It is to two French Annales historians — Fernand Braudel and Emanuel Le Roy Ladurie — that I owe my deep fascination with the small things in history that lay the foundations for the background within which the Great Men and the Great Ideas can strut their stuff.
I remember my first reading of Le Roy Ladurie’s Les Paysans de Languedoc and Montaillou, and they thrilled me. Le Roy Ladurie “shared the view [of the Annalistes] that historical explanation should emerge from the interlocking relationship of different strata of time: the longue durée of geography and climate; the social time of mentalités or collective mental attitudes, and that of political events. But, as he put it, many such studies lacked the “regard direct” of evidence from contemporary witnesses.” His own books, by contrast, thrived on such contemporary witnesses.
On the occasion of his 99th birthday, I want to re-post this:
* * *
Regular readers will no doubt know that I am not a fan of politicians, especially senior American politicians. However, I have always admired and been impressed by Jimmy Carter. The following profile is from an email newsletter from Mother Jones. I hope they won’t mind me reprinting it in full as it says exactly what I would like to say:
“He has never sought great riches, or to capitalize on the presidency for personal gain. He lives in a home that is assessed for a lesser value than the armored Secret Service vehicle that sits outside it.
Last week, at 94, Jimmy Carter became America’s oldest living former president, prompting praise for the human rights champion and Navy veteran. When in power, he looked ahead, installing solar panels in the White House and promoting a slew of judges of color and women to the federal bench, including Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Out of power, he oversaw election monitoring in many tight votes worldwide and has spent decades volunteering to build homes with Habitat for Humanity.
“We…are grateful for his long life of service that has benefitted millions of the world’s poorest people,” said the Carter Center, an Atlanta-based nonprofit focused on public policy.
As a public servant and after the presidency, Carter embodied the traits we feature each week in this newsletter. He thought of others and refused to take credit for the daring rescue of six US diplomats in Iran (an episode later made famous by the movie Argo). The reason? Carter didn’t want to endanger the lives of other US diplomats held hostage there.
Carter took the hard road internationally, seeking to burnish America’s standing by refusing to coddle strongmen, such as Chile’s authoritarian leader, Gen. Augusto Pinochet. As a young reporter in neighboring Argentina, I witnessed testimony from Carter’s human rights chief, Patricia Derian, on how she directly confronted a leader of that military government on torture. (Busted, Argentina’s naval chief rubbed his hands and replied: “You remember the story of Pontius Pilate, don’t you?”)
Although reviews of Carter’s presidency have been mixed, political scientist Robert A. Strong writes that “some consider him to be the nation’s greatest former President,” and that his work is admired by people on both sides of the aisle.
In a Washington Post interview last fall, the former president said it was difficult to abide President Donald Trump’s constant lies, and he called the current presidency a “disaster.” Carter recalled that he would have been expelled from the Naval Academy for a lie, and hinted that his father, who whipped him six different times with a peach tree branch, would not have tolerated mistruths, either.
Today is the 56th anniversary of one of the saddest days of my young life. A rain-soaked and ill-sited colliery spoil tip that loomed over the south Wales village of Aberfan collapsed, burying houses and a school, killing 116 children and 28 adults. Lessons had just begun for the morning when the 34m tip spilled 140,000 cubic yards of spoil into the village.
I didn’t know any of the victims, and had not even heard of the village until that morning. But I remember weeping as the news came over the radio, and I am tearing up now as I type this.
The National Coal Board and several employees were found to be responsible, and money was raised. But nothing could replace the lives that were lost due to management’s callous disregard for public safety.
956 years ago today, Norsemen from France destroyed the English army at Hastings and proceeded to overthrow Anglo laws and language and customs and economic system. England (and eventually Wales and Ireland) have yet to recover from the shock.
On the occasion of his 98th birthday, I want to re-post this from 2019:
* * *
Regular readers will no doubt know that I am not a fan of politicians, especially senior American politicians. However, I have always admired and been impressed by Jimmy Carter. The following profile is from an email newsletter from Mother Jones. I hope they won’t mind me reprinting it in full as it says exactly what I would like to say:
“He has never sought great riches, or to capitalize on the presidency for personal gain. He lives in a home that is assessed for a lesser value than the armored Secret Service vehicle that sits outside it.
Last week, at 94, Jimmy Carter became America’s oldest living former president, prompting praise for the human rights champion and Navy veteran. When in power, he looked ahead, installing solar panels in the White House and promoting a slew of judges of color and women to the federal bench, including Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Out of power, he oversaw election monitoring in many tight votes worldwide and has spent decades volunteering to build homes with Habitat for Humanity.
“We…are grateful for his long life of service that has benefitted millions of the world’s poorest people,” said the Carter Center, an Atlanta-based nonprofit focused on public policy.
As a public servant and after the presidency, Carter embodied the traits we feature each week in this newsletter. He thought of others and refused to take credit for the daring rescue of six US diplomats in Iran (an episode later made famous by the movie Argo). The reason? Carter didn’t want to endanger the lives of other US diplomats held hostage there.
Carter took the hard road internationally, seeking to burnish America’s standing by refusing to coddle strongmen, such as Chile’s authoritarian leader, Gen. Augusto Pinochet. As a young reporter in neighboring Argentina, I witnessed testimony from Carter’s human rights chief, Patricia Derian, on how she directly confronted a leader of that military government on torture. (Busted, Argentina’s naval chief rubbed his hands and replied: “You remember the story of Pontius Pilate, don’t you?”)
Although reviews of Carter’s presidency have been mixed, political scientist Robert A. Strong writes that “some consider him to be the nation’s greatest former President,” and that his work is admired by people on both sides of the aisle.
In a Washington Post interview last fall, the former president said it was difficult to abide President Donald Trump’s constant lies, and he called the current presidency a “disaster.” Carter recalled that he would have been expelled from the Naval Academy for a lie, and hinted that his father, who whipped him six different times with a peach tree branch, would not have tolerated mistruths, either.
Dame Hilary Mantel, the great historical novelist famous for the “Wolf Hall” books about Thomas Cromwell has died at the age of 70. She will be sorely missed. The following is one her most valuable lessons for all historians:
“Evidence is always partial. Facts are not truth, though they are part of it – information is not knowledge. And history is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past. It’s the record of what’s left on the record. It’s the plan of the positions taken, when we to stop the dance to note them down. It’s what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it – a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth. It is no more “the past” than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey. It is the multiplication of the evidence of fallible and biased witnesses, combined with incomplete accounts of actions not fully understood by the people who performed them. It’s no more than the best we can do, and often it falls short of that.”
The German Luftwaffe attacks against London known as the Blitz began on the afternoon of September 7, 1940 — eighty-two years ago today. They went on essentially uninterrupted for 79 days, and expanded across Great Britain. Here can be found the Guardian‘s report of the first night’s bombing.
The German airmen apparently have orders to loose their bombs whenever they feel they are over the area called Metropolitan London. Certainly 90% of all the damage done was to non-military objectives.
About 43,000 civilians died during the Blitz. Almost 140,000 more were injured, and more than a million homes damaged or destroyed. Even when the Blitz itself was over, the Germans continued to bomb London for several years. My parents spent much of their teen-aged years running to air shelters, sleeping in the Underground stations. My mother went to the school which suffered the first V2 rocket attack. Thousands of younger children were evacuated from London to “safer” country towns. A dozen or more years later, when I was a kid in the early 50s in west London, all my “playgrounds” were bomb sites that still hadn’t been rebuilt.
Those of us who are lucky to live in North America have no conception of what this could be like. Imagine, perhaps, the events of 9/11 happening all over the country every day for two months and more. And all of this just one lifetime away from us.
It seems hard to imagine for those of us who lived every minute of the post-Watergate saga, but it is 48 years ago today that Richard Nixon resigned as President of the United States.
He was indeed a crook (in a far more deep sense than, say, Donald Trump) and the system finally worked to eliminate him. Gerald Ford, to his everlasting shame, was quite wrong to pardon him.
Jstor.org has a great article about the history and development of the art we all recognize from the sides of orange crates.
Soon after the first railcar of oranges came out of California in 1877, “orchardists and fruit associations across California were using brightly colored box labels to build an identity for their orchards and advertise their produce.”
Well worth the read, with many more examples of the art.
Fifty-seven years ago today, in order to protect the world from “a second Cuba”, US President Lyndon Johnson — obviously not distracted enough by losing the Vietnam War — ordered the US Marines to invade that Caribbean superpower, the Dominican Republic. Operation Power Pack was launched on April 28th, 1965 and the occupation by the imperialist forces lasted until September 1966 after a pro-Trujillo, pro-American president was elected.
About 3,000 civilians are thought to have died to save the American Empire.
On 6th April, 1199, King Richard I of England died of gangrene from a wounded shoulder. Although he has come down through history with a glorious memory, he was, in my opinion, perhaps the worst king that England ever had.
He won the throne by rebelling and taking up arms against his mortally-ill father Henry II. He probably did not speak English, and he spent all but six months of his 10-year reign fighting wars for personal fame and glory in Europe and the Middle East. Onerous taxes on the poor were needed to pay for his campaigns and for the ransom demanded by the Holy Roman Emperor after Richard was captured.
Frankly, I think the crossbow bolt that struck him in the shoulder at the siege of Chalus-Chabrol did England a favour.
This evening I ZOOM-attended a Vancouver Heritage Foundation presentation given by Michael Kluckner on Vancouver in the 1960s and 1970s. It was a marvelously fluid talk, brilliantly illustrated with art, photographs, newspaper clippings and magazine covers. Michael is not only a fine artist and heritage writer, he was also involved in many of the events that he discussed.
The range of topics from the 1965-1975 period that he covered was broad and varied: hippy culture and lifestyle; music; publishing (Georgia Straight etc); the politics of the freeway, the Stanley Park entrance proposals, and False Creek, the development of Granville Island; the introduction of strata title and condos; civic and Provincial politics; and much else including the early careers of people well-known today.
One of the key take-aways is that little has really changed in terms of development pressures and affordability. He quoted a 1967 report that only 40% of residents could reasonably afford the housing available, and that the vacancy rate in Vancouver in 1971 was almost exactly the same as it is today.
It was particularly gratifying for me to better understand the earlier lives and deep involvement in important issues of several people I have come to know quite well here in Grandview.
Much of this will, I gather, be captured in Michael’s new book The Rooming House: West Coast in The 1970s which is soon to be published.
We all take trousers as a given, something that almost everyone uses. They have become ubiquitous all around the world. But like everything else around us, someone had to invent them and work out how to make them.
This is a fascinating video that examines the earliest trousers yet discovered. They are more than 3,000 years old from the deserts of central Asia, and their story illustrates the history of sheep rearing, weaving, and clothing manufacture in an entertaining fashion.
Fifty years ago today, the British Parachute Regiment shot more than thirty unarmed protesters in the Bogside neighbourhood of Derry, Northern Ireland, killing fourteen. Those killed and injured had gathered to protest anti-Catholic discrimination in housing and employment that was being enforced by British colonial forces.
This was the worst mass killing in Ulster’s modern history.
An inquiry — considered by most to be a whitewash — determined that the solders were “justified” in shooting. However, the later Saville Inquiry, finally published in 2010, proved that those shot were all unarmed, were of no danger to the soldiers, and that soldiers lied about their actions.
Far from quelling the protests, the Bogside Massacre led to a significant increase in IRA recruitment.
Today is the 130th anniversary of the takeover of the Hawai’i Islands by American trading interests, overthrowing the native kingdom.
America already had a long history of violent and genocidal imperialist annexation (“Manifest Destiny”) on the mainland. The coup in Honolulu was a logical, if long, step of the same impulse into the Pacific.
It was sixty-six years ago today that an experienced activist named Rosa Parks chose to say “No” when told to give up her bus seat for a white passenger on a rainy night in Montgomery, Alabama. Later, repeating her refusal to a police officer, she was arrested and became an historical figure.
Not withstanding the scores of millions of volunteer hours that went into the Civil Rights movement, and the billions of words crafted to defend the principles of equality and anti-discrimination, movements are often characterized by individual actions: Rosa Parks refusal being a classic example.
Never underestimate the ability of very small groups of people to start movements that develop into landslides of social change.
I always find the Conversation has an eclectic mix of essays, many of which will pique my interest. A recent case in point: the history of five sandwiches — tuna salad, the chow mein sandwich, club, peanut butter & jelly, Scotch woodcock — and what they say about American social history.
The histories of these foods run through the 1890s for the club sandwich — perfectly described as “a blend of elegance and blandness” — through the early years of the 20th century for tuna, pb & J, and the woodcock, and much more recently for the chow mein sandwich of the 1970s.
Image: Alena Haurylick
“As food historian Bee Wilson argues in her history of the sandwich, American sandwiches distinguished themselves from their British counterparts by the scale of their ambition. Imitating the rising skylines of American cities, many were towering affairs that celebrated abundance.
Exciting new research has proven that Norse explorers were cutting timber in L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, in the year 1021, exactly one thousand years ago.
Since the settlers’ village was discovered in the 1960s, it has been known that Norse sailors reached the continent around the turn of the first millennium, and the date of 1000 AD is often used as a reasonable estimate. However, a new technique of tree-ring counting has provided a precise date of 1021 for at least three pieces of felled timber at the site.
The new method uses evidence of a solar flare that occurred in 993; a flare that has been found to have affected tree rings all over the world. Counting out from that date to the bark left on the discarded wood provides the exact date on which it was cut — 1021 AD. Other marks on the wood show that they were cut with metal tools, which local indigenous peoples did not have at that date.
“It adds some intrigue,” says John Steinberg, an anthropologist at the Fiske Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Massachusetts Boston. “If the Vikings left Greenland around 1000, as the sagas suggest, L’Anse aux Meadows was occupied at least sporadically for perhaps 20 years, rather than just three years as has been assumed. On the other hand, it may be that it was only occupied for three years but those years were 15 years later than we thought.” Steinberg raises another possibility as well—that the Vikings went back and forth between Greenland and Vinland more commonly than has been believed.”
For historians studying an event that is best known from old sagas and legendary tales, achieving such precision in dating is a grand achievement.
On the occasion of his 97th birthday, I want to re-post this from 2019:
* * *
Regular readers will no doubt know that I am not a fan of politicians, especially senior American politicians. However, I have always admired and been impressed by Jimmy Carter. The following profile is from an email newsletter from Mother Jones. I hope they won’t mind me reprinting it in full as it says exactly what I would like to say:
“He has never sought great riches, or to capitalize on the presidency for personal gain. He lives in a home that is assessed for a lesser value than the armored Secret Service vehicle that sits outside it.
Last week, at 94, Jimmy Carter became America’s oldest living former president, prompting praise for the human rights champion and Navy veteran. When in power, he looked ahead, installing solar panels in the White House and promoting a slew of judges of color and women to the federal bench, including Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Out of power, he oversaw election monitoring in many tight votes worldwide and has spent decades volunteering to build homes with Habitat for Humanity.
“We…are grateful for his long life of service that has benefitted millions of the world’s poorest people,” said the Carter Center, an Atlanta-based nonprofit focused on public policy.
As a public servant and after the presidency, Carter embodied the traits we feature each week in this newsletter. He thought of others and refused to take credit for the daring rescue of six US diplomats in Iran (an episode later made famous by the movie Argo). The reason? Carter didn’t want to endanger the lives of other US diplomats held hostage there.
Carter took the hard road internationally, seeking to burnish America’s standing by refusing to coddle strongmen, such as Chile’s authoritarian leader, Gen. Augusto Pinochet. As a young reporter in neighboring Argentina, I witnessed testimony from Carter’s human rights chief, Patricia Derian, on how she directly confronted a leader of that military government on torture. (Busted, Argentina’s naval chief rubbed his hands and replied: “You remember the story of Pontius Pilate, don’t you?”)
Although reviews of Carter’s presidency have been mixed, political scientist Robert A. Strong writes that “some consider him to be the nation’s greatest former President,” and that his work is admired by people on both sides of the aisle.
In a Washington Post interview last fall, the former president said it was difficult to abide President Donald Trump’s constant lies, and he called the current presidency a “disaster.” Carter recalled that he would have been expelled from the Naval Academy for a lie, and hinted that his father, who whipped him six different times with a peach tree branch, would not have tolerated mistruths, either.
The German Luftwaffe attacks against London known as the Blitz began on the afternoon of September 7, 1940 — eighty-one years ago today. They went on essentially uninterrupted for 79 days, and expanded across Great Britain. Here can be found the Guardian‘s report of the first night’s bombing.
The German airmen apparently have orders to loose their bombs whenever they feel they are over the area called Metropolitan London. Certainly 90% of all the damage done was to non-military objectives.
About 43,000 civilians died during the Blitz. Almost 140,000 more were injured, and more than a million homes damaged or destroyed. Even when the Blitz itself was over, the Germans continued to bomb London for several years. My parents spent much of their teen-aged years running to air shelters, sleeping in the Underground stations. My mother went to the school which suffered the first V2 rocket attack. Thousands of younger children were evacuated from London to “safer” country towns. A dozen or more years later, when I was a kid in the early 50s in west London, all my “playgrounds” were bomb sites that still hadn’t been rebuilt.
Those of us who are lucky to live in North America have no conception of what this could be like. Imagine, perhaps, the events of 9/11 happening all over the country every day for two months and more. And all of this just one lifetime away from us.
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Jak's View of Vancouver v.3 