Category Archives: History

Da Vinci’s To-Do Lists

05 Friday Jan 2018

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“My favorite gems in his notebooks are his to-do lists, which sparkle with his curiosity. One of them, dating from the 1490s in Milan, is that day’s list of things he wants to learn. ‘The measurement of Milan and its suburbs,’ is the first entry. This has a practical purpose, as revealed by an item later in the list: ‘Draw Milan.’ Others show him relentlessly seeking out people whose brains he could pick: ‘Get the master of arithmetic to show you how to square a triangle… Ask Giannino the Bombardier about how the tower of Ferrara is walled… Ask Benedetto Protinari by what means they walk on ice in Flanders… Get a master of hydraulics to tell you how to repair a lock, canal and mill in the Lombard manner… Get the measurement of the sun promised me by Maestro Giovanni Francese, the Frenchman.’ He is insatiable.

Over and over again, year after year, Leonardo lists things he must do and learn. Some involve the type of close observation most of us rarely pause to do. ‘Observe the goose’s foot: if it were always open or always closed the creature would not be able to make any kind of movement.’ Others involve why-is-the-sky-blue questions about phenomena so commonplace that we rarely pause to wonder about them. ‘Why is the fish in the water swifter than the bird in the air when it ought to be the contrary since the water is heavier and thicker than the air?’

Best of all are the questions that seem completely random. ‘Describe the tongue of the woodpecker,’ he instructs himself. Who on earth would decide one day, for no apparent reason, that he wanted to know what the tongue of a woodpecker looks like? How would you even find out? It’s not information Leonardo needed to paint a picture or even to understand the flight of birds. But there it is, and, as we shall see, there are fascinating things to learn about the tongue of the woodpecker. The reason he wanted to know was because he was Leonardo: curious, passionate, and always filled with wonder.”

__________

Pulled from the intro to Walter Isaacson’s new biography, Leonardo da Vinci.

Some thirty chapters and five-hundred pages later, Isaacson has us at the book’s coda, “Describe the Tongue of the Woodpecker.” Here’s that coda, in full:

The tongue of a woodpecker can extend more than three times the length of its bill. When not in use, it retracts into the skull and its cartilage-like structure continues past the jaw to wrap around the bird’s head and then curve down to its nostril. In addition to digging out grubs from a tree, the long tongue protects the woodpecker’s brain. When the bird smashes its beak repeatedly into tree bark, the force exerted on its head is ten times what would kill a human. But its bizarre tongue and supporting structure act as a cushion, shielding the brain from shock.

There is no reason you actually need to know any of this. It is information that has no real utility for your life, just as it had none for Leonardo. But I thought maybe, after reading this book, that you, like Leonardo, who one day put ‘Describe the tongue of the woodpecker’ on one of his eclectic and oddly inspiring to-do lists, would want to know. Just out of curiosity. Pure curiosity.

Diplomacy, Ben Franklin Style

13 Friday Oct 2017

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“In France, seventy-year-old Franklin began the third phase of his extraordinary life. His fame as a scientist and philosopher blended with the huge excitement he generated as the spokesman for the embattled new republic, the United States of America. With consummate shrewdness, Franklin wore the simple clothes of an American Quaker, an imaginary character created by savants such as Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The French wanted to believe that in the new world a new kind of man was emerging, free of the corruptions and infirmities of their decadent old world. Franklin was more than ready to encourage this illusion. One excited Parisian wrote: ‘€œEverything about him announces the simplicity of primitive morals€… The people clustered about him as he passed and asked: “Who is this old peasant who has such a noble air?”‘

The old peasant, whose primitive morals had enabled him to maintain wives on both sides of the Atlantic without a hint of scandal, was soon displaying his gift for backstairs diplomacy. He began by charming France’€™s foreign minister, the Comte de Vergennes. With the help of several American victories on the battlefield, Franklin persuaded this cautious veteran of twenty-four years™ service in Europe’€™s capitals to back the United States, first with secret aid and then with a formal alliance in 1778. This was only the beginning of Franklin’€™s French accomplishments. He secured over $40 million in loans and gifts from the French treasury — €”the equivalent of perhaps $600 million today — €”money that kept the bankrupt American government functioning. He supervised the shipment of tons of supplies and weapons to America. He armed and equipped American sea captains, such as John Paul Jones, who preyed on British shipping in their home waters with spectacular success…

In a cheerful letter to a grandniece in America, Franklin had [an] explanation for his dalliances: ‘Somebody gave it out that I loved ladies; and then every body presented me their ladies (or the ladies presented themselves) to be embraced, that is to have their necks kissed. For as to kissing on the lips or cheeks it is not the mode here, the first is reckoned rude, and the other may rub off the paint. The French ladies have however 1000 other ways of rendering themselves agreeable; by their various attentions and civilities, & their sensible conversation. ‘Tis a delightful people to live with.’…

Occasionally, one madam or mademoiselle asked him if he cared for her more than the other pursuers. With a smile Franklin would reply in his limping French, ‘€˜Yes, when you are closest to me, because of the power of the attraction.’

The remark combined flirtation and a reminder of his fame as a scientist. He was comparing the lady’€™s impact on him to the way an electrified piece of metal drew iron filings to it. Behind these amorous games lay the goal Franklin never forgot — €”persuading the French to back the faltering American Revolution. He knew — €”and cheerfully approved — the passion for politics among upper-class French women. He hoped their enthusiasm for his amiable American ways would be transmitted to their influential husbands or lovers.”

__________

Pulled from Thomas Fleming’s The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers.

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The Last Wild Cheyenne

06 Monday Feb 2017

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Wooden Leg Cheyenne Indian

“I was baptized by the priest at the Tongue river mission when I was almost fifty years old. My wife and our two daughters were baptized too… I do not go often to the church, but I go sometimes. I think the white church people are good, but I do not trust many of the stories they tell about what happened a long time ago. I have made many friendships with the church people and am glad to have the white man churches among us, but I feel more satisfied in my prayers when I make them in the way I was taught. My heart is much more contented when I walk alone with my medicine pipe and talk with God about whatever may be troubling me. […]

Both of my daughters went to school at the Tongue river mission. They lived there during the school months. Each Sunday we were allowed to take them to our home… Later, I built a house only a quarter of a mile from the Mission, and on a sloping hillside above it. We could look from our front door and see the children at any time when they might be outside of the school buildings. My wife and I were pleased at their situation in life. ‘They will have more of comfort and happiness than we have had,’ we said to each other. […]

It is comfortable to live in peace on the reservation. It is pleasant to be situated where I can sleep soundly every night, without fear that my horses may be stolen or that myself or my friends may be crept upon and killed. But I like to think about the old times, when every man had to be brave. I wish I could live again through some of the past days when it was the first thought of every prospering Indian to send out the call:

‘Hoh-oh-oh-oh, friends: Come. Come. Come. I have plenty of buffalo meat. I have coffee. I have sugar. I have tobacco. Come, friends, feast and smoke with me.’”

__________

Pulled from the ending of Wooden Leg: A Warrior Who Fought Custer by Wooden Leg and Thomas B. Marquis.

Wooden Leg (1858-1940) was one of the thousand or so Cheyenne warriors who joined up with the Lakotas during the Battle of Little Bighorn. As book’s title suggests, that fight makes up the center of his story, though the before and after of WL’s life, including his sober and remarkably evenhanded reflections on Custer’s last stand, are the most interesting parts of the story. This excerpt makes a fitting end to it, not only because it captures the nuance of WL’s temperament, but also because it strikes a tranquil tone in finishing a story that’s in many ways wild.

Read on:

Photo: Wikicommons

They Were Men

27 Monday Jun 2016

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Robert Kennedy

“Every American boy should be made to play football and box and participate in all kinds of athletics, and above all the American should be taught discipline and decent living. Then he should be given a year of the toughest kind of military training, not the kind that we know, but the kind I gave my Rangers.

God, but I wish I had those boys now; we would tear the Germans stringy. I hear of those boys now and then and although they are almost all gone now, they have done unbelievable things and are spoken of almost in a tone of reverence by officers and men alike who have fought with them.

They were men.”

__________

The closing of Major Randolph Millholland’s letter to his daughter, Ginnie Schry, on December 22, 1944. Millholland trained the 29th Rangers for the D-Day invasion, leading them in a five-week course in amphibious landing, cliff scaling, and hand-to-hand combat. The group was ultimately disbanded and never saw combat as a unit, though Millholland’s men were later deployed separately throughout Europe.

I found this excerpt in chapter four of John Robert Slaughter’s book Omaha Beach and Beyond. The picture is of Bobby Kennedy, taken by Jacques Lowe, and available at 1stDibs.

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Our Next Series of Demands

03 Tuesday Nov 2015

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World Leaders at the Yalta Conference, 1945

“In November 1945 Maxim Litvinov, at that time Deputy Foreign Minister of the USSR (who, as his wife told me, had become not merely tactically but even ideologically disenchanted), was asked by the American envoy Averell Harriman what the West could do to satisfy Stalin. He answered: ‘Nothing.’ In June 1946, still in that post, he warned a Western journalist that the ‘root cause’ of the confrontation was ‘the ideological conception prevailing here that conflict between the Communist and capitalist worlds is inevitable’ — that is, no more than the doctrine long since announced by Lenin that ‘a series of frightful clashes’ were bound to occur between the two systems, leading finally to the world victory of communism. When the correspondent asked Litvinov, ‘Suppose the West would suddenly give in and grant all Moscow’s demands?… would that lead to goodwill and the easing of the present tension?’ Litvinov answered, ‘It would lead to you being faced, after a more or less short time, with our next series of demands.'”

__________

Excerpted from Robert Conquest’s Reflections on a Ravaged Century. In the book, Conquest, who Paul Johnson calls “our greatest living historian,” offers a blistering critique of not just Marx and his acolytes, but of the more general tendency for human beings to believe too strongly in the redemptive power of radical ideas and institutions.

On another level, in reading Litvinov’s ominous response, I was struck not by its application to today’s Russia (though some may argue that), but by how it reflects the unspoken approaches of so many groups and movements, both internal and external.

The photograph was taken at the 1945 Yalta Conference. Harriman is in the background, second from the right.

There’s more:

How the Great War Created the Modern State

26 Monday Oct 2015

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A.J.P. Taylor

“Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman.

He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police. Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service. An Englishman could enlist, if he chose, in the regular army, the navy, or the territorials. He could also ignore, if he chose, the demands of national defence. Substantial householders were occasionally called on for jury service. Otherwise, only those helped the state who wished to do so. The Englishman paid taxes on a modest scale: nearly £200 million in 1913-14, or rather less than 8 percent of the national income… [B]roadly speaking, the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone.

All this was changed by the impact of the Great War. The mass of the people became, for the first time, active citizens. Their lives were shaped by orders from above; they were required to serve the state instead of pursuing exclusively their own affairs. Five million men entered the armed forces, many of them (though a minority) under compulsion. The Englishman’s food was limited, and its quality changed, by government order. His freedom of movement was restricted; his conditions of work prescribed. Some industries were reduced or closed, others artificially fostered. The publication of news was fettered. Street lights were dimmed. The sacred freedom of drinking was tampered with: licensed hours were cut down, and the beer watered by order. The very time on the clocks was changed. From 1916 onwards, every Englishman got up an hour earlier in summer than he would otherwise have done, thanks to an act of parliament. The state established a hold over it citizens which, though relaxed in peacetime, was never to be removed and which the second World war was again to increase.”

__________

Pulled from the opening chapter “The Effects and Origins of the Great War” in A. J. P. Taylor’s English History, 1914-1945.

In The New Cambridge Modern History: 1898-1945, there’s a substantial discussion of this link between the First and Second World Wars and the rise of the modern administrative state. A summary paragraph:

Until after 1847 direct income tax had been a device almost peculiar to Great Britain… During the 1890s, pari passu with the great expansion of governmental expenditures on armaments as well as on social services, Germany and her component states, as well as Italy, Austria, Norway, and Spain, all introduced or steepened systems of income tax. French governments repeatedly shied away from it, though they resorted to progressive death duties in 1901, and it was 1917 before a not very satisfactory system of income tax was introduced. The great fiscal burdens of war accustomed people to heavier taxation.

In 1920, Paul Cambon, France’s ambassador to Britain, told Winston Churchill, “In the twenty years I have been here I have witnessed an English Revolution more profound and searching than the French Revolution itself.” He continued, “The governing class have been almost entirely deprived of political power and to a very large extent of their property and estates; and this has been accomplished almost imperceptibly and without the loss of a single life.” Cambridge summarizes this: “If M. Cambon was exaggerating in 1920, he was perceptively prophetic, for his description became substantially true after the second world war.”

Read on:

The Psychological Scar of the Six Day War

25 Sunday Oct 2015

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Six Day War Western Wall

“After years of rhetorical attacks on Israel, Nasser demanded the removal of UN peacekeepers in the Sinai and then blockaded the Strait of Tiran to Israeli shipping. [In the summer of 1967] Israel responded with an overwhelming preemptive attack that destroyed the entire Egyptian air force within two hours. When Jordan, Iraq, and Syria joined the war against Israel, their air forces were also wiped out that same afternoon. In the next few days Israel captured all of the Sinai, Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights, while crushing the forces of the frontline Arab states.

It was a psychological turning point in the history of the modern Middle East. The speed and decisiveness of the Israeli victory in the Six Day War humiliated many Muslims who had believed until then that God favored their cause. They had lost not only their armies and their territories but also faith in their leaders, in their countries, and in themselves. The profound appeal of Islamic fundamentalism in Egypt and elsewhere was born in this shocking debacle. A newly strident voice was heard in the mosques; the voice said that they had been defeated by a force far larger than the tiny country of Israel. God had turned against the Muslims. The only way back to Him was to return to the pure religion. The voice answered despair with a simple formulation: Islam is the solution.

There was in this equation the tacit understanding that God sided with the Jews. Until the end of World War II, there was little precedent in Islam for the anti-Semitism that was now warping the politics and society of the region. Jews had lived safely — although submissively — under Muslim rule for 1,200 years, enjoying full religious freedom; but in the 1930s, Nazi propaganda on Arabic-language shortwave radio… infected the area with this ancient Western prejudice. After the war Cairo became a sanctuary for Nazis, who advised the military and the government. The rise of the Islamist movement coincided with the decline of fascism, but they overlapped in Egypt, and the germ passed into a new carrier.

The founding of the state of Israel and its startling rise to military dominance unsettled the Arab identity. In the low condition the Arabs found themselves in, they looked upon Israel and recalled the time when the Prophet Mohammed had subjugated the Jews of Medina. They thought about the great wave of Muslim expansion at the point of Arab spears and swords, and they were humbled by the contrast of their proud martial past and their miserable present. History was reversing itself; the Arabs were as fractious and disorganized and marginal as they had been in jahiliyya times. Even the Jews dominated them. The voice in the mosque said that the Arabs had let go of the one weapon that gave them real power: faith. Restore the fervor and purity of the religion that had made the Arabs great, and God would once again take their side.”

 __________

Pulled from the second chapter of Lawrence Wright’s 2006 book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. The above photo shows Motta Gur’s paratroopers, the first wave of Israeli troops to reach Jerusalem’s Old City during the conflict.

I apologize for the brief hiatus. I’ve been busy in my time off, reading (Pale Fire, the news) and adding to an already massive drafts folder. Your regular programming will resume this week.

You can watch Wright discuss the subjects of Tower with the University of California’s Harry Kreisler below. It’s lulling to listen to such mellowed, Peter Sagal-type tones describe the world’s most notorious barbarians.

Then read on:

Lawrence Wright

Who Is the Happiest Man?

03 Saturday Oct 2015

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Herodotus

“Croesus, king of Lydia, asked him as follows: ‘Athenian guest, much report of thee has come to us, both in regard to thy wisdom and thy wanderings… a desire has come upon me to ask whether thou hast seen any whom thou deem to be of all men the most happy.’ This he asked supposing that he himself was the happiest of men; but Solon, using no flattery but the truth only, said: ‘Yes, O king, Tellos the Athenian.’

Croesus, marveling at that which he said, asked him earnestly, ‘In what respect dost thou judge Tellos to be the most happy?’ And he said: ‘Tellos, in the first place, living while his native State was prosperous, had sons fair and good and saw from all of them children begotten and living to grow up; and secondly he had what with us is accounted wealth, and after his life a most glorious end. For when a battle was fought by the Athenians at Eleusis against the neighbouring people, he brought up supports and routed the foe and there died by a most fair death; and his people buried him publicly where he fell, and honoured him greatly.’ […]

Croesus was moved to anger and said: ‘Athenian guest, hast thou then so cast aside our prosperous state as worth nothing, that thou dost prefer to us even men of private station?’ And he said: ‘Croesus, thou art inquiring about human fortunes of one who well knows that fate is apt to disturb our lot. For in the course of long time a man may see many things which he would not desire to see, and suffer also many things which he would not desire to suffer… As for thee, I perceive that thou art both great in wealth and king of many men, but that of which thou didst ask me I cannot call thee yet, until I learn that thou hast brought thy life to a fair ending: for the very rich man is not at all to be accounted more happy than he who has but his subsistence from day-to-day, unless also the fortune go with him to possess things of value. For many very wealthy men are not happy, while many who have but a moderate living are fortunate… But we must of every thing examine the end and how it will turn out at the last, for to many fate shows but a glimpse of happiness and then plucks them up by the roots and overturns them.'”

__________

Excerpted from the opening third of Herodtus’s The Histories, the only surviving work of the earliest known historian. (The excerpt is from the at-times haughtier G.C. Macauley version, which lends some gravity to sections like the one above. I haven’t read Tom Holland’s translation, but I assume it’s the best vernacular version out there.)

In The Histories, Herodotus notes that Croesus is a “Lydian by race,” a “ruler of the nations between the Syrians and the Paphlagonians,” and the “first Barbarian of whom we have knowledge.”

Read on:

What Is Mein Kampf about?

12 Saturday Sep 2015

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Adolf Hitler in Color

“Mein Kampf is fundamentally a text about nature. About what belongs in nature and what doesn’t belong in nature.

It describes nature as a conflict of races; everything else is incidental. The only things which truly exists in the human world are races, and the only thing they’re supposed to be doing is competing for land and resources.

In this text, the Jews figure not as a race — not as an inferior race, not as a superior race — but as something totally supernatural which has somehow come into the world and introduced evil.

The Jews have an ability which is, in effect, superhuman. They can do one thing that no one else can do, and that’s bring ways of thinking into the world.

So from Hitler’s point of view, the Jews are not actually subhuman. They’re more like superhuman, though that’s not quite right either. From Hitler’s point of view, and from the point of view of several leading Nazis, the Jews are not really human at all. They’re para-human: they only appear to be human, but are actually something else.

The evil that the Jews have introduced into the world — and this strikes me as very important — is ethical thinking. What the Jews have done which is so wrong, is to confuse our minds by introducing ideas which are not about racial struggle. They’ve introduced ethical life to the world.

So Hitler presents capitalism as Jewish; he presents communism as Jewish; he presents Christianity as Jewish.

Why? Because all of these ideas, different though they might seem, have the common feature that they allow people to see each other in non-racial terms. Whether I’m signing a contract with you, making a revolution with you, attending mass with you, it’s not race that matters. It’s some kind of other reciprocity.

Therefore Hitler could say, as he did say, that Saint Paul was basically the same person as Leon Trotsky…

Nature can only be pure if the Jews are gone, because Jews are the special, supernatural beings who make us something that we’re not.”

__________

Timothy Snyder, speaking in Krakow at the “Unimaginable” conference earlier this year. (He also touches on these themes around minute 20 in this 2013 talk at the Graduate Institute of Geneva.)

Snyder, who teaches history at Yale, has a new book out, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Writing. I can highly recommend not only his talks like the one above, but his written work, which is dynamic and crisp, and shows a true mastering of the broad political, cultural, and military forces of the early 20th century. His last effort, the highly acclaimed, subversive history of the second world war Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, has a place at the top of my shelf.

To get a condensed version of Snyder’s take on the ideology of the Reich, you can check out his article soon to be published in the New York Review of Books, “Hitler’s World”. In it, he gives depth to some of the concepts detailed above (Snyder has clearly been fixated on the project of clearing up Hitlerite ideology for some time). The following slice is among the most informative of the piece, and it lays bare the claims of those on both sides of the religious-atheist debate who try to claim the Führer as their opponents’ ally:

Hitler’s presentation of the Jewish threat revealed his particular amalgamation of religious and zoological ideas. If the Jew triumphs, Hitler wrote, “then his crown of victory will be the funeral wreath of the human species.” On the one hand, Hitler’s image of a universe without human beings accepted science’s verdict of an ancient planet on which humanity had evolved. After the Jewish victory, he wrote, “earth will once again wing its way through the universe entirely without humans, as was the case millions of years ago.” At the same time, as he made clear in the very same passage of My Struggle, this ancient earth of races and extermination was the Creation of God. “Therefore I believe myself to be acting according to the wishes of the Creator. Insofar as I restrain the Jew, I am defending the work of the Lord.”

Continue on topic:

Timothy Snyder

Gamal Abdel Nasser on the Muslim Brotherhood

04 Friday Sep 2015

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“In ‘53, we really wanted to compromise with the Muslim Brotherhood, if they were willing to be reasonable.

I met the head of the Muslim Brotherhood and he sat with me and made his requests. What did he request? The first thing he asked for was to make wearing a hijab mandatory in Egypt, and demand that every woman walking in the street wear a tarha (scarf). Every woman walking [someone in audience yells ‘Let him wear it!’, crowd erupts].

And I told him that if I make that a law, they will say that we have returned to the days of Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, who forbade women from walking during the day and only allowed walking at night, and my opinion is that every person in his own house decides for himself the rules.

And he replied, ‘No, as the leader, you are responsible.’ I told him, ‘Sir, you have a daughter in the Cairo school of medicine, and she’s not wearing a tarha. Why didn’t you make her wear a tarha?’

I continued, ‘If you… [crowd’s cheering interrupts] if you are unable to make one girl, who is your daughter, wear the tarha, how can you tell me to put a tarha on 10 million women myself?'”

__________

Gamal Abdel Nasser, saying the now nearly unsayable in a 1966 speech in Cairo.

As Menachem Begin once observed, “Civilization is intermittent.”

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Gamal Abdel Nasser

George Washington’s Stare

01 Tuesday Sep 2015

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George Washington

“Washington’s arrival in Philadelphia [for the Constitutional Convention in 1787] prompted a civic celebration the likes of which had not been seen since the end of the war. A cadre of his old officers rode out to greet him… Church bells pealed as the hero passed; the leading citizens vied for his favor…

On this festive note the convention commenced its sober business. Only two men were even contemplated for president of the convention: Franklin and Washington. Franklin deferred to Washington, perhaps partly from concern that his health would not stand the wear of daily sessions, but at least equally from knowledge that the project would have the greatest chance of success under the aegis of the eminent general. (Washington’s distance above mere mortals was already legendary. Several delegates were discussing this phenomenon when Franklin’s Pennsylvania colleague, Gouverneur Morris, a hearty good fellow, suggested it was all in their minds. Alexander Hamilton challenged Morris: ‘If you will, at the next reception evenings, gently slap him on the shoulder and say, “My dear General, how happy I am to see you look so well!” a supper and wine shall be provided for you and a dozen of your friends.’ Morris accepted the challenge and did what Hamilton demanded. Washington immediately removed Morris’s hand from his shoulder, stepped away, and fixed Morris with an angry frown until the trespasser retreated in confusion. Hamilton paid up, yet at the dinner Morris declared, ‘I have won the bet, but paid dearly for it, and nothing could induce me to repeat it.’)”

__________

Pulled from H.W. Brands’s very good biography The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin.

Go on: