I found this piece on an obscure and unsuccessful (for US)WWII fighter plane to be very interesting. It seems that while it was a failure in the Pacific for us, it worked for the Finns.
Raises the question of how much was the machine, how much the pilot and their training, and how much the opposing airforce? And to what extent does this illustrate a more general proposition about man/machine/environment?
Nearing the end of the Watergate book, which now recounts the briefing of the House Judiciary Committee by the special prosecutor and his staff, some 7500 pages of evidence.
According to Graff, two things particularly struck the memebers:
The Watergate book I'm reading starts one chapter with the observation: "October 1973 would prove to be perhaps the most historic month in the history of the American presidency..."
A reminder--the month saw the resignation of the vice president minutes before he was charged with crimes, and agreed to one, the Yom Kippur war which included a confrontation with the Soviet Union, and the Saturday Night Massacre, with the resignation of the Attorney General and deputy AG after Nixon fired the special prosecutor for Watergate.
In the process of reading Garrett Graff's Watergate. It's a reminder of how we simplify our history--many reporters involved other than Woodward and Bernstein.
Watched the documentary film Apollo 11 last night. Seeing it 54 years after the original offered a certain perspective, not to mention color and clarity.
Couldn't help noticing the almost 100 percent white male control room and the almost 100 percent white audience at Cape Canaveral viewing in person. The film didn't make a point of either, though I'm sure it wasn't by chance the camera passed over one woman in the control room and a couple blacks watching. The film was shot in 1969 with the sensibilities of the time, so I'm guessing it didn't miss much. I'm sure there was a sizeable TV audience of blacks, but few would have had the time and money to travel to the Cape. I can only guess the feelings of the black watchers; possibly discomfort at being one in a thousand, possibly participating in the sort of nationalistic pride most may have felt, or possibly just enjoying the spectacle.
Apollo 11 was a peculiarly white endeavor; IIRC many black leaders questioned spending the money on space rather than domestic needs. The black participants in the effort were hidden. See Hidden Figures. So it seemed an white American success, perhaps with a little credit to the German scientists who immigrated to Alabama after WWII.
In 1969 LBJ had been driven from office, so Tricky Dick got to call the astronauts after their recovery. We'd seen the assassinations of MLK and RFK, and the country was sharply divided. The immigration laws had been reformed in 1965 but it was too early to see their effect. We were still on the gold standard and inflation was starting to be a concern.
I don't know how modern historians place the moonshot in the flow of American life. I suspect many have considered it a sideshow, an assessment which may be changing as we try to get back to the moon and then to Mars.
Some discussion on twitter about the ending of government mental institutions, the deinstitutonalization movement. Apparently some believe that President Reagan was responsible, only to be corrected that his actions were as CA governor.
I remember the State Hospital in Binghamton, NY, not from personal experience but as a reference point in discussions when growing up. According to the website I linked to it dated to mid-19th century, was noted for its architecture, and treated alcoholism as a disease.
I also remember my sister had a paperback of The Snake Pit, the novel on which the award winning film was based (1948). I think I tried reading it when young; likely one of the books I never finished.
Anyhow, for me the reform movement started in the 40's, with the Snake Pit, then One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962 novel) followed by the documentary Titicut Follies (1967).
It seems to have been a case where liberal good intentions and fond hopes for drugs in place of institution were misplaced. Will it be 100 years before we get another effort for reform?
George Will's newest column is a review of a new biography of Gerald Ford. I don't know what Will thought of Nixon and Ford in the 1970s, but today he likes Ford and likes his pardon of Nixon.
Comments on the column don't. IIRC when it happened, I understood the logic and was pleased that Ford's approval rating crashed--I wanted the Democrats to resume their rightful place in the presidency, not realizing Carter's one term would be followed by 3 Republican dinosaurs.
I still don't know what to think now. Would seeing Nixon on trial have been helpful to the nation? Or would it have further entrenched partisanship? I don't know.
I do know that while Ford seemed a good person, by 1974 I still harbored resentment over his role in getting Justice Fortas to resign.
Americans, some of us, know that slavery was part of our history from 1619 to the Civil War. We're less knowledgable about the slavery in the Caribbean and South America. I'd have to use Google to find out the extent of slavery in Canada or Chile, Bolivia or Mexico.
I know, of course, that "slave" derived from "Slav" because Slavs were often enslaved sometime back in history. The TV series "Vikings" touched on slavery there.
The Bible includes codes for treatment of slaves.
My recent reading has included discussions of slavery among Native American tribes and enslavement and slave trading in Africa.
It turns out the Morrill Land Grant Act, enacted in 1862 during the Civil War, included some vague language about military training. It's language on the purpose of colleges with the money athorized reads:
the endowment, support, and maintenance of at least one college where the leading object shall be, without excluding other scientific and classical studies, and including military tactics, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life. [emphasis added]
The language is awkward, but the reasonable interpretation is the colleges is to focus on agriculture and mechanic arts but also including classics and science, including military. Apparently the phrase was added late, as earlier versions of the act preceded the Civil War.
The meaning of "industrial classes" is "working people", a little more expansive than "working class".
Reading "The Wife of Bath". Stumbled on the first sentence of Chapter 3, where the author Marion Turner claims that "women have also always been economically active.." She's focused on European women and the Middle Ages, but somehow the phrase caused me to think. "Economically active" isn't defined here, but I'd expect it to mean earning and spending money, which would make it more limited than working, although there might be a Venn diagram there.
I think we can assume that almost all women everywhere have worked for much of their lives, if competent, just as almost all men have worked, if competent. I don't know that we'd usually consider spending money as working, at least in common parlance, but we would, I think, consider it as economic activity.
The formal definition of "work" seems to be the expending of effort or thought to accomplish something.
Somehow the subject is fascinating, even if I'm not going anywhere with it today.
IIRC in my young the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association were generally quite conservative, perhaps with an exception for the ABA on civil rights (though ChatGpt says it was criticized for being too conservative).
At my college the most liberal professor was Douglas Dowd, an economist.
My question: the right today claims that colleges are dominated by liberals/the left. The right says that today liberals essentially veto the hiring of almost all conservatives in almost all fields, perhaps less so in engineering. Assuming that's right, how did we get to this point? Certainly liberals didn't dominate the academy in in the 1950s and 60s, so what happened?
My guess is that it's the result of the civil rights movement in the 1960s.Some protests split the professors, certainly they did at my alma mater--my advisor moved to Yale, But I think after the protests died down the academy found itself pretty much united in supporting civil rights for blacks, rights for women, and open to the other cultural movments--notably Hispanics and gays.
Discussing with my cousin the pros and cons of a decision on what to write caused me to reflect on ChatGpt, and how it might change historiography.
Some thoughts:
Kevin Drum had a post the other day showing the percentage of the nation's GDP devoted to the federal government. It's roughly 21 percent from 1980 to now. Kevin argues that shows the various tax cuts delivered by Republican presidents (Reagan, GWB, TFG) are responsible for our deficits: because spending has remained level(ish) the deficit must be on the tax side.
I don't find that argument conclusive. I think a more realistic picture is that spending and taxing both wiggle over the years: sometimes up and sometimes down, but consistently the public and its political leaders are comfortable with a regular deficit.
Stumbled across an odd fact today. I've been reading Roger Lowenstein's "Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War." It's interesting. A main character for most of the book is Sec. of Treasury Chase, who ends up designing the "National Bank System" and also had charge mostly for the Sea Island plantations after the Union Army took the islands. This led to what is called the Port Royal Experiment, giving the government the problem of how to handle the freed slaves and the occupied plantations. It was a forerunner of Reconsttuction's issues.
One problem was teaching adult blacks to read. A teacher was John Zachos, a Greek whose father was killed in the Greek rebellion in 1824, and was brought to the US by an American who supported the rebellion. He wrote a book, the first book the blacks had, entitled: " The Phonic Primer and Reader, A National Method of teaching Reading by the Sounds of the Letters without altering the Orthography. Designed Chiefly for the Use of Night-Schools Where Adults are Taught, and for the Myriads of Freed Men and Women, Whose First Rush from the Prison-House of Slavery is to the Gates of the Temple of Knowledge?"
It seems we often look at some statistics the wrong way. For example, it's common among the optimists among us to brag about the improvement in living standards by citing the reduction in the percentage of people in poverty. But I think it would be more impressive to look at it the other way.
So I asked ChatGpt to compare the number of humans above the poverty line in 1900 with the number in 2020. I can't guarantee the accuracy of the numbers but what it gave me (using World Book numbers of "extreme poverty") was 150 million in 1900 and 7.1 billion in 2020.
That's a whole lot of people who might be happy.
This is a comment I posted on Kevin Drum's post looking back at Iraq, which you should read:
"Wish I was blogging then so I'd have a good record of what I was thinking. As best I can remember I was dubious of Afghanistan, given the Soviets failure there, our failure in Vietnam, etc. But it went surprisingly well, and the aftermath seemed to be working well with Karzai getting support.
So with Iraq I was torn. The Post had a reporter who was filing good stories challenging the official line. I still had some skepticism about war. But on the other hand Bush did have Blair on board, and Blair seemed capable and had worked well with Clinton. So I think my attitude when the bombs began to fall was to the effect: I don't think I'd do this if I had the power, but I don't so I hope you're right and can do as well in Iraq as you seem to have done in Afghanistan.?
Roots of Progress is an interesting effort I follow. This particular post roused my usual contrarian reaction, but also triggered a question, specifically this:
" you should take into account that some types of labor were automated very early on, via wind and water mills"
My question is why? And who?
ChatGpt says, when asked how different civilizations ground their grain:
Ancient Egyptians: The ancient Egyptians used a hand-powered quern to grind their grains. The quern consisted of two flat stones, one placed on top of the other. The top stone was rotated back and forth to grind the grain into flour.
Ancient Greeks and Romans: The ancient Greeks and Romans used a rotary mill to grind their grains. The mill consisted of a circular stone wheel with a handle on one side. The grain was poured into a hole in the center of the wheel and was ground between the wheel and a stationary stone.
Native Americans: Native Americans used a mortar and pestle to grind their grains. The mortar was a bowl-shaped stone, and the pestle was a long, cylindrical stone used to crush the grain.
Chinese: The Chinese used a stone mill to grind their grains. The mill consisted of two horizontal stones with a vertical stone in the center. The grain was poured into a hole in the center stone and was ground between the stones.
Mesoamericans: The Mesoamericans used a metate to grind their grains. The metate was a flat stone slab, and the grain was ground using a handheld grinding stone called a mano.
Overall, each civilization developed methods that were suited to their particular needs and resources.
Based on skimpy research by google, it seems there's a transition from rubbing two stones together, to a rotary grinder hand powered and then to the water/wind driven grist mills.
Did women initiate these inventions?
Don't remember what I've written here about genealogical research. My sister did a lot during a year when she was no longer teaching school. That was back in 1978, long before the internet and the extensive digitization of sources.
A digression: genealogical research appeals to the sort of mind who reads detective stories. Back in the day there was great satisfaction in figuring out connections, assessing what the probabilities were when faced with incomplete evidence, etc. Unless you participated in a group devoted to genealogy, you didn't know whether you were the first to find your great great grandmother, or had some cousins preceded you. All that is, I think, rapidly vanishing. With ancestry.com and family search, once a connection is made it's visible to anyone in the world who wants to look. And with digitized sources, rapidly expanding to all the printed matter which still exists, and searching, no longer do you have to hit the libraries and local historical societies as did my sister; just click the mouse and pay the subscription fees.
Back tot he title. One set of clues to ancestry was generational naming patterns. These days the Social Security administration releases statistics on naming patterns, tracing the popularity of names. (I suspect there's been a recent drop in babies named Karen.) In the old days when family was more important, babies were often named according to a pattern. For example, my great grandfather named his first son Andrew after his father, and his daughter Sarah after his mother. In Scots Irish families the next set of children would likely be named after their mother's parents, and so on. The pattern was strong enough you could use it to deduce genealogy, at least in the 19th century (By the end of the century it was fading; while my father was named after his mother's father, and my uncle had his paternal grandmother's maiden name for his middle name, my uncle's first name and my aunt's name have no identifiable history in the family
We don't have such large families these days, and the pattern of naming has gone. Does that mean that family feeling is less, or just that a custom has faded away?
Akhil Reed Amar writes in Myth America about the founding fathers. He emphasizes Washington's importance to the Constitutional Convention and downplays Madison's contribution, sees little difference between "republican" and "democratic", emphasizes the "union" side of the founding, doesn't accept Charles Beard's interpretation, and accepts the Constitution as helping slavery.
All in all it seems well-argued. I was surprised by his singling out Beard; by 1960 he seemed no longer prominent.
