historeics

A Short History of the Modern Calendar

2012-02-10T20:33:00.000-08:00

Impressions & Observations by the Secret Service

2012-01-02T21:00:00.000-08:00

> Here are snippets from a book of "Impressions & Observations" of
> Secret Service personnel assigned to guard U.S. Presidents/First Ladies, and Vice Presidents:
>
> John and Jacqueline Kennedy:
> A philanderer of the highest order.
> She ordered the kitchen help to save all the left-over wine during State
> dinner, which mixed with fresh wine and served again during the next White
> House occasion.
> Lyndon Johnson
> Another philanderer of the highest order. In addition, LBJ was as crude as the day is long.
> (Both JFK and LBJ kept a lot of women in the White House for extramarital affairs, and both had set up "early warning systems" to alert them if/when their wives were nearby. Both Kennedy & Johnson were promiscuous and oversexed men. The wives were either naive or just pretended to "not know" about her husband's many liaisons.)
>
> Richard and Pat Nixon:
> A "moral" man but very odd and weird, paranoid, etc. He had horrible
> relationship with his family, and in a way, was almost a recluse.*
> She was quiet most of the time.*
>
> Spiro Agnew:
> Nice, decent man, everyone in the Secret Service was surprised about his downfall.
>
> Gerald and Betty Ford:
> A true gentlemen who treated the Secret Service with respect and dignity.
> He had a great sense of humor.
> She drank a lot!
>
> Jimmy & Rosalynn Carter
> A complete phony who would portray one picture of himself to public and
> very different in private, e.g., would be shown carrying his own luggage,
> but the suit cases were always empty; he kept empty ones just for photo op's.
> Wanted the people to see him as pious and a non-drinker, but he and
> his family drank alcohol a lot. He had disdain for the Secret Service, and
> was very irresponsible with the "football" nuclear codes. He didn't think
> it was a big deal and would keep military aides at a great distance. Often
> does not acknowledge the presence of Secret Service personnel assigned to
> serve him. She mostly did her own thing.
>
> Ronald and Nancy Reagan
> The real deal --- moral, honest, respectful, and dignified. They treated Secret Service and everyone else with respect and honor. Thanked everyone all the time. He took the time to know everyone on a personal level.
> One "favorite" story which has circulated among the Secret Service personnel was an incident early in his Presidency, when he came out of his room with a pistol tucked on his hip. The agent in charge asked: "Why the pistol, Mr. President?" He replied, "In case you boys can't get the job done, I can help." It was common for him to carry a pistol. When he met with Gorbachev, he had a pistol in his briefcase. Upon learning that Gary Hart was caught with Donna Rice, Reagan said, "Boys will be boys, but boys
> will not be Presidents." [He obviously either did not know or forgot JFK's and LBJ's escapades!]
> She was very nice but very protective of the President; and the Secret Service was often caught in the middle. She tried hard to control what the President ate, and he would say to the agent "Come on, you gotta help me out." The Reagans drank wine during State dinners and special occasions only; otherwise, they shunned alcohol; the Secret Service could count on one hand the times they were served wine during their "family dinner". For all the fake bluster of the Carters, the Reagans were the ones who lived
> life as genuinely moral people
>
> George H. and Barbara Bush:
> Extremely kind and considerate Always respectful. Took great care in making sure the agents' comforts were taken care of. They even brought them meals and other items.
> One time Barbara Bush brought warm clothes to agents standing outside at Kennebunkport ; one agent who was given a warm hat, and when he tried to nicely say "no thanks" even though he was obviously freezing, President Bush said "Son, don't argue with the First Lady, put the hat on.." He was the most prompt of the Presidents. He ran the White House like a well-oiled machine. She ruled the house and spoke her mind
>
> Bill and Hillary Clinton:
> Presidency was one giant party. Not trustworthy --- he was nice because he wanted everyone to like him, but to him life is just one big game and party. Everyone knows of his sexuality.
> She is another phony. Her personality would change the instant cameras were near. She hated with open disdain the military and Secret Service. She was another one who felt people were there to serve her. She was always trying to keep tabs on Bill Clinton.
>
> Albert Gore: An egotistical ass, who was once overheard by his Secret Service detail lecturing his only son that he needed to do better in school or he "would end up like these guys" -- pointing to the agents.
>
> George W. and Laura Bush:
> The Secret Service loved him and Laura Bush.
> He was also the most physically "in shape" who had a very strict workout regimen. The Bushes made sure their entire administrative and household staff understood to respect and be considerate of the Secret Service. Karl Rove was the one who was the most caring of the Secret Service in the
> administration.
> She was one of the nicest First Ladies, if not the nicest; she never had any harsh word to say about anyone.
>
> Barack & Michelle Obama:
> " Clinton all over again" - hates the military and looks down on the Secret Service. He is egotistical and cunning; looks you in the eye and appears to agree with you, but turns around and does the opposite---untrustworthy. He has temper tantrums.
> She is a complete bitch, who hates anybody who is not black; hates the military; and looks at the Secret Service as servants.

Truth is hard to refute!

2010-11-12T15:56:00.001-08:00

How did Jefferson know?

John F. Kennedy held a dinner in the white House for a group of the brightest minds in the nation at that time. He made this statement:
"This is perhaps the assembly of the most intelligence ever to gather at one time in the White House with the exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."

When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe .
Thomas Jefferson

The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.
Thomas Jefferson

It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world.
Thomas Jefferson

I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the
pretense of taking care of them.
Thomas Jefferson

My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government.
Thomas Jefferson

No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms.
Thomas Jefferson

The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves
against tyranny in government.
Thomas Jefferson

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
Thomas Jefferson

To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.
Thomas Jefferson

World War II Animated Map

2010-10-20T05:42:00.000-07:00

RCA Victor Puzzle Records

2010-06-19T05:50:00.000-07:00

RCA Victor Puzzle Records

Puzzle records are odd, multi-track records that expose a different outcome depending on the random groove the needle enters.

I've heard rumors that a record like this existed but it seemed to far fetched to be real, but here it is! Each side has 3 songs recorded, not one after the other, but right beside each other! There are 3 grooves on each side and the song you get depends on which groove you start in. Each song is about 1 minute long. Pretty fantastic!

Haven't seen one of these until now. I think they are pretty rare. This was released by Victor records in 1931, the middle of the Great Depression. Probably not a lot were actually sold.

The Novelty Orchestra shown on the label is actually Ray Noble's orchestra.

Now just enjoy this amazing record! Both sides are shown in this video.

Carousels Were Invented By The Military

2010-06-15T05:52:00.000-07:00

Depending on where you come from, you may call carousels by another name, perhaps: “merry-go-rounds”, “flying horses” or “roundabouts.”

They have been popular rides for the past 200 years, but they started off as military training machines. In fact, the word “carousel” comes from the Spanish word, carosella, which mean “little battle.”

This name was fitting because carousels were originally used to train knights to use their swords while riding on a horse that moves up and down. Objects were placed along the outside of the carousel; the knights tried to stab the objects or catch them on their swords.

Jousting competitors also trained on carousels, but, when Catherine de Medicis’ husband was killed in a sudden jousting accident (or “lost” as they called it back then), the carousel quickly became a safer form of entertainment. Crowds would watch as entertainers would catch objects on their swords and travel in circles until they got dizzy.

That sounds more boring than actually going to a mid-evil times restaurant, so spectators naturally wanted a shot at riding the carousel and even catching one of the objects on their sword. This is how it became the popular amusement ride it is today.

In fact, a small number carousels still exist that have an obstacle as part of the ride. On these carousels, riders will try to grab a brass ring as they ride around on the carousel. There are steel rings as well, and those are often thrown at a target to discourage people from keeping them as souvenirs. The brass ring can often be redeemed for a prize, which is usually a free ride on the carousel.

This is also where the term, “catch the brass ring” comes from.

What the Pill Gave Birth To

2010-05-08T10:42:00.000-07:00

America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation by Elaine Tyler May, Basic Books, 224 pages, $25.95

Elaine Tyler May's new book begins by quoting the lyrics to Loretta Lynn's 1975 anthem, "The Pill," an overburdened housewife's audacious cry of reproductive independence. "Promised me if I'd be your wife/ You'd show me the world/ But all I've seen of this old world/ Is a bed and a doctor bill," Lynn croons. "I'm tearin' down your brooder house/ 'Cause now I've got the pill." No feminist theorist could have better captured both the emancipatory power of the pill and the threat it posed to patriarchy. The pill wasn't just a medical breakthrough; it was part of a social revolution, one that was messy, incomplete, sometimes disappointing, but ultimately life-altering for millions of women.

America and the Pill is a brief history of that revolution, timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Food and Drug Administration's approval of the first birth-control pill. The book covers a lot of ground very quickly; reading it is a bit like being a passenger on a bus tour glancing at the passing landmarks without time to explore any of them. It lacks the depth and richness of May's superb 1995 history of childlessness in America, Barren in the Promised Land.

Still, there are worse things one can say about a book than that it should be longer. May's material is fascinating, even when her treatment of it is cursory. Although America and the Pill is sometimes celebratory, it is actually most useful in illuminating some of the darker corners of the pill's history, a history that women's health activists ought to know.

The story begins with Margaret Sanger (1879–1966), a complex heroine who for decades personified the cause of birth control and family planning. A fiery socialist in her early days, Sanger saw the gruesome consequences of unsafe abortion while working as a nurse in New York's immigrant slums and, in defiance of federal law, called for access to birth control. Though genuinely motivated by a passion for women's liberation, Sanger also embraced eugenics, a more respectable cause at the time than sexual freedom or feminist self-determination; indeed, after World War I, as Sanger's biographer Ellen Chesler has written, "eugenics became a popular craze in this country -- promoted in newspapers and magazines as a kind of secular religion." Collaboration with eugenicists provided Sanger with powerful allies, but it wasn't just a matter of convenience for her; she became an ardent advocate of population control for eugenic purposes.

May quotes a letter that Sanger wrote to her friend and patron, the heiress Katharine Dexter McCormick: "I consider that the world and almost our civilization for the next twenty-five years, is going to depend upon a simple, cheap, safe, contraceptive to be used in poverty stricken slums, jungles, and among the most ignorant people." She went on to call for immediate "national sterilization for certain dysgenic types."

One of the central tensions in Sanger's work, then, was between her commitment to reproductive freedom and her willingness to sanction reproductive coercion. A similar tension is at work throughout the history May recounts. McCormick, a brilliant feminist who was the second woman to graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, bankrolled the pill out of a commitment to women's rights. But as May writes, the scientists and doctors who developed the pill never envisioned it as an agent of female emancipation. Rather, they "hailed it as a miracle drug that would solve the global problem of overpopulation, thereby reducing poverty and human misery, especially in the developing world." They also hoped it would improve marital sex and domestic harmony, strengthening the nuclear family. In other words, they saw it as a tool for preserving existing power relations, not shaking them up.

It's a bleak irony that if the pill's inventors had been more concerned with women's health, they might have taken much longer to develop it. One of the scientists involved, Gregory Pincus, tested a version of the pill on 15 psychiatric patients at the Worcester State Hospital in Massachusetts. Early pills used far higher doses of hormones than modern contraceptives do, and during large-scale clinical trials in Puerto Rico, the side effects were so severe that a female doctor tried to halt the study, to no avail. "Pincus claimed that many of the women's symptoms were psychosomatic," May writes.

As May makes clear, such abuses weren't specific to the testing of the birth-control pill -- they were common to all drug development. "By the standards of the day, the [Puerto Rico] studies were scrupulously conducted," she writes. Furthermore, the women in Puerto Rico were hardly coerced; so many women were so desperate to control their fertility that the scientists had waiting lists of volunteers. Nevertheless, it's undeniable that the creation of the pill often involved a cavalier attitude toward poor or sick women.

May's own father, Dr. Edward Tyler, actually held up federal approval of the pill because of concerns about its safety. The head of the Planned Parenthood Clinic in Los Angeles, he had used the same hormonal compounds found in the pill to treat various gynecological disorders and discovered that they often caused weight gain, abnormal bleeding, swelling, and other problems. But eventually, Tyler assured an official of the Food and Drug Administration "that his earlier concerns had been addressed, and that he was now convinced that Enovid, as the pill was called, 'was safe.'" What changed his mind? May doesn't say.

In one of America and the Pill's most interesting chapters, May asks whether men would tolerate the sorts of side effects that women have regularly experienced. The prospect of a male pill has appeared on the horizon various times over the last 50 years, but the issue of side effects scuttled every effort. Scientists, May reports, "actually discovered an effective vaccine that completely stopped the production of sperm without interfering with sex drive." But it also made users' testicles shrink by a third, so the researchers abandoned it, concluding, "The psychological trauma of shrinking testes just cannot be overcome."

Yet for all this, as May demonstrates, the pill has been a tremendous boon for women, transforming sex and reproduction so thoroughly that it's hard for many to imagine what life was like before it. In the 1960s and 1970s, Black Power leaders denounced the pill as a tool of black genocide -- rhetoric often echoed by today's anti-abortion movement. But female civil-rights activists saw things very differently. "Although they were aware that some white proponents of the birth control pill and other forms of contraception hoped to reduce the numbers of black babies, they wanted the pill and saw it as essential to their reproductive freedom," May writes. For most women, the intentions behind the pill matter much less than its practical effectiveness.

Though May doesn't say it, right-wing opposition to the pill has probably helped temper earlier left-wing objections. As she points out, Our Bodies Ourselves, the feminist health bible, was deeply skeptical of the pill throughout the 1970s and 1980s, but by 2005, with new, low-dose formulations on the market and the culture wars in full swing, the book sang the pill's praises: "The advent of the Pill, probably more than any other event, has enabled women the world over to prevent or delay pregnancy and, in doing so, to complete our educations, choose our careers, and create more egalitarian relationships."

May herself doesn't go quite so far -- she sees the pill as much as a symbol of feminist gains as a cause. "Without the political and cultural upheavals of the last fifty years, particularly those brought about by the feminist movement, the pill would have been just one more contraceptive -- more effective and convenient than those that came before, but not revolutionary," she writes in her conclusion.

She's absolutely right. After all, the pill is widely available in Saudi Arabia, but it hasn't made a dent in that country's brutal patriarchy. Part of the problem with America and the Pill, though, is that it doesn't take the time to delve into the social maelstroms that made the pill so significant. The millions of women who, like Loretta Lynn's narrator, have used the pill to slip the bonds of biology, turning childbearing from an obligation into an option, have utterly reshaped our ideas about sex, marriage, and family. The furious, socially conservative backlash those women have engendered continues to dominate our politics. This slender book can only give us the contours of that tumultuous, still-unfolding story.

Pandora’s Briefcase

2010-05-08T10:33:00.001-07:00

Pandora’s Briefcase
It was a dazzling feat of wartime espionage. But does it argue for or against spying?
by Malcolm Gladwell May 10, 2010

In the months before the invasion of Sicily, British spies fooled German spies with a caper inspired by a detective novel.

In the months before the invasion of Sicily, British spies fooled German spies with a caper inspired by a detective novel.

On April 30, 1943, a fisherman came across a badly decomposed corpse floating in the water off the coast of Huelva, in southwestern Spain. The body was of an adult male dressed in a trenchcoat, a uniform, and boots, with a black attaché case chained to his waist. His wallet identified him as Major William Martin, of the Royal Marines. The Spanish authorities called in the local British vice-consul, Francis Haselden, and in his presence opened the attaché case, revealing an official-looking military envelope. The Spaniards offered the case and its contents to Haselden. But Haselden declined, requesting that the handover go through formal channels—an odd decision, in retrospect, since, in the days that followed, British authorities in London sent a series of increasingly frantic messages to Spain asking the whereabouts of Major Martin’s briefcase.

It did not take long for word of the downed officer to make its way to German intelligence agents in the region. Spain was a neutral country, but much of its military was pro-German, and the Nazis found an officer in the Spanish general staff who was willing to help. A thin metal rod was inserted into the envelope; the documents were then wound around it and slid out through a gap, without disturbing the envelope’s seals. What the officer discovered was astounding. Major Martin was a courier, carrying a personal letter from Lieutenant General Archibald Nye, the vice-chief of the Imperial General Staff, in London, to General Harold Alexander, the senior British officer under Eisenhower in Tunisia. Nye’s letter spelled out what Allied intentions were in southern Europe. American and British forces planned to cross the Mediterranean from their positions in North Africa, and launch an attack on German-held Greece and Sardinia. Hitler transferred a Panzer division from France to the Peloponnese, in Greece, and the German military command sent an urgent message to the head of its forces in the region: “The measures to be taken in Sardinia and the Peloponnese have priority over any others.”

The Germans did not realize—until it was too late—that “William Martin” was a fiction. The man they took to be a high-level courier was a mentally ill vagrant who had eaten rat poison; his body had been liberated from a London morgue and dressed up in officer’s clothing. The letter was a fake, and the frantic messages between London and Madrid a carefully choreographed act. When a hundred and sixty thousand Allied troops invaded Sicily on July 10, 1943, it became clear that the Germans had fallen victim to one of the most remarkable deceptions in modern military history.

The story of Major William Martin is the subject of the British journalist Ben Macintyre’s brilliant and almost absurdly entertaining “Operation Mincemeat” (Harmony; $25.99). The cast of characters involved in Mincemeat, as the caper was called, was extraordinary, and Macintyre tells their stories with gusto. The ringleader was Ewen Montagu, the son of a wealthy Jewish banker and the brother of Ivor Montagu, a pioneer of table tennis and also, in one of the many strange footnotes to the Mincemeat case, a Soviet spy. Ewen Montagu served on the so-called Twenty Committee of the British intelligence services, and carried a briefcase full of classified documents on his bicycle as he rode to work each morning.

His partner in the endeavor was a gawky giant named Charles Cholmondeley, who lifted the toes of his size-12 feet when he walked, and, Macintyre writes, “gazed at the world through thick round spectacles, from behind a remarkable moustache fully six inches long and waxed into magnificent points.” The two men coördinated with Dudley Clarke, the head of deception for all the Mediterranean, whom Macintyre describes as “unmarried, nocturnal and allergic to children.” In 1925, Clarke organized a pageant “depicting imperial artillery down the ages, which involved two elephants, thirty-seven guns and ‘fourteen of the biggest Nigerians he could find.’ He loved uniforms, disguises and dressing up.” In 1941, British authorities had to bail him out of a Spanish jail, dressed in “high heels, lipstick, pearls, and a chic cloche hat, his hands, in long opera gloves, demurely folded in his lap. He was not supposed to even be in Spain, but in Egypt.” Macintyre, who has perfect pitch when it comes to matters of British eccentricity, reassures us, “It did his career no long-term damage.”

To fashion the container that would keep the corpse “fresh,” before it was dumped off the coast of Spain, Mincemeat’s planners turned to Charles Fraser-Smith, whom Ian Fleming is thought to have used as the model for Q in the James Bond novels. Fraser-Smith was the inventor of, among other things, garlic-flavored chocolate intended to render authentic the breath of agents dropping into France and “a compass hidden in a button that unscrewed clockwise, based on the impeccable theory that the ‘unswerving logic of the German mind’ would never guess that something might unscrew the wrong way.” The job of transporting the container to the submarine that would take it to Spain was entrusted to one of England’s leading race-car drivers, St. John (Jock) Horsfall, who, Macintyre notes, “was short-sighted and astigmatic but declined to wear spectacles.” At one point during the journey, Horsfall nearly drove into a tram stop, and then “failed to see a roundabout until too late and shot over the grass circle in the middle.”

Each stage of the deception had to be worked out in advance. Martin’s personal effects needed to be detailed enough to suggest that he was a real person, but not so detailed as to suggest that someone was trying to make him look like a real person. Cholmondeley and Montagu filled Martin’s pockets with odds and ends, including angry letters from creditors and a bill from his tailor. “Hour after hour, in the Admiralty basement, they discussed and refined this imaginary person, his likes and dislikes, his habits and hobbies, his talents and weaknesses,” Macintyre writes. “In the evening, they repaired to the Gargoyle Club, a glamorous Soho dive of which Montagu was a member, to continue the odd process of creating a man from scratch.” Francis Haselden, for his part, had to look as if he desperately wanted the briefcase back. But he couldn’t be too diligent, because he had to make sure that the Germans had a look at it first. “Here lay an additional, but crucial, consideration,” Macintyre goes on. “The Germans must be made to believe that they had gained access to the documents undetected; they should be made to assume that the British believed the Spaniards had returned the documents unopened and unread. Operation Mincemeat would only work if the Germans could be fooled into believing that the British had been fooled.” It was an impossibly complex scheme, dependent on all manner of unknowns and contingencies. What if whoever found the body didn’t notify the authorities? What if the authorities disposed of the matter so efficiently that the Germans never caught wind of it? What if the Germans saw through the ruse?

In mid-May of 1943, when Winston Churchill was in Washington, D.C., for the Trident conference, he received a telegram from the code breakers back home, who had been monitoring German military transmissions: “MINCEMEAT SWALLOWED ROD, LINE AND SINKER.” Macintyre’s “Operation Mincemeat” is part of a long line of books celebrating the cleverness of Britain’s spies during the Second World War. It is equally instructive, though, to think about Mincemeat from the perspective of the spies who found the documents and forwarded them to their superiors. The things that spies do can help win battles that might otherwise have been lost. But they can also help lose battles that might otherwise have been won.

In early 1943, long before Major Martin’s body washed up onshore, the German military had begun to think hard about Allied intentions in southern Europe. The Allies had won control of North Africa from the Germans, and were clearly intending to cross the Mediterranean. But where would they attack? One school of thought said Sardinia. It was lightly defended and difficult to reinforce. The Allies could mount an invasion of the island relatively quickly. It would be ideal for bombing operations against southern Germany, and Italy’s industrial hub in the Po Valley, but it didn’t have sufficient harbors or beaches to allow for a large number of ground troops to land. Sicily did. It was also close enough to North Africa to be within striking distance of Allied short-range fighter planes, and a successful invasion of Sicily had the potential to knock the Italians out of the war.

Mussolini was in the Sicily camp, as was Field Marshal Kesselring, who headed up all German forces in the Mediterranean. In the Italian Commando Supremo, most people picked Sardinia, however, as did a number of senior officers in the German Navy and Air Force. Meanwhile, Hitler and the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht—the German armed-forces High Command—had a third candidate. They thought that the Allies were most likely to strike at Greece and the Balkans, given the Balkans’ crucial role in supplying the German war effort with raw materials such as oil, bauxite, and copper. And Greece was far more vulnerable to attack than Italy. As the historians Samuel Mitcham and Friedrich von Stauffenberg have pointed out, “in Greece all Axis reinforcements and supplies would have to be shipped over a single rail line of limited capacity, running for 1,300 kilometers (more than 800 miles) through an area vulnerable to air and partisan attack.”

All these assessments were strategic inferences from an analysis of known facts. But this kind of analysis couldn’t point to a specific target. It could only provide a range of probabilities. The intelligence provided by Major Martin’s documents was in a different category. It was marvellously specific. It said: Greece and Sardinia. But because that information washed up onshore, as opposed to being derived from the rational analysis of known facts, it was difficult to know whether it was true. As the political scientist Richard Betts has argued, in intelligence analysis there tends to be an inverse relationship between accuracy and significance, and this is the dilemma posed by the Mincemeat case.

As Macintyre observes, the informational supply chain that carried the Mincemeat documents from Huelva to Berlin was heavily corrupted. The first great enthusiast for the Mincemeat find was the head of German intelligence in Madrid, Major Karl-Erich Kühlenthal. He personally flew the documents to Berlin, along with a report testifying to their significance. But, as Macintyre writes, Kühlenthal was “a one-man espionage disaster area.” One of his prized assets was a Spaniard named Juan Pujol García, who was actually a double agent. When British code breakers looked at Kühlenthal’s messages to Berlin, they found that he routinely embellished and fictionalized his reports. According to Macintyre, Kühlenthal was “frantically eager to please, ready to pass on anything that might consolidate his reputation,” in part because he had some Jewish ancestry and was desperate not to be posted back to Germany.

When the documents arrived in Berlin, they were handed over to one of Hitler’s top intelligence analysts, a man named Alexis Baron von Roenne. Von Roenne vouched for their veracity as well. But in some respects von Roenne was even less reliable than Kühlenthal. He hated Hitler and seemed to have done everything in his power to sabotage the Nazi war effort. Before D Day, Macintyre writes, “he faithfully passed on every deception ruse fed to him, accepted the existence of every bogus unit regardless of evidence, and inflated forty-four divisions in Britain to an astonishing eighty-nine.” It is entirely possible, Macintyre suggests, that von Roenne “did not believe the Mincemeat deception for an instant.”

These are two fine examples of why the proprietary kind of information that spies purvey is so much riskier than the products of rational analysis. Rational inferences can be debated openly and widely. Secrets belong to a small assortment of individuals, and inevitably become hostage to private agendas. Kühlenthal was an advocate of the documents because he needed them to be true; von Roenne was an advocate of the documents because he suspected them to be false. In neither case did the audiences for their assessments have an inkling about their private motivations. As Harold Wilensky wrote in his classic work “Organizational Intelligence” (1967), “The more secrecy, the smaller the intelligent audience, the less systematic the distribution and indexing of research, the greater the anonymity of authorship, and the more intolerant the attitude toward deviant views.” Wilensky had the Bay of Pigs debacle in mind when he wrote that. But it could just as easily have applied to any number of instances since, including the private channels of “intelligence” used by members of the Bush Administration to convince themselves that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

It was the requirement of secrecy that also prevented the Germans from properly investigating the Mincemeat story. They had to make it look as if they had no knowledge of Martin’s documents. So their hands were tied. The dated papers in Martin’s pockets indicated that he had been in the water for barely five days. Had the Germans seen the body, though, they would have realized that it was far too decomposed to have been in the water for less than a week. And, had they talked to the Spanish coroner who examined Martin, they would have discovered that he had noticed various red flags. The doctor had seen the bodies of many drowned fishermen in his time, and invariably there were fish and crab bites on the ears and other appendages. In this case, there were none. Hair, after being submerged for a week, becomes brittle and dull. Martin’s hair was not. Nor did his clothes appear to have been in the water very long. But the Germans couldn’t talk to the coroner without blowing their cover. Secrecy stood in the way of accuracy.

Suppose that Kühlenthal had not been so eager to please Berlin, and that von Roenne had not loathed Hitler, and suppose that the Germans had properly debriefed the coroner and uncovered all the holes in the Mincemeat story. Would they then have seen through the British deception? Maybe so. Or maybe they would have found the flaws in Mincemeat a little too obvious, and concluded that the British were trying to deceive Germany into thinking that they were trying to deceive Germany into thinking that Greece and Sardinia were the real targets—in order to mask the fact that Greece and Sardinia were the real targets.

This is the second, and more serious, of the problems that surround the products of espionage. It is not just that secrets themselves are hard to fact-check; it’s that their interpretation is inherently ambiguous. Any party to an intelligence transaction is trapped in what the sociologist Erving Goffman called an “expression game.” I’m trying to fool you. You realize that I’m trying to fool you, and I—realizing that—try to fool you into thinking that I don’t realize that you have realized that I am trying to fool you. Goffman argues that at each turn in the game the parties seek out more and more specific and reliable cues to the other’s intentions. But that search for specificity and reliability only makes the problem worse. As Goffman writes in his 1969 book “Strategic Interaction”:

The more the observer relies on seeking out foolproof cues, the more vulnerable he should appreciate he has become to the exploitation of his efforts. For, after all, the most reliance-inspiring conduct on the subject’s part is exactly the conduct that it would be most advantageous for him to fake if he wanted to hoodwink the observer. The very fact that the observer finds himself looking to a particular bit of evidence as an incorruptible check on what is or might be corrupted is the very reason why he should be suspicious of this evidence; for the best evidence for him is also the best evidence for the subject to tamper with.

Macintyre argues that one of the reasons the Germans fell so hard for the Mincemeat ruse is that they really had to struggle to gain access to the documents. They tried—and failed—to find a Spanish accomplice when the briefcase was still in Huelva. A week passed, and the Germans grew more and more anxious. The briefcase was transferred to the Spanish Admiralty, in Madrid, where the Germans redoubled their efforts. Their assumption, Macintyre says, was that if Martin was a plant the British would have made their task much easier. But Goffman’s argument reminds us that the opposite is equally plausible. Knowing that a struggle would be a sign of authenticity, the Germans could just as easily have expected the British to provide one.

The absurdity of such expression games has been wittily explored in the spy novels of Robert Littell and, with particular brio, in Peter Ustinov’s 1956 play, “Romanoff and Juliet.” In the latter, a crafty general is the head of a tiny European country being squabbled over by the United States and the Soviet Union, and is determined to play one off against the other. He tells the U.S. Ambassador that the Soviets have broken the Americans’ secret code. “We know they know our code,” the Ambassador, Moulsworth, replies, beaming. “We only give them things we want them to know.” The general pauses, during which, the play’s stage directions say, “he tries to make head or tail of this intelligence.” Then he crosses the street to the Russian Embassy, where he tells the Soviet Ambassador, Romanoff, “They know you know their code.” Romanoff is unfazed: “We have known for some time that they knew we knew their code. We have acted accordingly—by pretending to be duped.” The general returns to the American Embassy and confronts Moulsworth: “They know you know they know you know.” Moulsworth (genuinely alarmed): “What? Are you sure?”

The genius of that parody is the final line, because spymasters have always prided themselves on knowing where they are on the “I-know-they-know-I-know-they-know” regress. Just before the Allied invasion of Sicily, a British officer, Colonel Knox, left a classified cable concerning the invasion plans on the terrace of Shepheard’s Hotel, in Cairo—and no one could find it for two days. “Dudley Clarke was confident, however, that if it had fallen into enemy hands through such an obvious and ‘gross breach of security’ then it would probably be dismissed as a plant, pointing to Sicily as the cover target in accordance with Mincemeat,” Macintyre writes. “He concluded that ‘Colonel Knox may well have assisted rather than hindered us.’ ” In the face of a serious security breach, that’s what a counter-intelligence officer would say. But, of course, there is no way for him to know how the Germans would choose to interpret that discovery—and no way for the Germans to know how to interpret that discovery, either.

At one point, the British discovered that a French officer in Algiers was spying for the Germans. They “turned” him, keeping him in place but feeding him a steady diet of false and misleading information. Then, before D Day—when the Allies were desperate to convince Germany that they would be invading the Calais sector in July—they used the French officer to tell the Germans that the real invasion would be in Normandy on June 5th, 6th, or 7th. The British theory was that using someone the Germans strongly suspected was a double agent to tell the truth was preferable to using someone the Germans didn’t realize was a double agent to tell a lie. Or perhaps there wasn’t any theory at all. Perhaps the spy game has such an inherent opacity that it doesn’t really matter what you tell your enemy so long as your enemy is aware that you are trying to tell him something.

At around the time that Montagu and Cholmondeley were cooking up Operation Mincemeat, the personal valet of the British Ambassador to Turkey approached the German Embassy in Ankara with what he said were photographed copies of his boss’s confidential papers. The valet’s name was Elyesa Bazna. The Germans called him Cicero, and in this case they performed due diligence. Intelligence that came in over the transom was always considered less trustworthy than the intelligence gathered formally, so Berlin pressed its agents in Ankara for more details. Who was Bazna? What was his background? What was his motivation?

“Given the extraordinary ease with which seemingly valuable documents were being obtained, however, there was widespread worry that the enemy had mounted some purposeful deception,” Richard Wires writes, in “The Cicero Spy Affair: German Access to British Secrets in World War II” (1999). Bazna was, for instance, highly adept with a camera, in a way that suggested professional training or some kind of assistance. Bazna claimed that he didn’t use a tripod but simply held each paper under a light with one hand and took the picture with the other. So why were the photographs so clear? Berlin sent a photography expert to investigate. The Germans tried to figure out how much English he knew—which would reveal whether he could read the documents he was photographing or was just being fed them. In the end, many German intelligence officials thought that Cicero was the real thing. But Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Foreign Minister, remained wary—and his doubts and political infighting among the German intelligence agencies meant that little of the intelligence provided by Cicero was ever acted upon.

Cicero, it turned out, was the real thing. At least, we think he was the real thing. The Americans had a spy in the German Embassy in Turkey who learned that a servant was spying in the British Embassy. She told her bosses, who told the British. Just before his death, Stewart Menzies, the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service during the war, told an interviewer, “Of course, Cicero was under our control,” meaning that the minute they learned about Cicero they began feeding him false documents. Menzies, it should be pointed out, was a man who spent much of his professional career deceiving other people, and if you had been the wartime head of M.I.6, giving an interview shortly before your death, you probably would say that Cicero was one of yours. Or perhaps, in interviews given shortly before death, people are finally free to tell the truth. Who knows?

In the case of Operation Mincemeat, Germany’s spies told their superiors that something false was actually true (even though, secretly, some of those spies might have known better), and Germany acted on it. In the case of Cicero, Germany’s spies told their superiors that something was true that may indeed have been true, though maybe wasn’t, or maybe was true for a while and not true for a while, depending on whether you believe the word of someone two decades after the war was over—and in this case Germany didn’t really act on it at all. Looking at that track record, you have to wonder if Germany would have been better off not having any spies at all.

The idea for Operation Mincemeat, Macintyre tells us, had its roots in a mystery story written by Basil Thomson, a former head of Scotland Yard’s criminal-investigation unit. Thomson was the author of a dozen detective stories, and his 1937 book “The Milliner’s Hat Mystery” begins with the body of a dead man carrying a set of documents that turn out to be forged. “The Milliner’s Hat Mystery” was read by Ian Fleming, who worked for naval intelligence. Fleming helped create something called the Trout Memo, which contained a series of proposals for deceiving the Germans, including this idea of a dead man carrying forged documents. The memo was passed on to John Masterman, the head of the Twenty Committee—of which Montagu and Cholmondeley were members. Masterman, who also wrote mysteries on the side, starring an Oxford don and a Sherlock Holmes-like figure, loved the idea. Mincemeat, Macintyre writes, “began as fiction, a plot twist in a long-forgotten novel, picked up by another novelist, and approved by a committee presided over by yet another novelist.”

Then, there was the British naval attaché in Madrid, Alan Hillgarth, who stage-managed Mincemeat’s reception in Spain. He was a “spy, former gold prospector, and, perhaps inevitably, successful novelist,” Macintyre writes. “In his six novels, Alan Hillgarth hankered for a lost age of personal valor, chivalry, and self-reliance.” Unaccountably, neither Montagu nor Cholmondeley seems to have written mysteries of his own. But, then again, they had Mincemeat. “As if constructing a character in a novel, Montagu and Cholmondeley . . . set about creating a personality with which to clothe their dead body,” Macintyre observes. Martin didn’t have to have a fiancée. But, in a good spy thriller, the hero always has a beautiful lover. So they found a stunning young woman, Jean Leslie, to serve as Martin’s betrothed, and Montagu flirted with her shamelessly, as if standing in for his fictional creation. They put love letters from her among his personal effects. “Don’t please let them send you off into the blue the horrible way they do nowadays,” she wrote to her fiancé. “Now that we’ve found each other out of the whole world, I don’t think I could bear it.”

The British spymasters saw themselves as the authors of a mystery story, because it gave them the self-affirming sense that they were in full command of the narratives they were creating. They were not, of course. They were simply lucky that von Roenne and Kühlenthal had private agendas aligned with the Allied cause. The intelligence historian Ralph Bennett writes that one of the central principles of Dudley Clarke (he of the cross-dressing, the elephants, and the fourteen Nigerian giants) was that “deception could only be successful to the extent to which it played on existing hopes and fears.” That’s why the British chose to convince Hitler that the Allied focus was on Greece and the Balkans—Hitler, they knew, believed that the Allied focus was on Greece and the Balkans. But we are, at this point, reduced to a logical merry-go-round: Mincemeat fed Hitler what he already believed, and was judged by its authors to be a success because Hitler continued to believe what he already believed. How do we know the Germans wouldn’t have moved that Panzer division to the Peloponnese anyway? Bennett is more honest: “Even had there been no deception, [the Germans] would have taken precautions in the Balkans.” Bennett also points out that what the Germans truly feared, in the summer of 1943, was that the Italians would drop out of the Axis alliance. Soldiers washing up on beaches were of little account next to the broader strategic considerations of the southern Mediterranean. Mincemeat or no Mincemeat, Bennett writes, the Germans “would probably have refused to commit more troops to Sicily in support of the Italian Sixth Army lest they be lost in the aftermath of an Italian defection.” Perhaps the real genius of spymasters is found not in the stories they tell their enemies during the war but in the stories they tell in their memoirs once the war is over.

It is helpful to compare the British spymasters’ attitudes toward deception with that of their postwar American counterpart James Jesus Angleton. Angleton was in London during the nineteen-forties, apprenticing with the same group that masterminded gambits such as Mincemeat. He then returned to Washington and rose to head the C.I.A.’s counter-intelligence division throughout the Cold War.

Angleton did not write detective stories. His nickname was the Poet. He corresponded with the likes of Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings, T. S. Eliot, Archibald MacLeish, and William Carlos Williams, and he championed William Empson’s “Seven Types of Ambiguity.” He co-founded a literary journal at Yale called Furioso. What he brought to spycraft was the intellectual model of the New Criticism, which, as one contributor to Furioso put it, was propelled by “the discovery that it is possible and proper for a poet to mean two differing or even opposing things at the same time.” Angleton saw twists and turns where others saw only straight lines. To him, the spy game was not a story that marched to a predetermined conclusion. It was, in a phrase of Eliot’s that he loved to use, “a wilderness of mirrors.”

Angleton had a point. The deceptions of the intelligence world are not conventional mystery narratives that unfold at the discretion of the narrator. They are poems, capable of multiple interpretations. Kühlenthal and von Roenne, Mincemeat’s audience, contributed as much to the plan’s success as Mincemeat’s authors. A body that washes up onshore is either the real thing or a plant. The story told by the ambassador’s valet is either true or too good to be true. Mincemeat seems extraordinary proof of the cleverness of the British Secret Intelligence Service, until you remember that just a few years later the Secret Intelligence Service was staggered by the discovery that one of its most senior officials, Kim Philby, had been a Soviet spy for years. The deceivers ended up as the deceived.

But, if you cannot know what is true and what is not, how on earth do you run a spy agency? In the nineteen-sixties, Angleton turned the C.I.A. upside down in search of K.G.B. moles that he was sure were there. As a result of his mole hunt, the agency was paralyzed at the height of the Cold War. American intelligence officers who were entirely innocent were subjected to unfair accusations and scrutiny. By the end, Angleton himself came under suspicion of being a Soviet mole, on the ground that the damage he inflicted on the C.I.A. in the pursuit of his imagined Soviet moles was the sort of damage that a real mole would have sought to inflict on the C.I.A. in the pursuit of Soviet interests.

“The remedy he had proposed in 1954 was for the CIA to have what would amount to two separate mind-sets,” Edward Jay Epstein writes of Angleton, in his 1989 book “Deception.” “His counterintelligence staff would provide the alternative view of the picture. Whereas the Soviet division might see a Soviet diplomat as a possible CIA mole, the counterintelligence staff would view him as a possible disinformation agent. What division case officers would tend to look at as valid information, furnished by Soviet sources who risked their lives to cooperate with them, counterintelligence officers tended to question as disinformation, provided by KGB-controlled sources. This was, as Angleton put it, ‘a necessary duality.’ ”

Translation: the proper function of spies is to remind those who rely on spies that the kinds of thing found out by spies can’t be trusted. If this sounds like a lot of trouble, there’s a simpler alternative. The next time a briefcase washes up onshore, don’t open it. ♦

Thomas Jefferson "The United States Declaration of Independence"

2010-04-28T06:48:00.000-07:00

The Sex Scholar

2010-04-01T19:28:00.000-07:00

Decades before Kinsey, Stanford professor Clelia Mosher polled Victorian-era women on their bedroom behavior—then kept the startling results under wraps.
By Kara Platoni
DOING HER PART: Mosher served with the American Red Cross in France during World War I.

In 1973, historian Carl Degler was combing the University archives, gathering research for a book on the history of the family. Sifting through the papers of Dr. Clelia Duel Mosher, who taught in Stanford's hygiene department around the turn of the 20th century, he came across a mysteriously bound file. Degler nearly put it aside, figuring it was a manuscript for one of Mosher's published works, mostly statistical treatises on women's height, strength and menstruation. But instead, he recalls, "I opened it up and there were these questionnaires"— questionnaires upon which dozens of women, most born before 1870, had inscribed their most intimate thoughts.

In other words, it was a sex survey. A Victorian sex survey. It is the earliest known study of its type, long preceding, for example, the 1947 and 1953 Kinsey Reports, whose oldest female respondents were born in the 1890s. The Mosher Survey recorded not only women's sexual habits and appetites, but also their thinking about spousal relationships, children and contraception. Perhaps, it hinted, Victorian women weren't so Victorian after all.

Indeed, many of the surveyed women were decidedly unshrinking. One, born in 1844, called sex "a normal desire" and observed that "a rational use of it tends to keep people healthier." Offered another, born in 1862, "The highest devotion is based upon it, a very beautiful thing, and I am glad nature gave it to us."

The survey's genesis—like its rediscovery—was a fortuitous accident. Mosher started it in 1892 as a 28-year-old biology undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin; she had been asked to address a local Mother's Club on "the marital relation" and as a single, childless woman seems to have used data collection to fill gaps in her knowledge. Afterward, Mosher continued conducting surveys until 1920, using variations on the same form and amassing 45 profiles in all. Yet Mosher never published or drew more than cursory observations from her data. She died in 1940, and the survey was entirely forgotten when Degler unearthed it.

"I remember I was so surprised when I first opened it and saw what was there," recalls Degler, 89, the Margaret Byrne Professor of American History, emeritus. "I said to the librarian there, 'Did anyone ever use these papers before?' I was sure that they'd been used before. [The subject] was something that was so instantaneously interesting at this point. And they said no, no one ever had looked at any of the papers, and certainly not at that survey. That's one of the great experiences of my life as a historian."

Degler alerted the world to the survey's existence in 1974 by analyzing it in the American Historical Review, concluding that although in the Victorian era "there was an effort to deny women's sexual feelings . . . the Mosher Survey should make us doubt that the ideology was actually put into practice." The survey was a sensation. Degler recalls feminist historians coming to the archives to make copies, and in 1980 it was printed as a book that soon hit college classrooms.

Mosher's survey, says Stanford historian Estelle Freedman, co-author of Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, was "a goldmine" for scholars. In an era when "the public ideal was that women should be very discreet, if not ignorant, about sexuality," says Freedman, Mosher was "asking very modern questions. She's opening up an inquiry about what is the meaning of sexuality for women." Mosher's survey, like her life, gave poignant testimony to the complex desires of women who were caught between traditional feminine norms and 20th-century freedoms.
Courtesy Stanford University Archives

Born in 1863 in Albany, N.Y., young Clelia had a scientific bent encouraged by her father, Dr. Cornelius Mosher, whom she idolized. He took her on his medical rounds and taught her to love botany and literature. Yet he couldn't bear to let his beloved—and somewhat sickly—daughter attend college, then considered a strain on young women's health. He tried to distract Clelia by helping her set up a small florist shop, but she squirreled away tuition money and off she went.

Mosher's college career was somewhat nomadic. In 1889, she entered Wellesley as a 25-year-old freshman but struggled academically and with ill health. She spent her junior year at the University of Wisconsin, where she conducted her first surveys, and in 1892 transferred to Stanford, enrolling in its second class of students. She received a physiology degree in 1893 and her master's in physiology in 1894, while working as an assistant in the department of hygiene teaching health, physiology and exercise to female students.

Thanks to a steady supply of young female research subjects, Mosher's scholarly aim soon became clear: to prove that women were not inferior to men, and that frailties chalked up to sex were really the effects of binding garments, insufficient exercise and mental conditioning. Her master's thesis, for example, showed that women breathe from the diaphragm, as men do, rather than from the chest, as was believed at the time. She concluded that this so-called biological difference was really due to tight corsetry.

She also began tracking students' menstrual periods, hoping to upend "functional periodicity," the idea that menstruation debilitated women. It was a canny subject choice for an ambitious female investigator. "That was not research that men could do easily, so she definitely claimed an area that was not accessible to men for her own research," says Elizabeth Griego, who wrote her 1983 dissertation on Mosher for an education doctorate at UC-Berkeley and spent most of the early 1980s in the Stanford archives sifting through Mosher's papers. (Griego is now vice president for student life at the University of the Pacific.)

But it wasn't until after 1896, when Mosher had moved on to Johns Hopkins to obtain her MD, that she analyzed her data. Again, she blamed nurture over nature: Painful menstruation, she concluded, was in most cases caused by inactivity, poor muscular development and the very idea of "inevitable illness." Sending girls to bed to dwell upon their discomfort, Mosher wrote, "produce[s] a morbid attitude and favor[s] the development and exaggeration of whatever symptoms there may be." Mosher was not subtle about her motivation for seeking to discredit functional periodicity. "Equal pay for women means equal work; unnecessary menstrual absences mean less than full work," she wrote. Convinced that women should stay active throughout their periods, Mosher even invented abdominal exercises—dubbed "moshers"—to counteract menstrual pain.

‘The skirt, as modified by the vagaries of fashion, has a direct bearing on the health, development and efficiency of the woman. In 1893-96 I made a series of observations on the clothing of ninety-eight young women. The average width of skirt was then 13.5 feet. The weight of the skirt alone was often as much as the entire weight of the clothing worn by the modern girl.’
–Clelia Mosher, Strength of Women (c. 1920)

By the time Mosher received her MD in 1900, there were approximately 7,000 female doctors and surgeons in the United States (almost 6 percent of the total), but they still faced discrimination. Mosher turned down a job as an assistant to a gynecological surgeon when told that men would refuse to work under her. She returned to Palo Alto and opened a private practice, but struggled to get patient referrals from male colleagues or win grants to fund her menstruation studies. In 1910, Stanford offered her an assistant professorship in personal hygiene as the medical adviser for women, and Mosher eagerly returned to academic life. "I think she started out thinking she would like to be a doctor and perhaps a surgeon, but she found the doors closed to her very quickly," muses Griego.

Instead, Griego says, Mosher found what mattered to her: a living wage, intellectual freedom and access to research subjects. Mosher restarted her menstruation research and completed a study showing that the average height of Stanford's entering female students had increased 1.5 inches in 20 years, a change she attributed to better exercise and comfortable clothing. Mosher became a full professor in 1928, one year before she retired.

Despite the increasing prevalence of professional women, Griego says Mosher was an "intellectual loner." She didn't join women's professional groups or bond with many female academics. (Her Stanford research collaborators were male.) "She was really not very interested in the kinds of things that even faculty women—certainly faculty wives—were interested in," says Griego. "She wasn't interested in teas, she wasn't particularly interested in nurturing or mentoring women. She was really a researcher and she wanted to be accepted for her scientific approach to subjects."

She cut an odd figure on campus, Griego says, in her habitual "mannish suit." In her writings, Mosher railed against fashion: Sewing dainty clothing wasted women's study time; a young girl "making tatting to decorate her clothes or knitting or embroidering while her brother is playing ball" would grow feeble and sedentary.

Mosher never married and had few close relationships, although her mother lived with her on campus. Mosher felt this anomie deeply. A diary entry from 1919 laments: "I am finding out gradually why I am so lonely. The only things I care about are things which use my brain. The women I meet are not so much interested and I do not meet many men, so there is an intellectual solitude which is like the solitude of the desert—dangerous to one's sanity."
TOUGHEN UP: Stanford women, c. 1917, try their strength using a device of Mosher and physiology professor Ernest Martin.
Courtesy Stanford University Archives

Some archival scraps hint at her longing for connection: an unfinished novel whose heroine chooses career over the man she loves, musings on the mother-daughter bond and, the most poignant, a series of letters to an imaginary friend. "I get the sense of companionship and you are spared the boredom of reading them," Mosher wrote impishly in 1921. But in 1926, her tone was more despairing. "Dear 'Friend who never was,'" she wrote, "I have given up ever finding you. I have tried out all my friends and they have not measured up to my dreams."

Mosher's biggest scientific splash also eluded her during her lifetime.

Because it was hidden so long, her sex survey had little influence on her contemporaries, but today it's a valuable historic document that gainsays the stereotype that Victorian women knew little of sex and desired it even less. Granted, it is small and nonrepresentative, favoring well-educated, middle-class white women, and only those willing to disclose intimate matters. Mosher took care to obscure their identities—names and residences were not recorded—but it's likely the group included Stanford faculty and wives, the Mother's Club members from Mosher's Wisconsin days and other women she knew. Of those surveyed, 34 had attended a university or teachers' college. Nine were Stanford alumnae, six from Cornell; other alma maters included Wellesley, Vassar and the University of California. Thirty respondents had worked before marriage, mostly as teachers.

Slightly more than half of these educated women claimed to have known nothing of sex prior to marriage; the better informed said they'd gotten their information from books, talks with older women and natural observations like "watching farm animals." Yet no matter how sheltered they'd initially been, these women had—and enjoyed—sex. Of the 45 women, 35 said they desired sex; 34 said they had experienced orgasms; 24 felt that pleasure for both sexes was a reason for intercourse; and about three-quarters of them engaged in it at least once a week.

Unlike Mosher's other work, the survey is more qualitative than quantitative, featuring open-ended questions probing feelings and experiences. "She's actually asking these questions not about physiology or mechanics—she's really asking about sexual subjectivity and the meaning of sex to women," Freedman says. Their responses were often mixed. Some enjoyed sex but worried that they shouldn't. One slept apart from her husband "to avoid temptation of too frequent intercourse." Some didn't enjoy sex but faulted their partner. Mosher writes: [She] "Thinks men have not been properly trained."

Their responses reflected the cultural shifts of the late 19th century, as marriage became viewed as a romantic union, not just an economic one, and as people began to dissociate sex from procreation, says Freedman. One woman, born in 1867, wrote that before marriage she believed sex to be only for reproduction, but later changed her mind: "In my experience the habitual bodily expression of love has a deep psychological effect in making possible complete mental sympathy & perfecting the spiritual union that must be the lasting 'marriage' after the passion of love has passed away with the years." Wrote another, born in 1863, "It seems to me to be a natural and physical sign of a spiritual union, a renewal of the marriage vows."

‘A great responsibility rests upon us as physicians and teachers of physical training to lead women to ideas of health, to hold out to each one an attainable physical ideal, to teach the mechanism of our wonderful bodies so that she obeys the laws of her body, laws learned so perfectly that they are obeyed automatically.’
–Clelia Mosher, The Relation of Health to the Woman Movement, 1915

Anxieties about unwanted pregnancies are also clear. This was a hot topic during the 19th century, when the marital fertility rate fell by half despite the criminalization of abortion and contraception, Freedman says. At least 30 respondents reported attempting birth control anyway. Many mentioned using douching, withdrawal or the rhythm method; a few had tried a "womb veil" or male condoms.

"My husband and I . . . believe in intercourse for its own sake—we wish it for ourselves and spiritually miss it, rather than physically, when it does not occur, because it is the highest, most sacred expression of our oneness," wrote one woman, born in 1860. "On the other hand there are sometimes long periods when we are not willing to incur even a slight risk of pregnancy, and then we deny ourselves the intercourse, feeling all the time that we are losing that which keeps us closest to each other." A woman born in 1862, who felt that without "a strong desire for children" marriage was no more than "legalized prostitution," nevertheless wrote: "I most heartily wish there were no accidental conceptions. I believe the world would take a most gigantic stride toward high ethical conditions, if every child brought into the world were the product of pure love and conscious choice."

So if not all Victorian women scorned sex, why do we think of them as prudish? First, says Freedman, the notion of passionlessness wasn't universal, it was a class privilege, a way for wealthier women to claim respectability that more sexually vulnerable slave, immigrant and working-class women couldn't. "To some extent it's a protection of women from the sense of availability, and in other ways it's a limitation on them and denying their sexuality," Freedman says. Virtue was also a way for women to demonstrate good citizenship—men expressed this in the public sphere, and women in the home.

Also, some historical sources are misleading. As Degler pointed out in his 1974 article, until the Mosher Survey, much information about Victorian sex lives came from health advice books, like those of Dr. William Acton, who wrote in 1865: "The majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled with sexual feelings of any kind. What men are habitually, women are only exceptionally." But these books, wrote Degler, designed to urge temperance to young women, were prescriptive rather than de-scriptive: "The so-called Victorian conception of women's sexuality was more that of an ideology seeking to be established than the prevalent view or practice of even middle-class women."

More accurate portrayals of women's lives likely were confined to diaries and letters. Similarly, Griego says, women probably unburdened themselves to Mosher as a well-credentialed female physician. "They wouldn't have responded to just anyone with that confidential information, but her own self-image as a researcher and scientist encouraged them to be honest and factual." Although the survey's size means we can't draw broad conclusions about Victorian life from it, Freedman says, it's still a remarkably telling document, "a lens on a moment of transition."
Courtesy Stanford University Archives

We may never know what Mosher made of her own survey. Her brief introduction merely notes that it provided "a priceless knowledge for a practicing physician and teacher; a background sufficiently broad to avoid prejudice in her work with women." A comment on the era's falling birthrate contains her only analysis: "The maladjustments in marriage occasionally occur at the first consummation of the marital relation. The woman comes to this new experience of life often with no knowledge. The woman while she may give mental consent often shrinks physically. Her slower time reaction deprives her of all physical response, or (2) too often her training has instilled the idea that any physical response is coarse, common and immodest which inhibits proper part in this relation."

Ultimately, Mosher's story is deeply ironic: She was a staunch feminist who remained aloof from sisterhood, a woman who rigorously researched sexuality and marriage yet probably experienced neither, a pioneering scholar who longed for recognition but did not live to enjoy it. Today there is an often well-rewarded place in our society for awkward overachievers, but Mosher struggled her entire life with her ungainly intellect and with being a woman in a man's research world.

"We need people to go before us, and she was certainly a way-shower for a generation that followed her," Griego says. "Even though she was not the kind of person that women of her time wanted to emulate, still she held out the possibility that women could be intellectuals, they could be scientists."

In her own writings, Mosher was acutely aware of her foresight, and of the possibilities that lay ahead for women once sex became less of a secret and gender less of a burden. "Born into a world of unlimited opportunity, the woman of the rising generation will answer the question of what woman's real capacities are," Mosher wrote in 1923. "She will have physical, economic, racial and civic freedom. What will she do with it?"

Packing the Supreme Court

2010-03-27T20:57:00.000-07:00

With Justices for All
By ALAN BRINKLEY

Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court

By Jeff Shesol

Illustrated. 644 pages. W. W. Norton & Company. $27.95

In 1937, a few months after his landslide re-election to a second term, Franklin Roosevelt set out on one of the boldest and most dangerous courses of his presidency. The conservative Supreme Court had already struck down a series of New Deal programs. Roosevelt feared that the mostly aged justices would go on to destroy the rest of his legislative achievements before he would have a chance to make any new appointments. As a result, he proposed a “reform” of the courts that would, among other things, have added an additional justice to the Supreme Court for every current justice over the age of 70. It became the most controversial proposal of his presidency — so much so that it nearly paralyzed his administration for over a year and destroyed much of the fragile unity of the Democratic coalition.

Jeff Shesol (the author of “Mutual Contempt,” an account of the relationship between Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy) is not the first to chronicle what became known as the “court-packing” controversy, but “Supreme Power” is by far the most detailed — and most riveting — account of this extraordinary event. Shesol provides a revealing portrait of the “nine old men,” as opponents of the court described them. At the same time, he presents in great detail Roosevelt’s own anguish over what he considered the court’s reactionary views. Both sides of the controversy were the products of deep conviction. The court was on a mission to combat what the justices viewed as a great danger to the basic principles of American democracy. The White House was on its own mission to save not just the New Deal, but also its restoration of the nation.

Within the Roosevelt administration, the proposal to enlarge the court seemed eminently reasonable. There was no constitutional bar to expanding the number of justices. All other measures — constitutional amendments, legislative remedies, mandatory retirements and similar proposals — seemed far more radical and far less likely to succeed. Court packing seemed the most moderate and cautious of the paths available — but still, they realized, a tremendously risky one.

Both the court and the White House paid a considerable price for their insularity and secrecy. The justices, of course, were isolated by design. But the White House and the Justice Department created their own insularity, pursuing their goals with such surprisingly successful secrecy that they gave few people, even within the administration, the opportunity to warn Roosevelt of the dangers he faced. Shesol recounts these miscalculations on both sides with particular skill.

And the dangers, it quickly became clear, were much greater than Roosevelt and his advisers had imagined. It was not surprising that the court-packing controversy would arouse the rage of the right, which already detested Roosevelt and the New Deal and believed the White House was building a dictatorship. More startling to the president was the outrage from within his own party — even among many staunch progressives — and the lukewarm loyalty he received even from those who agreed to support him. Many opponents of the proposal shared Roosevelt’s dismay at the court’s conservatism, but tampering with the institution seemed even to many liberals to represent excessive presidential power and a threat to the Constitution.

The justices of the Supreme Court were as sharply divided in the 1930s as they often seem to have become in the 21st century. Five of them (George Sutherland, James McReynolds, Willis Van Devanter, Pierce Butler and Owen Roberts) were largely opposed to the New Deal measures they were asked to consider. Four others (Louis Brandeis, Harlan Fiske Stone, Benjamin Cardozo and, somewhat precariously, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes), mostly supported the New Deal. In 1937, when the court-packing fight began, most of the justices had been on the bench for well over a decade, and none had been appointed during Roosevelt’s first four years. Hence the president’s frustration, and his belief that the court had become out of touch with the realities of the time.

During the first months of controversy, the likelihood of success, given the huge Democratic majorities in Congress, seemed high, despite the ferocity of the opposition. But gradually the president’s position eroded — a response to growing opposition and to the resentment of what many considered Roosevelt’s duplicity in proposing what he claimed to be court “reform” rather than what many people considered naked political pressure. In July 1937, the court proposal died in the Senate, by now undefended even by the White House and unlamented by most of the public. It was widely described as the most devastating defeat Roosevelt had ever experienced.

But how devastating was the defeat? In West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, a 1937 case contesting a minimum wage law in Washington State, Owen Roberts voted with the liberals to sustain the law. (Only one year earlier he had joined the conservatives in voting down another minimum wage law.) Over the following months, Roberts continued to vote mostly with the liberals. And beginning in mid-1937, a number of conservative justices retired, providing the president with the opportunity to appoint several new justices who transformed the ideological balance of the court.

Shesol does not engage directly with the scholarly debate over whether the court-packing controversy was responsible for the shift in the court’s behavior. The traditional story, supported by some of the leading historians of the New Deal, maintains that the pressure from Roosevelt persuaded Roberts, and perhaps others, to shift positions. Other historians — mostly legal scholars — argue that the court-packing fight had little or nothing to do with the court’s shift, that it represented instead a slow and steady evolution of constitutional law that long preceded the controversy. But even without taking an explicit stand, Shesol suggests a plausible argument that falls somewhere between these two interpretations.

One of Shesol’s many important contributions to an understanding of this controversy is his powerful description of the extraordinary opprobrium the court confronted as it began to overturn New Deal measures in 1935. Indeed, it was the deep unpopularity of the court that helped embolden Roosevelt to challenge it in 1937. In those first years of the New Deal, Shesol suggests, the conservative justices were stunned by the boldness and, they thought, radicalism of the New Deal; their opinions seemed to reflect their alarm and caused them to take positions even more conservative than they had in the recent past. Two years later, similarly stunned by the criticism they were receiving, the justices began to slowly back away from their most conservative views. Roberts’s shift occurred even before Roosevelt announced his court-packing plan; but that does not mean that the political furor played no role in his decision.

Shesol also draws attention to a more mundane but nevertheless considerable factor in the shift of the court. In 1937 Roosevelt supported, and Congress approved, a bill to assure retired justices that they would continue to receive their judicial salaries even after retirement. The absence of such benefits had deterred some aged justices from retiring; once the pensions were assured, several of them resigned.

“Supreme Power” is an impressive and engaging book — an excellent work of narrative history. It is deeply researched and beautifully written. Even readers who already know the outcome will find it hard not to feel the suspense that surrounded the battle, so successfully does Shesol recreate the atmosphere of this great controversy. There are many ways to explain what become known as the “Constitutional revolution of 1937,” but Shesol’s book is — at least for now — the most thorough account of this dramatic and still contested event.

Alan Brinkley, the Allan Nevins professor of history at Columbia University, is the author of “The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century.”

Monopoly--Amazing History !!!

2010-03-24T15:01:00.000-07:00

(You'll never look at the game the same way again!)
Starting in 1941, an increasing number of British Airmen found themselves as the involuntary guests of the Third Reich, and the Crown was casting about for ways and means to facilitate their escape...

Now obviously, one of the most helpful aids to that end is a useful and accurate map, one showing not only where stuff was, but also showing the locations of 'safe houses' where a POW on-the-lam could go for food and shelter.

Paper maps had some real drawbacks -- they make a lot of noise when you open and fold them, they wear out rapidly, and if they get wet, they turn into mush.
Someone in MI-5 (similar to America 's OSS ) got the idea of printing escape maps on silk. It's durable, can be scrunched-up into tiny wads, and unfolded as many times as needed, and makes no noise whatsoever.

At that time, there was only one manufacturer in Great Britain that had perfected the technology of printing on silk, and that was John Waddington, Ltd. When approached by the government, the firm was only too happy to do its bit for the war effort.

By pure coincidence, Waddington was also the U.K. Licensee for the popular American board game, Monopoly. As it happened, 'games and pastimes' was a category of item qualified for insertion into 'CARE packages', dispatched by the International Red Cross to prisoners of war.

Under the strictest of secrecy, in a securely guarded and inaccessible old workshop on the grounds of Waddington's, a group of sworn-to-secrecy employees began mass-producing escape maps, keyed to each region of Germany or Italy where Allied POW camps were regional system). When processed, these maps could be folded into such tiny dots that they would actually fit inside a Monopoly playing piece.

As long as they were at it, the clever workmen at Waddington's also managed to add:
1. A playing token, containing a small magnetic compass
2. A two-part metal file that could easily be screwed together
3. Useful amounts of genuine high-denomination German, Italian, and French currency, hidden within the piles of Monopoly money!

British and American air crews were advised, before taking off on their first mission, how to identify a 'rigged' Monopoly set -- by means of a tiny red dot, one cleverly rigged to look like an ordinary printing glitch, located in the corner of the Free Parking square.

Of the estimated 35,000 Allied POWS who successfully escaped, an estimated one-third were aided in their flight by the rigged Monopoly sets.. Everyone who did so was sworn to secrecy indefinitely, since the British Government might want to use this highly successful ruse in still another, future war.

The story wasn't declassified until 2007, when the surviving craftsmen from Waddington's, as well as the firm itself, were finally honored in a public ceremony.

It's always nice when you can play that 'Get Out of Jail' Free' card!
I realize most of you are (probably) too young to have any personal connection to WWII (Dec. '41 to Aug. '45), but this is still interesting.

The Golden Touch

2010-03-11T16:57:00.000-08:00

Banker J. P. Morgan rescued the dollar and bailed out the nation
By John Steele Gordon

On February 5, 1895, the Jupiter of American banking, J. P. Morgan, took the train from New York to Washington to see the president. He had no appointment but came to discuss matters of grave national interest. The crash of 1893 had thrown the country into deep depression, exposed a schizophrenic monetary policy, and now the nation’s gold standard stood on the brink of collapse.

The origin of the crisis lay more than two decades earlier, when Congress had decreed a return to the gold standard, which had been abandoned during the Civil War. (The gold standard effectively restrains inflation by requiring that a nation anchors its currency to gold at a set price.) In 1878 Congress passed the Bland-Allison Act, which ordered the Treasury to buy the silver then pouring out of Western mines in ever increasing amounts, at market price and to coin it at a ratio to gold of 16 to 1.

In 1878 the market price of silver was indeed close to the 16-to-1 ratio. But as silver output continued to swell, it dropped to about 20 to 1 by 1890. In that year Congress passed the Sherman Silver Act, requiring the government to buy even more bullion, 4.5 million ounces a month, and coin it, still at 16 to 1. This policy guaranteed inflation, favored by the poorer areas of the country, such as the South and, of course, the silver-rich West.

Anyone who knew Gresham’s law (“bad money drives out good”) could have predicted what happened next. With silver worth one-twentieth the price of gold in the marketplace but declared to be 25 percent more when coined into money, people began to spend the silver and hoard the gold.

With the government running big surpluses in the prosperous late 1880s and early 1890s, the effect of this monetary policy was masked. But when the crash of 1893 rolled in, bringing deep depression, the trickle of gold out of the Treasury became a flood. By early 1895 bets were being taken on Wall Street as to exactly when the Treasury would run out of gold and default. Two bond issues were sold to replenish the Treasury’s gold supply, but the gold just cycled out again. Congress, with many free-coinage-of-silver members, refused to authorize another issue. That’s when the deeply alarmed Morgan traveled to Washington in early February.

President Grover Cleveland at first refused to see him, but Morgan replied, in his best imperial manner, “I have come down to see the president, and I am going to stay here until I see him.” Cleveland saw him the next morning.
By early 1895 bets were being taken on Wall Street as to exactly when the Treasury would run out of gold and default

Cleveland, his attorney general, and the secretary of the Treasury all still hoped that they could persuade Congress to float another bond issue and thus avoid the embarrassment of having the gold standard rescued by the very symbol of Wall Street. A telephone call from New York informed them that the New York Subtreasury had only $9 million worth of gold left in its vaults. Morgan informed them that he knew of $12 million in drafts that might be presented at any moment. Cleveland’s back was up against the wall.

“What suggestions have you to make, Mr. Morgan?” he asked.

Whereupon Morgan made an extraordinary offer: he and the Rothschilds, the two most powerful forces in international banking at that time, would purchase 3.5 million ounces of gold in Europe in exchange for 30-year gold bonds. (Morgan had uncovered a forgotten Civil War-era statute that allowed the Treasury to issue bonds in exchange for coin.) He also guaranteed that the gold would not flow back out of the Treasury, at least for a while.

In effect, Morgan was offering to act as the nation’s (otherwise nonexistent) central bank, insulating the Treasury from market forces. And it worked. The bonds sold easily in both Wall Street and London, and Morgan and the Rothschilds, using a full battery of foreign exchange techniques, bolstered the dollar, keeping the gold in the Treasury.

Morgan’s rescue of the dollar, despite intense criticism from the Left, changed the country’s economic mood, and a strong recovery from the depression began. The next year the 36-year-old William Jennings Bryan would win the Democratic nomination with a promise that the moneyed classes “shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” It was one of the most famous speeches in American history, but his far less eloquent opponent, William McKinley, trounced him by running on a slogan of “sound money, protection, and prosperity.”

The election proved to be the start of the revival of Republican dominance in American politics that would last until 1932.

—John Steele Gordon, author of An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power (HarperCollins 2004), writes about economic history for the Wall Street Journal.

Abraham Lincoln "The Gettysburg Address"

2010-03-07T06:20:00.000-08:00

1906 San Francisco Street Car filmed 4 days before the 06 earthquake

2010-02-25T07:19:00.000-08:00

This is well worth viewing and filmed 4 days before the '06 earthquake.
You'll appreciate the research that it took to date this film so be sure
to read this first.....

Here's a neat opportunity to enjoy some time travel. The film is
from a streetcar traveling down Market Street in San Francisco, four
days before the big earthquake/fire that destroyed the area. You
can clearly see the clocktower at the end of the street at the
Embarcadero wharf that's still there... The quality & detail is
great, so be sure to view it full screen.

The film, was originally thought to be from 1905 until David Kiehn
with the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum figured out exactly when
it was shot. From New York trade papers announcing the film showing
to the wet streets from recent heavy rainfall & shadows indicating
time of year & actual weather and conditions on historical record,
even when the cars were registered (he even knows who owned them and
when the plates were issued!).

It was filmed only four days before the quake and shipped by train to NY for
processing. Amazing but true!

Creating a Postwar World

2010-02-06T11:08:00.000-08:00

Hour by hour with Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt.

By MATTHEW KAMINSKI

Sixty-five years ago this week, as Soviet and Allied forces headed toward Berlin in the final months of World War II, three political leaders remade the modern world. Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin met near the city of Yalta, on the coast of the Black Sea, to determine the fate of postwar Europe.

The decisions they arrived at, and the agreements they made, proved so momentous that Yalta soon became a symbol of the political failures that led to the Cold War. The captive nations of Eastern Europe in particular blamed Yalta for putting them under the control of the Soviet Union. In communist Poland, where I grew up, one often heard about naïve and sickly FDR—only two months away from death—delivering the motherland into Uncle Joe's clutches. Countless Estonians, Hungarians and Czechs felt the same way.

The end of the Cold War has given scholars a chance to step back and take a more dispassionate look at those eight consequential days in February 1945. It is hard to imagine anyone doing so better than S.M. Plokhy in "Yalta: The Price of Peace." A historian from Ukraine who teaches at Harvard University, Mr. Plokhy has produced a colorful and gripping portrait of the three aging leaders at their historic encounter. He does not shy away from making judgments about the deal they struck there.

We first meet Roosevelt the month before, on Jan. 20, 1945, delivering a memorable promise in his fourth inaugural address—to "work for a just and honorable peace, a durable peace, as today we work and fight for total victory in war." Two days later he boarded the U.S.S. Quincy and headed for Europe to realize this vision. It is clear that FDR's goals at Yalta were to win the Soviet Union's support for the United Nations and its help in the war against Japan. All else was secondary, thus setting the U.S. up for concessions to Moscow.

Churchill, for his part, came to Yalta looking to restore an independent and democratic France and Poland—part of a balance-of-power calculation that he deemed critical to the future of Europe—and to limit the reparations required of Germany, lest Europe face of a repeat of the Versailles treaty after World War I. Stalin's plans were imperial: to get back the territory that the Russians lost from Poland in 1920 (and briefly regained in the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact with Hitler) and to subordinate Eastern Europe to Soviet rule.

Mr. Plokhy takes the reader through the conference hour by hour, making it apparent that the outcome at Yalta was very much up for grabs. Over and over again we see one leader or another blithely pushing pet ideas or haggling over details of agreements that would affect millions of people for generations to come. The material from Soviet archives, along with Western accounts, enables Mr. Plokhy to reconstruct conversations among the participants and to tell us what informed their thinking.
[book0204]
Yalta: The Price of Peace

By S.M. Plokhy
Viking, 451 pages, $21.95

The undereducated son of a Georgian cobbler, Stalin emerges early in this portrait as a savvier negotiator than either the patrician Churchill or Roosevelt. His charm wins FDR over, leading the American on numerous occasions to side with him against Churchill. Stalin was also the best informed of the three, thanks to British spy Kim Philby and the rest of the "Cambridge Five" who had for months provided the Soviets with Allied position papers, sometimes even before Churchill or Roosevelt saw them. Stalin masterfully exploited the divisions his intelligence told him about among Western leaders over what should happen to Germany or Poland after the war.

FDR and his advisers underestimated Stalin and the threat he posed, although it is also true that the Red Army's already deep advance into Central Europe limited their leverage over him. Once FDR had secured Stalin's backing for the U.N.—and had presumptively handed Japan's Kuril Islands over to the Soviets in exchange for their promise to enter the Pacific war—the U.S. seemed to lose interest. To Churchill's annoyance, Washington caved in to the Soviet demand for domination over Poland (and, by extension, over the rest of Eastern Europe) and to the division of Germany. Churchill mused to an aide that the next war would be "ideological" and a year later declared that "an iron curtain has descended across the Continent." But he could claim half a victory: Stalin signed off on a French sector in occupied Germany, restoring Paris as a serious Continental power, a British goal throughout the war. And German reparations were indeed limited.

Mr. Plokhy is forgiving of FDR. The president played his own hand skillfully, he says, and acted as a broker between the quarrelsome Stalin and Churchill. Though called naïve, the British and Americans knew that Yalta set the stage for a quisling Poland and for the transfer of millions of people across the redrawn borders between Poland, Germany and the Soviet Union. FDR and Churchill tried to comfort themselves by believing that Moscow would honor its promise to allow free elections in its soon-to-be satellite states.

At the end of the Yalta conference, the mood was even upbeat. Roosevelt compared the atmosphere "to that of a family." The Americans and British thought that they got the best result possible. During the signing ceremony, the Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, noticed the lemon tree that Stalin had ordered put in FDR's room after the president remarked that martinis tasted better with lemons, and the minister suggested that his American and British peers each pluck a branch from it as a souvenir. They did. "The Allies returned home from the peace conference with branches of lemon instead of palm," writes Mr. Plokhy. "For the time being, they did not see the irony in their gesture."

Brewing Up a Civilization

2010-01-22T04:11:00.000-08:00

By Frank Thadeusz

Did our Neolithic ancestors turn to agriculture so that they could be sure of a tipple? US Archaeologist Patrick McGovern thinks so. The expert on identifying traces of alcohol in prehistoric sites reckons the thirst for a brew was enough of an incentive to start growing crops.

It turns out the fall of man probably didn't begin with an apple. More likely, it was a handful of mushy figs that first led humankind astray.

Here is how the story likely began -- a prehistoric human picked up some dropped fruit from the ground and popped it unsuspectingly into his or her mouth. The first effect was nothing more than an agreeably bittersweet flavor spreading across the palate. But as alcohol entered the bloodstream, the brain started sending out a new message -- whatever that was, I want more of it!

Humankind's first encounters with alcohol in the form of fermented fruit probably occurred in just such an accidental fashion. But once they were familiar with the effect, archaeologist Patrick McGovern believes, humans stopped at nothing in their pursuit of frequent intoxication.

A secure supply of alcohol appears to have been part of the human community's basic requirements much earlier than was long believed. As early as around 9,000 years ago, long before the invention of the wheel, inhabitants of the Neolithic village Jiahu in China were brewing a type of mead with an alcohol content of 10 percent, McGovern discovered recently.

McGovern analyzed clay shards found during excavations in China's Yellow River Valley at his Biomolecular Archaeology Laboratory for Cuisine, Fermented Beverages, and Health at the University of Pennsylvania Museum.

The bearded archaeologist is recognized around the world as an expert when it comes to identifying traces of alcoholic drinks on prehistoric finds. He ran so-called liquid chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry on the clay remnants from Asia and found traces of tartaric acid -- one of the main acids present in wine -- and beeswax in the shards' pores. It appears that prehistoric humans in China combined fruit and honey into an intoxicating brew.

Clever Survival Strategy

Additionally, plant sterols point to wild rice as an ingredient. Lacking any knowledge of chemistry, prehistoric humans eager for the intoxicating effects of alcohol apparently mixed clumps of rice with saliva in their mouths to break down the starches in the grain and convert them into malt sugar.

These pioneering brewers would then spit the chewed up rice into their brew. Husks and yeasty foam floated on top of the liquid, so they used long straws to drink from narrow necked jugs. Alcohol is still consumed this way in some regions of China.

McGovern sees this early fermentation process as a clever survival strategy. "Consuming high energy sugar and alcohol was a fabulous solution for surviving in a hostile environment with few natural resources," he explains.

The most recent finds from China are consistent with McGovern's chain of evidence, which suggests that the craft of making alcohol spread rapidly to various locations around the world during the Neolithic period. Shamans and village alchemists mixed fruit, herbs, spices, and grains together in pots until they formed a drinkable concoction.

But that wasn't enough for McGovern. He carried the theory much further, aiming at a complete reinterpretation of humanity's history. His bold thesis, which he lays out in his book "Uncorking the Past. The Quest for Wine, Beer and Other Alcoholic Beverage," states that agriculture -- and with it the entire Neolithic Revolution, which began about 11,000 years ago -- are ultimately results of the irrepressible impulse toward drinking and intoxication.

"Available evidence suggests that our ancestors in Asia, Mexico, and Africa cultivated wheat, rice, corn, barley, and millet primarily for the purpose of producing alcoholic beverages," McGovern explains. While they were at it, he believes, drink-loving early civilizations managed to ensure their basic survival.

A Hybrid Swill

Archaeologists have long pondered the question of which came first, bread or beer. McGovern surmises that these prehistoric humans didn't initially have the ability to master the very complicated process of brewing beer. However, they were even more incapable of baking bread, for which wild grains are extremely unsuitable. They would have had first to separate the tiny grains from the chaff, with a yield hardly worth the great effort. If anything, the earliest bakers probably made nothing more than a barely palatable type of rough bread, containing the unwanted addition of the grain's many husks.

It's likely, therefore, that early farmers first enriched their diet with a hybrid swill -- half fruit wine and half mead -- that was actually quite nutritious. Neolithic drinkers were devoted to this precious liquid. At the excavation site of Hajji Firuz Tepe in the Zagros Mountains of northwestern Iran, McGovern discovered prehistoric wine racks used to store airtight carafes. Inhabitants of the village seasoned their alcohol with resin from Atlantic Pistachio trees. This ingredient was said to have healing properties, for example for infections, and was used as an early antibiotic.

The village's Neolithic residents lived comfortably in spacious mud brick huts, and the archaeologist and his team found remnants of wine vessels in the kitchens of nearly all the dwellings. "Drinking wasn't just a privilege of the wealthy in the village," McGovern posits, and he adds that women drank their fair share as well.

A Mysterious Inscription?

In Iran of all countries, where alcohol consumption is now punishable by whipping, the American scientist found vessels containing the first evidence of prehistoric beer. At first he puzzled over the purpose of the bulbous vessels with wide openings found in the prehistoric settlement Godin Tepe. Previously known wine vessels all had smaller spouts.

McGovern was also perplexed by crisscrossed grooves scratched into the bottoms of the containers. Could it be some kind of mysterious inscription?

But back in the laboratory, he isolated calcium oxalate, known to brewers as an unwanted byproduct of beer production. Nowadays, breweries can filter the crystals out of their brew without any difficulty. Their resourceful predecessors, working 3,500 years B.C., scratched grooves into their 50-liter (13-gallon) jugs so that the tiny stones would settle out there. McGovern had discovered humankind's first beer bottles.

The ancient farmers in Godin Tepe harvested barley from fields near the village and mashed the crop using basalt stone. Then they brewed the ground grain into a considerable range of varieties, enjoying a sweet, caramel-flavored dark beer, an amber-hued lager-like concoction, and other pleasant-tasting beverages.

Around the same time, the Sumerians were paying homage to their fertility goddess Nin-Harra, whom they considered to be the inventor of beer. The creators of Mesopotamian civilization scratched instructions for brewing beer onto small clay tablets in Nin-Harra's honor. The main ingredient in their variety of beer was emmer, a variety of wheat that has since nearly disappeared.

Thus the human project that started with the first hominids to stumble around under fruit trees reached completion with these prehistoric beer drinkers. "Moderate alcohol consumption was advantageous for our early ancestors," McGovern speculates, "and they adapted to it biologically."

It is a legacy that still burdens humankind today. The archaeologist, however, sees himself as reasonably balanced in this respect. Ancestors on one side of his family, the McGoverns, opened the very first bar in their hometown of Mitchell, South Dakota. On the other side, however, an especially puritanical branch of the family originated from Norway and strictly avoided alcohol consumption.

URL:

* http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,668642,00.html

CBS Holocaust

2010-01-13T16:04:00.000-08:00

This story was aired on CBS on "60 MINUTES" ** about a long-secret German archive that houses a treasure trove of information on 17.5 million victims of the Holocaust. The archive, located in the German town of Bad Arolsen, is massive (there are 16 miles of shelving containing 50 million pages of documents) and until recently, was off-limits to the public. But after the German government agreed earlier this year to open the archives, CBS News' Scott Pelley traveled there with three Jewish survivors who were able to see their own Holocaust records. It's an incredibly moving piece, all the more poignant in the wake of the meeting of Holocaust deniers in Iran and the denial speeches in the UN. We're trying to get word out about the story to people who have a special interest in this subject.

It is now more than 60 years after the Second World War in Europe ended. This e-mail is being sent as a memorial chain, in memory of the six million Jews, 20 million Russians, 10 million Christians and 1,900 Catholic priests who were murdered, massacred, raped, burned, starved and humiliated with the German and Russia peoples looking the other way! Now, more than ever, with Iran, among others, claiming the Holocaust to be "a myth," it is imperative to make sure the world never forgets.

The Decade in 7 Minutes

2009-12-23T16:45:00.000-08:00

NEWSWEEK rewinds the first 10 years of the new century, reminding you of the best, worst, and unforgettable moments.

10 Nursery Rhymes and Their Origins

2009-09-05T19:44:00.000-07:00

What child doesn’t love nursery rhymes? It is this love which has allowed so many of these tales to survive hundreds of years. While many nursery rhymes are innocent stories, some contain morals and others have sinister or political underlying meanings. This list looks at ten popular nursery rhymes and their origins (or speculated origins).

10
Humpty Dumpty

Humpty Dumpty was first printed in 1810. At the time, a humpty dumpty was a clumsy person, so the nursery rhyme was meant as a riddle. It doesn’t actually state that Humpty Dumpty is an egg, so the aim of the reader is to guess what he really is. Of course there is not a person who knows the tale these days that doesn’t know he is an egg. There is speculation that the nursery rhyme had an underlying meaning – in which Humpty Dumpty represents King Richard III of England and the wall his horse. Others have suggested that it refers to the downfall of Cardinal Wolsey at the hand of King Henry VIII.

9
Sing a Song of Sixpence

Sing a song of sixpence dates back to at least the eighteenth century. In the original, the tale ends with a blackbird pecking off the nose of the maid in the garden; in the mid-nineteenth century this was sanitized with the addition of a final verse in which a doctor sews it back on. While interpretations vary wildly, the four and twenty blackbirds are most likely simply a reference to a common practice in the sixteenth-century in which large pies were baked then filled with live birds which would escape when the pie was cut. This stems from the fact that a meal was meant not just as nourishment, but entertainment.

8
Rock-a-bye Baby

Originally titled ‘Hushabye Baby’, this nursery rhyme was said to be the first poem written on American soil. Although there is no evidence as to when the lyrics were written, it may date from the seventeenth century and have been written by an English immigrant who observed the way native-American women rocked their babies in birch-bark cradles, which were suspended from the branches of trees, allowing the wind to rock the baby to sleep. An alternative interpretation states that the baby is the son of King James II of England, who was widely believed to be someone else’s child smuggled into the birthing room in order to provide a Catholic heir for James. In this interpretation, the cradle represents the Stuart monarchy.

7
Little Jack Horner

The first recorded version of Little Jack Horner comes from the eighteenth-century but it is most likely to have be known since the seventeenth. In the nineteenth century the story began to gain currency that the rhyme is actually about Thomas Horner, who steward to Richard Whiting, the last abbot of Glastonbury Abbey before the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII of England. The story is reported that, prior to the abbey’s destruction, the abbot sent Horner to London with a huge Christmas pie which had the deeds to a dozen manors hidden within it and that during the journey Horner opened the pie and extracted the deeds of the manor of Mells in Somerset. It is further suggested that, since the manor properties included lead mines in the Mendip Hills, the plum is a pun on the Latin plumbum, for lead. The current owners of Mells Manor have stated that they doubt this interpretation.

6
Little Bo Peep

The earliest record of this rhyme is in a manuscript of around 1805, which contains only the first verse. There are references to a children’s game called “Bo-Peep”, from the sixteenth century, including one in Shakespeare’s King Lear (Act I Scene iv), but little evidence that the rhyme existed. The additional verses are first recorded in the earliest printed version in a version of Gammer Gurton’s Garland or The Nursery Parnassus in 1810, making this one of the most modern nursery rhymes on the list.
5
Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary

Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary has been seen as having religious and historical significance, but its origins and meaning are disputed as is often the case. The most common interpretation identifies “Mary” with Mary I of England. The “How does your garden grow?” may make mocking reference to her womb and the fact that she gave birth to no heirs, or to the common idea that England had become a Catholic vassal or “branch” of Spain and the Habsburgs, or may even be a punning reference to her chief minister, Stephen Gardiner (”gardener”). “Quite contrary” could be a reference to her attempt to reverse ecclesiastical changes made by her father Henry VIII and her brother Edward VI. The “pretty maids all in a row” could be a reference to miscarriages or her execution of Lady Jane Grey. Capitalizing on the Queen’s portrayal by Whig historians as “Bloody Mary”, the “silver bells and cockle shells” could be colloquialisms for instruments of torture.

4
Baa, Baa, Black Sheep

Baa, Baa, Black Sheep is an eighteenth century nursery rhyme sung to the same tune as Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. It is possible that this rhyme is a description of the medieval ‘Great’ or ‘Old Custom’ wool tax of 1275, which survived until the fifteenth century. Contrary to some commentaries, this tax did not involve the collection of one third to the king, and one third to the church, but a less punitive sum of 6s 8d to the Crown per sack, about 5 per cent of the value. In the 1980s the theory was advanced that it made reference to slavery, but most scholars disagree.

3
Mary Had a Little Lamb

The nursery rhyme was first published as an original poem by Sarah Josepha Hale on May 24, 1830, and was inspired by an actual incident. As a girl, Mary Sawyer (later Mrs. Mary Tyler) kept a pet lamb, which she took to school one day at the suggestion of her brother. A commotion naturally ensued. Mary recalled:

“Visiting school that morning was a young man by the name of John Roulstone, a nephew of the Reverend Lemuel Capen, who was then settled in Sterling. It was the custom then for students to prepare for college with ministers, and for this purpose Mr. Roulstone was studying with his uncle. The young man was very much pleased with the incident of the lamb; and the next day he rode across the fields on horseback to the little old schoolhouse and handed me a slip of paper which had written upon it the three original stanzas of the poem…”

2
London Bridge is Falling Down

“London Bridge Is Falling Down is a well-known traditional nursery rhyme and singing game, which is found in different versions all over the world. One theory of origin is that the rhyme relates to supposed destruction of London Bridge by Olaf II of Norway in 1014 (or 1009). Another postulates that the rhyme refers to the practice of burying children alive in the foundations of the bridge – though there is no evidence to support this. The fair lady referred to could be Matilda of Scotland who was responsible for the building of a series of London bridges, or Eleanor of Provence who had custody of the bridge income from 1269 to 1281.

1
Ring a Ring o’ Roses

Ring a Ring o’ Roses first appeared in print in 1881 but it was being sung from at least the 1790s. Most people consider the nursery rhyme to be making reference to the Great Plague of London in 1665 but this view did not appear until after World War II. Furthermore, the symptoms don’t describe the plague particularly well, and the words upon which the plague interpretation is based don’t even exist in the earliest forms of the rhyme. The earliest form recorded is:

Ring around the rosy,
A pocket full of posies;
ashes, ashes
we all fall down!

Despite the fact that it is extremely unlikely to refer to the plague, the concept is so deeply set in the modern English speaker’s psyche that it is unlikely to fade in the future.

Top 10 Worst Military Decisions In History

2009-09-05T12:30:00.000-07:00

The effective prosecution of any war requires a load of decisions at all junctures. Many times, commanders will blunder through misinformation, faulty intelligence, or a misreading of the tactical or strategic situation. We, safely ensconced here in the future can play Monday morning quarterback with the decision of the past often without acknowledging the fact that the commanders in question lack our brilliant hindsight; however, some decisions are simple unconscionable. One has to think that someone, somewhere had to look at this choice and say “God, this is stupid!” This list represents, in chronological order, ten of what I consider to be the dumbest decisions anyone ever made. Each of these decisions either resulted in tremendously unnecessary loss of men and materiel or it resulted in the ultimate loss or needless prolonging of the war in which it took place.

10
Invading Russia
Napoleon Bonaparte (June 1812)
The only motivation I can fathom behind this idiotic blunder by a military genius is sheer boredom. To this point in his military career, Napoleon has known nothing but victory after victory. He’s conquered pretty much all of Europe that refused to ally with him and suddenly he was sitting around with the largest army ever gathered in Europe up until then with nothing to do. So Napoleon looks west, to Mother Russia.

We all know how it turned out but you have to think someone in that huge army knew it was a bad idea. In any event, he didn’t say anything and the rest is history. Napoleon invaded Russia with three quarters of a million men and didn’t fight much of a battle. The Russian retreated into the vastness of their country and burned everything in their wake. Result? Napoleon gets to Moscow only to find smoking ruins. Dejected at not getting to move his toy soldiers around on his big map, he turns the Grand Armee around and begins for home.

But then the real trouble began. Constant harassment by tiny, mobile Russian units. Constant hunger because the supply lines are cut in more places than Danish lace and, worst of all, winter sets in and the soldiers start freezing to death in droves. Three quarters of a million went in, but less than one in three would made it out.

9
The Alamo
Gen. Santa Anna (February 1836)
Someone has remarked that the Alamo seems to show up on nearly every military list. Well, it’s a great story. Not the least great part about it was it was so totally unnecessary. All the Alamo consisted of was a tiny adobe walled mission in the middle of a prairie. Basically, Santa Anna, aka Napoleon of the West, decided the tiny garrison in the tiny fort had to be taught a lesson about Mexican politics by his great big army.

One just has to think that someone, some hard campaigning Sergeant in the Mexican force had to look around at the wide open prairie on both sides of the Alamo and think to himself, “Why don’t we just go around? We can even shoot at them as we go by, but let’s get to the rebel capital and put down the rebellion.”
Instead, mainly as a result of Santa Anna’s pride, the main Mexican army spends days and days held up attacking this insignificant little outpost. This needless delay gives the Texas government time to get organized, gives people time to flee, and gives the main Texan army time to get reinforced and into better position. The end result was the Battle of San Jacinto where old Santa Anna got caught napping – literally – and the Republic of Texas was born.

8
Add Lard to Rifles
Some British Bureaucrat (May 1857)
This one will be a little obscure to some, but in the grand scheme of things, it was a world-changing event. The cartridge in question was for the new Pattern 3 Enfield rifle that was to be issued to all the Empire’s troops and replace the older, less efficient models. On the surface this doesn’t seem like a big deal and to us, it probably wouldn’t be. However, in 1857, cartridges weren’t brass, they were paper, and to load them, one had to first BITE the end off the cartridge and pour the contained powder down the barrel of the muzzle loaded weapon. Again, no big deal, until one realizes one singularly important fact. The lubricating lard smeared on the cartridges was made from animal fat. This fat could be obtained from either pigs or cows. In and of itself, that doesn’t present a problem until one realizes that the vast majority of foreign troops in the British Empire were either Muslim or Hindu, especially in India. Now, pigs are unclean to Muslims and cows are sacred to the Hindus so the thought of putting a cartridge with lard into their mouths was anathema to both parties. It didn’t help matters much that the political climate in India was becoming a powder keg, but the lard cartridges proved the final straw – the match that blew the keg, so to speak.

What resulted is known to history as the Sepoy Rebellion or the Sepoy Mutiny. Basically, without going into the very involved, tense and delicate political situation, the Sepoys or Indian soldiers, refused to touch the cartridges which constitutes mutiny. When the first few were seen being punished by the British colonial overlords, the rest rose up and began a bloody rebellion that lasted 13 months and saw tremendous bloodshed and cruelty on both sides. The British severity in putting down the revolt – many leaders were tied to the mouths of cannon and blasted to bloody vapor — remained in the minds of the Indian people through the rest of the 19th century and through two world wars in the 20th. In many ways, the Indian Independence Movement lead by Gandhi can trace its roots to this one monumentally boneheaded decision.

7
Losing Your Battle Plans
Unknown CSA Officer (September 1862)
During the American Civil War, one of the qualities that made General Robert E. Lee of the Confederacy so effective was the mysteriousness with which he moved and operated. His troops seemed to appear, fight, and melt away with uncanny speed. Now in reality, this was nothing more supernatural than very detailed and well-executed battle plans. Imagine what the Union generals could have done if they had only possessed a copy of one of Lee’s battle plans. In a wildly providential moment, that is exactly what happened on the eve of the Battle of Sharpsburg in September of 1862.

Union General George McClellan’s 90,000-man Army of the Potomac was moving to intercept Lee, and occupied a campsite the Confederates had vacated just a few days before. While setting up their tent, two Union soldiers discovered a copy of Lee’s detailed battle plans wrapped around three cigars. The order indicated that Lee had divided his army and dispersed portions, intending to bring battle near Antietam Creek. Everything was there in writing. It was a colossal blunder by some Confederate officer.

The outcome would have been even more disastrous for the Confederates had not McClellan waited about 18 hours before deciding to take advantage of this intelligence and reposition his forces. As it was, the Battle of Sharpsburg (or Antietam) would be the single bloodiest day of combat in American history with 23,000 killed and countless wounded before the sun set.

All that saved Lee was McClellan’s indecision. Still, the battle sapped numbers of soldiers that the Confederacy could ill afford to lose. More importantly, though, was the fact that England had been teetering on the fence of coming into the war to aid their cotton supplying Confederates, but with the outcome of Antietam, they decided to sit back for a little while longer, thus robbing the Confederacy of help it desperately needed. A different choice of wrapping paper could have made all the difference in the world to the history of North America.

6
Not Following the Enemy
Gen. George Meade (July 1863)
It sometimes looks like Lee did have some sort of guardian angel; either that or the Northern generals before Grant were all monumentally stupid. The former is more romantic, but the latter is easier to prove. In any event, Meade’s decision to let Lee slip back to Virginia is another example of Lee’s luck and an opposing general’s horrendous decision making ability.

The Army of Northern Virginia was done. Three days at Gettysburg had reduced the proud rebels to a shell of their former strength. Devil’s Den, Little Round Top, the Peach Orchard, and, at the last, Pickett’s Charge up Cemetery Ridge had produced the High Water Mark of the Confederacy. With all his reserves spent, Lee was gathering his badly mauled forces and trying mightily to make it back to the relative safety of Ol’ Virginy.

In his way was the rain swollen Potomac River. On his flanks were the persistent if largely ineffectual Union cavalry pickets. The roads were a quagmire of mud. In all, the stage was set for the final crushing blow to be delivered by the Army of the Potomac, which had several reserves that had seen little if any fighting. They would sweep down on the defeated boys in grey like an avenging blue tide. The Army of Northern Virginia would be crushed and the Civil War would be all but over. All that remained was for General Meade to give the order to attack.

Well, the order never came. For reasons that, to this day, are unclear Meade was reluctant to follow Lee. Instead, he gathered his forces in strength and waited. No one is quite sure what he was waiting for, but when President Lincoln found out that Meade had literally allowed the end of the war to slip through his hands, Honest Abe was incensed. It was largely Meade’s indecision that resulted in General Grant being called east from Vicksburg and placed in command of the Army of the Potomac. Had Meade attacked the defeated rebels at that opportune moment, the Civil War probably would not have drug on in a morass of attrition for nearly two more years. Countless lives, Union and Confederate alike, could have been spared and the Reconstruction Period would likely have looked much different.
5
Ignoring the Gatling
George A. Custer (June 1876)
It is generally held to be a good idea among most military men that, when the latest and greatest weapons are available, they should be used. The newly patented Gatling Gun was the earliest machine gun and had completed its trials. Custer had two to four of the guns and abundant ammunition available when he set out to uproot a “small Indian village” on the bank of the Little Bighorn River. Custer’s reasoning behind not using them was that the Gatling guns would impede his march and hamper his mobility. More importantly, he also is said to have believed that the use of so devastating a weapon would “cause him to lose face with the Indians.” Considering reports of Custer’s vanity, this is not hard to believe.

These problems do not change the fact that the Gatling guns would have been a decided equalizer in the face of what turned out to be overwhelming Indian superiority, and that elsewhere in the Indian wars, the Indians often reacted to new army weapons by breaking off the fight. Instead, Custer led more than 250 doomed men of the famous 7th Cavalry into the Montana hill country. If he had taken the then greatly improved machine guns with him the outcome of the much-discussed Last Stand would surely have been very different.

What could have been going through Custer’s mind as he stood, the breeze whipping his famous golden hair behind him, his loyal men dead all about him, and several hundred Sioux warriors galloping towards him intent on making him a human pincushion? Could it possibly have been, “I really could use those Gatling guns right about now.”

4
Invade Gallipoli
Winston Churchill (April 1915)
By the start of 1915, the Great War had ground to a halt. The trench lines stretched from Belgium through Italy and neither side was making progress. The war had devolved into mad suicide rushes across no man’s land into the teeth of the new Maxim guns. Predictably, casualties were mounting daily and the war that “will be over by Christmas” seemed to have no end in sight. To make matters worse, Russia was getting their mess kits handed to them all up and down the Eastern Front and the tsardom was beginning to look shaky. The German navy had cut all the usual supply lines to accessible ports and any port safe from the German fleet was either icebound or entirely too far away to be of any practical use. Something had to be done and quickly.

Enter Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. Now Churchill is well know for his personal bravery as well as his usually keen mind. He is also known for being a fan of a good stiff drink and apparently, he’d had several when he thought of this plan. Churchill proposed that a third front be opened up in the western Mediterranean. Specifically, he planned an attack on the Ottoman Empire held Dardanelles. The attack on what he termed the “soft underbelly of the Central Powers” would open up a warm water resupply depot for Russia and effectively turn the flank of the vast trench network. It was a great idea in theory and on paper.

The Gallipoli Campaign took place at Gallipoli peninsula in Turkey from 25 April 1915 to 9 January 1916. The intent was for a joint amphibian attack by British Empire and French forces up the peninsula to capture the Ottoman capital of Istanbul. To put it mildly, the attempt failed miserably with heavy casualties on both sides. The whole operation was botched from the beginning. The planned invasion was tipped off to the Turks who reinforced the peninsula with heavy guns and additional troops. Once the invasion began, it quickly stalled on the beachhead, thwarted by the Turkish occupation of the high ground.

To make a very detailed and long story short, the allied forces, the bulk of which were Australians and New Zealanders (who ultimately had the highest number of dead per capita of all nations in the war), were essentially trapped on the beaches in the open for months. No real progress was ever made inland despite several dogged attempts all around the peninsula. Promised naval artillery support was cut short as soon as the Admiralty found out – by the sinking of two battleships – that German U-boats were in the waters. The whole event was an unmitigated disaster. Conditions were unreal. In the summer, the heat was atrocious, which in conjunction with bad sanitation, led to so many flies that eating became extremely difficult. Corpses, left in the open, became bloated and stank. The precarious Allied bases were poorly situated and caused supply and shelter problems. A dysentery epidemic spread through the Allied trenches. Autumn and winter brought relief from the heat, but also led to gales, flooding and frostbite.

In the end, Churchill was sacked as Lord of the Admiralty, several generals saw their careers ended but most of all; tens of thousands of men on both sides were killed for absolutely no gain whatsoever. To this day, Gallipoli is remembered as ANZAC Day in Australia and New Zealand in honor of all the brave ANZACs who gave their lives for a stupid decision.

3
Soviet Invasion
Adolf Hitler, (September 1941)
Honestly? See item 10. Replace “Napoleon” with “Hitler”, “Russia” with “Soviet Union”, and “Le Grand Armee” with “Wermacht” and you have the gist of the story. Operation Barbarossa was, without a doubt, the worst case of someone who failed to learn from history being doomed to repeat it. Adolf Hitler proved that it’s not only teenagers who think, “It can’t happen to me.”

2
Micromanaging the War
Lyndon B. Johnson (August 1964)
Wars are best run by the professionals. Lyndon B. Johnson was President, but he was not a professional soldier by any means during the Vietnam War. That did not stop him from blowing what was a small insurgency with American “advisors” into an all out “police action” that would claim the lives of nearly 60,000 American soldiers, sailors, and airmen before it ended two Presidents later.

Johnson expanded American involvement on the ground in Vietnam as soon as he took office after JFK’s assassination. Unfortunately for the troops, LBJ watched opinion polls and it is hard to fight a war if you watch opinion polls. Basically, field commanders couldn’t attack certain high value targets without Johnson’s say-so and, given the distances and the time it would take to brief the President on each given situation, the men were fighting one step behind at all times. He also took fire from the press who said he was too cozy with the defense businessmen and the war was justification for increased defense spending to make these businesses rich. That speculation, like Johnson’s supposed involvement in JFK’s assassination, is better left to the conspiracy theorists.

What is a fact, however, is LBJ’s insistence on being a hands-on Commander-in-Chief seriously handicapped American efforts in the jungles of Vietnam. Ultimately, his decision to try running a war based on opinion polls proved his undoing and he dropped out of the 1968 Presidential elections.

1
Invading Afghanistan
Yuri Andropov (December 1979)
For centuries, countries outside of Afghanistan – from the Indian Mughals, to the British Empire, to the Islamic fundamentalists – have tried to impose their will upon the Afghan people. As a result, the Afghans are a hardy bunch and they can fight like devils. The are experts at guerilla warfare and it is always a safe bet to assume that whoever is invading them has enemies all to willing to supply the natives with effective weaponry. That is over 1200 years of history totally lost on the Soviets in 1979 when they sent in a massive number of troops to prop up the unpopular communist government in Kabul.

What followed was a ten year blood bath of death among the rocks. For years, Soviet Hind helicopters would hunt in the valleys for any of the Afghan fighters. Upon finding them, the guerillas would be mown down by cannon fire from the craft they called “The Crocodile”. Then the CIA saw a chance to return the favor the Soviets had played on the United States during its involvement in Vietnam and began supplying the Afghan fighters with Stinger surface to air missiles. So much for Soviet air superiority. Stingers shot down 333 Soviet helicopters in the course of the ten year war.

The saddest part is the Soviets had just witnessed the USA’s horrific ten year quagmire in Vietnam, but, like other groups in history, they figured it couldn’t happen to them. They were wrong. The Soviets lost 15,000 men and billions of rubles worth of equipment to Afghanistan and they got nothing in return. For the Afghans, the country was left devastated and ripe for a group called the Taliban to take over.

Admiral Wilhelm Canaris

2009-09-01T16:52:00.000-07:00

(1887-1945)

“I die for my fatherland. I have a clear conscience. I only did my duty to my country when I tried to oppose the criminal folly of Hitler.” - Admiral Wilhelm Canaris

The man behind the Nazi Abwehr spy network, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, was a shrewd, brilliant spymaster who not only managed to keep control of the Abwehr. He outwitted the slippery Himmler at almost every turn, while joined with other high-ranking German officers in a dangerous plot to eliminate Hitler and make a separate peace with the Allies.

Still, today, Wilhelm Canaris is the number one mystery man of the Nazi regime under Hitler - a man historians hardly can classify. A man who only seldomly came out of his shell, who didn’t talk much but was rather a listener. Almost everybody who knew him didn't really know exactly what his purpose and intentions were.

On the one hand he was the great protector of the German opposition against Hitler - on the other hand he was at the same time the one who prepared all the big expansion plans for the acts and crimes of Hitler in the Third Reich. While he highly protected and motivated the opposition members who were eager to fight against Hitler, he was also hunting them as conspirators - one of the many contradictions he was forced to live with to stay in control of the Abwehr.

Wilhelm Canaris, born January 1, 1887, in Aplerbeck, Germany, was celebrated as a war hero during the First World War for his exploits as a submarine captain, and he later became a top military spy for Germany. Canaris was appointed to head the Abwehr Military Intelligence in 1935.

In 1938, he made efforts to hinder Hitler from attacking Czechoslovakia and later he played an active role as a peace keeper. Canaris personally went to Franco and told him not to allow passage to the Germans for the purpose of capturing Gibraltar. Canaris was directly involved in the 1938 and 1939 coup attempts.

Admiral Canaris was an eye-witness to the killing of civilians in Poland. At Bedzin, SS troops pushed 200 Jews into a synagogue and then set it aflame. They all burned to death. Canaris was shocked. On 10 September, 1939, he had traveled to the front to watch the German Army in action. Wherever he went, his intelligence officers told him of an orgy of massacre. Two days later, he went to Hitler’s headquarters train, the Amerika, in Upper Silesia, to protest. He first saw General Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of the Armed Forces High Command. “I have information,” Canaris told Keitel, “that mass executions are being planned in Poland and that members of the Polish nobility and the clergy have been singled out for extermination.”

Canaris told Keitel, “The world will one day hold the Wehrmacht responsible for these methods since these things are taking place under its nose.” But Keitel urged Canaris to take the matter no further.

Soon the Vatican began to receive regular, detailed reports of Nazi atrocities in Poland. The information had been gathered by agents of the Abwehr by order of Canaris, who passed them on to Dr. Josef Muller, a devout Catholic and a leading figure in the Catholic resistance to Hitler. And Muller got the reports safely to Rome.

Canaris sent another of his colleagues, Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, on a flight to Sweden to meet secretly with Bishop Bell of Chichester. Bonhoeffer told Bell of the crimes his nation was committing, and assured Bell of growing resistance in Germany to such acts.

In March 1943, Canaris personally flied to Smolensk to plan Hitler’s assassination with conspirators on the staff of Army Group Center.

The Nuremburg Trials reveal Canaris’s strenuous efforts in trying to put a stop to the crimes of war and genocide committed in Russia by Reinhard Heydrich’s Einsatzgruppen forces. It is also revealed that Canaris prevented the killing of captured French officers in Tunisia just as he saved hundreds of Jews during the war.

In one instance he saved seven Jews from being sent to a concentration camp and certain death by going personally to Himmler, complaining that his Gestapo was arresting his agents. The seven were turned over to the Abwehr and taught a few codes, then smuggled out of Germany.

And Admiral Canaris underlined the Swiss will of resistance and Switzerland’s economic strength and geographic advantages. It was due to the views of Canaris that Hitler gave up his plans to incorporate Switzerland into his New Europe. Shortly before Canaris left office, he paid a visit to Bern, where he expressed to the German Ambassador his satisfaction about the success of their reports.

Canaris appointed his friend, the anti-Nazi Hans Oster, to the number two in the Abwehr agency. From his post, Oster contacted enemies of the regime and turned them into Abwehr agents. The most important of these were Hans Von Dohnanyi, the catholic lawyer Joseph Muller and the protestant priest Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Oster created an anti-Nazi hierarchy in the Abwehr, and soon he directed all of the military plans of the resistance. He used the Abwehr to save people from the Gestapo, to cover resistance actions, to help Jews escape from Germany, and to communicate between the different circles of the resistance.

All of his actions were approved by Admiral Canaris. The commander in chief of the Abwehr supported the resistance, although he claimed that he was too old to take an active part.

Admiral Canaris, along with his second-in-command, Hans Oster, actually helped the Allies while supervising all German espionage, counterespionage, and sabotage. Canaris was revealing almost all of the important German strategy and battle plans to the Allies - from Hitler’s impending western offensive against the Low countries and France to Hitler’s plan to invade Britain. He also misled Hitler into believing that the Allies would not land at Anzio in 1943.

In April that same year, Canaris made contact with the former governor of Pennsylvania, Commander George H. Earle, Roosevelt’s personal representative for the Balkans, stationed in Istanbul. One morning there was a knock on Earle’s hotel room door and there stood - in civilian clothes - Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. The head of the German Secret Service told Earle there were many sensible German people feeling that Hitler was leading their nation down a destructive path. Admiral Canaris continued that an honorable surrender from the German army to the American forces could be arranged.

Earle was convinced of the sincerity of Admiral Canaris and immediately sent an urgent message to Washington via diplomatic pouch, requesting a prompt reply. A month later, Canaris phoned, as had been agreed, but Earle could only say “I am waiting for news, but have none today.”

In the summer of 1943 Canaris met secretly with General Stuart Menzies, Chief of British Intelligence, and William J. Donovan, head of the Office of Strategic Services, at Santander, Spain. Canaris presented Menzies and Donovan with his peace plan: a cease fire in the West, Hitler to be eliminated or handed over, and continuation of the War in the East.

But though Donovan, Menzies and Canaris reached an agreement on the basis of Canaris’ proposal, President Roosevelt flatly declined to negotiate with “these East German Junkers” and called his presumptuous OSS chief to heel. Canaris’ peace offer was rejected .

That he was being misled by Canaris became evident to Hitler only after the conspirators attempted to kill him in July 1944. Canaris and many others were arrested. The principal prisoners were finally confined at Gestapo cellars at Prinz Albrechtstrasse, where Canaris was kept in solitary confinement, and in chains.

In The Canaris Conspiracy, Manvell and Fraenkel tell, how his cell door was permanently open, and the light burned continually, day and night. He was given only one third of the normal prison rations, and as the winter set in his starved body suffered cruelly from the cold. Occasionally he was humiliated by being forced to do menial jobs, such as scrubbing the prison floor, the SS men mocking him.

On February 7, 1945, Canaris was brought to the Flossenburg concentration camp but he was still ill-treated and often endured having his face slapped by the SS guards. But for months Canaris baffled the SS interrogators with one ruse after another, and he denied all personal complicity in the conspiracy. He never betrayed his fellow participants in the Resistance Movement.

During the waning weeks of the Nazi era, SS Obersturmbannführer Walter Huppenkothen and Sturmbannführer Otto Thorbeckwere detailed to Flossenburg to eliminate Canaris and the other resistance figures. The SS men staged a bogus “trial” before their men hung the victims.

In the closing days of World War II, in the gray morning hours of April 9, 1945, gallows were erected hastily in the courtyard. Wilhelm Canaris, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Major General Hans Oster, Judge Advocate General Carl Sack, Captain Ludwig Gehre - all were ordered to remove their clothing and were led down the steps under the trees to the secluded place of execution before hooting SS guards. Naked under the scaffold, they knelt for the last time to pray - they were hanged, their corpses left to rot.

Two weeks later the camp was liberated by American troops - on 23 April 1945.

One of Canaris’ fellow-prisoners, the Danish Colonel Lunding, former Director of Danish Military Intelligence, was imprisoned in the cell next to Canaris. He had contact with Canaris shortly before he watched the naked figure of the Admiral being led to execution. Through tapping on the wall of his cell Canaris told him: “This is the end. Badly mishandled. My nose broken. I have done nothing against Germany. If you survive, please tell my wife ..”

After the war, Huppenkothen and Thorbeck stood trial on three occasions, but the courts were never able to satisfactorily dispose of their case. In 1956, the German High Court ruled that this ceremony had been enough to render the murders “legal.” The high court judges also held that the killings were “legal” because the Nazi regime had possessed the right to execute “traitors.” The court, in effect, reconvicted the victims.

One of Canaris’ friends, Hans Bernd Gisevius, tells about the Admiral in his book from 1947 To the Bitter End:

“Canaris hated not only Hitler and Himmler, but the entire Nazi system as a political phenomenon .. He was everywhere and nowhere at once. Everywhere he traveled, at home and abroad and to the front, he always left a whirl of confusion behind him .. In reality this small, frail, and somewhat timid man was a vibrating bundle of nerves. Extremely well read, oversensitive, Canaris was an outsider in every respect. In bearing and manner of work he was the most unmilitary of persons ..”

Old memories

2009-08-20T18:54:00.000-07:00

PHOTOS OF The ATTACK ON PEARL HARBOR STORED IN AN OLD BROWNIE CAMERA

2009-07-17T04:57:00.000-07:00

Pearl Harbor

On Sunday, December 7th, 1941 the Japanese launched a surprise attack against the U.S. Forces stationed at Pearl Harbor , Hawaii By planning his attack on a Sunday, the Japanese commander Admiral Nagumo, hoped to catch the entire fleet in port. As luck would have it, the Aircraft Carriers and one of the Battleships were not in port. (The USS Enterprise was returning from Wake Island , where it had just delivered some aircraft. The USS Lexington was ferrying aircraft to Midway, and the USS Saratoga and USS Colorado were undergoing repairs in the United States .)

In spite of the latest intelligence reports about the missing aircraft carriers (his most important targets), Admiral Nagumo decided to continue the attack with his force of six carriers and 423 aircraft. At a range of 230 miles north of Oahu , he launched the first wave of a two-wave attack. Beginning at 0600 hours his first wave consisted of 183 fighters and torpedo bombers which struck at the fleet in Pearl Harbor and the airfields in Hickam, Kaneohe and Ewa. The second strike, launched at 0715 hours, consisted of 167 aircraft, which again struck at the same targets.

At 075 3 hours the first wave consisting of 40 Nakajima B5N2 'Kate' torpedo bombers, 51 Aichi D3A1 'Val' dive bombers, 50 high altitude bombers and 43 Zeros struck airfields and Pearl Harbor Within the next hour, the second wave arrived and continued the attack.
When it was over, the U.S. Losses were:

Casualties
US Army: 218 KIA, 364 WIA.
US Navy: 2,008 KIA, 710 WIA.
US MarineCorp: 109 KIA, 69 WIA.
Civilians: 68 KIA, 35 WIA.

TOTAL: 2,403 KIA, 1,178 WIA.
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Battleships
USS Arizona (BB-39) - total loss when a bomb hit her magazine.
USS Oklahoma (BB-37) - Total loss when she capsized and sunk in the harbor.
USS California (BB-4 4) - Sunk at her berth. Later raised and repaired.
USS West Virginia (BB-48) - Sunk at her berth. Later raised and repaired.
USS Nevada - (BB-36) Beached to prevent sinking. Later repaired.
USS Pennsylvania (BB-38) - Light damage.
USS Maryland (BB-46) - Light damage.
USS Tennessee (BB-43) Light damage.
USS Utah (AG-16) - (former battleship used as a target) - Sunk.
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Cruisers
USS New Orleans (CA-32) - Light Damage..
USS San Francisco (CA-38) - Light Damage.
USS Detroit (CL-8) - Light Damage.
USS Raleigh (CL-7) - Heavily damaged but repaired.
USS Helena (CL-50) - Light Damage.
USS Honolulu (CL-48) - Light Damage..
-------------------------- -- ---------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------
Destroyers
USS Downes (DD-375) - Destroyed. Parts salvaged.
USS Cassin - (DD -3 7 2) Destroyed. Parts salvaged.
USS Shaw (DD-373) - Very heavy damage.
USS Helm (DD-388) - Light Damage.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Minelayer
USS Ogala (CM-4) - Sunk but later raised and repaired.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Seaplane Tender
USS Curtiss (AV-4) - Severely damaged but later repaired.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Repair Ship
USS Vestal (AR-4) - Severely damaged but later repaired.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Harbor Tug
USS Sotoyomo (YT-9) - Sunk but later raised and repaired.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Aircraft
188 Aircraft destroyed (92 USN and 92 U.S. Army Air Corps.)

Jazz musicians who died young

2009-07-16T20:34:00.000-07:00

Bunny Berigan
Trumpet
Died of: a liver hemorrhage in 1942 at the age of 33

Bunny Berigan of Hilbert, Wisconsin, was an influential swing trumpeter, and played with Hal Kemp, Paul Whiteman, Benny Goodman, and Tommy Dorsey. His version of “I Can’t Get Started” was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1975, and his tone is a blend of Louis Armstrong and cool swing. His severe alcoholism led to pneumonia and cirrhosis of the liver, yet he refused doctor’s orders to rest and quit drinking. He suffered a massive liver hemorrhage and died two days later in a hospital in New York City.

Chick Webb
Drums

Died of: spinal tuberculosis in 1939 at the age of 34

Chick Webb of Baltimore, Maryland, was an innovative bandleader at the inception of hot swing in the late 30’s. His band was the house band at the famous Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, and he always managed to “beat” other swing bands in head-to-head battles at the Savoy. He discovered vocalist Ella Fitzgerald, and was a major influence of drummer Buddy Rich. He suffered from spinal tuberculosis since childhood, and complications eventually wore him down in 1939.

Fats Navarro
Trumpet
Died of: tuberculosis in 1950 at the age of 26

Theodore “Fats” Navarro of Key West, Florida, was one of the early pioneers of bebop, and the main trumpet influence of Clifford Brown. He played with a few big bands, such as Benny Goodman and Lionel Hampton, but he made his true fame from his brilliant small combo work with Charles Mingus, Coleman Hawkins, and Charlie Parker. He was the main rival of Dizzy Gillespie on bebop trumpet, and they both played with the distinctive puffed-out cheeks. He was a heroin addict with tuberculosis, and he died from complications of both in a New York City hospital.

Charlie Christian
Guitar
Died of: tuberculosis in 1942 at the age of 25

Charlie Christian of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, was highly influential in transferring the electric guitar from the staccato rhythm swing style of Freddie Green to the more modern bebop and cool jazz styles. He was the guitarist who paved the way for the guitar to be thought of as a solo instrument in addition to a rhythm instrument, and he basically played the guitar as if it were a saxophone. Although not a drug addict, Christian’s hectic lifestyle took a severe toll on his body, already weakened by tuberculosis. He died after a long stay in a hospital on Staten Island after it initially appeared that he was getting better.

Clifford Brown
Trumpet
Died of: a car crash in 1956 at the age of 25

Clifford Brown of Wilmington, Delaware, was a major turning point in the direction of jazz trumpet, and would undoubtedly have redefined the entire instrument had he lived. He and drummer Max Roach were trailblazers in the hard bop style of the early 50’s, and almost all modern trumpeters owe much of their playing styles to the players who immediately followed Clifford Brown, such as Donald Byrd, Freddie Hubbard, and Wynton Marsalis. In addition to his playing style, Clifford was an avid practitioner of clean, healthy living, and he helped break the heroin cycle that claimed so many young jazz musicians. Sadly, he was a passenger in a car that skidded out of control on a rainy turnpike in Pennsylvania, killing all occupants. One of the most widely recognized jazz ballads is the hauntingly beautiful “I Remember Clifford,” by Benny Golson.

Jaco Pastorius
Bass
Died of: a severe beating in 1987 at the age of 35

Jaco Pastorius of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, was arguably the most influential bassist in jazz history. He played a rock-fusion style and made the bass into a premier solo instrument. The success of his first solo album in 1976 led to his union with keyboardist Josef Zawinul and Weather Report. He was severely beaten by Luc Havan, a club bouncer in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and left comatose on the streets for several hours. His family disconnected his life support after 10 days in the hospital, and Havan eventually pled guilty to manslaughter.

Bix Beiderbecke
Cornet
Died of: alcohol withdrawal in 1931 at the age of 28

Bix Beiderbecke of Davenport, Iowa, was able to take his Dixieland roots and infuse them with the classical influences of jazz-loving French composers Debussy and Ravel. He helped make jazz more accessible to curious, yet cautious white audiences. He suffered from terrible alcoholism, and finally succumbed to its effects after years of poor health.

Charlie Parker
Alto Saxophone
Died of: pneumonia in 1955 at the age of 34

Charlie Parker of Kansas City, Missouri, also known as Yardbird Parker, or more simply “The Bird,” was one of the most influential jazz artists to have lived to any age. He pioneered the jazz style known as bebop, and was a major influence and contemporary of Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonius Monk. He helped redefine the process used by musicians to play improvised solos based on chord extensions and their relationships to similar melodies. Parker was hopelessly addicted to heroin and alcohol, and was in such terrible shape upon his death that the coroner incorrectly guessed he was in his 50’s.

A Brief History of Presidential Vacations

2009-07-16T17:06:00.000-07:00

By Ethan Trex on Top Story

We’re in the throes of summer vacation season, but at least one American is still on the job. While it’s rumored that President Obama will follow in the footsteps of President Clinton and vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, he hasn’t had a chance to break out his Bermuda shorts just yet. When Obama does take off, though, he’ll join in the grand tradition of presidential vacations, like these notable ones:
1. Abe Lincoln Doesn’t Go Too Far

lincoln-soldiers-homeFar-flung vacations are nice, but President Lincoln preferred to stay a bit closer to home. When Lincoln needed a getaway from the heat and political turmoil of Civil War-era Washington, D.C., he headed to…a different part of Washington, D.C. From 1862 to 1864 Lincoln spent June through November living in a cottage atop a hill at the Soldiers’ Home a few miles from the White House. Lincoln apparently loved the slight change of scenery, which meant slightly cooler temperatures and a chance to ride his horse each morning. If you’re considering a stay-cation this year, consider this Honest Abe’s endorsement.
2. FDR Heats Up Georgia

FDR-warmspringsSome presidents choose to head to their hometowns or a beachside resort for their vacations, but Franklin Roosevelt preferred to travel to western Georgia. Warm Springs, Georgia, is the home of (you guessed it!) warm springs that supposedly had therapeutic value for polio sufferers. FDR, who had contracted his own paralytic illness in 1921, started visiting Warm Springs in 1924 in the hope that exercising in the springs’ warm waters would cure him.

Although the springs didn’t reverse his illness, FDR felt like his time at the resort alleviated his symptoms somewhat. In 1927 he bought the resort he’d been staying at, and in 1932 he ordered a six-room Georgia pine house to be built on the property. This house was FDR’s retreat throughout his presidency and became known as the Little White House.

FDR was sitting for a portrait at the Little White House when he died of a stroke in April 1945. Today, the house is part of Georgia’s state park system and is open to visitors; it’s been preserved to look almost exactly as it did the day FDR died.
3. Movie Cowboy Does Real Ranching

Reagan_and_Gorbachev_in_western_hats_1992Think George W. Bush was the first president to sneak away from the White House to spend time on his ranch? Not quite. At the end of his second term as Governor of California in 1974, Ronald Reagan paid just over half a million dollars to acquire Rancho del Cielo in California’s Santa Ynez Mountains.

The 688-acre ranch, complete with stables and a 1500-square-foot adobe house, was Reagan’s go-to vacation destination while he was in office, and he entertained some big names there, including Margaret Thatcher, Queen Elizabeth II, and Mikhail Gorbachev, who gamely wore a cowboy hat during his visit.
4. LBJ Does Some Ranching, Too

LBJ-ranchGeorge W. Bush drew some criticism for spending so much time clearing brush on his Prairie Chapel Ranch, but by all indications, fellow Texan Lyndon Johnson was even more involved in the everyday operations of his ranch. Johnson, who had gotten into ranching in 1951, grew his LBJ Ranch into a 2700-acre spread populated by 400 head of Hereford cattle.

Johnson was no absentee owner when he was in Washington, either. Johnson frequently headed back on vacations and supposedly drove his foreman crazy by calling every day to talk about the weather on the ranch or how the pastures looked. Today, the National Park Service maintains LBJ’s spread as a working ranch, complete with a herd of cattle descended from the Herefords Johnson bred.
5. Nixon Gets the Right Ice Cubes

nixon-winterWhen Richard Nixon wanted a break from Washington, he headed to a modest ranch home he owned on Key Biscayne off Miami. Nixon’s “Florida White House,” which he visited 50-plus times during his tenure in office, eventually swelled to include three houses and a floating helipad, which the Department of Defense installed at a taxpayer expense of $400,000. (There was plenty of room for taxpayer outrage at the $625,000 total the government spent sprucing up the Florida White House; one itemized expense was $621 for a replacement icemaker because “the President does not like ice with holes in it.”)

Given that this house was Nixon’s retreat, it’s no surprise that some shady dealings transpired on the premises. Nixon allegedly discussed plans for the Watergate break-in at the house, and he holed up there when the coverup came to light. The house fell into disrepair after Nixon sold it, and in 2004 it was razed to make room for a new building.

nixon-westThe Florida White House wasn’t Nixon’s only retreat, though. He bought a mansion overlooking the Pacific Ocean in San Clemente, California shortly after taking office in 1969. Nixon dubbed his new digs “La Casa Pacifica,” but the press quickly started referring to the spread as “the Western White House.” This house wasn’t cheap for taxpayers, either; the government dropped over a million dollars improving this home with temporary office quarters for staffers, helipads, and an upgraded heating system.
6. FDR’s Successor Gets His Own Little White House

white-house-key-westHarry Truman may have been from Missouri, but he headed south when he needed some R&R. Truman started suffering from exhaustion in late 1946, and his physicians recommended a warm weather vacation to revitalize the President.

Truman took his vacation in a converted duplex in Key West that already held some history. The house, which was originally built in 1890 for the commandant and paymaster of Key West’s naval base, had already hosted William Howard Taft while he was in office in 1912. When Thomas Edison developed 41 new weapons to aid in the American efforts in World War I, he spent six months living in the house. Once Truman visited the house, though, it quickly became known as Truman’s Little White House. He ended up spending 175 days in Key West over the course of his two terms in office. Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy later used the house while they were in office, and it’s now open as a tourist attraction.
7. Teddy Roosevelt Goes Bear Hunting

teddy-hotel-colorado

Lounging on the beach is great, but do you really think Teddy Roosevelt would miss the opportunity to do something manly? Roosevelt’s vacation in 1905 took him to the Hotel Colorado in Glenwood Springs, CO, where he spent three weeks bear hunting.
8. Kennedy Retreats to His Compound

JFK-ice-cream
Starting in 1926, Joseph P. Kennedy began taking his family to Hyannisport, Massachusetts, on vacation each summer. His son John liked the area so much that in 1956 he bought a cottage of his own near his parents’ digs, and the family soon purchased a third cottage in the area, giving rise to the name “the Kennedy Compound.” JFK used his cottage as a base of operations for his presidential campaign and later vacationed there each summer he was in office.
9. George H.W. Bush Prefers Not to Ranch

kenneNot to be outdone by the Kennedys, the Bush family has an even older compound of their own in Kennebunkport, Maine. In 1903 George H. Walker, the grandfather of George H.W. Bush, built a great mansion on his oceanfront estate in Kennebunkport, and the property has remained in the family ever since.

George H.W. Bush used the Kennebunkport compound as his vacation home during his presidency, and George W. Bush made a few getaways to the house as well. Between father and son, they’ve entertained some pretty big names at their summer house, including Yitzhak Rabin, Vladimir Putin, and Nicolas Sarkozy.

Pacifists Caused World WWII

2009-07-10T14:39:00.000-07:00

Leftists, pacifists, and anti-war demonstrators think they are doing the world good by keeping their country from engaging in war. In actual fact, American pacifists in the 1930s made possible the appeasement of Hitler which led to World War II. Let me explain.

After World War I, many Americans came to view our intervention in that war and the subsequent peace settlements as a tragic mistake. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, on the other hand, had read Mein Kampf and realized that Hitler was a madman and was a threat not only to Europe but to America as well (1). Unfortunately, because of the neutrality acts Roosevelt was prevented from directly helping any country fight against Hitler.

Worse, when Roosevelt tried to persuade Britain to take a strong stand against Hitler, they were persuaded to do otherwise because they realized that because of the pacifists no help would come from America: From the book "No More Killing Fields" by David A. Hamburg:

[Chamberlain:] ... the Americans were not a useful counterweight to Germany: "It is always best and safest to count on nothing from the Americans but words. ...

Fearing Britain would have to face Germany without America, Chamberlain took the path of appeasement, which only encouraged Hitler to go further.

Because of their fear of war, because of their cowardice, American pacifists encouraged war where a more aggressive stance might have stopped Hitler altogether. Tens of millions dead; this is what pacifism wrought.

The 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence

2009-07-10T14:01:00.000-07:00

What kind of men were the 56 signers who adopted the Declaration of Independence and who, by their signing, committed an act of treason against the crown? To each of you the names Franklin, Adams, Hancock, and Jefferson are almost as familiar as household words.

Most of us, however, know nothing of the other signers.

Who were they? What happened to them?

I imagine that many of you are somewhat surprised at the names not there: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Patrick Henry. All were elsewhere.

Ben Franklin was the only really old man. Eighteen were under 40; three were in their 20s. Of the 56 almost half -24- were judges and lawyers. Eleven were merchants, 9 were landowners and farmers, and the remaining 12 were doctors, ministers, and politicians.

With only a few exceptions, such as Samuel Adams of Massachusetts, these were men of substantial property.

All but two had families. The vast majority were men of education and standing in their communities. They had economic security as few men had in the 18th century.

Each had more to lose from revolution than he had to gain by it. John Hancock, one of the richest men in America, already had a price of 500 pounds on his head.

He signed in enormous letters so "that his Majesty could now read his name without glasses and could now double the reward." Ben Franklin wryly noted: "Indeed we must all hang together, otherwise we shall most assuredly hang separately." Fat Benjamin Harrison of Virginia told tiny Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts: "With me it will all be over in a minute, but you , you will be dancing on air an hour after I am gone.

These men knew what they risked. The penalty for treason was death by hanging. And remember: a great British fleet was already at anchor in New York Harbor.

They were sober men. There were no dreamy-eyed intellectuals or draft card burners here. They were far from hot-eyed fanatics, yammering for an explosion.

They simply asked for the status quo. It was change they resisted. It was equality with the mother country they desired. It was taxation with representation they sought. They were all conservatives, yet they rebelled.

It was principle, not property, that had brought these men to Philadelphia. Two of them became presidents of the United States. Seven of them became state governors. One died in office as vice president of the United States. Several would go on to be U.S. Senators.

35,000 year old flute found

2009-06-28T15:38:00.000-07:00

Archaeologists find oldest ever flute in southern Germany

A Tübingen research team has revealed what is thus far the oldest musical instrument in the world ever discovered. In a cave in the Swabian Mountains, archaeologists uncovered a flute believed to be more than 35,000 years old made from the hollow wing bones of a giant vulture. This is not the first such astonishing discovery of this group of Tübingen researchers.
35,000 year old Bone Flute discovered in the Swabian Mountains, picture-alliance dpa

Prehistoric expert Nicholas Conard from the University of Tübingen is known worldwide for his spectacular Ice Age finds. Only a few weeks ago he landed an archaeological coup with the discovery of the oldest known human artistic representation ever found known as the Venus of Hohle Fels.

On Wednesday, Conard revealed the flute, the oldest evidence for a musical instrument worldwide. And while it’s not the first Ice Age flute found in the Swabian Mountains, its age reveals the importance of music to daily life at that time. It was dated using radiocarbon dating techniques and is 5,000 years older than the instruments discovered so far.

Like the Venus statue, the flute was discovered in the cave known as the Hohle Fels located nearby Schelklingen, around 20 kilometers from the city of Ulm. Although similar flutes were found in southern France and Austria, this is believed to be the oldest such instrument and proof for the evidence of Stone Age musicians on earth.

A precursor to modern flutes

Twelve parts of the musical instrument were found in the lowest levels of the cave believed to date from the time period of the Aurignacian culture that existed in Europe and southwest Asia 40,000 years ago. The Aurignacian peoples were especially well known for their worked bone points and cave art. Assembled, the twelve pieces represent by far the most completely preserved musical instrument thus far found in the Swabian caves.

The flute was discovered in the summer of 2008 and has until now been under assembly. It is made from the bones of a vulture whose wingspan of 2.3 to 2.65 meters made for ideal bones in the construction of instruments. The flute is 22 cm long, has five holes and a notch at the end. The flute can no longer be played, however, because the bottom half is missing. Conard's team had a replica of the old flute made, which when played sounds amazingly similar to a modern flute.

The research team also found individual fragments from three ivory flutes. Additional musical instruments from the Ice Age were discovered years before at other sites in the Swabian Mountains. All in all, the Tübingen researchers have excavated four flutes made of bone and numerous ivory flutes. Conard says this clearly reveals that musical traditions played an important part of life in even the earliest human civilizations.

The Swabian Mountains provide good conditions for archaeologists and the Tübingen team are known for their excavation techniques. Although this is the oldest flute so far found, it's likely that music was played in other parts of the world at that time.

The public will be able to view the flute together with the Venus statue for the first time at an Ice Age exhibit in Stuttgart September 18-January 10.

www.archaeologie.uni-tuebingen.de

10 Ancient Inventions You Think Are Modern

2009-06-07T18:49:00.000-07:00

Following on from our previous list Top 10 Ancient Inventions You Think Are Modern, we have put together this list. It includes items that were omitted from the first but are still fascinating. Most of the things found here are considered by most to have come from the modern world (or the medieval world at the earliest) but all pre-date the birth of Christ. Feel free to mention others you might know in the comments.
10
Football

The Ancient Greeks and Romans are known to have played many ball games, some of which involved the use of the feet. The Roman game harpastum is believed to have been adapted from a team game known as episkyros. The Roman politician Cicero (106-43 BC) describes the case of a man who was killed whilst having a shave when a ball was kicked into a barber’s shop. These games appear to have resembled rugby football. Also, documented evidence of an activity resembling football can be found in the Chinese military manual Zhan Guo Ce compiled between the 3rd century and 1st century BC. It describes a practice known as cuju (literally “kick ball”), which originally involved kicking a leather ball through a small hole in a piece of silk cloth which was fixed on bamboo canes.

9
Toothbrushes

A variety of oral hygiene measures have been used since before recorded history. This has been verified by various excavations done all over the world, in which chewsticks, tree twigs, bird feathers, animal bones and porcupine quills were recovered. Many people used different forms of toothbrushes. Indian medicine (Ayurveda) has used the neem tree (a.k.a. daatun) and its products to create toothbrushes and similar products for millennia. A person chews one end of the neem twig until it somewhat resembles the bristles of a toothbrush, and then uses it to brush the teeth. In the Muslim world, the miswak, or siwak, made from a twig or root with antiseptic properties has been widely used since the Islamic Golden Age.
8
Sutures

Sutures have a long and bizarre history, dating back to ancient Egypt, where everything from tree bark to hair was used to stitch human flesh back together again. Physicians have used suture to close wounds for at least 4,000 years. Archaeological records from ancient Egypt show that Egyptians used linen and animal sinew to close wounds. In ancient India, physicians used the pincers of beetles or ants to staple wounds shut. They then cut the insects’ bodies off, leaving their jaws (staples) in place. Other natural materials used to close wounds include flax, hair, grass, cotton, silk, pig bristles, and animal gut. The fundamental principles of wound closure have changed little over 4,000 years.
7
Maps

A Babylonian clay tablet that has been generally accepted as “the earliest known map” is the artifact unearthed in 1930 at the excavated ruined city of Ga-Sur at Nuzi, 200 miles north of the site of Babylon (present-day Iraq). Small enough to fit in the palm of your hand (7.6 x 6.8 cm), most authorities place the the date of this map-tablet from the dynasty of Sargon of Akkad (2,300-2,500 B.C.) The surface of the tablet is inscribed with a map of a district bounded by two ranges of hills and bisected by a water-course. This particular tablet is drawn with cuneiform characters and stylized symbols impressed, or scratched, on the clay. Inscriptions identify some features and places. [Source]
6
Soap

Papyrus Ebers

The earliest recorded evidence of the production of soap-like materials dates back to around 2800 BC in Ancient Babylon. A formula for soap consisting of water, alkali and cassia oil was written on a Babylonian clay tablet around 2200 BC. The Ebers papyrus (Egypt, 1550 BC) indicates that ancient Egyptians bathed regularly and combined animal and vegetable oils with alkaline salts to create a soap-like substance. Egyptian documents mention that a soap-like substance was used in the preparation of wool for weaving. Galen describes soap-making using lye and prescribes washing to carry away impurities from the body and clothes. The best soap was German, according to Galen; soap from Gaul was second best. This is the first record of true soap as a detergent.

5
Shipyards

The world’s earliest dockyards were built in the Harappan port city of Lothal circa 2400 BC in Gujarat, India. Lothal’s dockyards connected to an ancient course of the Sabarmati river on the trade route between Harappan cities in Sindh and the peninsula of Saurashtra when the surrounding Kutch desert was a part of the Arabian Sea. Lothal engineers accorded high priority to the creation of a dockyard and a warehouse to serve the purposes of naval trade. The dock was built on the eastern flank of the town, and is regarded by archaeologists as an engineering feat of the highest order. It was located away from the main current of the river to avoid silting, but provided access to ships in high tide as well. The name of the ancient Greek city of Naupactus means “shipyeard”. Naupactus’ repuation in this field extends to the time of legend, where it is depicted as the place where the Heraclidae built a fleet to invade the Peloponnesus.
4
Speculum

A speculum (Latin for “mirror”) is a medical tool for investigating body cavities, with a form dependent on the body cavity for which it is designed. Vaginal specula were used by the Romans, and speculum artifacts have been found in Pompeii. The original instruments were excavated from the House of the Surgeon at Pompeii, so named because of the materials that were recovered there. It comprises a priapiscus with 2 (or sometimes 3 or 4) dovetailing valves which are opened and closed by a handle with a screw mechanism, an arrangement that was still to be found in the specula of 18th-century Europe. Soranus is the first author who makes mention of the speculum specially made for the vagina. Graeco-Roman writers on gynecology and obstetrics frequently recommend its use in the diagnosis and treatment of vaginal and uterine disorders, yet it is one of the rarest surviving medical instruments. [Source]
3
Processed Rubber

Although vulcanization is a 19th century invention, the history of rubber cured by other means goes back to prehistoric times. The name “Olmec” means “rubber people” in the Aztec language. Ancient Mesoamericans, spanning from ancient Olmecs to Aztecs, extracted latex from Castilla elastica, a type of rubber tree in the area. The juice of a local vine, Ipomoea alba, was then mixed with this latex to create an ancient processed rubber as early as 1600 BC. Archaeological evidence indicates that rubber was already in use in Mesoamerica by the Early Formative Period – a dozen balls were found in the Olmec El Manati sacrificial bog. By the time of the Spanish Conquest, 3000 years later, rubber was being exported from the tropical zones to sites all over Mesoamerica. Iconography suggests that although there were many uses for rubber, rubber balls both for offerings and for ritual ballgames were the primary products.
2
Umbrellas

In the sculptures at Nineveh the parasol appears frequently. Austen Henry Layard gives a picture of a bas-relief representing a king in his chariot, with an attendant holding a parasol over his head. It has a curtain hanging down behind, but is otherwise exactly like those in use today. It is reserved exclusively for the monarch (who was bald), and is never carried over any other person. In Egypt, the parasol is found in various shapes. In some instances it is depicted as a flaellum, a fan of palm-leaves or coloured feathers fixed on a long handle, resembling those now carried behind the Pope in processions. In China, the 2nd century commentator Fu Qian added that this collapsible umbrella of Wang Mang’s carriage had bendable joints which enabled them to be extended or retracted.
1
Toothpaste

The earliest known reference to toothpaste is in a manuscript from Egypt in the 4th century A.D., which prescribes a mixture of iris flowers. Many early toothpaste formulations were based on urine. However, toothpastes or powders did not come into general use until the 19th century. The Greeks, and then the Romans, improved the recipes for toothpaste by adding abrasives such as crushed bones and oyster shells. In the 9th century, the Persian musician and fashion designer Ziryab is known to have invented a type of toothpaste, which he popularized throughout Islamic Spain. The exact ingredients of this toothpaste are currently unknown, but it was reported to have been both “functional and pleasant to taste”.

A CULTURAL HISTORY OF WING CHAIRS

2009-06-06T06:10:00.000-07:00

WING NUTS

In books, films, and television, the wing chair has become a shorthand signifier for power, depravity, and corruption.

In Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), rival pedophiles Quilty and Humbert, during their final sleazy face-off, fall into two wing chairs. In Billy Wilder’s film Double Indemnity (1944), Barbara Stanwyck cooks up a plot to kill her husband from one wing chair, then hides a gun beneath the cushion of another. On the reality TV show The Apprentice (2004), real-life tycoon Donald Trump indoctrinates or dispenses with tycoons-in-the-making from his corporatized, boardroom wing chair.

Signs generate meaning, but meaning is not absolute; it changes continually as the relationship between viewer/reader and sign is renegotiated. It is possible, for example, to get a wing chair today without being a real estate tycoon or a corrupt bank CEO. You can purchase your very own Chippendale wing chair for five dollars on eBay or go DIY and make your own with help from the short Howcast.com video How to Make a Cardboard Chair. Regardless of these sweet, democratizing advances, the prevailing meaning of the wing chair in popular culture reflects our need as consumers to have an easy embodiment of our macabre, off-kilter, libidinous, power-mongering drive.

Charles II, crowned king of England, Scotland, and Ireland in 1660, could be fingered as the wing chair’s progenitor, insofar as he masterminded the cultural circumstances inspiring the wing chair’s invention and necessity. When Charles II came to power, thereby ushering in the Restoration—a period freed from the Puritans’ censorious moral beliefs toward sex and self-indulgence—his parliament ordered dead Puritan leader Oliver Cromwell’s body exhumed from its resting place in Westminster Abbey, posthumously decapitated, and dumped into a mass grave.[1] With Puritanism symbolically dismembered and reburied, the wealthy British populace was finally free to unwind, and needed an appropriate chair in which to do so.

According to Lucy Wood, a senior curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the wing chair’s direct ancestor was a more obdurate and morose bit of furnishing known as the sleeping chayre, or the reposeing chayre. The two stiff colossal side-pieces of the sleeping chayre cloistered the sitter in a kind of opulent coffin, and were attached to the base by iron ratchets that permitted forward and backward adjustments. (The predecessor to the sleeping chayre was the invalid chair. With its leg supports linked by straps, castors, and rods jutting out from the arms to support a reading desk, the invalid chair looks closer to a medieval stretching rack than to an item designed for convalescing.[2])

The wing chair, first known as the easy chair, had a high back, low seat, sumptuous upholstery, and side-pieces, known as wings, cheeks, or lugs, to protect the sitter from nasty drafts and other distractions. The earliest example of the wing chair—a stiff and sallow descendant of the sleeping chayre—appeared sometime between 1660 and 1680. Around the year 1700, however, a novel shape was introduced: the curve. Since at least the Venus of Willendorf, a figurine dated around 24,000-22,000 BCE, civilization has idealized the female curve.[3] As a symbol of such sensuous stuff, the curve was, unsurprisingly, shunned by the Puritans, people who strove to defeminize what was naturally feminine in women by shrouding them in loose, shape-obscuring smocks. During the Restoration, however, the female form was once again adored and joyfully distorted. Corsetieres were employed to amplify a woman’s breasts and posterior. Whether with a peplum or a pinked-out frill, the backlash against the constraints on sexuality was in full swing, and the wing chair became the libidinous embodiment of the post-Puritan id.

What it took to get an 8th grade education in 1895

2009-06-05T09:28:00.000-07:00

What it took to get an 8th grade education in 1895.....

Remember when grandparents and great-grandparents stated that they only had an 8th grade education? Well, check this out. Could any of us have passed the 8th grade in 1895?

This is the eighth-grade final exam from 1895 in Salina , Kansas , USA . It was taken from the original document on file at the Smokey Valley Genealogical Society and Library in Salina , and reprinted by the Salina Journal.

8th Grade Final Exam: Salina , KS - 1895
Grammar (Time, one hour)
1. Give nine rules for the use of capital letters.
2. Name the parts of speech and define those that have no modifications.
3. Define verse, stanza and paragraph
4. What are the principal parts of a verb? Give principal parts of 'lie,''play, ' and 'run.'
5. Define case; illustrate each case.
6 What is punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of punctuation.
7 - 10. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.
Arithmetic (Time,1 hou r 15 minutes)
1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.
2. A wagon box is 2 ft. Deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. Wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
3. If a load of wheat weighs 3,942 lbs., what is it worth at 50cts/bushel, deducting 1,050 lbs. For tare?
4. District No 33 has a valuation of $35,000.. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?
5.. Find the cost of 6,720 lbs. Coal at $6.00 per ton.
6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.
7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft... Long at $20 per metre?
8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.
9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance of which is 640 rods?
10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt
U.S. History (Time, 45 minutes)
1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided
2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus
3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.
4. Show the territorial growth of the United States
5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas
6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.
7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton , Bell , Lincoln , Penn, and Howe?
8. Name events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, 1865.
Orthography (Time, one hour)
[Do we even know what this is??]
1. What is meant by the following: alphabet, phonetic, orthography, etymology, syllabication
2.. What are elementary sounds? How classified?
3. What are the following, and give examples of each: trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals& nbsp;
4. Give four substitutes for caret 'u.' (HUH?)
5. Give two rules for spelling words with final 'e.' Name two exceptions under each rule.
6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each.
7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: bi, dis-mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono, sup.
8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fare, last.
9. Use the following correctly in sentences: cite, site, sight, fane, fain, feign, vane , vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.
10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by syllabication.
Geography (Time, one hour)
1 What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?
2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas ?
3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean?
4. Describe the mountains of North America
5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia , Odessa , Denver , Manitoba , Hecla , Yukon , St. Helena, Juan Fernandez, Aspinwall and Orinoco
6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S. Name all the republics of Europe and give the capital of each.
8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude?
9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers..
10. Describe the movements of the earth. Give the inclination of the earth.

Notice that the exam took FIVE HOURS to complete.

Gives the saying 'he only had an 8th grade education' a whole new meaning, doesn't it?! Also shows you how poor our education system has become and, NO, I don't have the answers!

The Battle of Midway (1942)

2009-05-30T18:45:00.000-07:00

A color documentary short that portrays the decisive battle of Midway. The naval/air confrontation between the carrier forces of Japan and the U.S. is considered to be the turning point of World War II in the Pacific. Directed by John Ford.«

A look back: 148 years ago, Civil War emotions boiled here

2009-05-24T06:13:00.000-07:00

By Tim O'Neil
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
05/10/2009

ST. LOUIS — In the first weeks of the Civil War, St. Louis was in a turmoil of divided loyalty. Gov. Claiborne Jackson schemed to add Missouri to the Confederacy. Congressman Frank Blair Jr. and Army Capt. Nathaniel Lyon worked to save it for the Union.

Unionists mustered volunteers to guard 36,600 weapons at the St. Louis Arsenal, on the Mississippi River at Arsenal Street. Jackson ordered state militia Gen. Daniel Frost to seize the guns. On May 8, a steamboat arrived with four cannons in boxes stamped "marble." Secessionists hauled them to Lindell Grove, a meadow on the western edge of town (now the site of St. Louis University) where Frost's militia was camped.

While strutting militiamen grandly accepted the compliments of ladies, the intense Lyon was busy. Legend has it that he donned a widow's veiled garb and rode through the militia camp. At noon on May 10 — 148 years ago Sunday — Lyon and his soldiers, many of them German immigrants, left the Arsenal for the two-hour march to Lindell Grove. They easily surrounded the militiamen, whose tents were just east of present-day Grand and Lindell boulevards.

Without a shot fired, Frost's troops surrendered and filed onto Olive Street. Hecklers had other ideas. Southern sympathizers mocked the German soldiers as "Hessians." A few threw rocks. Somebody fired shots. Union troops opened fire.

William Sherman, an area streetcar executive and future Union army hero, dove for a gully with his son, Willie, 7. Within moments, at least 28 civilians and seven soldiers lay dead or dying along Olive between Compton and Garrison avenues.

That night, three Germans were murdered downtown. The next day, another clash between soldiers and rioters at Broadway and Walnut Street cost six more lives. Federal reinforcements calmed the city, which stayed uneasily with the Union.

Frost joined the Confederate army. Lyon was killed while leading a Union army in battle near Springfield, Mo. Willie Sherman accompanied his father on the great campaign to capture Vicksburg, Miss., but contracted yellow fever and died.

On May 10, 1928, a statue of Lyon was installed at Grand and Pine Street. It was moved 32 years later to Lyon Park, next to the old arsenal, after Harriet Frost Fordyce — daughter of Gen. Frost — donated $1 million to St. Louis University. She died in 1960.

nazi-germany 1939 in color

2009-05-21T12:09:00.001-07:00

"Ted Kennedy: The Dream That Never Died"

2009-05-19T11:57:00.001-07:00

"Book: Ted Kennedy could not find the words to confess in meeting with Mary Jo Kopechne's parents

In "Ted Kennedy: The Dream That Never Died" - out today - author Edward Klein reveals that Ted visited with Mary Jo's parents twice following her death, but could never find the words to confess how the 28-year-old died.

"Ted had us come to his house in McLean [Va.], saying he wanted to talk," Mary Jo's now-deceased mother, Gwen, told Klein. "But [the visit] was uncomfortable - for all of us. Ted led us to believe he was going to explain what really happened. But when the time came, after plenty of small talk, he said he just couldn't talk about it. It was very puzzling. Twice we drove all the way down there [from Pennsylvania], and twice he couldn't talk about how our daughter died."

Mary Jo Kopechne was killed on July 18, 1969, when Kennedy accidentally drove his car off a bridge on Martha's Vineyard's Chappaquiddick Island. Although the senator swam to safety, his passenger, Mary Jo, drowned in the car. Kennedy left the scene and didn't contact authorities until the following day. He eventually pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident and was given a suspended sentence of two months in jail.

Klein writes of the incident, "The burden of guilt sat on Ted's chest like an anvil. He desperately wanted to relieve himself of the guilt, but in the end, he couldn't find the words to express his feelings. And, in fact, he would never find expiation for his guilt.""
http://www.nydailynews.com/gossip/2009/05/19/2009-05-19_kennedy_could_not_find_words_to_confess_kopechne.html

Europe In Worst Recession Since World War II

2009-05-16T15:56:00.001-07:00

Here are the awful figures out of Europe:

* Germany's economy shrank by 3.8% in the first three months of the year.
* Austria's economy shrank 2.8%.
* The economy of the Netherlands shrank 2.8%.
* Spain's economy contracted by by 1.8%.
* France's economy shrank 1.2 percent.
* The UK saw a 1.9% contraction.
* Italy's economy shrank by 2.4%.

24 THINGS ABOUT TO BECOME EXTINCT IN AMERICA

2009-05-16T14:13:00.000-07:00

24. Yellow Pages
This year will be pivotal for the global Yellow Pages industry. Much like newspapers, print Yellow Pages will continue to bleed dollars to their various digital counterparts, from Internet Yellow Pages (IYPs), to local search engines and combination search/listing services like Reach Local and Yodle Factors like an acceleration of the print 'fade rate' and the looming recession will contribute to the onslaught. One research firm predicts the falloff in usage of newspapers and print Yellow Pages could even reach 10% this year -- much higher than the 2%-3% fade rate seen in past years.

23. Classified Ads
The Internet has made so many things obsolete that newspaper classified ads might sound like just another trivial item on a long list. But this is one of those harbingers of the future that could signal the end of civilization as we know it. The argument is that if newspaper classifieds are replaced by free online listings at sites like Craigslist.org and Google Base, then newspapers are not far behind them.

22. Movie Rental Stores
While Netflix is looking up at the moment, Blockbuster keeps closing store locations by the hundreds. It still has about 6,000 left across the world, but those keep dwindling and the stock is down considerably in 2008, especially since the company gave up a quest of Circuit City . Movie Gallery, which owned the Hollywood Video brand, closed up shop earlier this year. Countless small video chains and mom-and-pop stores have given up the ghost already.

21. Dial-up Internet Access
Dial-up connections have fallen from 40% in 2001 to 10% in 2008. The combination of an infrastructure to accommodate affordable high speed Internet connections and the disappearing home phone have all but pounded the final nail in the coffin of dial-up Internet access.

20. Phone Landlines
According to a survey from the National Center for Health Statistics, at the end of 2007, nearly one in six homes was cell-only and, of those homes that had landlines, one in eight only received calls on their cells.

19. Chesapeake Bay Blue Crabs
Maryland 's icon, the blue crab, has been fading away in Chesapeake Bay . Last year Maryland saw the lowest harvest (22 million pounds) since 1945. Just four decades ago the bay produced 96 million pounds. The population is down 70% since 1990, when they first did a formal count. There are only about 120 million crabs in the bay and they think they need 200 million for a sustainable population. Over-fishing, pollution, invasive species and global warming get the blame.

18. VCRs
For the better part of three decades, the VCR was a best-seller and staple in every American household until being completely decimated by the DVD, and now the Digital Video Recorder (DVR). In fact, the only remnants of the VHS age at your local Wal-Mart or Radio Shack are blank VHS tapes these days. Pre-recorded VHS tapes are largely gone and VHS decks are practically nowhere to be found. They served us so well.

17. Ash Trees
In the late 1990s, a pretty, iridescent green species of beetle, now known as the emerald ash borer, hitched a ride to North America with ash wood products imported from eastern Asia. In less than a decade, its larvae have killed millions of trees in the Midwest , and continue to spread. They've killed more than 30 million ash trees in southeastern Michigan alone, with tens of millions more lost in Ohio and Indiana . More than 7.5 billion ash trees are currently at risk.

16. Ham Radio
Amateur radio operators enjoy personal (and often worldwide) wireless communications with each other and are able to support their communities with emergency and disaster communications if necessary, while increasing their personal knowledge of electronics and radio theory. However, proliferation of the Internet and its popularity among youth has caused the decline of amateur radio. In the past five years alone, the number of people holding active ham radio licenses has dropped by 50,000, even though Morse Code is no longer a requirement.

15. The Swimming Hole
Thanks to our litigious society, swimming holes are becoming a thing of the past. '20/20' reports that swimming hole owners, like Robert Every in High Falls, NY, are shutting them down out of worry that if someone gets hurt they'll sue. And that's exactly what happened in Seattle . The city of Bellingham was sued by Katie Hofstetter who was paralyzed in a fall at a popular swimming hole in Whatcom Falls Park . As injuries occur and lawsuits follow, expect more swimming holes to post 'Keep out!' signs.

14. Answering Machines
The increasing disappearance of answering machines is directly tied to No 20 our list -- the decline of landlines. According to USA Today, the number of homes that only use cell phones jumped 159% between 2004 and 2007. It has been particularly bad in New York ; since 2000, landline usage has dropped 55%. It's logical that as cell phones rise, many of them replacing traditional landlines, that there will be fewer answering machines.

13. Cameras That Use Film
It doesn't require a statistician to prove the rapid disappearance of the film camera in America . Just look to companies like Nikon, the professional's choice for quality camera equipment. In 2006, it announced that it would stop making film cameras, pointing to the shrinking market -- only 3% of its sales in 2005, compared to 75% of sales from digital cameras and equipment.

12. Incandescent Bulbs
Before a few years ago, the standard 60-watt (or, yikes, 100-watt) bulb was the mainstay of every U.S. home. With the green movement and all-things-sustainable-energy crowd, the Compact Fluorescent Light bulb (CFL) is largely replacing the older, Edison-era incandescent bulb. The EPA reports that 2007 sales for Energy Star CFLs nearly doubled from 2006, and these sales accounted for approximately 20 percent of the U.S. light bulb market. And according to USA Today, a new energy bill plans to phase out incandescent bulbs in the next four to 12 years.

11. Stand-Alone Bowling Alleys
BowlingBalls.US claims there are still 60 million Americans who bowl at least once a year, but many are not bowling in stand-alone bowling alleys. Today most new bowling alleys are part of facilities for all types or recreation including laser tag, go-karts, bumper cars, video game arcades, climbing walls and glow miniature golf. Bowling lanes also have been added to many non-traditional venues such as adult communities, hotels and resorts, and gambling casinos.

10. The Milkman
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in 1950, over half of the milk delivered was to the home in quart bottles, by 1963, it was about a third and by 2001, it represented only 0.4% percent. Nowadays most milk is sold through supermarkets in gallon jugs. The steady decline in home-delivered milk is blamed, of course, on the rise of the supermarket, better home refrigeration and longer-lasting milk. Although some milkmen still make the rounds in pockets of the U.S. , they are certainly a dying breed.

9. Hand-Written Letters
In 2006, the Radicati Group estimated that, worldwide, 183 billion e-mails were sent each day. Two million each second. By November of 2007, an estimated 3.3 billion Earthlings owned cell phones, and 80% of the world's population had access to cell phone coverage. In 2004, half-a-trillion text messages were sent, and the number has no doubt increased exponentially since then. So where amongst this gorge of gabble is there room for the elegant, polite hand-written letter?

8. Wild Horses
It is estimated that 100 years ago, as many as two million horses were roaming free within the United States . In 2001, National Geographic News estimated that the wild horse population had decreased to about 50,000 head. Currently, the National Wild Horse and Burro Advisory board states that there are 32,000 free roaming horses in ten Western states, with half of them residing in Nevada . The Bureau of Land Management is seeking to reduce the total number of free range horses to 27,000, possibly by selective euthanasia.

7. Personal Checks
According to an American Bankers Assoc. report, a net 23% of consumers plan to decrease their use of checks over the next two years, while a net 14% plan to increase their use of PIN debit. Bill payment remains the last stronghold of paper-based payments -- for the time being. Checks continue to be the most commonly used bill payment method, with 71% of consumers paying at least one recurring bill per month by writing a check. However, on a bill-by-bill basis, checks account for only 49% of consumers' recurring bill payments (down from 72% in 2001 and 60% in 2003).

6. Drive-in Theaters
During the peak in 1958, there were more than 4,000 drive-in theaters in this country, but in 2007 only 405 drive-ins were still operating. Exactly zero new drive-ins have been built since 2005. Only one reopened in 2005 and five reopened in 2006, so there isn't much of a movement toward reviving the closed ones.

5. Mumps & Measles
Despite what's been in the news lately, the measles and mumps actually, truly are disappearing from the United States . In 1964, 212,000 cases of mumps were reported in the U.S. By 1983, this figure had dropped to 3,000, thanks to a vigorous vaccination program. Prior to the introduction of the measles vaccine, approximately half a million cases of measles were reported in the U.S. annually, resulting in 450 deaths. In 2005, only 66 cases were recorded.

4. Honey Bees
Perhaps nothing on our list of disappearing America is so dire; plummeting so enormously; and so necessary to the survival of our food supply as the honey bee. Very scary. 'Colony Collapse Disorder,' or CCD, has spread throughout the U.S. and Europe over the past few years, wiping out 50% to 90% of the colonies of many beekeepers -- and along with it, their livelihood.

3. News Magazines and TV News
While the TV evening newscasts haven't gone anywhere over the last several decades, their audiences have. In 1984, in a story about the diminishing returns of the evening news, the New York Times reported that all three network evening-news programs combined had only 40.9 million viewers. Fast forward to 2008, and what they have today is half that.

2. Analog TV
According to the Consumer Electronics Association, 85% of homes in the U.S. get their television programming through cable or satellite providers. For the remaining 15% -- or 13 million individuals -- who are using rabbit ears or a large outdoor antenna to get their local stations, change is in the air. If you are one of these people you'll need to get a new TV or a converter box in order to get the new stations which will only be broadcast in digital.

1. The Family Farm
Since the 1930s, the number of family farms has been declining rapidly. According to the USDA, 5.3 million farms dotted the nation in 1950, but this number had declined to 2.1 million by the 2003 farm census (data from the 2007 census hasn't yet been published). Ninety-one percent of the U.S. farms are small family farms.

The Mystery of Everett Ruess

2009-05-14T19:48:00.000-07:00

The Mystery of Everett Ruess

By Gregory McNamee on History

“I have seen almost more beauty than I can bear,” Everett Ruess wrote of the canyonlands of the Colorado Plateau, in that stark, rocky country where Utah, Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico meet, immediately after first having wandered through them in the early 1930s.

When he wrote those words, Everett Ruess was not quite 17 years old. He had left his parents’ Hollywood home to wander the world. Along the way he arrived at Big Sur and met the famed photographer Edward Weston, who urged the boy to develop his considerable, though untrained, talents as artist and poet.

Ruess heeded Weston and went to find inspiration in the desert. He journeyed to the Navajo nation and sought out John Wetherill, the trader who had discovered many ancient Ancestral Puebloan sites. Wetherill, suspicious of the strange, footloose youth, pointed him to a remote spot 45 miles from the nearest postbox, and there Everett made his home.

He read the classics. He explored ancient places—Cedar Mesa, Keet Seel, Chaco Canyon—and the rock mazes of the Colorado River and its tributaries. He painted, made block prints, and wrote essays, poems, and affectionate letters to his family and friends.

He left the canyonlands after a year of freedom in the hope of finding professional training in the arts. He lasted out a miserable semester at UCLA and then set out for the Sierra and San Francisco, passed the time with Weston, Ansel Adams, and Dorothy Lange. He returned to the desert in the spring of 1934. Following the Kaiparowits Plateau—about as remote a place as then existed in North America—he explored the Escalante River country of southern Utah. In November, he wrote a letter to his family, saying, “As to when I shall visit civilization, it will not be soon, I think.” Then he disappeared.

No search party would ever catch up to him. One team found an inscription on a canyon wall: “NEMO 1934.” Nemo, no one, what Odysseus (in the Latin translation that Everett knew) said to Polyphemus while fleeing the giant’s cave.

In his 1984 book Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty, Western historian W. L. Rusho reviewed several theories that had been floated about the young man’s disappearance. One speculation was that the boy fell to his death near Hole-in-the-Rock and was swept away by the waters of the Escalante River. Others suggested foul play. Still others supposed Everett to be alive and well and living secure in some labyrinthine hermitage, rather in the way that Butch Cassidy, the famed outlaw from those parts, was supposedly spotted in various desert venues long after being gunned down in Bolivia.

In the early 1970s, a Navajo Indian man told his granddaughter about an incident many years before. He had witnessed three young Ute Indians chase down a white man, kill him, and steal his mules. The Navajo man had buried the body but then, averse in the Navajo way to mentions of death, kept silent about what he had seen for nearly 40 years before speaking about it.

Thirty-five more years passed. The granddaughter confided the story to her brother. They went to the place their grandfather had spoken of, and there they found a shattered skull.

Reports David Roberts in the current issue of National Geographic Adventure, DNA tests of the remains and of Everett Ruess’s living relatives indicate with certainty that the skull and nearby bones were his. Moreover, a reconstruction of the broken skull reveals the smiling face that Dorothea Lange captured on film three-quarters of a century earlier.

Everett Ruess’s retreat into the back of beyond has long fascinated literary desert rats. Prefiguring another ill-starred escape into nature, a tale told in actor-director Sean Penn’s 2007 film Into the Wild, it remains an inspiration of a kind—if, in the end, a tragedy, and with questions yet unanswered.

A protest against Racism and Discrimination

2009-05-05T19:33:00.000-07:00

The most curious document has just been discovered by archeologists working in the rubble left behind in a suburb of Munich in Germany. The document is a statement dated August 23, 1944. It was evidently issued by the Reichsamt gegen Rassismus und Benachteiligung, which means the Reich's Bureau against Racism and Discrimination.
Here is the translation:

The Reich's Bureau against Racism and Discrimination

August 23, 1944
German Comrades and Citizens:

On behalf of the Reich's Bureau against Racism and Discrimination, I have been asked to formulate this letter of protest concerning insensitivity and racism in the Third Reich. The request came several weeks ago but I was only able to compose the statement on behalf of the Bureau now that I am on leave from my military post as a guard at the camp in Birkenau.

We German citizens of conscience have decided to speak out against an intolerable expression of racism! We refer of course to the wearing of some tee-shirts with barbarous slogans and photographs by Allied troops currently involved in the aggression against the Third Reich. In recent days, we have seen photographs and numerous eyewitnesses have come forward to describe American and British troops in France, Belgium and Holland who were seen in local pubs and cafes during their free hours wearing tee-shirts that carried insensitive epithets about Germans and Germany. One showed a Wiener Schnitzel lying on a guillotine with its tip being sliced off. Another showed Allied soldiers urinating into Bavarian beer mugs. Others contained the derogatory terms 'Kraut' and 'Gerry' and even 'Hun.' Anti-German graffiti is showing up more and more frequently on the walls of Dutch and Belgian public buildings.

There were bumper stickers to be seen on the backs of some American and British tanks and other vehicles that cheered the dropping of incendiary bombs on German citizens. And posters being placed in the towns of French villages under the military occupation of the Allied imperialist forces showed German cities in flames with accompanying slogans celebrating the fires. This is even without beginning to describe the insensitive anti-German rhetoric and behavior of the Soviet Red Army soldiers.

I think we can all agree that this sort of thing is intolerable. We call upon the League of Nations to convene a special assembly to denounce the racism and intolerance being displayed by Allied soldiers. We also ask that the Pope speak up.

There is no doubt that this entire war was caused by the racial intolerance and bigotry of American, British and Russian soldiers, not to mention the thuggish French and Yugoslav partisans. These people simply refuse to accept Germans as fellow human beings, entitled to respect and dignity. Our Bureau is striving to stamp out racism in the New Middle Europe by demanding that all such graffiti, posters, and tee-shirts be banned at once. Only when these expressions of anti-German intolerance and racism are removed will there be any hope for tranquility!

On behalf of the Reichsamt gegen Rassismus und Benachteiligung

Hans Schikelgruber, Hauptamtsleiter

Forensic probe affirms image is Lincoln

2009-05-05T19:06:00.000-07:00

Features in 'Portrait of Young Man' match 16th president
In 1987, Albert who was then living in Paris, sought the opinion of Dr. Claude N. Frechette, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon at the American Hospital in Paris, to examine a daguerreotype Kaplan believed was the first known photographic image ever made of the youthful future-president Abraham Lincoln.

As WND reported, Kaplan purchased the daguerreotype in 1977 from a group of 100 being sold by an art gallery on 57th Street in New York City. The sales receipt described the daguerreotype simply as "Portrait of a Young Man."

Frechette presented his findings in a 13-page footnoted forensic report entitled "The Kaplan Daguerreotype of Abraham Lincoln." It has been archived on a website Kaplan created for research materials on Lincoln and the daguerreotypes that he has collected over the past three decades.

"The evidence speaks for itself," Frechette concluded after an extensive analysis. "The nature and substantial number of identical characteristics of the man in the Kaplan daguerreotype, and those of Lincoln, tell us profoundly that the young man in the Kaplan daguerreotype is Abraham Lincoln."

At the start of his analysis, Frechette described the Kaplan daguerreotype as "a print of an exceptionally high quality, 19th century daguerreotype of a robust, confident-looking and smartly dressed young man."

Admitting the examination was of a150-year old case, Frechette explained, "The most objective approach in examining a century-and-a-half old image seemed to be that of a plastic surgeon who evaluates pre- and post-operative photographs and anthropomorphic data of patients with cranio-facial deformities."

Since both the Kaplan daguerreotype taken in the early 1840s and the Meserve #1 daguerreotype image made in 1848 feature the left side of Lincoln's face, Frechette selected for close scrutiny 15 of the known Lincoln images with poses that also featured the left side of his face.

Particularly useful because of the angle of Lincoln's head in the pose was a photograph made by an unknown photographer at Matthew Brady's gallery in Washington, D.C., taken around 1862.

Frechette re-photographed the three images and adjusted their sizes to standardize the distance between the pupils in Lincoln's eyes.

He then began a detailed examination of the features in each of the three photographs, concluding that the vertical dimensions of the mandible, maxilla, nose length and the positions of the orbits of the face shown in the Kaplan daguerreotype were the same as those of the face of Abraham Lincoln.

"Lincoln clearly had a unique face with a large forehead, a penetrating gaze, prominent cheek bones, a strong nose and a well-outlined jaw," Frechette wrote. "The moles on his face were also characteristic features."

In addition to the measurements Frechette made of Lincoln's facial features, he noted the similarity in facial characteristics, among which are the following:

* Regarding the mole on Lincoln's right cheek, Frechette wrote: "A faint circular shadow appears at the lower portion of the middle third of the right nasolabial crease, which is the precise location of Lincoln's characteristic nevus (prominent right mole) seen in later Lincoln images.

* In the Kaplan daguerreotype, the hair appears to be dark and thick. The style is identical to that worn by Lincoln in his early and late portraits. There is a characteristic "tuft" on the right, above the ear. The top of the left ear is totally covered by hair that is purposely combed forward, as it is in many Lincoln photographs.

* The forehead is broad and high, and the hairline in the left temporal region is also identical to those in later photographs.

* The eyebrows are heavy and have two different hair patterns, similar to the eyebrows in later photographs of Lincoln. The medial (inner) portion is dark and linear whereas the lateral (outer) half is more bushy. The left eyebrow, the one fully seen, extends over the entire length of the superior orbital

* The philtral columns (the edges of the vertical groove in the upper lip) are well marked and extend to the base of the nose in the Kaplan daguerreotype, a prominent feature in Lincoln photographs.

* In the Kaplan daguerreotype, the left half of the upper lip is somewhat thicker than the right – another prominent feature in Lincoln photographs.

Frechette's detailed discussion of facial features regarding the lips, cheeks and ears are presented in his paper archived on the LincolnPortrait.com website.

Frechette found important similarities when examining Lincoln's eyes.

At the age of 10, Lincoln was kicked by a horse, sustaining a major head trauma on the left side, with a loss of consciousness. As a result, Lincoln suffered from diplopia (double vision) and exophoria (outward deviation) of the left eye, both due to partial paralysis of the small eye muscles.

Frechette noted three fairly technical points regarding Lincoln's eyes, which he considered important in deriving his conclusion that the young man of the Kaplan daguerreotype was Lincoln:

* The gentleman in the Kaplan daguerreotype has a rare condition, bilateral ptosis (drooping eyelids), evident in many photographs of Lincoln.

* Two other findings are characteristic: the lateral extension of the free border of the upper lid beyond the outer corner of the eye (lateral commissure), and the well-defined upper and lower superficial heads of the medial canthal tendon, which attaches the inner corner of the eye commissure. The upper segment is easily seen in all Lincoln portraits, whereas the lower branch is only occasionally seen because of shadows or poor photographic depth-of-field. Photographic presentations of these features are rarely seen in pictures of individuals, but are seen in known Lincoln portraits and in the Kaplan image.

* There is a phenomenon known as Hirschbert's test of corneal light reflex, a white dot seen in both eyes that reflects the prime source of illumination. Usually the dots are located in the same spot in both eyes (with regard to the iris, or "black of the eye"). However, in the Kaplan, and in the other Lincoln images, this is not true. The left eye's gaze is in fact slightly more lateral, placing the dot in that eye toward the inside.

Kaplan noted that several Lincoln contemporaries recorded their observations of the deep-set nature of Lincoln's eyes, a characteristic Kaplan found as well in his daguerreotype.

Frechette also commented that numerous accounts have revealed that Lincoln underwent a noticeable change in his physical appearance beginning in January 1841, as a result of the grave emotional crisis that coincided with his reported failure to go through with his scheduled marriage to Mary Todd, leaving her literally waiting for him at the altar.

"This emotional crisis, just one of a series of such episodes to plague him throughout his life, was the cause of Lincoln losing a considerable amount of weight," Frechette wrote.

"To the shores of Tripoli"

2009-04-12T19:23:00.000-07:00

"To the shores of Tripoli" refers to the Marine role in Thomas Jefferson's war against the Barbary pirates. The "Barbary coast" was a collection of Moslem mini-states on Africa's Mediterranean coast stretching from present day Algeria to present day Libya. The principal source of revenue for the Barbary states was attacking shipping in the Mediterranean, stealing their cargoes, and hold the crews for ransom or selling them into slavery.

The European powers of the day thought it cheaper to pay tribute to the Barbary states than to attack the pirates, and in 1784, the U.S. Congress followed suit. This was opposed by Mr. Jefferson, then the minister to France, who thought paying tribute would lead to larger demands. "It will be more easy to raise ships and men to fight these pirates into reason, than money to bribe them," Mr. Jefferson wrote in a letter to the president of Yale University in 1786.

Thomas Jefferson favored forming an international coalition to fight the pirates, but the Europeans wouldn't go along. When he became president in 1801, Mr. Jefferson refused Tripoli's demands for an immediate payment of $225,000, whereupon the Pasha of Tripoli, Yussif Karamanli, declared war on the United States.

This turned out to be a big mistake for Mr. Karamanli. President Jefferson dispatched naval forces to the Mediterranean, and sent one of the most remarkable of American heroes, William Eaton, to Egypt to raise an army to attack Tripoli. The only Americans Captain Eaton had with him were seven Marines led by Lt. Presley O'Bannon.

Mr. Eaton led the seven Marines and a motley force of about 500 Arab and Greek mercenaries on a 500-mile trek across the Libyan desert to attack Tripoli's capital of Derna, which was captured on April 27, 1805 in large part because of the reckless courage displayed by Lt. O'Bannon and his Marines. The dress sword Marine officers carry is modeled on the Mameluke sword an Arab prince presented to Lt. O'Bannon after the victory.

American naval forces commanded by Commodore Edward Preble and Captain Stephen Decatur had successes against the other Barbary states. On June 5, 1805, the Pasha signed a surrender treaty and President Jefferson told Congress the threat posed by the Barbary pirates was at an end.

Seizures of U.S.-flagged ships on the high seas have been few and far between since Jefferson's time, thanks largely to his forceful response.

Classic gags discovered in ancient Roman joke book

2009-03-19T05:51:00.000-07:00

Classic gags discovered in ancient Roman joke book

We may admire the satires of Horace and Lucilius, but the ancient Romans haven't hitherto been thought of as masters of the one-liner. This could be about to change, however, after the discovery of a classical joke book.

Celebrated classics professor Mary Beard has brought to light a volume more than 1,600 years old, which she says shows the Romans not to be the "pompous, bridge-building toga wearers" they're often seen as, but rather a race ready to laugh at themselves.

Written in Greek, Philogelos, or The Laughter Lover, dates to the third or fourth century AD, and contains some 260 jokes which Beard said are "very similar" to the jokes we have today, although peopled with different stereotypes – the "egghead", or absent-minded professor, is a particular figure of fun, along with the eunuch, and people with hernias or bad breath.

"They're also poking fun at certain types of foreigners – people from Abdera, a city in Thrace, were very, very stupid, almost as stupid as [they thought] eggheads [were]," said Beard.

An ancient version of Monty Python's dead parrot sketch sees a man buy a slave, who dies shortly afterwards. When he complains to the seller, he is told: "He didn't die when I owned him."

Beard's favourite joke is a version of the Englishman, Irishman, Scotsman variety, with a barber, a bald man and an absent-minded professor taking a journey together. They have to camp overnight, so decide to take turns watching the luggage. When it's the barber's turn, he gets bored, so amuses himself by shaving the head of the professor. When the professor is woken up for his shift, he feels his head, and says "How stupid is that barber? He's woken up the bald man instead of me."

"It's one of the better ones," said Beard. "It has a nice identity resonance ... A lot of the jokes play on the obviously quite problematic idea in Roman times of knowing who you are." Another "identity" joke sees a man meet an acquaintance and say "it's funny, I was told you were dead". He says "well, you can see I'm still alive." But the first man disputes this on the grounds that "the man who told me you were dead is much more reliable than you".

"Interestingly they are quite understandable to us, whereas reading Punch from the 19th century is completely baffling to me," said Beard.

But she queried whether we are finding the same things funny as the Romans would have done. Telling a joke to one of her graduate classes, in which an absent-minded professor is asked by a friend to bring back two 15-year-old slave boys from his trip abroad, and replies "fine, and if I can't find two 15-year-olds I will bring you one 30-year-old," she found they "chortled no end".

"They thought it was a sex joke, equivalent to someone being asked for two 30-year-old women, and being told okay, I'll bring you one 60-year-old. But I suspect it's a joke about numbers – are numbers real? If so two 15-year-olds should be like one 30-year-old – it's about the strange unnaturalness of the number system."

Beard, who discovered the title while carrying out research for a new book she's working on about humour in the ancient world, pointed out that when we're told a joke, we make a huge effort to make it funny for ourselves, or it's an admission of failure. "Are we doing that to these Roman jokes? Were they actually laughing at something quite different?" .

Secret Message found in Lincoln Watch

2009-03-11T09:09:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON -- Curators at the National Museum of American History have settled a 148-year-old mystery once and for all.

On Tuesday, they opened up a pocket watch that belonged to President Abraham Lincoln and discovered a hidden message long rumored to be inside.

It read: "April 13, 1861. Fort Sumter was attacked by the rebels on the above date. J. Dillon." It then read: "April 13, 1861. Thank God we have a government. Jonathan Dillon."

Dillon, a watchmaker who was repairing Lincoln's timepiece, reportedly said he was moved to write a message inside after the first shots of the Civil War were fired at Fort Sumter in South Carolina.

The story has been passed down through the Dillon family and was reported in 1906 by The New York Times.

Geronimo’s Heirs Sue Secret Yale Society Over His Skull

2009-02-20T11:43:00.000-08:00

By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.

HOUSTON — The descendants of Geronimo have sued Skull and Bones, a secret society at Yale University with ties to the Bush family, charging that its members robbed his grave in 1918 and have kept his skull in a glass case ever since.

The claim is part of a lawsuit filed in federal court in Washington on Tuesday, the 100th anniversary of Geronimo’s death. The Apache warrior’s heirs are seeking to recover all his remains, wherever they may be, and have them transferred to a new grave at the headwaters of the Gila River in New Mexico, where Geronimo was born and wished to be interred.

“I believe strongly from my heart that his spirit was never released,” Geronimo’s great-grandson Harlyn Geronimo, 61, told reporters Tuesday at the National Press Club.

Geronimo died a prisoner of war at Fort Sill, Okla., in 1909. A longstanding tradition among members of Skull and Bones holds that Prescott S. Bush — father of President George Bush and grandfather of President George W. Bush — broke into the grave with some classmates during World War I and made off with the skull, two bones, a bridle and some stirrups, all of which were put on display at the group’s clubhouse in New Haven, known as the Tomb.

The story gained some validity in 2005, when a historian discovered a letter written in 1918 from one Skull and Bones member to another saying the skull had been taken from a grave at Fort Sill along with several pieces of tack for a horse.

Ramsey Clark, a former United States attorney general who is representing Geronimo’s family, acknowledged he had no hard proof that the story was true. Yet he said he hoped the court would clear up the matter.

Tom Conroy, a spokesman for Yale, declined to comment on the lawsuit but was quick to note that the Tomb was not on university property.

Members of the Skull and Bones, who guard their organization’s secrecy, could not be reached for comment. Though the society is not officially affiliated with the university, many of Yale’s most powerful alumni are members, among them both Bush presidents and Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts.

“Of all the items rumored to be in the Skull and Bones’s possession, Geronimo’s skull is one of the more plausible ones,” said Alexandra Robbins, the author of “Secrets of the Tomb” (Little Brown 2002), a book about the society. “There is a skull encased in a glass display when you walk in the door of the Tomb, and they call it Geronimo.”

Some local historians and anthropologists in Oklahoma have cast doubt on the tale, noting that no independent evidence has been found to suggest that Geronimo’s grave was disturbed in 1918. Ten years later, the army covered the grave with concrete and replaced a simple wooden headstone with a stone monument, making it nearly impregnable.

Geronimo, whose given name was Goyathlay, put up fierce resistance to white settlers, fighting the Mexican and United States armies for nearly three decades. He finally surrendered, with only 35 men left, to Gen. Nelson A. Miles on the New Mexico-Arizona border in 1886 and spent the rest of his life in prison, dying of pneumonia.

Not all Apaches want to move his remains to New Mexico. The branch of the tribe that settled at Fort Sill after Geronimo died is fighting to keep the grave where it is.

“There is nothing to be gained by digging up the dead,” said Jeff Houser, the chairman of the Fort Sill Apache Tribe. “It will not repair the damage to the tribe caused by its removal and imprisonment.”

10 Weird Facts About Presidents

2009-02-17T16:55:00.000-08:00

In case you didn’t get enough Presidential Facts from the mag, I have this whole collection of strange facts I’ve written down about U.S. Presidents. None of them really have anything to do with one another so I’ve never been able to tie them into a themed post before. But since it’s Presidents’ Day, I don’t think I really need a theme other than that.

1. James Monroe once chased the Secretary of the Treasury out of the White House with a pair of fire tongs.
2. Andrew Jackson may have looked like a hardened old soul, but he was quite the merry prankster: when he was in school, he invited a bunch of prostitutes to the annual Christmas Ball, just because he knew how much it would freak out all of the “proper” attendees. He also liked to move outhouses around so when people went out to use their bathroom, the bathroom was no longer there.
3. John Quincy Adams liked skinny dipping in the Potomac. He thought bathing and swimming in ice-cold water was good for his constitution.
4. Martin Van Buren’s autobiography doesn’t mention his wife even once.

5. Queen Victoria once declared that Millard Fillmore was the most handsome man she had ever seen. What do you guys think? Was Millard a hottie? My assessment: no.
6. James Buchanan is the only U.S. President to remain a bachelor his entire life. Some speculated that he was gay, and his extremely close relationship with Congressman William Rufus King didn’t do anything to dispel the rumors. The two of them were often referred to as “Mr. Buchanan and his wife.”
7. Rutherford B. Hayes and his family spent every single evening in the White House singing gospel hymns.
8. William McKinley’s wife suffered from epilepsy. When she had seizures at public events and dinners, McKinley would just drape his handkerchief over her face and carry on with whatever matters were at hand.
9. Teddy Roosevelt was a big eater. It wasn’t uncommon for him to take down a dozen eggs for breakfast.
10. Lyndon B. Johnson wore a watch with an alarm on it and liked to set it off when he got bored listening to speeches.

The Origins Of Ice Cream Cone

2009-02-17T16:16:00.000-08:00

An amazing picture of the invasion of Normandy on Utah Beach

2009-02-17T14:35:00.000-08:00

WWII Monopoly

2009-02-16T20:22:00.000-08:00

Starting in 1941, an increasing number of British airmen found
themselves as the involuntary guests of the Third Reich, and the
Crown was casting about for ways and means to facilitate their escape.
Now obviously, one of the most helpful aids to that end is a useful
and accurate map, one showing not
Only where stuff was, but also showing the locations of 'safe houses'
where A POW on-the-lam could go for food and shelter.

Paper maps had some real drawbacks -- they make a lot of noise when
you open and fold them, they wear out rapidly, and if they get wet,
they turn into mush. Someone in MI-5 (similar to America 's OSS ) got the
idea of
printing escape maps on silk. It 's durable, can be scrunched-up into
tiny wads, And unfolded as many times as needed, and makes no noise
whatsoever.

At that time, there was only one manufacturer in Great Britain that
had perfected the technology of printing on silk, and that was John
Waddington, Ltd. When approached by the government, the firm was
only too happy to do its bit for the war effort.
By pure coincidence, Waddington was also the U.K. Licensee for the
popular American board game, Monopoly. As it happened, 'games and
pastimes' was a category of item qualified for insertion into 'CARE
packages', dispatched by the International Red Cross to prisoners of war.
Under the strictest of secrecy, in a securely guarded and inaccessible
Old workshop on the grounds of Waddington's, a group of
sworn-to-secrecy employees began mass-producing escape maps, keyed to
each region of Germany or Italy where Allied POW camps were
(regional system). When processed, these maps could be folded into
such tiny dots that they would actually fit inside a Monopoly playing
piece. As long as they were at it, the clever workmen at Waddington's also
managed to add:

1. A playing token, containing a small magnetic compass 2. A two-part
metal file that could easily be screwed together 3. Useful amounts
of genuine high-denomination German, Italian,and French currency
hidden within the piles of Monopoly money!

British and American air crews were advised before taking off on
their first mission, how to identify a 'rigged' Monopoly set -- by
means of a tiny red dot, one cleverly rigged to look like an ordinary
printing glitch, located in the corner of the Free Parking square.

Of the estimated 35,000 Allied POWS who successfully escaped, an
estimated one-third were aided in their flight by the rigged Monopoly
sets. Everyone who did so was sworn to secrecy indefinitely since the
British Government might want to use this highly successful ruse in
still another future war. The story wasn't declassified until 2007
when the surviving craftsmen from Waddington's, as well as the firm
itself, were finally honored in a public ceremony.

It's always nice when you can play that 'Get Out of Jail' Free' card!

44 US Presidents - George Washington to Barack Obama

2009-02-13T20:24:00.000-08:00

Les 44 présidents des Etats Unis
by thony911

morphed to the music Boléro by Ravel.

Presidential Bloopers Extravaganza

2009-02-13T13:18:00.000-08:00

Every Known Photograph of Abraham Lincoln

2009-02-13T13:03:00.000-08:00

Every known photograph taken of Abraham Lincoln from 1846 to his death in 1865.

The Great Escape???

2009-02-12T16:50:00.000-08:00

During WWII, there was a German POW camp in Arizona (near but not too near Phoenix). One day a German POW got his hands on a map and saw a river wasn't too far and, if they had a boat, they'd be able to get away. Oh, there were no fences around the camp because it was in the middle of the desert with no place to go.

Well, the Germans secretly built a boat and planned their escape. They carried the boat to the water (or where the water should have been). You see, the rivers in the desert don't always have water in them. (The expression "when it rains it pours" must have been said by someone from the Arizona desert.) It was not rainy season so the river was dry. The Germans had to walk back to the POW camp with their tails between their legs.

Wreck of Warship Is Found in English Channel

2009-02-02T10:33:00.000-08:00

Wreck of Warship Is Found in English Channel
By WILLIAM J. BROAD

Sea explorers probing the depths of the English Channel have discovered what they say is a legendary British warship that sank in a fierce storm in 1744 with the loss of more than 900 men and possibly four tons of gold coins valued at $1 billion.

The team found the wreckage of the HMS Victory last year and confirmed its identify through a close examination of 41 bronze cannons visible on the sandy ocean bottom, Greg Stemm, head of the discovery team, said at a news conference Monday in London.

The team lifted two of the cannons and gave them to the British Ministry of Defense, he said, and is now negotiating with British authorities on the disposition of the artifacts and treasure before it attempts further recoveries.

“I’m surprised we’ve been able to keep it under wraps for nine months,” Mr. Stemm said at the news conference, calling the find “a momentous discovery.” He is the head of Odyssey Marine Exploration Inc. of Tampa, Fla., a private company that specializes in deep sea exploration and recovery.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Stemm called the find “hard to beat” in terms of raw history, lost treasure, and solved mysteries. The team found the wreck far from its reported resting place, and said the discovery had cleared the name of its commander, Admiral Sir John Balchin, whose navigation had been impugned after the catastrophic loss.

The press conference was held by the Discovery Channel, which plans to air a show Thursday about the ship on its weekly “Treasure Quest” program, which debuted last month.

The Victory was armed with up to 110 bronze cannons — one of deadliest vessels of the age. The biggest cannon weighed four tons and could fire cannonballs weighing 42 pounds — the largest and most powerful guns then used in naval warfare.

In July 1744, the flagship and its fleet of warships were sent to rescue a Mediterranean convoy blockaded by a French fleet at Lisbon. After chasing the French away, the Victory escorted the convoy as far as Gibraltar and headed home.

A hard gale scattered the British fleet shortly after it entered the English Channel, and on Oct. 5, 1744, somewhere off the Channel Islands, Victory went down with all hands. The flagship was the only member of the British fleet lost at sea.

The belief spread that ship had grounded on the Casquets, a group of rocky islets west of Alderney that protrude a few dozen feet above the water line. The rocks are called the “graveyard of the English Channel.” The lighthouse keeper of Alderney was court-martialed for failing to keep the lights on at the time of the ship’s disappearance.

That November, a Dutch newspaper reported that Victory had been carrying 400,000 pounds sterling from Lisbon that was destined for Dutch merchants. At the news conference, the ship’s finders said that would amount to about four tons of gold coins.

Historically, Victory was the last Royal Navy warship to be lost with a complete set of bronze cannons.

For decades, Mr. Stemm and his colleagues worked on the cutting edge of deep sea exploration, using sonars and robots to discover scores of interesting wrecks and thousands of artifacts. They have found treasures valued at hundreds of millions of dollars.

Last April, the Odyssey team was exploring the English Channel when a sonar registered an intriguing blip. Ensuing investigations with a tethered robot showed the seabed covered with cannons, a copper cooking kettle, hull remains, rectangular iron ballast, two anchors, rigging, two probable gunner’s wheels and 41 bronze cannons, including eight large guns that could fire 42-pound cannonballs.

“These were the biggest cannon in the age of sail,” Mr Stemm told the news conference. “These things are huge, simply amazing.”

He rode the 'Orphan Train' across the country

2009-01-28T04:55:00.000-08:00

They called it the Orphan Train. It carried scores of street urchins -- with no parents, no homes -- out of New York City between 1854 and 1929. At each station, the orphans would stand outside the coaches, wearing their best clothes, hoping they'd be chosen by inspecting families.
PUEBLO, Colorado (CNN) -- Orphan Train rider Stanley Cornell's oldest memory is of his mother's death in 1925.
"My first feeling was standing by my mom's bedside when she was dying. She died of tuberculosis," recalls Cornell. "I remember her crying, holding my hand, saying to 'be good to Daddy.' "

"That was the last I saw of her. I was probably four," Cornell says of his mother, Lottie Cornell, who passed away in Elmira, New York.His father, Floyd Cornell, was still suffering the effects of nerve gas and shell shock after serving as a soldier in combat during WWI. That made it difficult for him to keep steady work or care for his two boys.

"Daddy Floyd," as Stanley Cornell calls his birth father, eventually contacted the Children's Aid Society. The society workers showed up in a big car with candy and whisked away Stanley and his brother, Victor, who was 16 months younger. Stanley Cornell remembers his father was crying and hanging on to a post. The little boy had a feeling he would not see his father again.

The two youngsters were taken to an orphanage, the Children's Aid Society of New York, founded by social reformer Charles Loring Brace.

"It was kind of rough in the orphans' home," Cornell remembers, adding that the older children preyed on the younger kids -- even though officials tried to keep them separated by chicken wire fences. He says he remembers being beaten with whips like those used on horses.

New York City in 1926 was teeming with tens of thousands of homeless and orphaned children. These so-called "street urchins" resorted to begging, stealing or forming gangs to commit violence to survive. Some children worked in factories and slept in doorways or flophouses.

The Orphan Train movement took Stanley Cornell and his brother out of the city during the last part of a mass relocation movement for children called "placing out."Brace's agency took destitute children, in small groups, by train to small towns and farms across the country, with many traveling to the West and Midwest. From 1854 to 1929, more than 200,000 children were placed with families across 47 states. It was the beginning of documented foster care in America.

"It's an exodus, I guess. They called it Orphan Train riders that rode the trains looking for mom and dad like my brother and I."

"We'd pull into a train station, stand outside the coaches dressed in our best clothes. People would inspect us like cattle farmers. And if they didn't choose you, you'd get back on the train and do it all over again at the next stop."

Cornell and his brother were "placed out" twice with their aunts in Pennsylvania and Coffeyville, Kansas. But their placements didn't last and they were returned to the Children's Aid Society.

"Then they made up another train. Sent us out West. A hundred-fifty kids on a train to Wellington, Texas," Cornell recalls. "That's where Dad happened to be in town that day."

Each time an Orphan Train was sent out, adoption ads were placed in local papers before the arrival of the children.

J.L. Deger, a 45-year-old farmer, knew he wanted a boy even though he already had two daughters ages 10 and 13.

"He'd just bought a Model T. Mr. Deger looked those boys over. We were the last boys holding hands in a blizzard, December 10, 1926," Cornell remembers. He says that day he and his brother stood in a hotel lobby.

"He asked us if we wanted to move out to farm with chickens, pigs and a room all to your own. He only wanted to take one of us, decided to take both of us."

Life on the farm was hard work.

"I did have to work and I expected it, because they fed me, clothed me, loved me. We had a good home. I'm very grateful. Always have been, always will be."

Taking care of a family wasn't always easy.

"In 1931, the Dust Bowl days started. The wind never quit. Sixty, 70 miles an hour, all that dust. It was a mess. Sometimes, Dad wouldn't raise a crop in two years."

A good crop came in 1940. With his profit in hand, "first thing Dad did was he took that money and said, 'we're going to repay the banker for trusting us,' " Cornell says.

When World War II began, Cornell joined the U.S. Army Signal Corps. He shipped out to Africa and landed near Casablanca, Morocco, where he laid telephone and teletype lines. Later he served in Egypt and northern Sicily. While in Italy, he witnessed Mount Vesuvius erupting.

It was on a telephone line-laying mission between Naples and Rome that Cornell suffered his first of three wounds.

"Our jeep was hit by a bomb. I thought I was in the middle of the ocean. It was the middle of January and I was in a sea of mud."

With their jeep destroyed and Cornell bleeding from a head wound, his driver asked a French soldier to use his vehicle to transport them. The Frenchman refused to drive Cornell the five miles to the medical unit.

"So, the driver pulled out his pistol, put the gun to the French soldier's head and yelled, 'tout suite!' or 'move it!' " Cornell recalls.

Once he was treated, Cornell remembers the doctor saying, "You've got 30 stitches in your scalp. An eighth of an inch deeper and you'd be dead."

Cornell always refused to accept his commendations for a Purple Heart even though he'd been wounded three times, twice severely enough to be hospitalized for weeks. He felt the medals were handed out too often to troops who suffered the equivalent of a scratch.

His younger brother served during the war in the Air Force at a base in Nebraska, where he ran a film projector at the officers' club.

As WWII was drawing to a close, Stanley Cornell headed up the teletype section at Allied headquarters in Reims, France. "I saw [Gen. Dwight] Eisenhower every day," he recalls.

On May 7, 1945, the Nazis surrendered. "I sent the first teletype message from Eisenhower saying the war was over with Germany," Cornell says.

In 1946, the 25-year-old Stanley Cornell met with his 53-year-old birth father, Daddy Floyd. It was the last time they would see each other.

Cornell eventually got married and he and his wife, Earleen, adopted two boys, Dana and Dennis, when each was just four weeks old.

"I knew what it was like to grow up without parents," Cornell says. "We were married seven years and couldn't have kids, so I asked my wife, 'how about adoption?' She'd heard my story before and said, 'OK.' "

After they adopted their two boys, Earleen gave birth to a girl, Denyse.

Dana Cornell understands what his father and uncle went through.

"I don't think [Uncle] Vic and Stan could have been better parents. I can relate, you know, because Dad adopted Dennis and me. He has taught me an awful lot over the years," Dana Cornell says.

Dana Cornell says his adoptive parents have always said that if the boys wanted to find their birth parents, they would help. But he decided not to because of how he feels about the couple who adopted him. "They are my parents and that's the way it's gonna be."

Stanley and Earleen Cornell have been married 61 years. She is a minister at a church in Pueblo, Colorado, and is the cook at her son's restaurant, Dana's Lil' Kitchen.

Stanley Cornell believes he is one of only 15 surviving Orphan Train children. His brother, Victor Cornell, a retired movie theater chain owner, is also alive and living in Moscow, Idaho.

DNA Could Illuminate Origins of Medieval Manuscripts

2009-01-26T14:33:00.000-08:00

The DNA of animal skins used as parchment for medieval manuscripts could reveal where the texts were made.

By comparing the genetic codes of manuscripts of unknown origin to those whose provenance and age is known, an English professor hopes to learn where and when the mysterious manuscripts were made.

"One of the things we try to do when we study a text is to guess from the handwriting and dialect where and when it's from," said Tim Stinson of North Carolina State University . "But these are inexact processes, and it takes a lot of guesswork. Our tools have been fairly blunt instruments — until now."

Initial tests showed that the animal skin pages contained enough intact DNA to make analysis worthwhile. So Stinson and his brother Mike Stinson, a biologist at Southside Virginia Community College, skin samples taken from five pages of a 15th century French prayer book. Preserved mitochondrial DNA revealed that the pages came from two closely related calves.

Those results, said Stinson, are a proof of principle that it's possible to create a DNA database from manuscripts of known age and origin. Monastic paperwork tended to be dated, so DNA from those works could be cross-indexed with that of literary works from tomes of unknown provenance, producing a taxonomy of manuscript manufacture.

"This could help us understand not just things, not just books, not just medieval cows, but people," said Stinson.

In addition to pinpointing manuscript origin, such a taxonomy could flesh out the as-yet-murky transition from monastic to commercial publishing.

"When did books become a business, as opposed to something monks did? That's a puzzle nobody knows," said Stinson. "This could be a social history of producing a good for trade."

DNA matches could also help link pages from books that have been broken up by unsavory collectors and sold piecemeal to museums and galleries around the world.

Before this can happen, however, Stinson needs to refine his technique. Testing currently requires the removal of a half-centimeter square — enough to turn the stomach of any true bibliophile. Stinson plans to repeat testing with ever-smaller samples until a process is found that leaves no visible scars.

Stinson also needs grant money for the project, which will be presented at the upcoming Bibliographical Society of America meeting in New York City. Tests run between $800 and $1000 per sample, and dozens of samples will be needed for the initial database.

Medieval manuscript identification could be a tough sell in today's economy, but Stinson believes that historical insight is still valuable.

He gave the example of an undated poem he's currently translating, about the Roman destruction of Jerusalem. The poem, said Stinson, reflects anti-Semitic tendencies common in parts of medieval England.

"Who was circulating these — what time, and when? Was it country gentlemen? Monks? Where are these being produced?" he wondered. As can be claimed of so much of history, Stinson said, "The matter in Jerusalem is far from over."

Dieting in the year 1087

2009-01-04T19:24:00.000-08:00

It is said that in the year 1087, William the Conqueror (who became King of England after his success at the Battle of Hastings) found he could no longer ride his horse because he was too fat. He reportedly refused to get out of bed, and began drinking alcohol instead of eating food in an attempt to lose weight. If this story is true, it may be the first recorded instance of someone changing food intake in order to reduce their bulk.(thus dieting)

Although it is apparently true that he had grown quite fat by the end of his life, we have no record of what success King William's alcoholic 'liquid diet' might have had. King William died that same year, but since he died from injuries he suffered when his horse fell, we may assume his regime was at least partially successful, because he was on his horse once again.

RIP Freddie Hubbard

2008-12-31T09:52:00.000-08:00

Freddie Hubbard, energetic jazz trumpeter, dies at 70
By Peter Keepnews
Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Freddie Hubbard, a jazz trumpeter who dazzled audiences and critics alike with his virtuosity, his melodicism and his infectious energy, died Monday in Sherman Oaks, California. He was 70.

The cause was complications of a heart attack he had Nov. 26, said his spokesman, Don Lucoff of DL Media.

Over a career that began in the late 1950s, Hubbard earned both critical praise and commercial success - although rarely for the same projects.

He attracted attention in the 1960s for his bravura work as a member of the Jazz Messengers, the valuable training ground for young musicians led by the veteran drummer Art Blakey, and on albums by Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and many others. He also recorded several well-regarded albums as a leader. And although he was not an avant-gardist by temperament, he participated in three of the seminal recordings of the 1960s jazz avant-garde: Ornette Coleman's "Free Jazz" (1960), Eric Dolphy's "Out to Lunch" (1964) and John Coltrane's "Ascension" (1965).

In the 1970s Hubbard, like many other jazz musicians of his generation, began courting a larger audience, with albums that featured electric instruments, rock and funk rhythms, string arrangements and repertory sprinkled with pop and R&B songs like Paul McCartney's "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" and the Stylistics' "Betcha by Golly, Wow." His audience did indeed grow, but his standing in the jazz world diminished.

By the start of the next decade he had largely abandoned his more commercial approach and returned to his jazz roots. But his career came to a virtual halt in 1992 when he damaged his lip, and although he resumed performing and recording after an extended hiatus, he was never again as powerful a player as he had been in his prime.

Frederick Dewayne Hubbard was born on April 7, 1938, in Indianapolis. His first instrument was the alto-brass mellophone, and in high school he studied French horn and tuba as well as trumpet.

After taking lessons with Max Woodbury, the first trumpeter of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, at the Arthur Jordan Conservatory of Music, he performed locally with, among others, the guitarist Wes Montgomery and his brothers.

Hubbard moved to New York in 1958 and almost immediately began working with groups led by the saxophonist Sonny Rollins, the drummer Philly Joe Jones and others. His profile rose in 1960 when he joined the roster of Blue Note, a leading jazz label; it rose further the next year when he was hired by Blakey, widely regarded as the music's premier talent scout.

Adding his own spin to a style informed by Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and Clifford Brown, Hubbard played trumpet with an unusual mix of melodic inventiveness and technical razzle-dazzle. The critics took notice. Leonard Feather called him "one of the most skilled, original and forceful trumpeters of the '60s."

After leaving Blakey's band in 1964, Hubbard worked for a while with another drummer-bandleader, Max Roach, before forming his own group in 1966. Four years later he began recording for CTI, a record company that would soon become known for its aggressive efforts to market jazz musicians beyond the confines of the jazz audience.

Hubbard won a Grammy Award for the album "First Light" in 1972 and was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2006.

He is survived by his wife of 35 years, Briggie Hubbard, and his son, Duane.

Hubbard was once known as the brashest of jazzmen, but his personality as well as his music mellowed in the wake of his lip problems. In a 1995 interview with Fred Shuster of Down Beat, Hubbard offered some sober advice to younger musicians: "Don't make the mistake I made of not taking care of myself. Please, keep your chops cool and don't overblow."

In Memoriam 2008

2008-12-29T20:25:00.000-08:00

In chronological order of their deaths, these are people with whom I was at least vaguely familiar who passed away this year:

Lee Dreyfus, former governor of Wisconsin.

Gerry Staley, former MLB pitcher.

Jimmy Stewart, former British racecar driver.

Phillip Agee, author and former CIA agent.

Jim Dooley, former Chicago Bears coach.

Johnny Grant, former honorary mayor of Hollywood.

Rod Allen, former lead singer of the Fortunes (”Here Comes that Rainy Day Feeling Again”).

Sir Edmund Hillary, first mountaineer to reach the summit of Mount Everest.

Johnny Podres, former MLB pitcher.

Bobby Fischer, chess grandmaster.

Ernie Holmes, former NFL player.

John Stroger, Chicago politician.

Lois Nettleton, movie and TV actress.

Lou Palmer, radio announcer.

Georgia Frontiere, owner of St. Louis Rams football team.

John Stewart, member of the Kingston Trio.

Eugene Sawyer, former mayor of Chicago.

Suzanne Pleshette, movie and TV actress.

Heath Ledger, movie actor.

Margaret Truman Daniel, author and daughter of Harry S Truman.

Ed Vargo, former MLB umpire.

Earl Butz, former secretary of agriculture.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, former guru to the Beatles.

Roy Scheider, movie actor.

Freddie Bell, R&B singer.

Tom Lantos, member of Congress and Holocaust survivor.

Robin Moore, author (”The Green Berets”).

Evan Mecham, former governor of Arizona.

Buddy Miles, rock drummer.

William F. Buckley Jr., author, political commentator, founder of the National Review magazine.

Mike Smith, lead singer of the Dave Clark Five.

Jerry Groom, former NFL player.

Buddy Dial, former football star.

Bob Purkey, former MLB player.

Ivan Dixon, movie and TV actor (”Hogan’s Heroes”).

Sir Arthur Clarke, author (”2001: A Space Odyssey”).

Richard Widmark, actor.

Paul Scofield, actor.

Neil Aspinall, former road manager for the Beatles.

Wally Phillips, Chicago radio personality.

Charlton Heston, movie actor.

Bob Pellegrini, former NFL player.

Joy Page, movie actress (”Casablanca”).

Al Wilson, soul singer (”Show and Tell”).

Paul Davis, pop singer (”65 Love Affair”).

Eddy Arnold, country music singer.

Arthur Burks, mathemetician and computer pioneer.

Utah Phillips, folk singer.

Jimmy McGriff, jazz and blues organist.

Dick Martin, comedian (”Laugh-In”).

Sydney Pollack, movie actor and director.

Earle Hagen, TV theme composer (”The Andy Griffith Show”).

Harvey Korman, actor and comedian.

Yves St. Laurent, fashion designer.

Paul Sills, co-founder of the Second City improv troupe.

Mel Ferrer, actor.

Bo Diddley (pictured above), rock pioneer.

Tim Russert, TV journalist.

Cyd Charisse, actress and dancer.

Dody Goodman, actress and comedian.

George Carlin, comedian.

Larry Harmon, actor (Bozo the Clown).

Evelyn Keyes, actress (”Gone With the Wind”).

Charles Joffe, producer of most of Woody Allen’s movies.

Michael DeBakey, pioneer heart surgeon.

Bobby Murcer, former MLB player.

Tony Snow, journalist and White House press secretary.

Les Crane, TV personality.

Jo Stafford, singer (”Jambalaya”).

Estelle Getty, TV actress (”Golden Girls”).

Anne Armstrong, Republican politician.

Skip Caray, baseball broadcaster.

Orville Moody, golfer.

Bernie Mac, comedian and actor.

Isaac Hayes, soul musician.

Gene Upshaw, NFL player and union executive.

Phil Hill, racecar driver.

Jerry Reed, country singer and actor.

Ike Pappas, TV journalist.

Richard Wright, keyboardist and songwriter for Pink Floyd.

Norman Whitfield, Motown songwriter (”I Heard It Through the Grapevine”).

Anna Langford, Chicago politician.

Connie Haynes, singer.

Dick Lynch, former NLF player.

Mickey Vernon, former MLB player.

Paul Newman, actor.

Nick Reynolds, former member of the Kingston Trio.

Lloyd Thaxton, TV personality.

Gil Stratton, sportscaster and actor (”Stalag 17″).

Tom Tresh, former MLB player.

Edie Adams, singer and actress.

Levi Stubbs, lead singer of the Four Tops.

Ben Weider, bodybuilding enthusiast.

Richard Blackwell, fashion critic.

Tony Hillerman, mystery writer.

Delmar Watson, former child actor (”Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”).

Studs Terkel, author and radio personality.

Yma Sumac, singer.

Michael Crichton, author (”Jurassic Park”).

Heather Pick, TV journalist.

Jody Reynolds, singer and guitarist (”Endless Sleep”).

Preacher Roe, former MLB pitcher.

Miriam Makeba, singer.

Herb Score, former MLB pitcher.

Odetta, folk singer.

Nina Foch, actress.

Beverley Garland, actress.

Sunny von Bulow, heiress.

Dennis Yost, lead singer of the Classics IV.

Robert Prosky, actor.

Betty Page, pin-up model.

Van Johnson, actor.

Sammy Baugh, former NFL player.

Paul Weyrich, conservative political activist.

Conor Cruise O’Brien, political activist and author.

W. Mark Felt, “Deep Throat” of Watergate fame.

Dock Ellis, former MLB pitcher.

Harold Pinter, playwright.

Eartha Kitt, singer and actress.

Delaney Bramlett, singer and songwriter.

Presidential Controversies (From Swimming Nude to Getting Drunk)

2008-12-17T10:46:00.000-08:00

By Gregory McNamee on History

When Barack Obama takes office on January 20, 2009, as the forty-fourth president of the United States, he will bear the weight of the world on his shoulders.

Apart from having the normal jitters, the new president, remembering recent events, will doubtless be uncomfortably aware that from then on his every move will be under the close eye of lawmakers, lobbyists, journalists, and citizens. One error, one gaffe, one small lapse of judgment, the new president might reasonably think, and I’m toast: just think of Bill Clinton. Just look at the last eight misbegotten years.George Washington

Small wonder that Franklin Pierce, who served as president from 1853 to 1857, remarked that all he wanted to do on leaving office was to get drunk. And small wonder that James Madison, our fourth president, was moved to reply to an admirer, “I would much rather be in bed.”

The new president might be cheered, though, to know that our presidents have from the very start been the subjects, and sometimes the authors, of controversy and scandal.

Our presidents, to put it another way, have always been in hot water—or, in the case of John Quincy Adams, in cold water. Adams was fond of swimming nude in the Potomac River. Respectable Washingtonians disapproved, but Adams kept bathing au naturel even after someone once stole his clothes as he swam, and even after a reporter cornered him in the river and refused to let him dress until Adams had given her an exclusive interview.

The first to discover how unpopular a president can be was George Washington, who, we tend to forget, was not universally well liked in his time. Ardent republicans in the first government of the United States accused Washington of wanting to establish himself as a new, homegrown king, especially after Washington took stern measures to force his fellow citizens to pay their taxes. Washington did have an imperious and sometimes impatient way, as he showed when he went to the Senate on August 22, 1789, to press for a new treaty with the Creek Indians. After Washington had made his argument for making this new treaty, a senator asked for clarification on one or two points. When Washington did not reply satisfactorily, the senator moved that the treaty be sent for further study to a committee. “This defeats every purpose of my coming here!” Washington cried. He swore that he would never again enter the Senate, and his successors have followed suit.

Washington touched off a minor scandal when he appointed a New York tavern keeper named Sam Fraunces to the new post of steward, responsible for keeping the president well fed and for arranging state dinners for visiting dignitaries. Fraunces took his duties seriously, saying, “While General Washington is president of the United States, and I have the honor to serve him as steward, his establishment shall be supplied with the very best of everything that the country can afford.” Fiscal conservatives trying to balance the new country’s books after an expensive revolutionary war were outraged by Fraunces’s free-spending ways, but Washington kept him on until, the story has it, he discovered that his steward had paid the outrageous sum of three dollars for a single fish. He fired Fraunces, and for the rest of his term budget-minded critics of the government had nothing to complain about.

Andrew Jackson of Tennessee had less refined tastes than George Washington’s. During his time in office (1829–1837) he was often criticized for hosting drunken parties in which his friends from the wild frontier showed their enthusiasm by breaking White House china and the occasional window. But Jackson came under more criticism still when he refused to recharter the Bank of the United States, a private corporation in which the federal government held a substantial block of stock. Westerners and populists detested the bank, and so did Jackson, who denounced it as an instrument of monopoly and special privilege, saying, “Our rich men have not been content with equal protection and equal benefits, but have besought us to make them richer by act of Congress.” That may have been so, Jackson’s critics allowed, but even so the bank was well managed and kept the economy on course. When the bank dissolved after Jackson ordered that the federal government cease making deposits, panic ensued. Jackson eventually had to charter a new national bank under rules that, albeit with many changes, still apply today. Jackson wasn’t happy about the outcome. He threatened to hang anyone who opposed him.

Until recently, Andrew Johnson (1865–1869) was the only American president to have been impeached. Historians are now inclined to the view that Johnson did no wrong, but the politicians of his time hated the Tennessean, who served on the Union side during the Civil War. When the war ended, Johnson urged that the defeated Confederate states be readmitted to the Union without reparations. Many unforgiving congressmen felt otherwise, and they impeached Johnson for “high crimes and misdemeanors” when he fired his secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, for siding with so-called radical Reconstructionists who insisted on severely punishing the southern states. Those congressmen also insisted that only they could dismiss members of the cabinet, and they passed the Tenure of Office Act—which was later ruled unconstitutional—to make sure that this would be so. Johnson escaped conviction by just one vote, but to this day he is remembered, like Richard Nixon, largely for having touched off a scandal in government.

Calvin Coolidge, a taciturn New Englander, reasoned that by keeping his mouth closed he’d keep out of trouble. The technique usually worked, but Coolidge had a habit that Ronald Reagan shared, and that brought both presidents much criticism. Coolidge, it seems, loved his afternoon nap—which often lasted for three or four hours, on top of eight or nine hours of normal nighttime sleep. Coolidge had a sense of humor about his penchant for sawing logs, even if his political opponents did not; once, when an aide awakened him from a sound midday sleep, Coolidge asked, “Is the country still here?” Coolidge also argued that the country benefited from his nap habit—after all, he said, he couldn’t initiate any potentially costly federal actions while he was asleep.

But there is no time to sleep now. Godspeed, Mr. President. Controversy awaits—but also, it is to be hoped, so do glory and greatness.

8 Famous People Who Died in the Bathroom

2008-10-10T14:58:00.000-07:00

1. Elvis Presley

On January 8, 1935, Elvis Presley, the King of Rock 'n' Roll, was born in Tupelo, Mississippi. He was discovered in Memphis by Sun Records founder Sam Phillips, who was looking for a white singer with an African-American sound and style.

Elvis catapulted to fame following three appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956 and 1957. Although he was pushed off the charts by The Beatles and the rest of the British invasion in the early 1960s, he still sold more than a billion records in his lifetime, more than any other recording artist in history.

His movie career kept him in the public eye until his comeback album in 1968, and in the 1970s, he sold out shows in Las Vegas as an overweight caricature of his former self.

Elvis's addiction to prescription drugs was well known, and on August 16, 1977, he was found dead on the bathroom floor in his Graceland mansion. A vomit stain on the carpet showed that he had become sick while seated on the toilet and had stumbled to the spot where he died. A medical examiner listed the cause of death as cardiac arrhythmia caused by ingesting a large number of drugs.

2. Lenny Bruce

Controversial comedian Lenny Bruce was born Leonard Alfred Schneider in October 1925. Bruce was famous in the 1950s and 1960s for his satirical routines about social themes of the day, including politics, religion, race, abortion, and drugs. His use of profanity -- rarely done at that time -- got him arrested numerous times. He was eventually convicted on obscenity charges but was freed on bail.

On August 3, 1966, Bruce, a known drug addict, was found dead in the bathroom of his Hollywood Hills home with a syringe, a burned bottle cap, and other drug paraphernalia. The official cause of death was acute morphine poisoning caused by an accidental overdose.

3. Elagabalus

Scandalous 3rd-century Roman emperor Elagabalus married and divorced five women, including a Vestal Virgin (a holy priestess), who under Roman law should have been buried alive for losing her virginity. Elagabalus also may have been bisexual.

Objecting to his sexual behavior and his habit of forcing others to follow his religious customs, his grandmother Julia Maesa and aunt Julia Avita Mamaea murdered Elagabalus and his mother (Julia Maesa's own daughter) in the emperor's latrine. Their bodies were dragged through the streets of Rome and thrown into the Tiber River.

4. Robert Pastorelli

Born in 1954, actor and former boxer Robert Pastorelli was best known as Candace Bergen's housepainter on the late 1980s sitcom Murphy Brown. He had numerous minor roles on television and also appeared in Dances with Wolves, Sister Act 2, and Michael, as well as a number of made-for-TV movies.

Pastorelli struggled with drug use and in 2004 was found dead on the floor of his bathroom of a suspected heroin overdose.

5. Orville Redenbacher

Orville Redenbacher, founder of the popcorn company that bears his name, was born in 1907 in Brazil, Indiana. Millions came to know him through his folksy television commercials for the specialty popcorn he invented.

He sold the company to Hunt-Wesson Foods in 1976 but remained as a spokesperson until September 20, 1995, when he was found dead in a whirlpool bathtub in his condominium, having drowned after suffering a heart attack.

6. Claude François

Claude François was a French pop singer in the 1960s who had a hit with an adaptation of Trini Lopez's folk song "If I Had a Hammer."

On March 11, 1978, François's obsession with cleanliness did him in when he was electrocuted in the bathroom of his Paris apartment as he tried to fix a broken light bulb while standing in a water-filled bathtub.

7. Albert Dekker

Actor Albert Dekker, who appeared in Kiss Me Deadly, The Killers, and Suddenly, Last Summer, was blacklisted in Hollywood for several years for criticizing anticommunist Senator Joe McCarthy.

Dekker later made a comeback, but in May 1968, he was found strangled to death in the bathroom of his Hollywood home. He was naked, bound hand and foot, with a hypodermic needle sticking out of each arm and obscenities written all over his body. The official cause of death was eventually ruled to be accidental asphyxiation.

8. Jim Morrison

Born on December 8, 1943, Jim Morrison was best known as the lead singer for The Doors, a top rock band in the late 1960s. His sultry looks, suggestive lyrics, and onstage antics brought him fame, but drug and alcohol abuse ended his brief life.

On July 3, 1971, Morrison was found dead in his bathtub in Paris. He reportedly had dried blood around his mouth and nose and bruising on his chest, suggesting a massive hemorrhage brought on by tuberculosis. The official report listed the cause of death as heart failure, but no autopsy was performed because there was no sign of foul play.

Attack of the Killer Balloons

2008-09-13T08:32:00.000-07:00

During World War II, Japan had a secret weapon designed to spark a massive forest fire in the United States. Thanksfully, the device - which was partly made by Japanese schoolgirls - was a dud. Here's the bizarre story of the Fugo killer balloons:

On May 5, 1945, Reverend Archie Mitchell, his wife Elsie, and five children from his Sunday school drove from the tiny southern Oregon town of Bly for a picnic on Gearhart Mountain. While Reverend Mitchell parked the car, his wife and the children explore. They came upon a device the U.S. government knew about but had kept secret. When one of them touched the device, it exploded: Mrs. Mitchell and the five children were killed. The six Oregonians became the only known fatalities on the U.S. mainland from enemy attack during all of World War II.

MADE IN JAPAN

The exploding contraption was a Japanese Fugo balloon bomb, the brainchild of Major General Sueyoshi Kusaba of the Japanese Ninth Army Technical Research Laboratory. The balloons measured 33 feet across and 70 feet long from top to bomb. They were constructed (by Japanese schoolgirls) from bits of a tough paper called washi, made from mulberry trees, and glued together with potato paste. The bomb parts were made in a factory - not by schoolgirls.

Filled with hydrogen gas, the payload consisted of 36 sandbags for ballast, four incendiary bombs, and one 33-pound antipersonnel bomb. Launched to rise 35,000 feet, the balloons were designed to use the prevailing Pacific eastward winds to reach the west coast of North America. As the balloons leaked gas and lost altitude, barometric pressure switches caused the sandbags to drop off and the balloons to rise back to the jetstream. The trip took three to five days. By the time they reached the United States, the baloons, now out of sandbags, were supposed to drop the bombs and then self-destruct. The Japanese hoped the bomb would cause forest fires and panic the American public.

FUGO, FUGO, FUGO!

Between October 1944 and April 1945, Japan launched 9,300 of these balloons. Estimates are that fewer than 500 balloons reached the United States or Canada; the rest fell into the Pacific Ocean.

In November 1944, one balloon was discovered in the ocean off San Pedro, California. In January 1945, a balloon bomb landed in Medford, Oregon, without exploding. At some point, a rancher in Nevada discovered a balloon and used it as a tarp to cover his hay; police later discovered that two bombs were still attached to it.

WHAT BALLOONS?

Most of the balloons either exploded harmlessly or failed to detonate on impact. Approximately 90 of them were recovered in the United States as far east as Michigan. Strict censorship kept their existence out of the newspapers, and those who knew of their presence were sworn to secrecy. It was feared that news of the balloons arrival would encourage the launching of more balloons. They weren't seen as much of a danger, but the hush-hush handling of the situation worked: the Japanese abandoned the project because they didn't hear of any success.

But after the Mitchell family tragedy in Oregon, the public was warned. The last balloon bomb was found in Alaska in 1955; its bombs were still capable of exploding. Ironically, on March 10, 1945, one of the last paper balloons desceded near Hanford, Washington. The balloon landed on electrical power lines, shutting off the Hanford nuclear reactor for three days. The Hanford reactor, part of the top-secret Manhattan project, was producing plutonium for the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, five months later.

The Fugo balloon bombs are considered a failure as weapons system. There were no proven bomb-caused forest fires, and they caused little other damage. Elsie Mitchell and the five children were the tragic exceptions.

6 Australians who caught lucky breaks

2008-09-12T06:47:00.000-07:00

Australia is known as the “lucky country.” And while statistically Australians aren’t any luckier than anyone else, why split hairs? Here are a 6 examples of the Luck of the Aussies.
1. Bernhardt Otto Holtermann: Mining by Candle
Many prospectors descended on Australia in the nineteenth century, looking for gold. Nobody, however, did quite as well as German-born miner Bernhardt Holtermann and his business partner, Louis Beyer. Mining by candlelight outside Hill End in October 1872, they struck a gold nugget nearly five feet high, weighing 235 kg (630 pounds), and worth about US$21,000 (a lot of money in those days). At the time it was the world’s largest specimen of reef gold. They extracted the rock in one piece, and prepared to pose for photos, as thousands descended to the mountain to see “Holtermann’s Nugget.” While Holtermann regarded the nugget as his own, his company refused to sell it to him. Instead, the giant nugget was crushed with other quartz, yielding about 93 kg of gold – meaning that, even when his luck ran out, he was still a lucky guy.
2. Jack Buntine: Dodging bullets for a smoke

Eight thousand, one hundred and forty-one Australians died during World War I at the Turkish outpost of Gallipoli. Private Jack Buntine was not one of them – which is almost surprising. Jack was known for running over the tops of trenches (against regulations) to rescue wounded friends or swap cigarettes with enemy soldiers. “I suppose I was pretty lucky,” he later said, “but you know, I never worried about getting hit… We used to go swimming at Gallipoli and they would be shooting at us. You’d see bullets going in the water around you, but they didn’t worry me.”
After surviving a vicious bout with the flu, Jack survived the Great Depression by working as a trapper, shooter and gold miner. His first wife died of peritonitis at the age of 31, leaving him with two children, so he found a more regular job with the Post and Telegraph Department, climbing up telegraph poles and driving maintenance trucks on dangerous, unsealed bush tracks. He enjoyed this so much that he continued to do it until his retirement. He died peacefully in 1998 at age 103.
3. Hugh Jackman: On the strength of a publicity photo

The movie Mission: Impossible II (2000), filmed mostly in Sydney, co-starred a few Aussie actors. But it turned out to be a big break for one Australian actor in particular – and he didn’t even appear in the film! Indeed, it helped his career because he wasn’t in it. As the shooting schedule ran two months overtime, Scottish actor Dougray Scott couldn’t return to Hollywood in time to play his next role: Wolverine, an angry super-hero, in X-Men. The X-Men producers, forced to do a last-minute recast – selected Hugh Jackman on the strength of a mere publicity photo. Jackman, then unknown in Hollywood (and best-known in Australia as the star of stage musicals and light romantic comedies), was thrust into a completely different role, getting top billing over a distinguished cast. Overnight, he became a major Hollywood star, as the X-Men became a successful movie franchise. Not bad for a face in a publicity photo.
4. Ian Thorpe: Saved from 9/11, twice

If things had happened slightly differently, and according to plan, Ian Thorpe might have joined the 2,752 people who died in the 9/11 terrorist attack in 2001. The swimmer (at the time Australia’s most popular sportsman, and considered by many to be the world’s best swimmer) was visiting New York with his personal assistant, Michelle Flaskas. They were supposed to stay at the Tribeca Hotel, across the road from the World Trade Centre, but were forced to switch to another hotel, 15 minutes’ walk away, because of a double booking. On the morning of September 11, they had planned to go to a viewing platform near the top of one of the Twin Towers. Thorpe first went for a morning jog, then – while waiting for Flaskas to get ready – switched on the television to see that both towers were ablaze. He was perhaps half an hour away from certain death.
5. Victoria Friend: 20 minutes from death

It hardly seems right when an accident survivor is described as “lucky”, even if they’ve just lost friends or relatives. But within those parameters, Victoria Friend was extremely lucky. In 1999, Friend survived a light air crash in the New South Wales bush. The same crash killed her fiancé, Geoff Henderson, and left her lying alone for over 40 hours, with multiple fractures and severe burns to 40 percent of her body. After she was eventually rescued, doctors said that her vital organs were shutting down, and that she wouldn’t have survived much longer. One doctor estimated that she was a mere 20 minutes from death, and was rescued just in the nick of time. She briefly became a national celebrity, praised for her amazing ability to survive.
6. Steven Bradbury: Happy to skate on thin ice

At Salt Lake City in 2002, speed-skater Steven Bradbury won what television commentators called “perhaps the most incredible gold medal in Olympic history”. He was Australia’s first-ever Winter Olympics champion and, of course, the nation was celebrating. Others, however, were not so happy. Bradbury won his medal after his opponents (including the favorite, America’s Apolo Anton Ohno) had crashed in a heap in front of him. He simply skated around them, and cheerfully crossed the finish line first, to the jeers of the mostly American crowd. NBC commentators called it a farce, demanding a re-skate. Even foul play was suggested, as the umpire happened to be Australian. Ohno, meanwhile, picked himself up, continued to the end, and graciously accepted the silver medal.
Bradbury later claimed that he had won a strategic victory; he knew he couldn’t skate faster than his opponents, but he also knew that he could gamble on a crash. Whatever the case, he won – and by his own admission, it was due to luck more than anything else.

10 Victims of the Hope Diamond Curse

2008-09-12T06:36:00.000-07:00

On this day in 1792, the Hope Diamond was stolen from the house that stored the crown jewels. It’s a pretty fascinating little bauble, if you’re the sort of person who is impressed by 45.52 carat gems (I am). But you probably wouldn’t want to own it – it’s cursed, you know. The story goes that the curse started from the Tavernier Blue, which was the precursor to several large diamonds, including the Hope Diamond. Take this with a grain of salt, because it’s never been proved: Jean-Baptiste Tavernier stole the 115.16 carat blue diamond from a Hindu statue, where it was serving as one of the eyes. Upon discovering it was missing, priests put a curse on whoever was in possession of the gem.

Which brings me to our Quick 10 topic: 10 people who have (supposedly) experienced the Hope Diamond Curse.

1. Jean Baptiste-Tavernier. The story is that he came down with a raging fever soon after stealing the diamond, and after he died, his body was possibly ravaged by wolves. However, other reports show that he lived until the ripe old age of 84, so… yeah.

2. King Louis XIV. He bought the stone from Tavernier and had it recut in1673. It was then known as “The Blue Diamond of the Crown” or the “French Blue”. King Louis died of gangrene and all of his legitimate children died in childhood, except for one. But that isn’t atypical of the times, I don’t think.

3. Nicholas Fouquet, who worked for King Louis XIV, is said to have worn the diamond for some special occasion. Shortly thereafter, he fell out of favor with the king and was banished from France. The Louis changed this sentence to life imprisonment, so Fouquet spent 15 years in the fortress of Pignerol. Some people believe that he was the real Man in the Iron Mask, but other accounts dispute this.

marie4. and 5. Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Louis inherited the French Blue, Marie wore it, and I think we all know what happened there.

6. Marie-Louise, Princess de Lamballe, was a member of Marie Antoinette’s court and was her closest confidante. She was killed by a mob in a most horrific fashion – apparently hit with a hammer, decapitated, stripped, and disemboweled, among other things. Her head was impaled on a pike and carried to Marie Antoinette’s prison window.

7. Wilhelm Fals was a Dutch jeweler who recut the diamond again. His son ended up murdering him and then killing himself.

8. Greek merchant Simon Maoncharides owned the diamond. His curse? He drove his car over a cliff and killed himself, his wife and his child.

evalyn9. Evalyn Walsh McLean. Evalyn was a spoiled heiress who lived a charmed life… until she bought the diamond. She happily wore the diamond and there are stories that she would even affix the jewel to her dog’s collar and let him wander around the apartment with it. But wearing the Hope Diamond came at a steep price: first her mother-in-law died, her son died at the age of nine, her husband left her for another woman and later died in a mental hospital, her daughter died of a drug overdose at 25 and she eventually had to sell her newspaper – the Washington Post - and died owing huge debts. Evalyn’s surviving kids sold the diamond to Harry Winston. Nine years later, Winston mailed the gem to the Smithsonian for $2.44 in postage and $155 in insurance. Which brings us to number 10:

10. James Todd, the mailman who delivered the diamond to the Smithsonian, apparently had his leg crushed in a truck accident shortly thereafter. He also suffered a head injury in a separate accident. Oh, also, his house burned down.

There’s no doubt that Marie Antoinette, Louis XVI and Princess de Lamballe were a tragic bunch; and Evalyn Walsh McLean definitely went through her share of hard times. But lots of these are probably exaggerated and twisted a bit to fit the tale and make the curse seem even more horrible. I wonder if even writing about the diamond can make you fall under the umbrella of the curse? After all, the Princess de Lamballe and the mailman didn’t have much to do with the gem at all.

Remembering Lewis and Clark, 205 Years Later

2008-09-07T05:57:00.000-07:00

Two hundred and five years ago, on the morning of August 30, 1803, a 29-year-old Virginian named Meriwether Lewis, lately private secretary to President Thomas Jefferson, left Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to journey down the Ohio River to its confluence with the Tennessee River and thence westward. Only three miles passed before a fellow traveler, eager to try Lewis’s newfangled hunting rifle, shot a bystander in the head (”she fell instantly and the blood gusing [sic] from her temple,” Lewis recorded in his notebook, adding, “we were all in the greatest consternation”). The victim revived, though, and Lewis and company went on their way, joining his friend William Clark and another party of soldiers and hunters 400 miles downstream.homeimage

Three years later, weather-beaten and weary, the grandly named “Corps of Discovery,” some 40 men strong, marched down the streets of St. Louis. There they were hailed as heroes, deservedly. Lewis, Clark, and their companions had, after all, traveled across 8,000 miles of largely uncharted territory. They had hauled two tons of equipment on their long journey from the Ohio to the Pacific Ocean: sextants and pistols, barometers and barrels, mirrors and knives to trade with the people they met along the way. They had described more than 300 plant and animal species new to science, among them the grizzly bear, which would ever after haunt Lewis’s dreams, and the prairie dog. And they had helped open the door to the American conquest of a vast interior recently sold to the United States by Napoleon Bonaparte, who had had no legal authority to do so.

Jefferson had instructed the Corps of Discovery to undertake several tasks. The first was to map the northern portion of those lands. The second was to determine whether the western rivers that drained into the Mississippi led to the Pacific Ocean; if they did, and if the fabled Northwest Passage really did exist, then American ships would be able to travel straight to China without having to skirt British-controlled shipping lanes in the Caribbean and South Atlantic. The third was to determine the location and strength of any Europeans the Corps might encounter along the way, and there were plenty afoot in the West, from French trappers to Russian whalers and Spanish missionaries—and, always, British agents.

Only farther down on Jefferson’s list of instructions to Lewis did American Indians figure. Were they friendly or hostile? What wealth did they possess? How were they organized politically? Could they be enlisted as allies?

Heroes they were, but not for long. Within a generation, the men of the Corps of Discovery were all but forgotten. The record had no need for them: the logic of Manifest Destiny had begun to unfold even before they returned to St. Louis. A century would pass, at the dawn of another American empire, before Lewis and Clark again took their place in the national pantheon. Through the efforts of historians and writers such as Elliot Coues and Reuben Gold Thwaites, archives were thrown open, dossiers dusted off, maps redrafted, and editions of the expedition’s mountainous journals prepared.

089-meriwether-lewis-memorial-1.jpgThose journals tell us much: they speak of hardship, of constant sickness, of danger, of bad weather and beasts, of Clark’s many preoccupations, of Lewis’s gnawing loneliness. But often we must often between the lines to get at what the circumspect authors truly had on their minds. Does Toussaint Charbonneau, the trapper and boatman who joined the expedition at Fort Mandan, North Dakota, deserve our remembrance as an intrepid guide and skin-saver, or should we see him as one of the most cowardly, feckless, and useless humans to have drawn breath? Was Sacagawea, the teenaged Shoshone girl who came along with Charbonneau as wife or as property, and whom the men called “Janey” as they would any camp follower, a help or a hindrance? Were the soldiers under Lewis and Clark’s command worthy comrades, or a constant reminder that the categories “civilized” and “savage” were both fluid and misapplied?

Depending on which page you turn to and which voice you heed, the answers will vary. That ever so deliberate ambivalence complicates the work of anyone who would regard the men (and women) of the Corps either as heroes unalloyed or as destroyers unleashed in an American Garden of Eden. Both threads are common in interpretations of American history, and neither is complete.

Other questions remain. What happened to York, Clark’s slave, whom the Indians they encountered found more mysterious, and more attractive, than the leaders of the expedition? Did York return to the Plains to become a Crow warrior and elder, as some believe, or did he fall to cholera in Tennessee? What of Sacagawea, or Janey, or Porivo, as some called her? Did she, too, die of illness in 1812, or did she run away from Charbonneau to find safe haven among the Comanches, then return to live among her own people until her death as an old woman in 1884? Did Meriwether Lewis commit suicide along the Natchez Trace in 1809, or was he murdered?

Three million words of firsthand history cannot tell us, but historians have made some reasonable and altogether fascinating guesses over the last 200-odd years—work of scholarly detection that will go on for years to come.

The Turk Chess Automaton Hoax

2008-09-03T09:25:00.000-07:00

"Tis a deception! granted, but such a one as does honour to human nature;
a deception more beautiful, more surprising, more astonishing, than any
to be met with in the different accounts of mathematical recreations."
[Karl Gottlieb von Windisch 1784]

To impress the Austrian Court of Empress Maria, the Hungarian polymath, Wolfgang von Kempelen, designed an ingenious chess playing mechanical device in 1770. The machine consisted of a cabinet with a chess board on top, doors that concealed brass cogs and gears, with a carved torso dressed up like a Turkish man attached to the back of the construction as it faced the audience. One of the turban wearing dummy's arms was moveable and the hand was of course able to pick up and move the chess pieces. It came to be known as 'the Turk' and exhibition chess matches against a host of challengers made it one of the most popular and enduring automaton shows of the 18th and 19th centuries.

The internal design included false clockwork pieces that moved in concert with the hidden operator's (a chess master) seat movement and helped him stay concealed - he moved around to avoid detection when the host (Kempelen in the beginning) opened doors and invited the audience to peer through to the other side - creating the illusion of a humanless automaton. Magnetic chess pieces allowed the board layout to be seen by a simple reciprocal system inside; ventilation pipes provided air for the operator and other pipes diverted candle smoke out through the Turk (who also smoked a pipe). A pegboard laid out the chessboard inside the cabinet and pantographic controls (a dual, fixed movement system, often used for drawing - see computer schematic above) worked the arm and hand on the main chessboard, moving chess pieces around as pegs were moved inside by the chess master/operator. There is more to it obviously but this was the basic set-up.

After its debut before royalty, the device took a back seat in Kempelen's life and it wasn't until the 1780s that he was persuaded to take the Turk on a tour of Europe. A succession of opponents (including chess champions and the likes of Benjamin Franklin) vied for the opportunity to play the increasingly popular magical machine. As might be expected, skeptics emerged and there were at least a couple of books (the illustrations above are from one of these) that claimed to explain the illusion.

Kempelen retired the device before the end of the decade, and in 1808, the Turk was brought back into service under a new (and fairly mercenary) master, Johann Mälzel. He would attract the Turk's most famous opponent, Napoleon Bonaparte, who, from varied accounts, was said to have been defeated once because of illegal moves and again when he laid down his King. Many more exhibitions followed, as did profits, bankruptcy, tours of America and Cuba and eventually, while in semi-retirement, the Turk was destroyed in a fire in Philadelphia 1854.

Since that first European tour in the latter stages of the 18th century, a veritable industry of academic enquiry has blossomed (and continues) attempting to analyse and explain the specific mechanisms and peculiar characteristics associated with the Turk. Perhaps the most famous publication is the 1789 book by Joseph Racknitz, 'Über den Schachspieler des Herrn von Kempelen und dessen Nachbildung' (something like: Overview and illustration of Mr Kempelen's chess playing machine). The coloured engravings above are all from this book in which Racknitz claimed to have deduced the tricks - including of course the stowaway human brain inside - behind the Turk's elaborate design, and he assembled the first reconstructed models of Kempelen's machine. As best I can tell, the majority of illustrations of the device on the web are black and white copies of some of these figures - these coloured versions* from the original book have only appeared on the web in recent times. *[now online at Wikimedia]

* There is a wealth of material to read online about all of this but wikipedia is probably the best resource - it's a very detailed article.
* The computer graphic comes from this 1999 pdf article by Glaeser/Strouhal - 'Kempelen's Chess Playing Pseudo-Automaton..'
* The photograph of the Turk (courtesy of Marc Wathieu) is from an exhibition on the automaton from this year. There is a fairly good website associated with the event.
* Chessbase have some alternative illustrations plus a number of photographs from a rebuilt modern version of the Turk (Ernst Strouhal from a Vienna Arts University was also involved here).
* 'The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine' by Tom Standage, 2002: non-fiction. [CompleteReview]
* 'The Chess Machine' by Robert Löhr, 2007: fiction. [review]

10 Fascinating Facts About the Ancient Olympic Games

2008-08-04T05:45:00.000-07:00

1. Ancient Olympic Athletes Competed in the Nude

Milo of Kroton, one of the greatest Ancient Olympic champion. He won
the wrestling event 6 times, over the span of 34 years!

Yes, that's right - ancient Olympic sportsmen (all men, by the way) ran, wrestled, and fought buck naked. The ancient Greeks had a tradition of doing things nude (they walked around in the buff in the bedroom and at parties called sympsia*, and they exercised without any clothes on) - indeed, the word gymnasium came from the Greek word gymos, which means "naked."

Why naked? Well, to appreciate and celebrate the male physique, of course, and as a tribute to the gods. Participants regularly anointed themselves with olive oil to enhance their looks ... and to keep the skin smooth!

In the sixth century, there was an actually attempt to make athletes wear loincloths, but this proved to be unpopular and soon afterwards nudity regained its status as fashion in athletics.

*Great trivia for the next time you're in a boring symposium: the original symposium is a nude drinking party (sympotein is Greek for "to drink together"), complete with courtesans (basically sophisticated prostitutes).
2. The Prudes Wore Penis Restraints

Did I say all athletes competed naked in the Ancient Olympics? Silly me - actually, not all of them were naked.

Some wore a kynodesme (literally a "dog leash"), a thin leather thong used as a penis restraint:

[The kynodesme] was tied tightly around the part of the foreskin that extended beyond the glans. The kynodesme could then either be attached to a waist band to expose the scrotum, or tied to the base of the penis so that the penis appeared to curl upwards.

3. A Chef Won the Very First Olympic Games

The very first recorded Ancient Olympic Games took place in 776 BC. The event was a stadion race (a foot race equivalent to a 190-m or 208-yard dash). The winner was a humble baker from the Greek city state of Elis named Coroebus (also spelled Koroibos).

For the first 13 games, the stadion race was the only competition. At the 14th Ancient Olympic Games, a double race was added.
4. ... and He Won ... An Olive Branch!

An Olympionike or a winner of an event receiving an olive wreath and red ribbons
(Epiktetos Painter, 520 - 510 BC - from mlahanas.de)

Yup - that's because the Ancient Olympic Games didn't have any medals or prizes. Winners of the competitions won olive wreaths, branches, as well as woolen ribbons. Oh, that and the all important honor.

They did, however, come home as heroes - and got showered with gifts there. Many victors subsequently used their fame to endorse products and to get paid posing for sculptures and drawings (just like today, huh?)
5. More than Just Running: Wrestling and Boxing Added to the Ancient Olympics

Tired of all the running, a new game of wrestling (called pale) was added to the 18th Olympics in 708 B.C.

Greek wrestling was a bit more fun than your regular high school wrestling. For one, submission holds were allowed (actually, they were encouraged) and that a referee could punish an infraction by whipping the contestant with a stick until the undesirable behavior stopped!

Later, pygme/pygmachia or Ancient Greek boxing was added. Now, some historian believed that boxing was originally developed in Sparta. Being the original tough guys, Spartans believed that helmets were unnecessary in battle. Instead, they boxed themselves in the face to prepare for battles!

In the Ancient Olympics, there were no rounds - boxing was done when a fighter was knocked out cold (if the fight lasted too long, then they each took turn punching each other in the head until one collapsed).
6. Pankration: Ancient Greek Mixed Martial Arts

In this Pankration scene, the pankriatiast on the right is trying to gouge his opponent's eye and the ref is about to beat the living tar out of him with a stick
(Photo: Jastrow [Wikimedia])

If you think that Ancient Greek boxing was violent, it's more like knitting when compared to pankration, the ancient form of mixed martial arts.

How violent was pankration? Let's just say that there were only two rules: no eye gouging and no biting (the referees carried sticks to beat those who violated the rules). Everything else - including choke holds, breaking fingers and neck - was legit. There was no weight division or time limits: the fight continued until a combatant surrendered, lost consciousness, or died.

In 564 BC, Arrhachion of Philgaleia was crowned the pankration victor ... even after he had died:

Arrhachion's opponent, having already a grip around his waist, thought to kill him and put an arm around his neck to choke off his breath. At the same time he slipped his legs through Arrhachion's groin and wound his feet inside Arrhachion's knees, pulling back until the sleep of death began to creep over Arrhachion's senses. But Arrhachion was not done yet, for as his opponent began to relax the pressure of his legs, Arrhachion kicked away his own right foot and fell heavily to the left, holding his opponent at the groin with his left knee still holding his opponent's foot firmly. So violent was the fall that the opponent's left ankle was wrenched from his socket. The man strangling Arrhachion ... signaled with his hand that he gave up. Thus Arrhachion became a three-time Olympic victor at the moment of his death. His corpse ... received the victory crown. (Source)

Lastly, just to prove that they're bad asses, the ancient Greeks then decided to start a pankration event for the paides or youth (boys aged 12 to 17) Olympic games!
7. The Olympic Games Weren't the Only One

Those Greeks sure did love their sports! The Ancient Olympic games were actually just a part of four sports festival called the Panhellenic Games:

- The Olympic Games, the most important and prestigious game of them all, was held in honor of Zeus every four years near Elis.
- Pythian Games was held every four years near Delphi in honor of Apollo
- Nemean Games was held every two years near Nemea, in honor of Zeus
- Isthmian Games was held every two years near Corinth, in honor of Poseidon

The games were arranged in such a way that there was one going on (almost) every year.
8. Heraea: Ancient Olympics for Women

Married women were banned at the Ancient Olympics on the penalty of death. The laws dictated that any adult married woman caught entering the Olympic grounds would be hurled to her death from a cliff! Maidens, however, could watch (probably to encourage gettin' it on later).

But this didn't mean that the women were left out: they had their own games, which took place during Heraea, a festival worshipping the goddess Hera. The sport? Running - on a track that is 1/6th shorter than the length of a man's track on the account that a woman's stride is 1/6th shorter than that of a man's!

The female victors at the Heraea Games actually got better prizes: in addition to olive wreaths, they also got meat from an ox slaughtered for the patron deity on behalf of all participants!

Overall, young girls in Ancient Greece weren't encouraged to be athletes - with a notable exception of Spartan girls. The Spartans believed that athletic women would breed strong warriors, so they trained girls alongside boys in sports. In Sparta, girls also competed in the nude or wearing skimpy outfits, and boys were allowed to watch (to encourage gettin' it on later marriage and procreation). (Photo: Sikyon.com)
9. Ancient "Computer" Used to Set Olympics Date

In 1901, a Greek sponge diver discovered the wreck of an ancient cargo ship off the coast of the Antikythera island. One of the item recovered was an ancient mechanical computer that became known as the Antikythera mechanism. Scientists estimated that it was created in 150 to 100 BC

For over a hundred years, scientists debated the true purpose of the Antikythera mechanism and marveled at the intricacies of the device (mind you, the mechanical clock didn't appear in the West until about a thousand years later).

Recently, scientists believed that they've finally cracked the mystery:

Tony Freeth, a member of the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project, said he was "astonished" at the discovery.

"The Olympiad cycle was a very simple, four-year cycle and you don't need a sophisticated instrument like this to calculate it. It took us by huge surprise when we saw this.

"But the Games were of such cultural and social importance that it's not unnatural to have it in the Mechanism." (Source)

10. Christianity Killed the Ancient Olympics

The Romans, who conquered Greece, viewed the Olympics as a pagan festival.

So, in AD 393, Roman Emperor Theodosius I banned the Ancient Olympics in part to institute Christianity as a state religion. The Olympics was no more ... until it was revived 1,500 years later in 1896.

6 Historical Snitches

2008-08-04T05:39:00.000-07:00

1. Anna Sage: Dillinger’s Deadly Date

Picture 9.pngThe Tale: Anna Sage was a Romanian immigrant who came to America in 1909 and found work in a brothel in East Chicago, Ind. Although she was successful in this venerable and established field (she opened several of her own houses of ill repute in Indiana and Illinois), the Department of Labor sought to deport her as an “alien of low moral character.” But when famed bank robber John Dillinger—whom she met through mutual gal pal Polly Hamilton—asked her to a movie, Sage thought she’d found a way to stamp her Green Card. Dillinger was wanted in five states, and Sage hoped that if she turned him in, the good karma would translate into an invitation to stay in the U.S.
Picture 10.pngThe Tattle: To stage the arrest, Sage called her ex-boyfriend, Martin Zarkovich, at the East Chicago Police Department, and was put in contact with agent Melvin Purvis, who was working the Dillinger case for the FBI. Sage told Purvis about her upcoming date with Dillinger at the Biograph Theater on July 22, 1934. (O.k., maybe she didn’t specify the year…) In order to be identified in the crowd, Sage agreed to wear a white blouse and orange skirt that night, even though history would later dub her the “Lady in Red.” (Historians believe the lights of the marquee made her outfit appear red, spawning the moniker.) As she, Dillinger, and Polly Hamilton exited the theater, Purvis confronted the group. Dillinger tried to run, which worked pretty well until four FBI bullets put a hitch in his stride. He died at the scene.
The Aftermath: Sage collected $5,000 for information leading to Dillinger’s “capture,” but was soon sent back to Romania. According to most sources, agents at the FBI told Sage they couldn’t prevent her deportation because of the organization’s lack of influence over the Department of Labor, but recent research suggests a more devious motive. In Jay Robert Nash’s book Dillinger: Dead or Alive, the author suggests the whole episode was a setup. Because the FBI’s failure to capture the elusive Public Enemy No.1 was a source of considerable consternation, Nash believes the scene outside the theater that night was the shooting of an innocent man staged by Sage, Zarkovich, and the FBI. The goal? Alleviate pressure on the FBI and help keep the “Lady in Red” in the country. Nash claims Sage’s hasty deportation was part of the cover-up, and also points to discrepancies between the body of the dead man and Dillinger. John Dillinger was widely known for his blue eyes and missing upper tooth. The body from the scene, however, had brown eyes and a full set of teeth. Adding further credence to Nash’s theory is the disappearance of local criminal John Lawrence the night of the shooting.
2. Aldrich Ames: Soviet Mole and CIA Rat

Picture 15.pngThe Tale: Aldrich Hazen Ames was pretty much born a CIA agent. His father spied for the CIA in Burma during the 1950’s, and at age 16, Aldrich went to “The Farm,” a CIA training facility, to learn the ropes himself. Despite his pedigree, it seems unlikely that Ames will win CIA Employee of the Year. Not now. Not tomorrow. Not ever. Why? Because Ames was the most damaging mole in CIA history. Beginning in 1985, he sold out every spy the CIA and FBI had in the then-USSR, and we doubt a “my bad” will cover that.
The Tattle: Ironically, Ames started out at the CIA recruiting Soviets to spy on their government, but he soon discovered he wasn’t very good at convincing people to snitch. Luckily for him (and his career), his next assignment was with a Soviet Diplomat to Colombia named Aleksandr Dmitrievich Ogorodnik. Ogorodnik had already been convinced to spy for the U.S., but he didn’t prove very useful until he was transferred to Ames’ CIA department. In Ames’ hands, Ogorodnik (code-named Trigon) was reassigned to the Russian Foreign Ministry, where he developed a knack for photographing sensitive documents and files. Although Ames had never successfully recruited a single spy, his handling of Trigon earned him a promotion. He became the Counterintelligence Branch Chief of Soviet Operations, where he had access to information on every aspect of U.S. operations in Russia. Life was looking swell for Ames until he ran into some girl trouble. Ames was having an affair with a Colombian woman named Maria del Rosario Casas. He brought Rosario to Washington, D.C., and it wasn’t long before she started making trouble. She demanded Ames divorce his wife, which he did, wiping out almost all of his savings and assets. Rosario also spent money like it was going out of style, calling home daily and swiftly digging Ames nearly $35,000 into debt.
Ames became so desperate for funds that he considered robbing a bank. But then he remembered that the Soviets paid $50,000 for the names of U.S. spies working in their country. He arranged a meeting with Sergei Chuvakhin of the Soviet Embassy and gave him the names of three CIA spies. In exchange for this information, Ames received $50,000. The story could have ended here but for the arrest of another tattletale, former Navy Warrant Officer John Walker, Jr., who was caught selling information to the Russians. Ames got so freaked out that he, too, would be exposed that he decided to beat all possible blabbers to the chase. He contacted Chuvakhin and gave him the names of every single “human asset” the CIA had in Russia. To make the deal sweeter, he also reportedly gave up a British spy and nearly seven pounds of documents that he’d carried out of the CIA office in his briefcase. For his generosity in “playing the game,” the double agent was made the world’s highest-paid spy, with an annual salary of $300,000.
The Aftermath: Ames named 25 spies. All of them were caught, and at least 10 were executed. Meanwhile, the unsuspecting CIA transferred him to its office in Rome. Ames felt Rosario would be happier there and wanted to distance himself from all his mischief. He did not, however, distance himself from the cash the Russians were paying him, and he and Rosario lived lavishly. Although his CIA salary was $70,000 a year, he wore a Rolex watch and drove a Jaguar to work. It only took the CIA nine years to notice that something didn’t quite add up, and the couple was arrested in 1994. Today, Ames is serving out a life sentence, and Rosario was shipped off to Colombia after serving a five-year jail term.
3. Doña Marina: Dictator’s Translator

Picture 16.pngThe Tale: To this day, Doña Marina remains a controversial figure in Mexican history. To some, she’s the embodiment of treason for her role in helping the Spanish conquer the Aztecs. Others believe she was simply a victim. To still others, La Malinche (as she was called) is the symbolic mother of the Mexican race who saved hundreds of Aztecs from the conquistadores.
This is what we do know: Doña Marina was born to a noble tribal chief in the southeast part of the Aztec Empire. As firstborn, she was to become her father’s successor. After her father died, however, her mother remarried and had a son whom she wanted to rule the tribe. To make sure La Malinche didn’t make too much trouble over the deal, her parents sold her into slavery. She spent several years as a slave in the present-day state of Tabasco. When Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés invaded the country, she became one of his servants.
The Tattle: Although described as intelligent, forward, and ambitious, La Malinche’s most important attribute was her linguistic skill. A native speaker of the Aztec tongue, Nahuatl, her years in Tabasco also left her fluent in Mayan. This was of tremendous help to Cortés, who was negotiating with Mayan tribes as a means of usurping power in Mexico. Her talents were discovered when she began speaking in Mayan to a member of Cortés’ party, a friar named Gerónimo de Aguilar. It was unusual for a Spanish monk like Aguilar to know Mayan, but as luck would have it, he had been shipwrecked in Mexico in 1511 and spent seven years living among the Mayan tribes and learning their language. Before long, Aguilar was translating La Malinche’s Mayan into Castilian for Cortés. This was a major breakthrough in communicating with the Aztecs, but the process was slow and cumbersome. Fortunately, La Malinche quickly achieved fluency in Castilian, converted to Christianity, took the name Doña Marina, and was promoted to Cortés’ personal staff. Soon, she became Cortés’ constant companion (read: mistress) and played an essential role in the Spanish conquest.
The Aftermath: Aided by Marina (not to mention his superior weapons and military tactics), Cortés subdued the Aztecs in 1521, marking the official fall of the Aztec Empire. Amid all of his conquering, Cortés and Marina had a son who, as the product of Native American and European ancestry, is recognized as the first official Mexican citizen.
Today, much of the Hispanic world sees La Malinche only as a woman who betrayed her people. In fact, her name eventually coined the term malinchista, which describes a Mexican who favors and/or imitates the language and customs of another country. Some modern Mexican feminists even claim that the stereotypical disdain that Mexican men display toward their women is rooted in their anger at Marina’s betrayal. Is all this anger misplaced? There’s evidence to suggest so. Many historians contend that Marina’s diplomacy saved Aztec lives and brought civility to an otherwise barbaric society. Still, to this day, the house Marina and Cortés shared in Mexico City is not even adorned by a plaque. Current resident Rina Lazo explained, “For Mexico to make this house a museum would be like the people of Hiroshima creating a monument for the man who dropped the atomic bomb.”
4. Mordechai Vanunu: Paying the Price of Going Public

Picture 14.pngThe Tale: Mordechai Vanunu was a Moroccan who immigrated to Israel in 1963 with his parents and his ten siblings. Upon arrival, Vanunu served in the Israeli army before finding employment at the Dimona Nuclear Research Center in the Negev desert. Happy to have a job, he worked there from 1976 to 1985 before concluding that Dimona was a secret nuclear weapons production plant that was covertly producing military warheads. That’s when he started to feel a smidge uncomfortable. The “research facility” housed an enormous plutonium separation plant that rendered the Israeli nuclear arms program vastly more advanced than the international community suspected and operated entirely without the knowledge of the Israeli people. Fully aware of the harsh repercussions he could face, Vanunu felt it was incumbent on him to share this information with the world.
The Tattle: Despite having signed an “Official Secrets Pact,” Vanunu brought a camera to work one day and stealthily photographed the facility. Soon thereafter, he fled Israel and went public with his information. On October 5, 1986, The London Sunday Times headline blared, “Revealed: The Secret of Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal.” The cat was out of the bag, and it was sharing Israel’s secrets with anyone who’d listen.
The Aftermath: Even before the Times story ran, the Israelis knew what Vanunu was up to. Agents from Israel’s intelligence institute, Mossad, lured him to Italy, where he was kidnapped, drugged, and cargo-shipped back to Israel. (Details of this abduction were made public when Vanunu inked them on his hand and allowed quick-thinking news photographers to snap pictures.) In Israel, Vanunu was charged with treason and espionage. Despite international outcry, the closed-door trial led to an 18-year prison sentence, the first 11 of which he spent in solitary confinement. In 1998, Vanunu was allowed to join the general prison population, and in 2004, he was “conditionally” released. While currently “free,” the Israeli government still refuses to let Vanunu leave the country, and he is forbidden to speak with the international media. He remains an unrepentant whistleblower and has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize several times.
5. Elia Kazan: Snitch To The Stars

Picture 13.pngThe Tale: Between 1945 and 1957, Elia Kazan enjoyed a hot streak few in Hollywood could even dream about. He directed 13 acclaimed motion pictures (including “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “East of Eden”) and was nominated for four Best Director awards. Kazan was riding high when Hollywood entered the blackest period in its history (barring the second and third installments of the “Matrix” trilogy): the Communist witch hunts of the 1950’s.
The Tattle: A philosophical and politically passionate man, Kazan had been a founding member of the leftist Group Theater in New York and, for a little more than a year, was a member of the Communist Party. In 1934, however, Kazan’s ideals began to diverge sharply from those of the Party, and he soon found himself a zealous anti-Communist. Wanting names, the government pressured Kazan to spill the beans, even threatening to have him blacklisted by major Hollywood studios. After wrestling with the question of whether or not he should sacrifice his career for people whose ideals he disdained, Kazan decided to share his knowledge of Communists in Hollywood with the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In 1952, he went before the Committee and named eight of his Group Theater buddies who had been members of the Communist Party with him.
The Aftermath: After Kazan’s testimony, the government was fast on the tails of those he’d named, pressuring them for yet more names, and it was officially witchhuntin’ season! Many actors, writers, and directors were blacklisted, and scores of careers were ruined. The era remains one of the least tinselly in Tinseltown history.
Not surprisingly, pretty much everyone not already in the business of rooting out Commies reviled Kazan. His longtime friend and confidant, Arthur Miller, explained his feelings on the matter in his allegorical play “The Crucible.” Not to be outdone, Kazan shot back by crafting a sympathetic informer character in his film “On The Waterfront,” which Miller rebutted in “A View From The Bridge.” (Jeez, guys, just pick up the phone or something.) But the controversy surrounding Kazan was yet to abate. In 1999, Kazan was presented with a lifetime achievement award at the Oscars, and more than 500 people showed up to protest. Writer and director Abraham Polonsky, whom 20th Century Fox had fired and blacklisted for his refusal to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee, said of the event, “I’ll be watching, hoping someone shoots him.” Um, Mr. Polonsky, do you think you could put that in the form of a play?
6. Sammy “The Bull” Gravano: Blabbing on the Boss

Picture 12.pngThe Tale: Probably the world’s most notorious hairdresser-turned-hitman, Salvatore “Sammy The Bull” Gravano was the highest-ranking Italian Mafia member ever to break omerta, the mob code of silence. Born in Brooklyn and nicknamed “The Bull” for his short stature, thick neck, and ruthless fighting tactics, Gravano rose to the position of underboss in the Gambino crime family. Allegedly responsible for 19 murders, Gravano was no angel, and no tight-lips, either. Sammy’s damning testimony sealed the fate of many in the organization, including his former boss, John Gotti.
The Tattle: The reason Gravano snitched varies depending on whom you ask. Some claim he did it to receive a lighter prison sentence, while others say he got mad after hearing Gotti badmouthing him on a wiretap. But in Underboss: Sammy The Bull Gravano’s Life In The Mafia, Gravano says Gotti needed to be taken down because he was addicted to publicity, and all the attention was harming the mob. Either way, Gravano delivered such damaging testimony in court that lead Gotti prosecutor John Gleeson described him as having rendered “extraordinary, unprecedented, historic assistance to the government.”
The Aftermath: Information provided by Gravano created a ripple effect throughout the Mafia underground, and numerous corroborating witnesses came forward. Dozens of luminaries in the Cosa Nostra crime syndicate were convicted, jury-rigging schemes were exposed, mobsters already in jail had their sentences extended, and high-ranking members of the Gambino, Colombo, DeCalvacante, and Lucchese families were imprisoned. In 1995, Gravano got a cushy five-year sentence for his 19 murders, and was later placed in the Witness Protection Program. After his release, Sammy made the most of his second chance by teaming up with some neo-Nazis and getting busted for selling Ecstasy. Not so bright, Bull. He got 19 years in the slammer this time, a sentence he’s still serving.

10 Most Decisive Ancient Battles

2008-08-04T05:19:00.000-07:00

10
Carrhae
53 BC

The Battle of Carrhae in 53 BC was a decisive victory for the Parthian Spahbod Surena (try saying that 10 times fast!) over the Roman general Crassus near the town of Carrhae (now the present-day ruins of Harran, Turkey). A Parthian force of 1,000 cataphracts and 9,000 horse archers under general Surena met the Romans at Carrhae. Crassus’ cavalry was screening ahead of the main force when they were engaged by the cataphracts, and the weapons his cavalry employed were not capable of piercing the cataphracts armor. His cavalry was soon surrounded and routed, and his son Publius killed. Rome was humiliated by this defeat, and this was made even worse by the fact that the Parthians had captured several Legionary Eagles. It is also mentioned by Plutarch that the Parthians found the Roman prisoner of war that resembled Crassus the most, dressed him as a woman and paraded him through Parthia for all to see. The capture of the golden Aquilae (legionary battle standards) by the Parthians was considered a grave moral defeat and evil omen for the Romans. It required a generation of diplomacy before the Parthians returned them. An important and unexpected implication of this battle was that it opened up the European continent to a new and beautiful material: silk. However, the most immediate effect of the battle was that Carrhae was an indirect cause for the fall of the Republic, and the rise of the Empire. [Source]

9
Pydna
168 BC

The Battle of Pydna in 168 BC between Rome and the Macedonian Antigonid dynasty represents the ascendancy of Rome in the Hellenic/Hellenistic world and the end of the Antigonid line of kings, whose power traced back to Alexander III of Macedon. It is often considered to be the classic example of the Macedonian phalanx against the Roman legion, and generally accepted as proving the superiority of the latter over the former. This was not the final conflict between the two rivals, but it broke the back of Macedonian power. The political consequences of the lost battle were severe. The Senate’s settlement included the deportation of all the royal officials and the permanent house arrest of Perseus. The kingdom was divided into four republics that were heavily restricted from intercourse or trade with one another and with Greece. There was a ruthless purge, with allegedly anti-Roman citizens being denounced by their compatriots and deported in large numbers (300 000). [Source]
8
Ipsus
301 BC

The Battle of Ipsus was fought between some of the Diadochi (the successors of Alexander the Great) in 301 BC near the village of that name in Phrygia. Antigonus I Monophthalmus and his son Demetrius I of Macedon were pitted against the coalition of three other companions of Alexander: Cassander, ruler of Macedon; Lysimachus, ruler of Thrace; and Seleucus I Nicator, ruler of Babylonia and Persia. The battle opened with the usual slowly intensifying skirmishing between the two armies’ light troops, with elephants eventually thrown into the fray by both sides. Efforts were made by both sides to hamstring the enemy’s elephants, but also had to hang back to protect their own. Demetrius’ superior right-flank cavalry drove Antiochus’ wing back, but was halted in his attempted rear blow by Seleucus, who moved the elephant reserve to block him. More missile troops moved to the unprotected Antigonid right flank, as Demetrius was unable to disengage from the elephants and enemy horse to his front. At the beginning of the day, Antigonus had not been able to wear plate armor; this disadvantage was unexpectedly used by an anonymous allied peltast, who killed him with a well-thrown javelin. Without leadership and already beginning to flee, the Antigonid army completely disintegrated. The last chance to reunite the Alexandrine Empire had now passed. Antigonus had been the only general able to consistently defeat the other Successors; without him, the last bonds the Empire had had began to dissolve. Ipsus finalized the breakup of an empire, which may account for its obscurity; despite that, it was still a critical battle in classical history and decided the character of the Hellenistic age. [Source]
7
Gaugamela
331 BC

The Battle of Gaugamela took place in 331 BC between Alexander the Great of Macedonia and Darius III of Achaemenid Persia. The battle, which is also inaccurately called the Battle of Arbela, resulted in a massive victory for the Macedonians. While Darius had a significant advantage in numbers, most of his troops were of a lower quality than Alexander’s. Alexander’s pezhetairoi were armed with a six-meter spear, the sarissa. The main Persian infantry was poorly trained and equipped in comparison to Alexander’s pezhetairoi and hoplites. After the battle, Parmenion rounded up the Persian baggage train while Alexander and his own bodyguard chased after Darius in hopes of catching up. As at Issus, substantial amounts of loot were gained following the battle, with 4,000 talents captured, as well as the King’s personal chariot and bow. The war elephants were also captured. In all, it was a disastrous defeat for the Persians, and possibly one of Alexander’s finest victories. At this point, the Persian Empire was divided into two halves – East and West. Bessus murdered Darius, before fleeing eastwards. Alexander would pursue Bessus, eventually capturing and executing him the following year. The majority of the existing satraps were to give their loyalty to Alexander, and be allowed to keep their positions, however, the Persian Empire is traditionally considered to have fallen with the death of Darius. [Source]
6
Marathon
490 BC

The Battle of Marathon during the Greco-Persian Wars took place in 490 BC and was the culmination of King Darius I of Persia’s first full scale attempt to conquer the remainder of Greece and incorporate it into the Persian Empire, which would secure the weakest portion of his western border. The longest-lasting legacy of Marathon was the double envelopment. Some historians have claimed it was random rather than a conscious decision by Miltiades - the Tyrant of the Greek Colonies. In hoplitic battles, the two sides were usually stronger than the center because either they were the weakest point (right side) or the strongest point (left side). However, before Miltiades (and after him until Epaminondas), this was only a matter of quality, not quantity. Miltiades had personal experience from the Persian army and knew its weaknesses. As his course of action after the battle shows (invasions of the Cyclades islands), he had an integrated strategy upon defeating the Persians, hence there is no reason he could have not thought of a good tactic. The double envelopment has been used ever since, such as when the German Army used a tactic at the battle of Tannenberg during World War I similar to that used by the Greeks at Marathon. [Source]

5
Cynoscephalae
197 BC

The Battle of Cynoscephalae was fought in Thessaly in 197 BC between the Roman army, led by Titus Quinctius Flamininus, and the Antigonid dynasty of Macedon, led by Philip V. This Macedonian defeat marks the passing of imperial power from the successors of Alexander the Great to Rome. Along with the later Battle of Pydna, this defeat is often held to have demonstrated that the Macedonian phalanx, formerly the most effective fighting unit in the ancient world, was now obsolete, although in fact the phalanx was able to force the legions back and held their own with swords until twenty maniples fell upon their rear (due to the weak Macedonian flanks and the Roman elephants routing the disordered Macedonian left flank). As a consequence of his loss, Philip had to pay 1,000 talents to Rome, as well as disband his navy and most of his army. He also had to send his son to Rome as a hostage. The battle in many ways determined the subsequent history of the Mediterranean. It also was a major turning point in how wars were fought. The image above is the site of the Battle of Cynoscephalae today. [Source]
4
Actium
31 BC

The Battle of Actium was the decisive engagement in the Final War of the Roman Republic between the forces of Octavian and those of the combined forces of Mark Antony and Cleopatra. It was fought on September 2, 31 BC, on the Ionian Sea near the Roman colony of Actium in Greece. Octavian’s fleet was commanded by Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, while Antony’s fleet was supported by the fleet of his lover, Cleopatra VII, queen of Ptolemaic Egypt. The victory of Octavian’s fleet enabled him to consolidate his power over Rome and its domains, leading to his adoption of the title of Princeps (”first citizen”) and his accepting the title of Augustus from the Senate. As Augustus Caesar, he would preserve the trappings of a restored Republic, but many historians view his consolidation of power and the adoption of his honorifics flowing from his victory at Actium as the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the Roman Empire. The political consequences of this sea battle were far-reaching. As a result of the loss of his fleet, Mark Antony’s army, which had begun as equal to that of Octavian’s, deserted in large numbers. In a communication breakdown, Antony came to believe that Cleopatra had been captured, and so he committed suicide. Cleopatra heard the news about Mark Antony and, rather than risk being captured by Octavian, committed suicide herself, on August 12, 30 BC. She allowed herself to be bitten by a poisonous asp that was reportedly hidden for her in a basket of figs. [Source]
3
Siler River
73 BC

The Third Servile War, also called the Gladiator War, The Battle of Siler River, and The War of Spartacus by Plutarch, was the last of a series of unrelated and unsuccessful slave rebellions against the Roman Republic, known collectively as the Servile Wars. The Third Servile War was the only one to directly threaten the Roman heartland of Italia and was doubly alarming to the Roman people due to the repeated successes of the rapidly growing band of rebel slaves against the Roman army between 73 and 71 BC. The rebellion was finally crushed through the concentrated military effort of a single commander, Marcus Licinius Crassus, although the rebellion continued to have indirect effects on Roman politics for years to come. The Third Servile War was significant to the broader history of ancient Rome mostly in its effect on the careers of Pompey and Crassus. The two generals used their success in putting down the rebellion to further their political careers, using their public acclaim and the implied threat of their legions to sway the consular elections of 70 BC in their favor. Their actions as Consuls greatly furthered the subversion of Roman political institutions and contributed to the eventual transition of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire. [Source]
2
Pharsalus
48 BC

The Battle of Pharsalus was a decisive battle of Caesar’s Civil War. On August 9, 48 BC, the battle was fought at Pharsalus in central Greece between forces of the Populares faction and forces of the Optimates faction. Both factions field armies from the Roman Republic. The Populares were led by Gaius Julius Caesar (Caesar) and the Optimates were led by Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (Pompey). In addition to Pompey, the Optimates faction included most of the Roman Senate. The victory of Caesar weakened the Senatorial forces and solidified his control over the Republic. Pompey fled from Pharsalus to Egypt, where he was assassinated on the order of Pharaoh Ptolemy XIII. The Battle of Pharsalus ended the wars of the First Triumvirate. The Roman Civil War, however, was not ended. Pompey’s two sons, the most important of whom was Sextus Pompeius, and the Pompeian faction led now by Labienus, survived and fought their cause in the name of Pompey the Great. Caesar spent the next few years ‘mopping up’ remnants of the senatorial faction. After finally completing this task, he was assassinated in a conspiracy arranged by Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus. [Source]
1
Salamis
480 BC

The Battle of Salamis, was a decisive naval battle between the Greek city-states and Persia in September, 480 BC in the strait between Piraeus and Salamis Island, an island in the Saronic Gulf near Athens. The Greeks were not in accord as to how to defend against the Persian army, but Athens under Themistocles used their navy to defeat the much larger Persian navy and force King Xerxes I of Persia to retreat. The Greek victory marked the turning point of the campaign, leading to the eventual Persian defeat. The Battle of Salamis has been described by many historians as the single most significant battle in human history. The defeat of the Persian navy was instrumental in the eventual Persian defeat, as it dramatically shifted the war in Greece’s favor. Many historians argue that Greece’s ensuing independence laid the foundations for Western civilization, most notably from the preservation of Athenian democracy, the concept of individual rights, relative freedom of the person, true philosophy, art and architecture. Had the Persians won at Salamis, it is very likely that Xerxes would have succeeded in conquering all the Greek nations and passing to the European continent, thus preventing Western civilization’s growth (and even existence). Given the influence of Western civilization on world history, as well as the achievements of Western culture itself, a failure of the Greeks to win at Salamis would almost certainly have had seriously important effects on the course of human history. [Source]

What You Didn’t Know About the Lincoln Assassination

2008-07-16T20:55:00.000-07:00

I’m reading Assassination Vacation right now, a book by Sarah Vowell about her trips across America to visit destinations involved with Presidential assassinations.
The Lincoln Administration Assassination?

If everything went as planned, it wouldn’t have been just the Lincoln Assassination – it would have been the Lincoln Administration Assassination. At the same time John Wilkes Booth was offing Lincoln, two accomplices were supposed to be doing the same to Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward. Booth thought he could also kill General U.S. Grant, who was supposed to have been attending Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theater with the Lincolns. Johnson’s assassin chickened out and didn’t even attempt; the Seward attempt was unsuccessful. He was stabbed a number of times but survived. U.S. and Julia Grant declined the Lincoln’s invitation, so Henry Rathbone and his fiancee Clara Harris went in their place. Rathbone was a military officer and Harris was the daughter of U.S. Senator Ira Harris. In a weird side note, Rathbone’s mother married Harris’ father, making them step-siblings as well as husband and wife when they eventually tied the knot.
The Kidnapping Plot
Actually, before it was an assassination plot, it was a kidnapping plot. Booth wanted to kidnap Lincoln and exchange him for Southern Prisoners of War. In 1865, Booth spent about $4,000 of his own money to arrange the kidnapping. There are couple of reasons why the plot failed. At one point, Booth was lying in wait to kidnap Lincoln, but he didn’t show up at the right time. Then, a couple of days after Robert E. Lee surrendered, Booth was in attendance when Lincoln gave a speech about giving black people the right to vote. Infuriated, Booth decided a mere kidnap attempt wouldn’t do – assassination was the only answer.
His Name is Mudd

People will still debate this point today – did Dr. Samuel Mudd have a part in the assassination, or was he merely a doctor doing his duty? Here’s the story: After shooting Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth jumped off the balcony to escape. The spur of his boot got caught in the flag hanging on the balcony and he fell to the stage rather ungracefully, breaking his leg.

He somehow managed to escape on horseback anyway, and went to Dr. Mudd’s house in southern Maryland on his way to Virginia. Mudd set Booth’s leg and even had a carpenter make him a pair of crutches. Mudd never contacted authorities, not even when he went to town the next day and saw the news of Lincoln’s assassination (if he had not heard of it before then). A couple days later, he finally asked his cousin to tell the Cavalry what happened. Mudd was questioned and didn’t tell the whole truth, thus making him suspicious. He said he had met Booth before, but only once, and only coincidentally. The truth was, the pair had met at least twice before the fateful night in April when Mudd fixed Booth’s leg. The first time, Booth was scouting out the area “for real estate” and was introduced to Mudd. Some people believe he was there to recruit Mudd in the assassination plot. The second time, Booth, Mudd, and two other men who had roles in the murder had drinks together in Washington. Mudd accidentally (or not) forgot to mention the second meeting.

Mudd was convicted for being part of the conspiracy to murder Lincoln, and he served nearly four years at Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas, about 70 miles from Key West. After one escape attempt, Mudd was an outstanding prisoner who saved the lives of many inmates when Yellow Fever broke out at the Fort in 1867. When prison doctor died, Mudd took over his duties.

Both Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan wrote letters to the Mudd family during their administrations stating that Samuel Mudd had only been performing his duties as a doctor, and was clear of all suspicion.
John Wilkes Booth’s Mummy

Most people believe that John Wilkes Booth died when soldiers caught up to him at the Garrett Farm in Virginia. When Booth refused to surrender, the barn he was hiding in was set on fire, and Booth was fatally shot in the neck. I guess the soldiers wanted to cover their bases. But of course, some people believe it wasn’t really Booth in the barn. Supposedly, Booth escaped, and a look-alike died in his place. Here’s how that story came about: In the 1870s, a man named Finis Bates became friends with a man named John St. Helen. St. Helen became very ill and thought he was on his deathbed. He confessed to Bates that he was John Wilkes Booth. St. Helen recovered and denied ever saying it, then skipped town. Then, roughly 30 years later, a man named David E. George died and had confessed to someone else that he was John Wilkes Booth. Bates traveled to Enid, Oklahoma, where George had died, to see if it was the same man he knew as John St. Helen. It was. The body was mummified, sold and toured for a while, including at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. Its whereabouts today are unknown.
The Robert Todd Lincoln Curse

Robert Todd Lincoln might have been the kiss of death for Presidents. He wasn’t actually at Ford’s Theater when his father was shot, although he was invited to go. He was informed that the elder Lincoln had been shot and made it to his deathbed. A little more than 16 years later, in 1881, President James A. Garfield invited Robert Todd (Garfield’s Secretary of War) to accompany him to his alma mater, Williams College, to give a speech. Garfield was shot by Charles J. Guiteau at the train station on his way to the speech, with Robert Todd standing right there. Fast-forward another 20 years and you’ll find Robert Todd at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, N.Y. You know who else was there? President McKinley and his assassin, Leon F. Czolgosz. Although Robert Todd didn’t witness the shooting, he was definitely present when it happened. In Assassination Vacation, Sarah Vowell says that when Robert Todd was asked to attend some White House function later in life, he declined and grumbled, “If only they knew, they wouldn’t want me there.”

A few other tidbits about the Lincoln Assassination:

• Later in life, Henry Rathbone lost his mind and tried to kill himself. Although that attempt failed, he succeeding in shooting his wife, Clara, before stabbing her to death. He went after his kids, too, but that didn’t pan out. His son, Henry Riggs Rathbone, later represented Illinois in the U.S. Congress.

• Like Robert Todd Lincoln, maybe Ford’s Theater was cursed. The government bought the theater from owner John Ford, then gutted it to create an office building. In 1893, the inner structure of the building collapsed and killed 22 people. The building was then used as a warehouse for a bit, and then remained empty until it was reconstructed to look like the original theater. It reopened in 1968.

• You can find one of John Wilkes Booth’s legacies in Central Park. Well, a legacy of sorts. On November 25, 1864, Booth performed Julius Caesar with his two brothers at the Winter Garden Theater in New York. Proceeds from the play went to buy a statue of Shakespeare for Central Park, and it’s still there today.

10 Failed Assassination Attempts

2008-07-16T20:41:00.001-07:00

1. Andrew Jackson, 1835. I love this one, because when house painter Richard Lawrence’s shots misfired, Old Hickory beat him with a cane until he could be apprehended. Dude was tough.
2. Teddy Roosevelt, 1912. Teddy was giving a speech in Milwaukee when he was shot once by saloon-keeper John Schrank. Unperturbed, Roosevelt announced that he had been shot but insisted on finished out his speech anyway. His thick speech and his glasses case stopped the bullet from being fatal. The bullet was never removed.
3. Franklin Roosevelt, 1933. Giuseppe Zangara shot five times at Roosevelt. He wounded four people and killed Chicago mayor Anton Cermak. The shooting happened on February 15; Zangara was executed in Florida’s infamous Old Sparky for Cermak’s murder on March 20.
4. Harry Truman, 1950. Two Puerto Rican pro-independence activists walked right up to the Blair House, where Truman was staying, with intent to assassinate Truman. One of the men distracted Secret Service while the other approached a guard booth and killed the guard inside. President Truman looked out his bedroom window; one of the activists was only 31 feet away. Both men were killed by gunfire – one at the hand of the other, and one by the Secret Service.

5. JFK, 1960. Years before Lee Harvey Oswald, 73-year-old Richard Pavlick intended to crash his car, loaded up with dynamite, into Kennedy’s car. Pavlick saw Jackie and Caroline saying goodbye to the President and decided to call the operation off. When he was pulled over for a moving violation a few days later, he still had dynamite in his car and the Secret Service nabbed him.
6. Richard Nixon #1, 1972. Arthur Bremer intended to shoot Nixon when he was visiting Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Ontario. He was unable to get a good shot and there was too much security due to Vietnam War protests. When he gave up on that attempt, he settled for shooting Democratic Presidential Candidate George Wallace a month later instead.
7. Nixon #2, 1974. Samuel Byck, a former tire salesman, hijacked a plane at the Baltimore/Washington International Airport. He shot both the pilot and the co-pilot and told a passenger to fly the plane. Byck was shot through the glass of the aircraft door and ended up finishing himself off before the police could make their way into the cockpit.
8. Gerald Ford #1, 1975. Charles Manson devotee Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme tried to shoot Ford when he was shaking hands in a crowd in Sacramento. She tried to fire on him when he reached to shake her hand, but the firing chamber was empty.
9. Gerald Ford #2, 1975. Just 17 days later, on September 22, Sara Jane Moore fired at Ford in San Francisco. The guy standing next to Moore saw what was happening and jerked her arm away, making the shot miss the President. She was paroled just last year.
10. Jimmy Carter, 1979. Carter was in L.A. to give a speech when a man was arrested with a gun. His story was that he was only there to distract Secret Service; other hit men with sniper rifles were waiting in the wings to assassinate Carter. The man, Raymond Lee Harvey, escaped conviction because there was a lack of evidence.

MR. GATLING'S TERRIBLE MARVEL

2008-07-11T21:13:00.000-07:00

The Gun That Changed Everything and the Misunderstood Genius Who Invented It

By Julia Keller

Viking. 294 pp. $25.95

The Gatling gun, invented during the Civil War by an ardent Unionist but not really put into use until afterward, bore only passing resemblance to the modern machine gun. Mounted on a carriage, towed into position by horses or troops, it was large, clumsy and had limited mobility. It was used by the artillery rather than by the infantry (which now employs what Julia Keller calls "the deadly bouquet of assorted assault rifles"), and it was rejected by the Union's procurement officer, who "was notoriously resistant to any sort of innovation in firearms."

Had that officer been less stiff-necked and more open-minded, it's possible that the war would have ended sooner and the casualty lists would have been shorter. Or so one can infer from Keller: "For all of Richard Jordan Gatling's cool-headed technical finesse and businessman's brio, he actually came up with his gun, he claimed, for the most tender-hearted of reasons: as a way of saving lives. 'It occurred to me,' he wrote to a friend in 1877, 'that if I could invent a machine -- a gun -- which could by rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a great extent, supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease be greatly diminished.' As disingenuous and self-serving as that sentiment sounds, it ended up being quite correct: Innovations in arms steadily reduced the relative lethality of battles (not to mention the cost of waging war) throughout the twentieth century."

The great significance of the Gatling gun, as subsequent use demonstrated all too bloodily, was that it began the transformation of warfare from man-to-man combat into a depersonalized arena in which "men, women, and children were like stalks of wheat beneath a scythe," mowed down with total disregard for their individuality. It presaged modern warfare in all the dehumanized anonymity with which combatants and innocents are killed. But Julia Keller, cultural critic at the Chicago Tribune, looks on a brighter side as well:
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"The Gatling gun is a weapon of death, but its story is not altogether grim. For it is also the story of a nation on the rise and of a man who, by inventing a new kind of machine, helped propel it in that upward trajectory. It is the story of a country just at the moment when its destiny begins to stir, and of an individual whose career was hitched to that amazing creative and economic boom. It is the story of one genius who helped push America to the top, a man of decency and vision and ambition, a man who held dozens of patents for a variety of life-enhancing gadgets but who died disillusioned, his name attached in the popular mind not to plows or bicycles or flush toilets or dry-cleaning machines, all of which he improved, but to a gun. A utilitarian device whose use came down to a chilling simplicity: death."

As that paragraph suggests, Keller is given to broad strokes, sweeping generalizations, large claims and overheated prose. More about that later. For now suffice it to say that she's obviously smart and has done a lot of interesting research into the life of a man who is almost totally forgotten. Whether this is the great injustice she believes it to be is for each reader to decide, but Gatling was a formidably inventive man at a time when Yankee tinkerers -- "untutored dreamers," Keller calls them -- were coming up with new stuff day after day and flooding the Patent Office with their inventions. Gatling "was no crackpot eccentric, but a respected and socially connected businessman, married to the daughter of a prominent Indianapolis physician." Indeed, Keller finds it "difficult to reconcile the man who created the Gatling gun with the loyal husband and gentle father, to reconcile the canny, competitive arms merchant with the decent, peace-loving citizen," though in truth those contradictions have been constant themes in the business, commercial and industrial life of this country and most others.

Keller argues that Gatling possessed a "phenomenal mechanical genius," and though "genius" strikes me as more than a bit over the top, the range of his inventions is impressive. Early in his career he came up with "a new variety of plow, a cotton cultivator, a washer to tighten gears more effectively"; between 1844 and 1862, he obtained "nine patents for agricultural implements; his inventions include a hemp brake, a rotary plow, a lath-making machine, a gearing machine and a steam-driven marine ram." All told, he received 43 patents in his lifetime. One of his agricultural inventions, a seed planter, was the inspiration, Keller believes, for the gun: "Fed by a gravity-driven hopper, the seeds dropped, one by one, into the furrow. Gatling couldn't get that process out of his mind: its rotating simplicity, its smooth mechanical perfection." She traces this idea to the summer of 1861. By then it was clear that the Civil War, which confident Yankees thought would be over in a matter of weeks, was going to be a tough slog. Keller writes:

"Gatling had everything he needed: the basic mechanical design, embodied in his seed planter; the moral imperative, supplied by the memory of the dead and ailing soldiers as they arrived at the Indianapolis train station; and the commercial impulse, which arose as a possibly awkward but completely predictable consequence of the realization that this might well be a drawn-out, expensive affair. It might last years, not months, despite all the breezy hypothesizing at the outset. And long wars meant large profits for gunmakers."

By 1863 Gatling's gun was in production, and he sold 13 that year, principally to the controversial Union general Benjamin F. Butler, who bought them "for a thousand dollars apiece with his own money, after the ordnance department had turned down his request for funds." He doesn't seem to have gotten productive use out of them. "Indeed," Keller writes, "the only place in which a Gatling gun was destined to make an appreciable difference during the Civil War wasn't on a battlefield at all. It didn't come in the midst of a struggle between competing armies. And it would set the tone for the weapon's dark reputation later in the century, for its grim identification with the forces of oppression and exploitation."

In July 1863, during the draft riots in New York City, three Gatling guns were set up at the offices of the New York Times, whose editor, Henry Jarvis Raymond, was an outspoken opponent of the rioters' anti-draft sentiments. The mob approached the Times but backed off when it saw the guns: "The story foretells the way Gatling's guns would be deployed after the war: as menacing symbols, as icons of sheer destructive ferocity, even if they just sat there." That's putting it a little melodramatically, but in essence it's true. During the last three decades of the 19th century, "Gatling guns were purchased by police departments, state militias, and factory owners" and became known as "tools of domination and intimidation, both at home and abroad." In time "Gatling guns became the weapon of choice for British forces determined to enforce colonial rule in Africa," and Teddy Roosevelt became their ardent champion; he called them the "inseparable companions" of his Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War.

Gatling died in 1903 at 85. The likely explanation for his drift into the fog of history is that his gun was soon replaced by other automatic weapons -- light, portable, efficient and even more deadly -- and the phrase "Gatling gun" pretty much vanished from common usage. Certainly the gun seems a period piece now, though it's difficult to find anything to regret in that. Its inventor's story is interesting, but it really can't carry all the thematic weight Keller lards onto it -- she works overtime trying to portray him as the definitive 19th-century American -- and there are times when her prose simply gets out of hand: "No, no, no. His head was too full of all the things he wanted to build. Things he thought he could sell, thereby building a great fortune. He was a restless young man. He was brimming with energy and purpose and hope. He had caught his country's peculiar fever. There was no cure," or, "Richard Gatling and his brothers had followed different rivers as they moved beyond their youth, into the world at large; but everything eventually would come back to one river, the river of the past, and it ran, as it always does, from darkness into light and then into darkness again."

Whatever that means. What it means to me is: Beware of journalists who think they're poets. ·