 broke out. He signed up to fight the British, served under Andrew Jackson, and at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend was wounded three times. Jackson was impressed and later hired Houston as an Indian agent overseeing the removal of the Cherokees from Tennessee to Arkansas. Houston's sympathies lay too much with the Indians and he didn't last long in that position. He then studied for and passed the bar, then ran successfully for Congress and in 1827 was elected Governor of Tennessee. His future seemed bright, but then he met a woman.

After a mysterious affair with a young woman Houston was forced into marriage. Then within a matter of weeks his wife left him. He then resigned his governorship, went back to live with the Cherokee, opened a trading post, was adopted into the tribe, and married an Indian woman [which technically made him a bigamist since his estranged wife and he were not divorced]. From there it was downhill. He took to drink, got involved in some questionable business deals, was arrested for assaulting one of his business partners, was convicted in civil court and fled the country for Mexico rather than pay the fine. His future seemed dark, but once again he pulled off a stunning reversal.

His Indian wife refused to accompany him so he left her behind. In Texas he got involved with the independence movement and when the revolution broke out he was given a military command and within a year became Commander in Chief of the Texican forces. After independence he was elected President of Texas twice, finally divorced his first wife and, at the age of 47 married a 21 year old woman. Third time was a charm. They had eight children.

After Texas was annexed in 1835 Houston was elected Senator and returned to Washington in triumph. Then in 1857 as sectional tensions rose he returned to Texas determined to keep it from leaving the Union. He was elected Governor in 1859 [the only person to have been elected governor of two different States] and worked to keep the State from seceding. He failed and in 1861, after Texas joined the Confederacy, was removed from office. After that he retired and devoted himself to Masonic activities. He was in poor health at that point and two years later he contracted pneumonia and died.

Quite a career, one that stands as testament to the extreme fluidity of early American society and to the amazing range of opportunities it afforded ambitious individuals. Sam Houston was a remarkable man living in a remarkable country.

And this day in 1844 followers of William Miller, a religious leader, gathered together to welcome the second coming of Jesus Christ. He didn't show up.

And on this day in 1918 the Spanish Influenza epidemic was raging. Both Baltimore and Washington ran out of coffins in which to bury the dead. Before it had run its course more than half a million people died in the United States. Globally mortality estimates range between 50 and 100 million people. The "Spanish Lady" probably killed more people than the "Black Death" of the Fourteenth Century.

And on this day in 1962 the Kennedy administration was blundering its way through the Cuban Missile Crisis. As a result of some spectacularly stupid covert activities engineered by the White House Fidel Castro, fearing yet another invasion, had invited the Soviets to send troops and missiles to his country. We had learned of the missile deployment as early as September and had hard proof of their existence early in October, but the adminstration dithered. Finally on the 22nd Kennedy went on TV to tell the American people about the missile threat, ordered a blockade of Cuba [technically an act of war] and placed the American military world-wide on high alert [DEFCON 3 -- we would go to DEFCON 2, for the only time in our history, on the following day]. I was living in Florida at the time and remember how scary it was to look up several times a day to see military jets flying over [to be continued].

More Science Hokum -- The Missing Link

Don't believe what you see on TV. This critter, Darwinis Massilae, discovered by reputable scientists and even endowed with a cute name, "Ida" [as all primate fossils seem to be] was hyped by no less a figure than David Attenborough as a direct ancestor of Homo Sapiens. Any real scientist knows that such claims are ridiculous -- even if a direct ancestor were to be found there would be no way of telling that it was directly on our line of descent -- but journalists, often abetted by academic careerists looking for headlines, keep pimping the concept. Well, as it turns out "Ida" is only remotely related to the hominin line of descent, but viewers of Attenborough's documentary are unlikely to know that. He kept calling her a "missing link".

Read about it here.

This Day In History

For all you blatherskites out there, today is "Babbling Day". So, for most of us on the inter-whatchamacallits, that means go out there and just behave the way we always do.

On this day in 1492 Cristopher Columbus "discovered" America. I wrote about this a few weeks ago [here] so I won't repeat myself.

And on this day in 1692 Willim Penn was deposed as Governor of Pennsylvania. His friendship with the Stuart monarchs did not stand him in good stead after they were driven from the throne and opened him to charges of being disloyal to the new Hanoverian monarchy. He also had some problems paying his debts that landed him in prison and almost cost him his proprietorship. He had a complicated life.

On this day in 1792 USS Constitution "Old Ironsides" was launched in Boston.

Today is the anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar, fought in 1805. It is perhaps the most important, certainly the most celebrated, naval battle in British history. In it Lord Horatio Nelson, directing battle from the deck of his flagship HMS Victory, was slain, but lived long enough to see his fleet utterly destroy a combined French and Spanish fleet. In the battle the Franco-Spanish fleet lost 22 of 33 ships of the line. The British lost none. This overwhelming victory confirmed British naval superiority, forestalled any attempts on the part of France to invade England, and gave the U.K. a decisive advantage in the Napoleonic conflicts. Henceforth Britain could without interference tap the commercial resources of the entire Atlantic world and the rest of its far-flung empire. The result was that with each succeeding year Britain became wealthier while France, cut off from global trade networks, was forced to adopt a command economy that drained its commercial resources. Britain could afford to fund Napoleon's antagonists on the European continent. In addition Britain could, and did, easily move troops to attack any point on Napoleon's periphery and resupply them. After Trafalgar Napoleon was doomed, but it would take another ten years for him to realize it.

This was not a good day for Native Americans, but then what one was?

On this day in 1837 Billy Powell was captured and imprisoned. Never heard of him, you say? Billy was better known by his Indian name, Osceola [which translates loosely as "loud drunk"] the leader of Seminole resistance in Florida. This brought an end to the Second Seminole War and ended Indian resistance in the Southeast. Osceola's English name points up an interesting and important aspect of the Indian wars in the East -- many combatants were of mixed ancestry. Osceola, for instance, was of Indian, English, Irish, and Scottish descent and was raised in a mixed community. What is more, at various times in his life Osceola was affiliated with the Muscogee, the Creek, and the Seminole Indians. This speaks to a cultural fluidity that is seldom recognized by historians who try to shoehorn these conflicts into a simple moralistic narrative of racial antagonism and oppression. Reality was far more complex.

And on this day in 1867 the first round of the Medicine Lodge Treaties were signed. This complex set of treaties involved representatives of the US government and of the Kiowa, Comanche, Plains Apache, and some elements of the Cheyenne, and Arapaho nations. In them the Indians agreed to cede traditional lands in exchange for reservations in Oklahoma and life on the dole. As it turned out the Treaty was pretty much of a sham. The signatories for the Indian tribes were immediately challenged by the leadership of their own communities and the terms of the treaties were never ratified. Conflict continued for years thereafter. On the US side Federal agents and territorial [and later State] officials systematically defrauded the Indians that did accept the treaty terms. Eventually the Indians carried their case all the way to the Supreme Court which in 1903 decided that they had no protection under the Bill of Rights because they, by signing the treaty, had become "wards of the state".

Happy Birthday to Samuel Taylor Coleridge [1772] -- "In Xanadu did Kubla Kahn a stately pleasure-dome decree...."

And also to Alfred Nobel, the prize guy [1833]; "Dizzy Gillespie, the best!!!! [1917]; and Ursula Kroeber LeGuin [1929].

And on this day in 1980 the Phillies won their first World Series Championship ever [after 98 years of futility]. I remember it well.

Demise Of the Dollar

Niall Ferguson, economic historian extraordinaire, predicts the imminent demise of the dollar. [He] warns that China's love affair with the dollar is fading faster than anyone realizes.

Check it out here.

Ferguson is always provocative, but his arguments are solid and backed up by a deep understanding of economic history. I would not dismiss him, although in this case I am by no means convinced he is right.

Sarah and Oprah -- Together at Last

You just knew it was going to happen.

Newsday reports:

"In a world exclusive, Oprah Winfrey will interview former Alaska
governor Sarah Palin for an episode of "The Oprah Winfrey Show" to air Monday, Nov. 16, 2009. Winfrey and Palin will meet for the very first time on the episode, which will mark Palin's first interview to discuss her upcoming book, "Going Rogue: An American Life" and her first-ever appearance on the "Oprah" show.

Read it here.

I'll be watching.

This Day In History

It's only unofficial, but who cares about that? Today is National Brandied Fruit Day. So get yourself some fruit, some brandy..., ok, a lot of brandy..., and get marinated.

On this day in 1818 the Anglo-American Convention of 1818 was signed. It settled a lot of long-standing issues between the UK and the USA over fishing rights, boundary disputes [between the USA and Canada] and the status of the far Western territories.

People forget that for a century after independence our greatest international foe was Britain and much of our foreign and military policy was aimed at keeping the Brits from expanding their influence in North America. In 1812-1815 open warfare had broken out, in large part because of friction between Canada and the USA. This treaty was an attempt to find a long-term solution to this perennial set of problems. It set the northern boundary of the United States at the 49th Parallel running between the Lake of the Woods and the Rockies. By its terms Britain and the US would jointly administer and settle the territory we called Oregon [they called it Columbia]. The US gave up claims to southern Alberta [the last major territorial concession by the US] and the Brits gave up claims to Ruperts Land south of the Parallel. And lest we forget, the Brits agreed to compensate American slaveholders for slaves that had been freed during the War of 1812.

Commentators often suggest that this convention solved the major border problems between the US and Canada for all time, but it didn't. The main theater of conflict just shifted westward to the Oregon territory.

And on this day in 1947 HUAC [the House Committee on Un-American Activities] began hearings on the influence of communists in Hollywood. There is an enormous amount of mythology surrounding this committee and its investigations.

First of all, it was not a Republican creation. Through the 1930s bipartisan House committees had looked into both Communist and German influence in America. In 1938 a special investigating committee was set up under the chairmanship of Rep. Martin Dies, Jr. [D, Texas]. At first it mostly investigated Nazis and other German immigrants, then the KKK, but committee member John Rankin [D, Mississippi] protested, arguing that the Klan was "an old American institution". It then shifted its focus to investigate Communist infiltration of New Deal agencies and non-governmental Communist "Popular Front" organizations that were proliferating in immigrant communities on both coasts. As it turned out, even the committee itself was not immune to infiltration. Samuel Dickstein [D, New York], the committee Vice-Chairman, was named in NKVD documents as a Soviet agent. You don't get any more Anti-American than that.

In 1945 the Committee was reconstituted as a standing committee under the chairmanship of Edward J. Hart [D, New Jersey]. It launched a number of investigations into Communist infiltrataion of American institutions, including government agencies. The most famous of these was an investigation, spearheaded by a young California representative, Richard Nixon [R], that resulted in the prosecution of Alger Hiss, a high ranking State Department official. The investigation made Nixon famous and jump-started his rise to national office. In 1947 the committee scheduled nine days of hearings on Communist influence in Hollywood. Several leading figures in the film industry were called to testify. Ten of the witnesses who were called before the committee refused to answer any questions put to them and were cited for "contempt of Congress". These were the much lionized "Hollywood Ten". Hollywood lefties have ever since treated them as martyrs. At no time did Joseph McCarthy have any direct involvement with the committee. McCarthy, after all, was a Senator and this was a House committee.

And on this date in 1973 President Richard Nixon fired Special Prosecutor [and Kennedy acolyte] Archibald Cox and accepted the resignations of Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Assistant Attorney General William Ruckelshaus. This was branded by the press as the "Saturday Night Massacre" and was an important development in the Watergate scandals. It led directly to numerous calls from Democrat leaders for Nixon's impeachment. It would not be long before he would return to private life.

Bad Stats, not Bad Teaching

I have complained before that many "scientists" unknowingly arrive at erroneous conclusions because they are incompetent at statistical analysis. Bill Gates advisers on education reform are no exception. After spending two billion dollars on research the Gates Foundation has arrived at an explanation for poor student performance -- bad teachers. The key finding:

"Research shows that there is only half as much variation in student achievement between schools as there is among classrooms in the same school. If you want your child to get the best education possible, it is actually more important to get him assigned to a great teacher than to a great school."

Read about it here.

Sounds good, doesn't it? An emphasis on teacher skills leads naturally to a whole slew of policy prescriptions and Gates obviously wants to put them into place, after all he's spent 2 billion dollars coming up with them.

But not so fast. John Hawks, who really does understand statistics, points to an obvious flaw in the Gates analysis.

So let's say a typical elementary school has 20 students in each class and 4 classes in each grade level. What Gates is saying is that the variance in means between samples of 20 students within a school is greater than the variance in means between samples of 80 students among schools.

Uhh...the standard error in a sample of 20 is twice the standard error in a sample of 80. Seems like Gates' point is pretty easily explained by statistics without blaming the teachers.

Read it here.

Nice catch! I guess that the "scientists" who have been spending Bill Gates' money skipped class the day they covered ANOVA in Stat 101, or maybe they just had a bad teacher.

This Day In History

Today is "Evaluate Your Life Day". Of course that assumes you have one. I don't.

On this day in 439 AD the Vandals, led by Gaiseric, captured Carthage in North Africa [Tunisia today]. People today forget that the Vandals [an East German people who have gotten really horrible press over the centuries] were once a Mediterranean sea power based in Africa. For nearly a century they controlled much of North Africa until finally defeated by Roman forces under the command of Belisarius in 533 AD.

On this day in 1739 a British sea captain, Robert Jenkins, stood before Parliament and delivered an impassioned statement recounting his bad treatment by Spanish coast guards. At the end of his speech he held aloft his severed ear which had been cut off by the Spanish troops who had boarded his ship. This dramatic gesture may or may not [probably not] have led Parliament to declare war on Spain but the conflict has ever since been known as the "War of Jenkins' Ear". It raged for eleven years and became embroiled in a more general struggle, the "War of the Austrian Succession". The real point of issue was Spain's attempt to control the sale of slaves in Latin America.

Here's a biggie. On this day in 1781 Major General Lord Charles Cornwallis surrendered to General George Washington and the Count de Rochambeau at Yorktown. This effectively ended the military phase of the American Revolution.

And on this day in 1812 Napoleon began his retreat from Moscow. It is one of the most disastrous military campaigns in history. There is a famous graphical representation by Charles Joseph Minard illustrating how the march on Moscow and subsequent retreat affected the French forces. You can view it here.

And speaking of enormous disasters, on this day in 1949 the People's Republic of China was formally proclaimed.

And on this day in 1879 Thomas A. Edison held the first public demonstration of the electric light bulb. Life would never be the same.

And on this day in 1932 Philly Chuck Klein won the National League MVP. Way to go, Chuck.

Perspectives on Human Evolution

Some of the best discussion to be found on the web is at "Bloggingheads". A dialogue I found particularly interesting over the weekend was conducted between a population geneticist [Razib Kahn] and an evolutionary anthropologist [John Hawks]. Here's the first segment which discusses basic issues in human evolution and then spends some time on the Flores Hobbit.



And here's the second segment that considers the recent publication in Science of a new species of hominin, Ardipithecus.



These guys are really good. Fascinating stuff.

Hawk Mountain

There's a really nice article in the travel section of tomorrow's [Oct 18, 2009] Baltimore Sun on Hawk Mountain. Check it out here.

Here are a few pictures I've taken from up on the mountain. The fall migration is in full swing, so head on up to the sanctuary and don't forget to take your cameras.

Ted Turner on Poverty

"You know, if you economize and don’t buy new airplanes or long-range jets, or that sort of thing, you can get by on a billion or two.”

Read it here.

Shake Your Breasts

Mark Steyn keeps us up to date on the latest in the application of Sharia Law.

The insurgent group Al Shabaab has sent gunmen into the streets of Mogadishu to round up any women who appear to have a firm bust, residents claimed yesterday.

The women are then inspected to see if the firmness is natural, or if it is the result of wearing a bra. If they are found wearing a bra, they are ordered to remove it and shake their breasts....

Read it here.

This Day In History

Today is "Dictionary Day" so here goes:

dic⋅tion⋅ar⋅y

–noun, plural -ar⋅ies.

1.

a book containing a selection of the words of a language, usually arranged alphabetically, giving information about their meanings, pronunciations, etymologies, inflected forms, etc., expressed in either the same or another language; lexicon; glossary: a dictionary of English; a Japanese-English dictionary.

2.	a book giving information on particular subjects or on a particular class of words, names, or facts, usually arranged alphabetically: a biographical dictionary; a dictionary of mathematics.

3.	Computers. a. a list of codes, terms, keys, etc., and their meanings, used by a computer program or system. b. a list of words used by a word-processing program as the standard against which to check the spelling of text entered.

---

Origin:
1520–30; < class="ital-inline">dictiōnārium, dictiōnārius < class="ital-inline">dictiōn- word (see diction ) + -ārium, -ārius -ary

Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2009.

On this day in 1701 a group of New England Congregationalists founded "The Collegiate School of Killingworth" as a conservative alternative to Harvard College. Today the school is known as "Yale University".

And on this day in 1793 "Prisoner No. 280", the "Widow Capet", better known as Marie Antoinette, was beheaded. The one thing that most people remember about her was that she was supposed to have said "Let them eat cake" but she didn't. Jean Jacques Rousseau, made that up. Anyone who closely follows today's partisan politics can sympathize with her tragic life. Read about it here.

And on this day in 1849 Avery College, for the education of free Blacks, was founded in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. You can read about it here.

And on this day in 1859 anti-slavery fanatic and domestic terrorist John Brown led a force of 21 men in an assault on the federal armory at Harper's Ferry (then VA). He thought this would provoke a slave uprising and race war in America. It didn't. Instead a troop of marines led by Robert E. Lee captured him. He was tried by the State of Virginia, convicted of treason, and hanged by the neck until he was dead. Anti-slavery politicians and intellectuals made a martyr of him while Democrats claimed that he was the true face of the Republican Party. Historians agree that the controversy surrounding his trial and death was important in exacerbating the tensions that led to the Civil War. A popular song commemorating his death ("John Brown's Body") became a national sensation and was the basis for Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic".

And on this day in 1909 the Pittsburgh Pirates won the World Series, beating Detroit 4 games to 3.

And on this day in 1916 eugenics fanatic Margaret Sanger opened her first birth control clinic in Brooklyn, NY. Make of that what you will.

And on this day in 1934 a strong candidate for the worst human being ever to live, Mao Tse Tung, began the "long march" that brought Communists to power in China.

And on this day in 1978 Karol Cardinal Wojtyla, a Pole, was elected Pope and took the name John-Paul II. He was the first non-Italian Pope since 1523.

Happy Birthday to a gaggle of writers: Noah Webster (1758), Oscar Wilde (1854), Eugene O'Neill (1888), Cleanth Brooks (1906), Kathleen Winsor (1919) and Gunther "I vas not a Nazi" (but he vas) Grass (1927).

False Modesty

Toby Harnden, writing in the Telegraph, notes that protestations to the contrary Obama seems to be very pleased with himself for winning the Nobel Prize:

it’s become abundantly clear that Obama isn’t even faintly sheepish about the award. Yeah, there’s all the usual guff about him being humbled, it’s about us not him blah blah blah. But this can’t mask the fact that he’s as pleased as punch about landing the prize. He’s lapping it up and seems to view it – sadly and mistakenly – as a major validation.

I would not be surprised to learn that the White House was pressuring the Nobel Committee to make the award. Of course there's not evidence yet of any such manipulation, but I certainly wouldn't put it past these clowns. As Harnden notes the White House misses no opportunity to remind people that Obama won the award.

Read the whole thing here.

Sheesh!

This Day In History

On this day in 1529 Ottoman armies led by Suleiman ("the Magnificent") finally retreated from the walls of Vienna. For more than a century Muslim armies had relentlessly attacked and conquered Christian realms in Eastern Europe. This was their first significant defeat. Historians are divided as to whether Suleiman intended the conquest of the entire continent or whether he simply saw Vienna as an easy prize after having conquered Hungary. Either way this marked the maximum expansion of the Ottoman Empire into Europe. Christianity would survive and eventually turn back the tide of Muslim conquest in the East as it already had done in Spain.

On this date in 1878 Thomas Alva Edison founded the Edison Electric Light Company. This company in the 1880's was combined with other Edison business ventures under the name "Edison General Electric" and eventually, when combined with other independent companies, emerged as the General Electric Corporation we all know and love today. Well..., maybe not love exactly.

Thomas Edison is one of the most fascinating figures in American history. Born into poverty, homeschooled [he only had three months formal education], and lacking any marketable skills, he achieved success through hard work, relentless self-improvement, and a fascination with practical science. He was an obsessive tinkerer. When as a young man in the 1860's he secured a job as a telegrapher he immediately began experiments to improve the technology. This led to the first of his patents; by the time his career ended he held 1093 of them, including patents on the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and the first practical long-lasting light bulb. His greatest contribution, however, was his creation at Menlo Park, New Jersey of an industrial research laboratory that systematized the process of invention. It is not too much to say that he had a greater positive impact on the lives of more people around the world than any political figure in our history.

On this day in 1894 a French artillery officer, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, was accused of selling military secrets to Germany. His trial and conviction became one of the most famous political dramas of modern French (and European, for that matter) history. Dreyful, it turned out, had been falsely charged and his trial had been a sham. When evidence clearing him emerged the Army had tried to cover it up. The whole thing, charges and counter-charges, was fought out in the popular press, largely due to a series of exposes written by Emil Zola, who rode this story to international fame and fortune. Argument centered on the fact that Dreyfus was Jewish and evolved into a general discussion of anti-semitism, militarism, and the role of Jews and the military in French life. Some historians credit the "Dreyfus Affair" with playing an important role in fostering modern anti-semitism. Others note it's contribution to the emergence of a coherent class of intellectuals who functioned as critics of the society and culture that sustained them.

Happy birthday to three of my least-favorite intellectuals: Friedrich Nietzsche [1844]; John Kenneth Galbraith [1908], and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr [1917]. Don't get me started....

And, most importantly, on this day in 1933 the Philadelphia Eagles played their first NFL game. They lost to the Giants 56-0.

I was in a mellow mood tonight so I fired up some Al Jarreau on You Tube and settled in for some nostalgic easy listening, then I came across this. I knew that Jarreau was a religious guy but I had never heard him do gospel standards. Here he is singing "Go Tell It On The Mountain".



Aaaaah! Now wasn't that nice? You bet it was!

Sarah Won't Go Away Quietly

Don Surber reports on Sarah Palin's new initiative. Read about it here and keep your eyes peeled for announcements.

Shifting Paradigms in Population Studies

There's a terrific post over at Dienekes' blog in which he systematically traces the changing consensus view on European origins over the course of the past century. An invasion [arrows on the map] model was replaced by a cultural diffusion model, which was supplanted by a demic diffusion model, which was replaced by a paleolithic persistence model, and now today we have come full circle to the current position.

What does seem certain... is that dramatic events took place starting at the Neolithic, and that modern Europeans trace their ancestry principally to Neolithic and post-Neolithic migrants, and not to the post-glacial foragers who inhabited the continent.

which is essentially to restate the old multiple invasions [arrows on a map] understanding. It's been a long strange journey that has brought us back to where we started, and it's not over yet.

Read it here.

What this points out is the way in which "science" operates as one consensual view is replaced time and again by another and yet another. In other words, scientific consensus is constantly changing and scientific authority is a foundation of shifting sands. Only a fool would build a public policy structure on it.

More Science Follies -- The Collapsing Warmist Narrative

The tide is finally turning -- the media are at last beginning to question the global-warming narrative being pushed by the environmental alarmists. Here's a report from ClimateDepot.

It appears at long last that media's faith is waning. Appeals to authority about the alleged global warming “consensus” are now being met with a healthy dose of skepticism by increasing large portions of the mainstream media. Statements like UN IPCC lead author Kevin Trenberth that the UN IPCC "has spoken" no longer have the comforting effect on many key members of the journalistic flock.
....

A steady stream of peer-reviewed studies, a continued lack of global warming, real world data and scientists continuing to dissent, have finally moved major establishment media outlets to report that the debate not only is "not over" but that skeptics may have been correct all along. [Note: Journalists are now sensing what Atmospheric physicist James A. Peden, formerly of the Space Research and Coordination Center in Pittsburgh, warned about in 2008. “Many [scientists] are now searching for a way to back out quietly (from promoting warming fears), without having their professional careers ruined," Peden said.]

The estimable Tim Blair points, for instance, to the Daily Mail, formerly a warmist organ, that now presents this balanced story.

This Day In History

Today is "Be Bald and Free Day" so go out there, shave off your hair, and experience true freedom.

On this day in 1066 AD William, Duke of Normandy, defeated King Harold Godwinson at the Battle of Hastings. This was the decisive battle in the Norman Conquest of Britain. This was the last successful invasion of England and it had enormous impact on English elite culture. Before Hastings the dominant influence had been Scandinavian, afterward it was French.

And on this day in 1322 Robert the Bruce of Scotland defeated King Edward II of England thus forcing him to recognize Scotland's independence. Eventually the two kingdoms would be united, but under a Scottish, not an English monarch.

And on this day in 1773 the First Continental Congress adopted the "Declaration and Resolves", one of the fundamental documents of American political culture. It sets out in specific terms the rights to which Americans were entitled including rights to "life, liberty, and property" and the right to representation. Read the whole text here.

And on this day in 1884 George Eastman patented the "roll film" that allowed the efficient recording of sequential images on a chemically-treated strip of material. This technique made possible the invention, four years later, of the motion picture camera and soon thereafter the emergence of an international film industry. Art and life would never be the same. Eastman went on to found Kodak and become one of the great philanthropists of his day.

On this day in 1912 former President Theodore Roosevelt (and current candidate for re-election on the Progressive Party ticket) was on his way to a speaking event in Milwaukee when a shot rang out. The bullet struck Roosevelt in the chest but penetrated only three inches because it passed through his eyeglass case and a copy of the speech he intended to give. The shooter, John Schank, was immediately apprehended and Roosevelt, noting that he was not coughing up blood, refused to seek medical attention. Instead he delivered a ninety-minute speech during which he said, with reference to the shooting, that "it takes more than that to kill a bull moose". The press had a field day with the story and the "Bull Moose" became fixed in the public mind as the symbol of both Roosevelt and the Party. When he finally did submit to medical examination doctors determined that it would be too risky to remove the bullet so they left it in place. Roosevelt carried it in his body for the rest of his life. I don't know about you, but I find TR to be a pretty scary guy.

And on this date in 1917 Mata Hari [real name Margaretha Geertruida Zelle], an exotic dancer and paramour of many of Europe's most powerful men, was executed in Paris for being a German spy. Debate still rages around her. Was she really a spy or was she the innocent dupe of a French spymaster who himself was a double-spy? I get a headache thinking about things like that. She was not a great beauty, but men certainly found her interesting and she led an exotic life. Her fame was only enhanced by her death and the subsequent mysterious disappearance of her body. In death she became one of the most famous females of the twentieth century and the archetype for the femme fatale. You can read about her here. Take some time to do so -- she was, as they say, interesting.

Happy Birthday to William Penn [1644], Dwight D. Eisenhower [1890] and Lillian Gish [1896]. And a very special "Happy Birthday" to my wife. Today is an embarrassment of riches -- so much could be written about any of these fascinating people -- but I'm limited in time and space and so must call a halt here.

Neat Site -- Presidential Inaugurals

Check out this site. It presents the full transcripts and videos [if available] of presidential inaugural addresses. And (this is what makes it neat) it does a world cloud analysis of each speech. It's fun to watch the emphases change over time.

HT -- Twisted by Knaves

More Talk, Talk, Talk

Oh you just knew this was going to happen. Despite all the assurances to the contrary issuing from the administration Russia is backing away from any effective sanctions on Iran.

From AFP:

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that for the moment it would be wrong to talk about a fourth round of UN Security Council sanctions on Iran.

"Threats of new sanctions and pressure against Iran under current circumstances are counterproductive," Lavrov said.

Clinton said world powers were "actively pursuing the engagement track" with Iran but that in "in the absence of significant progress... we will be seeking to rally inernational opinion behind additional sanctions."

The top US diplomat denied she had come to Russia to ask Russia for favours: "We reviewed the situation and where it stood," she said.

Russia has the most robust relations with Iran of any major world power, has supplied Tehran with military hardware and is building the country's first nuclear power plant in the southern city of Bushehr.

Read it here.

This is the way it always goes with the "international community". Talk, talk, talk leads only to more talk, talk, talk and nothing is ever decided. The "process" becomes not just the means to an end but the end itself. Unless, of course, some "cowboy" decides that the time has come for unilateral action.

This is the fatal flaw of the liberal transnationalist approach to world affairs. Nations have interests and goals that are, in the end, mutually exclusive and all the talk, talk, talk, until the end of time will not change that. What is worse, expanding the number of participants in the dialogue simply makes agreement even more remote.

This Day In History

Today is International Skeptics Day so go out there and question everything. Start with yourself..., lessee now..., I think I think, therefore I think I am..., or maybe not. How can I be sure? Then move on to less interesting subjects. Can I really believe what Obama says about the personal and social benefits of government run health insurance?

On this day in 54 AD, Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus became emperor of Rome. There is no truth to the traditions that he was the Antichrist or that he fiddled while Rome burned. Historians are not all that sure that he was even a bad emperor. He did get some really bad press though from aristocratic chroniclers, but he appears to have been quite popular with commoners.

If you were one of the Knights Templar in France in 1307 today was a very bad day for you. King Philip just ordered that all of you be rounded up and tortured to death to pay for your sins, and to give Dan Brown something to write about someday.

On this day in 1775 the Continental Congress decides that if they are going to get serious about this war with Britain they will need a navy. They ordered the construction of two warships, and thus was born the United States Navy.

And on this day in 1812 at the Battle of Queenstown Heights in Ontario British forces turned back a United States invading army.

On this day in 1890 Conrad Richter, Pulitzer Prize Winning novelist, was born in Pine Grove, Pennsylvania. He worked all levels of the publishing world and could write anything. He wrote for and edited newspapers, wrote for the Saturday Evening Post; his work appeared in numerous pulp magazines spanning subjects as diverse as ghost stories, mysteries, science fiction, romance, and westerns. He also produced several historical novels. Two of them, The Sea of Grass and The Light In the Forest were made into films; another The Town was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. I remember as a teenager going to see Light in the Forest in the theater and being completely mesmerized by Carol Lynley, who played one of the leads. Click here to see why.

And on this day in 1903 the Boston Pilgrims defeated the Pittsburgh Pirates in the first World Series five games to three.

And on this day in 1925 the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, was born. Whether you agreed with her or not, you always knew one thing -- she would never, ever go wobbly on you.

Two Jazz greats, Art Tatum and Ray Brown, were born on this day [in 1910 and 1926 respectively].

Here's a sample of Tatum's amazing technique. He was universally acknowledged as the greatest jazz pianist of his time. [Commentary by Chick Corea, not a bad keyboard artist himself]

And here's an example of Ray Brown's work. Ray was a Pittsburgh kid and as a young man was a fixture of the Pittsburgh Jazz Scene. He then went on to play with Tatum, Diz, Bird, and Oscar Peterson. He backed Frank Sinatra, Nancy Wilson, Billy Eckstein, and Sarah Vaughan. Along with Milt Jackson and Kenny Clarke he formed the legendary MJQ [Modern Jazz Quartet]. He was married to Ella Fitzgerald!!!! He promoted the careers of Quincy Jones and Diana Krall. You get the picture -- everybody of note in the Jazz universe wanted to work with Ray Brown. He was that good.

And, saving the best for last, on this day in 1960 Bill Mazeroski led off the ninth inning with a home run over the scoreboard at Forbes Field to beat the Yankees 10-9 in the seventh game of the World Series. I don't care what they say -- to me that still stands as the greatest baseball game ever played.

Over at the World Affairs Journal Jagdish Bhagwati has a stirring defense of capitalism against Joseph Stiglitz and others who pronounced its collapse in the current round of economic disruptions. Read it and learn here.

The Good President Speaks

Don Surber has excerpts from President Bush's recent address to a religious conference in Tennessee. Check it out here.

UPDATE:

I miss Bush.

So does the Anchoress who notes that people who proudly proclaim their hatred of Bush are quite willing to brand anyone who criticizes Obama a "hater". She wonders why those "enlightened" souls on the Left who hated Bush because of questionable election practices, toleration of torture, rendition and indefinite detentions, "wiretapping", deficit spending, exposing the identity of a CIA agent, basing policy on faulty intelligence, or because of his refusal to sign on to the Kyoto protocol, do not absolutely loathe and despise Presidents Obama and Clinton, because they did or are doing much the same or worse.

Her point, and it is a good one, is that Bush was hated not on matters of substance but on style. She writes:

In reviewing all this, it does seem to me that this passionate “hate” of George W. Bush is based not on substance but on style. Obama swagger is cool; Bush swagger was arrogant. Obama arrogance is “confidence.” Bush confidence was “ignorance.” Obama’s misspeaks and gaffes are ignored, Bush’s were magnified. Obama looks good. Bush looked goofy. All that “hate” seems to be part of an adolescent values system that is willing to overlook a multitude of sins as long as you get to belong to the jock/cheerleader clique, and not the Nerd/AV gang.

Well said. This is something that needs to be said. George W. Bush was a far better president than either his predecessor or, to this point, his successor.

Read it here.

Headlines From Drudge

Here are the current headline links on the Drudge Report:

BBC: What happened to global warming?
US CHILL MAP...
Montana cold breaks records...
Record Cold temps in Idaho threaten potato crops...
Austria: Earliest snowfall in history set to break records...
Man has microphone cut off after asking about 'errors' in Gore film...
Video...
Soros says aims to invest $1 Billion in green tech...
Greenpeace activists clamber on to Houses of Parliament in climate change protest...
Energy crisis postponed, new gas rescues the world...

Do you see a theme emerging here? I do. The long overdue rise of skepticism on the subject of global warming in the press and the frantic efforts of alarmists to suppress the skeptics. Unfortunately, it might be too late. Congress may well pass a cap and trade bill or energy tax before reality fully sets in.

This Day In History

The government has officially designated today to be Columbus Day, marking Cristobal Colon's "discovery" of America, but on this day in history he was still at sea and didn't make landfall until the 21st. So, in the interest of accuracy I will continue to celebrate "Old Farmer's Day". This too is just an approximation -- there has long been a tradition of communities setting aside a day in October to honor the American farmer. The 12th seems to be the most common day so designated, and I'll follow the custom. So, find yourself a really old farmer and give him or her a hug or a handshake, whichever you deem appropriate.

I might as well write a bit about Columbus, since everybody else does. In recent decades he has become a very controversial figure as left wing critics have assiduously tried to destroy his reputation. Suffice it to say that he deserves neither the adulation he was accorded by many early writers nor the venomous hatred recently directed toward him. He was a man who conceived of and accomplished extraordinary things that had immense consequences for world history.

Columbus was by no means the first person to "discover" the New World -- there had been a Viking colony in Newfoundland five centuries before him, and it is likely that fishermen had been visiting the Grand Banks throughout the High Middle Ages [recent claims that the Chinese had discovered Amercia are bogus] -- but his voyage had consequences far greater than any other. It led to permanent European settlement in the Americas and that was one of the most significant developments in the history of the world. The story of his voyages is well known. I will confine myself to a few comments to correct the distorted accounts that currently prevail in schoolbooks and the mass media.

Scholarly consensus is that Columbus was Italian, from Genoa, sailing in the service of the Crown of Castile. There is no plausible evidence to suggest, as some writers have asserted, that he was Jewish, Portuguese, Catalan, or Norwegian or any other nationality.

Certainly Columbus and his men were extremely brutal toward the natives they encountered, but this was not an unusual practice either in Europe or in the Americas. The people he first encountered were Arawak Indians [Tainos or Lukayan] whom he described as being peaceful. Over time Columbus and his successors kidnapped, killed, and enslaved these people with the result that they eventually went extinct. But we should contextualize these actions.

The Arawak were already being driven toward extinction by other Indians in the Caribbean -- the Caribs, to be specific. Caribs regularly raided Arawak communities, killing all the men and taking the women as slaves. Consequently, the Arawaks were rapidly declining at the time Columbus arrived. And the Arawaks turned out not to be as peaceful as Columbus first described them. He left a settlement in Hispanola when he returned to Spain, and when he came back on his second voyage the "Chrismas Fort" settlement had been destroyed and its inhabitants slaughtered by local Indians. After that, the Spaniards did indeed exterminate all Indian communities in the islands that they thought might be a threat to their rule.

It should also be noted that Columbus was also harsh toward Spanish settlers, many of whom he had killed when they protested his actions and policies. He was certainly an incompetent and harsh governor who was eventually removed and imprisoned by the Crown, but that is not the same as being the genocidal monster some popular accounts have portrayed.

It is not accurate to suggest, as some writers have, that Columbus introduced slavery and genocide to the New World. To do so is just an ahistorical exercise in cheap moralism, applying twenty-first Century standards to the past. Both enslavement and the systematic extermination of enemy peoples were being widely practiced by the native inhabitants of the Americas long before any Europeans arrived.

It is not true that Columbus or any of his patrons or associates thought the world was flat. That idea was an invention of Washington Irving in his 1828 biography. Where Columbus was wrong was in assuming that the earth was much smaller than it actually is, but contemporary scholars were well aware of the real dimensions of the globe.

It is a matter of some controversy whether or not Columbus introduced syphilis to Europe. What is certain is that he and his successors did bring a number of epidemic diseases with them to America and that these devastated native populations.

Enough, already.

A couple of Pennsylvania references:

On this day in 1850 Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania (now called Medical College of Pennsylvania [MCP, get it?]) was founded. It was the first women's medical school in America. And four years to the day later Lincoln University [originally the Ashmun Institute] was founded. All in all, it has been a good day for women and minorities.

More Pennsylvania Pictures -- Fog In the Valley

Early in the morning fog rolled up from the Schuylkill and filled the valley. It made for some very nice photo opportunities as the sun broke over the mountain.




Facing back the other way the moon was still high in the sky and stood out clearly in the still dark sky.



Later in the day I wandered out again with my camera. Here's a bit of what I saw.




Ah yes, Fall is finally here in full.

Latest from the Boys

Jackie and Dunlap respond to Obama's Nobel Prize:

The Decline of Scientific Authority [continued]

John Hawks makes reference to one of my pet peeves -- the promiscuous use of statistics by scientists who lack a firm grounding in the discipline. There's far too much quick and dirty analysis going on out there by "scientists" seeking to produce splashy results for publication, and lest you think this is not important, much of this shady stuff is being used by politicians and administrators as a basis for formulating policy. GIGO = very bad public policy.

Hawks is talking specifically about migration studies seeking to reconstruct past population movements based on genetic variation in current populations when he notes: a routine problem in "modern human origins" research [is] -- alternative models are rarely evaluated, and people almost never take a null hypothesis testing approach.

Read it here.

Shoddy practice is a problem not just in anthropology. It permeates scientific inquiry and is most problematic in areas such as medical, dietary, and environmental studies where big money, politics, and ideology intrude on the investigatory process. The peer review process that is supposed to guard against it has completely broken down. Journalism trumpets uncritically the results of badly flawed studies. Non-specialists are at a loss as to what or who to believe. [here]

The essential conceit of modern scientific inquiry is that a credentialed, self-policing "community of competence" could provide policy makers with unbiased authoritative information. That clearly is no longer the case, if it ever was.

This Day In History

Today is National Angel Food Cake Day..., mmmm, mmmm, mmmm. So find yourself an angel and feed her some cake.

On this day in 732 AD Charles "the Hammer" Martel led a force of Franks and Burgundians against a Muslim army led by Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi. Tradition long had it that Martel's victory over the invading Muslims marked one of the great turning points in history -- the high watermark of Islamic conquest -- and Martel was heralded as the saviour of Christian Europe. Many modern historians agree with this assessment. Others argue that it was a minor defeat for a powerful Umayyad Caliphate, simply indicating that it was over-extended as it sought conquests north of the Pyrenees and would have had to stabilize its frontiers anyway. The long subsequent Islamic retreat from Western Europe, they argue, had more to do with internal stresses than with Christian military actions. Muslim historians used to consider the battle to be a great disaster, but now mostly consider it to be insignificant, preferring instead to focus on contemporary successful Islamic invasions of Christian realms in the Balkans. Regardless of its importance in the continuing conflict between Christians and Muslims, the Battle of Tours was of great significance because it laid the basis for the Carolingian Empire that dominated Western Europe for centuries thereafter.

This one's for Larry. On this day in 1845 the U. S. Naval Academy was founded at Annapolis, Maryland.

And on this day in 1911 revolution broke out in China, leading to the abdication of Pu-Yi, the last of the Qing emperors (he was six years old at the time) and the proclamation of the Chinese Republic.

And on the very same day the Panama Canal opened, providing a convenient sea-route between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

And on this day in 1971, Vice President Spiro Agnew, beset by charges of corruption, was forced to resign his office. This was the first major breakthrough in bringing down the Nixon presidency.

That very same day, the Phillies played and won their first game at the Vet. Ever since then it has been a long, strange journey.

And on this day in 2009 the ridicule of the Nobel Prize Committee continues unabated.

Service on Trotsky

Robert Service has a new biography out. This time he takes on left-wing icon Leon Trotsky. Service exposes the deep malignancy of the man, his actions, and his ideas -- something that Western intellectuals in their enthusiasm for all things left have, for the most part, chosen to ignore. Check out John Gray's review here. Buy the book here.