BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

Increased knowledge clearly implies increased responsibility. Nicolaas Bloembergen, 1981.

In 1948 two young Dutch people, Nicolaas Bloembergen and Deli Brink, found some common ground in what might be called shared experiences. She had spent WWII in a Japanese concentration camp, and survived, and he had spent two years in hiding in occupied Holland, eating tulip bulbs to stay alive. But “Nico’s” privations were perhaps unique, for he remembers reading—in an attic—Quantum Theorie des Elektrons und der Strahlung. Born on March 11, 1920, Nicolaas Bloembergen had already distinguished himself as a graduate student in Physics at Utrecht under Leonard Ornstein, but the Nazis closed the university and Ornstein, a Jew, cheated the gas chambers by dying (Bloembergen tells us) of stress and starvation. After the liberation, Bloembergen traveled to Harvard at just the right time, to join a project on nuclear magnetic resonance under Edward Purcell. Bloembergen returned to Holland to defend his PhD (at Leiden), marry Deli, and return to Harvard. The marriage lasted 67 years, until his death in 2017. Meanwhile, he was on the Harvard faculty when Purcell won the Nobel Prize (in 1954), and he was still on the Harvard faculty when he won the Nobel in 1981. His Nobel was for fundamental research work on lasers, but colleagues said the prize could have been awarded for any one of three things, not least the article (later a book) that Bloembergen had co-authored with Purcell in 1948. Apparently the celebrations in 1981 were particularly widespread, for “Nico” was a famously kind and funny man, especially revered by his students. So when, at Cambridge in 1981 and with Deli at his side, he toasted the Nobel news with an oversized burette, across the country his graduate students—who called themselves the ‘Nicolettes’—joined in. Later, in Bloemgarden’s non-retirement at the University of Arizona (where he refused to accept any salary), many Nicolettes regathered to celebrate his 90th birthday with an optical sciences symposium—and a tennis tournament. ©

[Stanley]

That dangerous thing, a female wit. Lord Byron on Lady Hester Stanhope.

While colonists contemplated independence, a baby was born in London who became one of the most independent women of her generation. She was Lady Hester Stanhope, born on March 12, 1776. Her fiery nature was nurtured by her father, the third earl Stanhope, a political radical (and gifted scientist) and by her connection with the Pitts (her mother was a Pitt and her uncle William Pitt the Younger). Of course there were no “jobs” for women of Lady Hester’s ilk, and for a long time no man came forward to claim her, so in 1800 she became William Pitt’s hostess, both in political London and down home at Walmer Castle. She loved it. Pitt was still a center of attention, and so was she. Tall and beautiful, she attracted notice also for her independent, imperious nature. Despite this, Pitt (before his death in 1806) got parliament to vote Lady Hester a pension of £1200 annually, quite enough for most mortals but not for Hester Stanhope, whose unhappiness deepened when (in 1809) the one man who may have wanted her for a wife, General Sir John Moore, was killed in battle. So she left England altogether, sailing first to Malta. There she met a wealthy young Englishman, Michael Bruce, and engaged in a passionate affair with him that lasted three years and took both of them into Ottoman lands, Athens (where they sported with Lord Byron), then Cairo, then Jerusalem, then Beirut, and finally Damascus. They traveled in such style that they were taken for European nobility, indeed becoming a diplomatic issue, and Lady Hester added to the sensation not only by going unveiled but by dressing as a Turkman (or, sometimes, a Bedouin) and riding horseback, alone. After dismissing Michael Bruce in 1813, and still on her pension, Lady Hester lived in the hills above Beirut, in splendid if somewhat tattered isolation, emerging only to involve herself in archaeological digs, scholarly research, and Lebanese civil wars. In life and since her death she’s been celebrated in poetry, painting, and prose, and now a movie may be made about her: it’s tentatively titled “The Lady Who Went Too Far.” Says who? ©

[Tizer]

...emerging only to involve herself in archaeological digs, scholarly research, and Lebanese civil wars.

As one does!

[Stanley]

. . . dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs . . . have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we can't get rid of them. Henrik Ibsen, Ghosts, 1881.

Henrik Ibsen did not so much create modernism in the theatre as turn to it, first with Pillars of Society (1877) and A Doll House (1879). Having tasted the pleasures of realism and of outraging a public morality he thought stifling and hypocritical, Ibsen then wrote his most infamous famous play, Ghosts (1881). Its Danish (preferred by Norwegian literati) title of Gengangere should have been rendered “the revenants,” for it concerns the rebirth of old, private sins, and their expiation through public suffering. In Ghosts, a son (Oswald) with his father’s (Captain Alving’s) disease falls in love with his father’s illegitimate daughter, but even before we get to syphilis and incest his mother (Helene Alving) has been struggling to expiate her sin of conforming to a marriage to an intolerable monster. To save her son, she’s sent him away and is determined to rid herself of her late husband’s ghost by using his estate to establish an orphanage. The son’s return, his illness, and his threatened incest bring it all crashing down, including the orphanage. Ghosts ends with Oswald begging his mother to kill him with an overdose before his syphilis completes its ruinous course. The play was produced here and there (first in Chicago, 1882, by a Danish touring company!!), but it was its London premiere, on March 13, 1891, that allows us to measure its dramatic impact on the conventional moralities of the day. British censorship rules required it to be a private subscription performance (among the subscribers were Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and George Bernard Shaw), but even so it provoked widespread outrage. It was “a loathsome sore unbandaged” and “gross, almost putrid, indecorum.” Thus ironically the critics described the last stages of syphilis, but what may have bothered them even more was the play’s “effeminate men and male women.” In short, Ghosts confirmed Ibsen’s status as the avatar of the modern and, at the same stroke, dramatically extended the empire of drama. ©

[SCG note.... I know nothing about it. It sounds like a fun night out!}

[Stanley]

Our church has a long history. Rev'd Calvin Marshall, James Varick Memorial Church (AME Zion), New York City, 2007.

Christianity was slow to come to the slave quarters, partly for fear that slaves might take too seriously the explicit messages (e.g. the Exodus story) and implicit ones (equality amongst communicants) in the Bible. When religion did come, it was in an edited version that moved many slaves to establish congregations “down in the cane breaks” where they could “steal away to [their own] Jesus.” Up north, even after slavery ended, similar problems led first to trouble within established churches about membership, attendance, and communicant status for black Christians, and ultimately to the formation of black denominations, the most notable of which were the African Methodist Episcopal Church (founded in Philadelphia in 1816) and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (founded in New York City on March 14, 1821). While their mere existence was a reproach to Christianity’s claims to universality, their names tell a contrasting story, for from the beginning both did have strong (if complicated) ties to the (white) Methodist Church. The AME Zion Church was not an offshoot of the AME Church, but in its founding an outgrowth of the racial history of New York City’s churches, especially the Methodists, then a rapidly-growing denomination with anti-slavery tendencies. Still, freedmen and slaves came to prefer their own churches, if at first only with “approved” white ministers, circa 1800. As New York’s delayed emancipation took hold, and as black congregants waxed in confidence, having an “approved” white minister seemed first anomalous, then downright insulting, and the AME Zion Church came into being with its first Bishop named as James Varick (1750-1827), a Methodist since his conversion (in a white church) in 1766. Today both the AME Zion Church and the AME Church are in “full communion” (communicant membership, ministers, etc.) with the United Methodist Church, but only since May 2012. One might say, then, that “it’s been a long time coming.” ©

[Stanley]

Pray, would you know the reason why I'm crying?// The Comic Muse, long sick, is now a-dying! From the prologue to She Stoops to Conquer, 1773.

As an historian of Restoration England, I’ve always enjoyed “Restoration Comedy.” It was as if the nation (and remember, theatre was still attended by all sorts) had wearied of Puritan gravity and, in hopes that their new king, Charles II, really was a “merrie” monarch, let down its hair and trooped off to watch actors (and actresses!!) render sin a subject of satire and make good character an incongruity. Then I fear I lose interest, learning from critics rather than from knowledge that in the 18th century, theatrical comedy trended towards the soppy and sentimental. If that’s true, the Restoration’s sublime ridiculousness was revived with a bang on March 15, 1773, with the premiere performance of Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, in which, amid a tangle of sub-plots, mistaken identities, and farcical encounters, a country gentleman’s daughter (Kate Hardcastle) disguises herself as a somewhat bawdy maid of all work and, eventually, wins her man. At the end, another couple are also happily united. Although the play does manage thus to tie off all strings and produce a happy ending, it’s not to be characterized as sentimental, but rather as satire, or as comedy of errors, or as farce, or all three. It’s not of course a Restoration comedy proper. Besides being a century too late the characters’ names don’t hint at their comic faults and foibles (although Mr. Hardcastle is a bit pompous, and Tony Lumpkin is a bit of a lump). Still, some thought of it at the time as a Restoration revival, and its success encouraged copycat comedies. Most famously, it brought Richard Brinsley Sheridan out of the woodworks with his The Rivals (1775) and School for Scandal (1778), in which latter play the servant Careless takes no care, Sir Peter Teazle teases, Lady Sneerwell sneers, and Sir Benjamin Backbite . . . . Well, you get the idea. So while the American colonists were taking life seriously (and remember, plays were still banned in Puritan Boston), London was laughing its head off. ©

[Stanley]

We wish to plead our own cause. "To our patrons," in the first number of the Freedom's Journal, 1827.

One hears a lot, from my generation, how little time today’s students spend studying. A grain of truth? Perhaps, although we forget how many of our student friends were content with their “gentleman C” (as I was in my freshman and sophomore years). It’s also the case that high tuition costs (especially at state universities) mean that students have less study time available. Another factor is that today’s students can get more done in less time. This is particularly true in my field, where digitization and the internet enable students to “do” sophisticated searches in minutes. Thus today, I turned on my computer to find that the first black-owned newspaper in America (the Freedom’s Journal, in New York City) began publication on March 16, 1827. I then “unearthed” (as we used to say of our scholarly labors) rather a lot of biographical information about the editors, John Russwurm and Samuel Cornish, and publisher, the Rev’d Peter Williams, Jr., all black men who had been born free. Some of that was in Wikipedia (which is getting better), but most was in “respectable” sources. Not only that, I was able to call up full screen pictures of all (103) surviving copies of the Freedom’s Journal and to find that it had circulated, by subscription, through 11 states, the revolutionary republic of Haiti, Canada, and Britain. I read in the editors’ statement of purpose that their aim was to present “people of colour” as free spirits, benevolent individuals, loving families, men, women and children eager to learn and eager to work, thus to combat prejudice with knowledge, propaganda with fact. The Journal’s very first news item was of an African-American ship’s captain-owner and his all-black crew, successfully plying the transatlantic trade routes. When I was a student, it would have taken hours to find the information and days to get to an archive that possessed the Journal. Today I did it at my desk, within an hour of waking. That may not be “industry,” but it is progress. ©

[Stanley]

WhenI play on my fiddle in Dooney,// Folk dance like a wave of the sea; // My cousin is priest in Kilvarnet, // My brother in Moharabuiee. Yeats, "The Fiddler of Dooney".

Just in case you hadn’t noticed the green beer, green socks, and green hats, it’s St. Patrick’s Day. Nominally, it’s a celebration of an Irish saint (or, rather, a Romano-British missionary who went to Ireland to become Irish), but it’s also a celebration of Ireland and of the Irish. That’s fairly new because, back in 19th-century Boston, the more the Irish flooded in the less they were liked: and the more they were needed. That was odd, for the depopulation of rural New England (native Yankees like the Blisses moved west to more fertile soil) meant that Boston money needed those huddled masses for manufacturing and railroad building, and the burgeoning urban leisure classes cried out for maids and cooks. But no one liked the Irish. The great abolitionist Theodore Parker hated them for their religion and their poverty, and even the genial Thoreau couldn’t welcome them to Walden. Mobs burned a convent in Charlestown, and on each November 5th “natives” gathered to burn the Pope. The parallels to today’s anti-Mexican hysteria, stoked by The Trumpster, are downright eerie, right down to the pronouns “us” and “them”. But “they” prospered, not only in politics but in banking and commerce, some even (grudgingly) welcomed in “society,” and so it was that on St. Patrick’s Day, 1922, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the holy of holies for the city’s cultural elite, playing in its sparkling new temple, Symphony Hall, sanctified the Green with a premiere performance of “Five Irish Fantasies,” poems of the very Irish William Butler Yeats set to music and performed—for the premiere—by that absurdly and yet quintessentially Irish singing sensation, the tenor John McCormack. One swoons in the shamrock just to think of it. Of course, the composer was the German immigrant, Charles Loeffler, and the conductor was the French immigrant, Pierre Monteux, but then, dammit, we were (and we are) a nation of immigrants. “They” are “us.” Happy St. Pat’s Day, all you ersatz Irish!!!!!!!! Next stop: Cinco de Mayo!! ©

[Stanley]

Do not worry about your difficulties with Mathematics. I assure you that mine are still greater. Albert Einstein.

It is difficult for the mere laity to understand how much mathematicians enjoy just messing about with numbers. The cognoscenti are as likely to say “number”, singular, rather than “numbers”, plural, for number is not just 1, 2, 3, 4, ∞, a plural series ad infinitum but it’s a concept. My view is that this “messing about” really got underway when people began to think that counting things could also be a way to describe and analyze them. This desire intensified in the early modern period (ca. 1500-1750) when old categories were breaking down so rapidly that reducing things to simple units promised if not to end confusion then at least to explain it. One “messing about” by-product, in 1637, was Fermat’s Conjecture—now finally (1995) proven as a theorem—which I won’t even try to explain. About a century passed, during which Newton or Leibniz or both invented the Calculus, which proved surprisingly useful, but mere “messing about” got another shot in the arm when in June 1742 the Russian math whiz Christian Goldbach conjectured that every even positive number (integer) greater than two can be expressed as the sum of two prime numbers. Thus four can equal 3 + 1, 12 can equal 7 + 5, and so on. It seems simple enough, and has been tested to destruction (so far it works for all positive even numbers up to 4 X 10¹⁸, which is, take my word for it, a BIG collection of positive even numbers), but it has yet to be “proven.” Thus we are back where we started, just messing about. Goldbach, who was born on March 18,1690, first proposed this “conjecture” to a mathematics friend, Leonhard Euler, who quickly replied that it works but predicted—so far, correctly—that it could never be proven. But apparently a fair “number” of mathematicians are still messing about trying to do so. ©

[chinatyke]

Do not worry about your difficulties with Mathematics. I assure you that mine are still greater. Albert Einstein.

It seems simple enough, and has been tested to destruction (so far it works for all positive even numbers up to 4x1018, which is, take my word for it, a BIG collection of positive even numbers), but it has yet to be “proven.” ©

That should be 4 x 10 to the power of 18 not 4x1018 (which is not a very big number).

[Corrected in original. Tizer]

[Stanley]

Probably a glitch in the formatting China and down to my transposing the piece to the site. You are quite right of course. Don't blame Bob, we all understand the sense of it.
I tried copying the correct number with superscript from Libre Office but it still comes out 4 X 1018.

[Corrected in original. Tizer]

[Stanley]

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 1925.

Time will tell whether our e-mails will survive, out there in the ether, so that in future others will be able to use them to interpret our lives. I am transcribing two sets of family letters (those that endured tornadoes and house fires). They give skeletal substance to the warm flesh of family stories, for instance my Bliss grandparents’ courting letters, ca. 1906-1911, which begin with him saluting her as “My Dear Miss McKinley” and end with “Ethel” calling “Ralph” her “lover boy.” Letters give out other tidbits, too. The physical survival of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s letters and telegrams to his editor (the immortal Max Perkins at Scribners) show that on March 19, 1924, Fitzgerald was “CRAZY” (in telegrams everything came in caps) about a new title for his third novel (then in progress): “UNDER THE RED WHITE AND BLUE.” Other prospective titles had been—or would be—“Among the Ash Heaps,” “The High Bouncing Lover,” and “Trimalchio.” The last had potential to arouse interest, Trimalchio having been the Emperor Nero’s ‘director of pleasures.’ Perkins, an adept at curbing his young writers’ enthusiasms, conspired with Zelda to talk some sense into their boy genius, and the title eventually chosen was The Great Gatsby (1925). Perfection!! A title for the ages!!! Thus was christened one of the century’s great fictions!! Except, at first, that wasn’t true. The book impressed some critics, but not many, and while Gertrude Stein liked it well enough to praise it faintly (“you write naturally in sentences and that is a comfort”) the book-buying public of the Jazz Age preferred jazz. Fitzgerald’s royalties for The Great Gatsby dropped from $153 in 1926 to $32 in 1927, and to exactly $13.13 in 1940, the year he died, dead drunk. So that title change was truly inconsequential. And yet, in the fullness of time, the title proved to be just right to keep posterity from putting it among the ash heaps. The novel and its “Gatsby” have become metaphors for their era, and we still have the correspondence that named it. ©

[Stanley]

One day, when we were on the Ramparts, the vision of my awakening brain came towards us. Lady Isabel Burton, on meeting Sir Richard Burton for the first time, 1851, in Boulogne.

It’s generally known that Victorian wives (though not the great queen) expected to play second fiddle to their husbands, but when the players were Sir Richard and Lady Isabel Burton such a solution was not on the program. Instead, and to posterity’s benefit, we had a duet, a companionable marriage of nearly (not quite) equal persons. Lady Isabel Burton was herself a “notable,” born Isabel Arundell in London on March 20, 1831 into a Catholic family with an arm’s length of connections with European aristocrats, of course with the Barons Arundell of Wardour but also with the Holy Roman Empire. She met Burton when she was 20 and was attracted to him (he was already by his own estimation a magnetic figure), although it took her years to close the match. Her parents disapproved, partly because he was Protestant, and when they finally married (in 1861) it was without parental consent. They were an active couple, more often than not together on Burton’s travels and, when at home (in England, or Damascus, or Trieste), swimming, riding, and fencing (!!) together. Isabel defended Richard in his diplomatic disgrace (circa 1870-71) and then helped Richard write up his adventures. She sometimes tried to edit out or warn readers of the juicier bits, and her expurgated “household” version of Sir Richard’s Arabian Nights translation was a failure. And Lady Isabel published in her own name, very successfully, first with travel books of her own and then, famously, after Richard’s death, a two-volume Life and a much longer Collected Works of her favorite first fiddler. Isabel Burton was a lady in her own right, a lion for animal welfare, and while they lived in Trieste a noblewoman of the Hapsburg empire (by an ancestor’s right, on which she had insisted). She and Richard lie today in the Burton mausoleum at Mortlake church, near Kew. It’s built of concrete and stone, but it’s shaped like a desert tent, for Richard had said, “I should like us both to lie in a tent, side by side.” And so they did. ©

[Stanley]

A born comedienne . . .who makes herself a general favourite on her first entrance." A review of Amy Height's performance in 'The Gay Grisette,' London, 1899.

Josephine Baker was more appreciated in Paris than in her native St. Louis, but she was not the first African-American to find in Europe a better market for her talents. It was more than a “trickle” of American black writers, actors, and musicians that “became” European for this reason. Among the migrants, successful in her lifetime, was Amy Height. She was born in Boston, probably in 1866, but we know she died—and was mourned—in Southwark, London, on March 21, 1913. By then she’d been British for 30 years, first appearing (as a girl Man Friday) in a Robinson Crusoe pantomime in Barnsley in 1883. She toured with an African-American banjo troupe in 1888, and by then was a fixture in panto, the music hall circuit, and by the 1890s had successfully transitioned into “serious” theatre, first winning favorable notices as Aunt Chloe in the still popular dramatizations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But Amy was not always typecast as “black,” often playing the love interest in panto comedies (she was the princess in Dick Whittington and His Cat) and in serious theatre too, for instance the farce The Gay Grisette (1899) and as the lead in the drama Madame Delphine (1900). By then, she was also enjoying being top of the bill in music halls from London to Cardiff to Liverpool. Such were her successes that they were reported in America, at least in the New York Times, where she was once identified as “a Negro actress from America,” an interesting phrasing which may help to explain why Amy Height left in the first place. Her life has been reconstructed through British census reports and theatrical reviews, through which it becomes clear that Amy (and her audiences) constantly underestimated her age. She was 30 in the 1891 census but only 29 in the 1911 census. In the Christmas season of 1912-13 Amy was reported to “sing and dance herself into favor as Smut-Tee the servant” in the panto Aladdin, after which she fell victim to pneumonia and died in the Southwark Infirmary. ©

[Stanley]

"I do not ask for my rights. I have no rights; I have only wrongs." Caroline Sheridan Norton, speaking in court in her own case, 1853.

One of the ironies of the Anglo-American legal system was that women’s legal disabilities were increased by marriage. In England, a married woman could not own property, and (unless there were specific prenuptial agreements) even her inheritances went to the husband. Nevertheless, most women entered into the state of marriage, if only to avoid statelessness. Such a one was Caroline Elizabeth Sheridan. Granddaughter of the playwright and politician Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and (luckily for her) one of five talented and loyal siblings, Caroline was born on March 22, 1808. Her father died soon after, which might have meant ruin but for the family’s connections (with the crown and with leading Whigs), so Caroline grew up in “grace and favour” quarters at Hampton Court. At length she married a second son of a Tory peer. Beautiful, intelligent, willful, and poor, she’d gone through two seasons without landing a fish, so settled for George Norton, no fish he, but a spineless creature whose other bad qualities were spite and violence. Caroline bore him three children but not much else, and became instead an author in her own right (as her mother and grandfather had been), and too friendly with other men. Her best poetry and novels won her fame, her lesser scribblings brought her income, and her male friendships brought her troubles, including separation without divorce. Out of the legal desperation and financial disabilities of that state (even worse than marriage or spinsterhood), Caroline Sheldon Norton, pamphleteer, built a deserved reputation as one of the founding architects of married women’s legal rights, partly enshrined in the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1867. And then, at the very end of her life, after her husband’s death left her at liberty, Caroline found married happiness with an old friend, Sir William Stirling Maxwell. Sadly, she died four months later, in June 1877. Today she’s remembered for her novels and poems, but this lady deserves as big a nod for her legal and political acumen, and for her courtroom courage. ©

[Stanley]

Nature has done nothing by piecemeal. There is no inconsistency in her productions. William Smith.

A recent immigrant who’s greatly enriched our native land is Simon Winchester. Well before he gave up Britain for the USA, he gave up geology for news journalism (notably at The Guardian), then journalism for history and biography, and now he may be turning back towards current affairs. But his best books have been about his first love. They are Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded (2003), about the devastating eruption of 1883, and The Map that Changed the World (2001) which outlines a much quieter, yet more profound, process by which a common man with a common name changed the way we understand the earth beneath our feet. His name was William Smith, born in humble but respectable circumstances (the son of an Oxfordshire blacksmith) on March 23, 1769. Cared for by an uncle after his father’s death, William was, given his background, well educated. His talents won him a good apprenticeship, with a surveyor, at a good time to be a surveyor, for landowners were crazy to find coal beneath their barley, and then to transport the heavy stuff to where it was needed to fuel Britain’s industrial revolution. Smith prospered because he proved expert at finding coal and mapping canal routes, but while he was those tasks he noticed certain repeating patterns on and beneath the land’s surface. Everywhere the earth came in layers, and each layer, everywhere, not only were the rocks the same but they contained the same distinctive set of fossils. Moreover, the layers were not regular but folded, so outcrops here might be subterranean somewhere else. And so William Smith made a map, a famous map, a geological map, of Britain’s substrata. Winchester also details, in sometimes moving prose, how and why Smith almost lost it, how his original map was found, and how William Smith himself was rescued from poverty and obscurity by men who recognized that even a blacksmith’s son could, through self-education and careful observation, make a scientific discovery that changed the world. ©

[Tripps]

It's quite unusual to hear of someone who is still alive in this feature. I thought the name Simon Winchester rang a faint bell, and yes - it is he who was heavily involved a reporter during the Falklands invasion.

I first found this - which is from another of the journalists who were arrested as spies, and detained for the whole conflict. Eventually they released on bail, and flown back to UK..

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2007/ ... g.business

Strange - that account says they were seized in Argentina, but a book I have from the Sunday Times Insight Team has him in a bungalow in the grounds Government House lying on the floor dodging bullets, during the invasion on April 2nd. I'm unclear as to how he got to Ushuaia in Argentina to be arrested.

I don't think I'd be a good historian. My head's hurting already.
I also have a vague memory that I saw an interview with him once, and wasn't impressed.

[Stanley]

I ordered the book about Smith and the map that changed the world.

[Stanley]

When I get to Canada, where the laws will own me and protect me, that shall be my country, and its laws I will obey. George Harris, in Uncle Tom's Cabin, ch. 11, "In Which Property Gets into an Improper State of Mind"

The Underground Railway had many stations, many conductors, and more than one destination. Among its stationmasters were Jervis Langdon (in Elmira, NY), whose daughter Livy would one day marry Sam Clemens and teach him a thing or two about race. Another was my great-great-great grandfather John White, a refugee from North Carolina who called his Madison County, IL, farm “Liberty Prairie.” Family legend and a fragment of evidence suggest that White kept special hams for the passengers, leg bones completely intact, so they could be more easily carried on the long trek north. How far north? After all, even Madison County was “free soil.” But many escapees (e.g. quite a number of those liberated by Harriet Tubman) decided that life would or must be better in Canada, and just kept going. There were several reasons for this, the most important that the Canadian border put them beyond the reach of all but the most brazen slave hunters. But it was also believed (and letters and word of mouth tended to confirm it) that Canada was a better place. One snippet of evidence for this was that when (1834) the British empire abolished slavery, Ontario courts and its legislature consistently held that all blacks—whatever their prior status—became subjects of the crown, and on March 24, 1837, a court decision confirmed that this included the right (for male property holders, of course) to vote. There was some trouble over it, both white resistance and black push, notably in an 1848 spat in Colchester, Ontario (which by then was one-third black, so successful was the Underground Railway), when a local justice confirmed that right and heavily fined the (white) town council chairman who had whipped up the trouble. In Canada, non-property holders (white and black) and women (white and black) had to wait for the 20th century to enter into their full civil rights. On both sides of the border, we should remember that these advances were hard won and still need protection. ©

[Stanley]

Pretensions to moral superiority are devastatingly destructive. Mary Douglas

Just as the rightward lurch of the Republican Party left many without a political home, so in Britain the Conservative Party’s rejection of “one nation” Toryism cast adrift the cultural anthropologist Mary Douglas and her husband James, once the director of the Conservative research department. Both retained their Roman Catholic faith (and their affection for the old church’s Latin mass), and Mary continued to plow the dicey ground of cross cultural translation and bring forth luxurious harvests. Mary Douglas was born on March 25, 1921, in San Remo, Italy, where her parents had spent their delayed honeymoon. They’d married in Burma where her dad ran the opium monopoly as a British civil servant and her mom was the daughter of a senior judge in the Indian Civil Service. But Mary never lived in Burma, and her cross-cultural bent also owed something to being brought up by convent nuns after her mother’s death in 1933. After that came several Oxford degrees, from PPE (Politics, Philosophy, and Economics) to Anthropology, her first book (on bride price in Africa), marriage to James Douglas (in 1951), three children, further work on African anthropology, and then, in the 1960s, a move to cross-cultural studies, often focusing on religion. This included, inter alia, a brilliant ‘translation’ of Leviticus that highlighted the strict logic of its codes: ‘rules sanctioned by dangers.’ Much later, Douglas offered further insights into the authorship, literary structure and cultural utility of both Leviticus and Numbers. For most of her life, Mary Douglas taught at London University, but her work brought her many visiting appointments, including one to Lancaster University’s pioneering Department of Religious Studies. I met her there, attended one lecture, was struck by her brilliance, but—stuck in my historian’s silo—did not fully appreciate the relevance of her insights both to contemporary social issues and to my own researches in early American religious history. ©

[Stanley]

Whenever I meet in Laplace with the words 'Thus it plainly appears', I am sure that hours and perhaps days, of hard study will alone enable me to discover how it plainly appears. Nathaniel Bowditch.

The Chinese are today’s patent pirates, but before we whip up a Trumpian fury about their perfidies, we might remember how we transformed our agrarian republic into the world’s economic powerhouse in less than a century. Our mills, our great mines, our iron and steel industries, did not get where they got to by honoring European (particularly British) patents. Just ask Charles Dickens, for our piracies extended to publishing. Even Nathaniel Bowditch, whom we lionize as the epitome of the self-made genius, partook of piracy—in his case, literally. To give our myth its due, let’s concede his humble origins, for Bowditch was born a cooper’s son in Salem, MA, on March 26, 1773, and schooled in rudimentary fashion to become an apprentice in ships’ chandlery. Along the line, Bowditch developed an insatiable curiosity beyond conventional schooling, first algebra and then the calculus. To get at the latter he learned Latin, so he could read Newton’s Principia and copy it out in English. He learned French to translate Laplace’s Mécanique celeste, which enabled him to undertake his most famous work, a complete revision of a British tract on navigation, that became Bowditch’s The New American Practical Navigator (1802). Indeed young Bowditch did like the sea, and it was through actual piracy (not his own, admittedly, but a Salem friend’s privateering for the French) that Bowditch gained use of the complete scientific library of the Irish chemist Richard Kirwan to transform himself into a passable scientist. It was as such that Nathaniel Bowditch was offered chairs at Harvard (physics) and Virginia (mathematics and physics). But he turned both down, for he’d found a better trade through copying all (apparently) of the statistical papers of England’s Royal Society, and so it was that Nathaniel Bowditch, actuarial scientist, prospered mightily as president of two Boston insurance companies. It was the American way. Even so, generous to a fault, England’s Royal Society made him a member. ©

[Stanley]

The really real McCoy

Just last Saturday, these notes highlighted an 1848 Ontario case whereby a judge confirmed that the British emancipation act did indeed mean that Canada’s black men could vote. The case had been brought by blacks in Colchester, who had been (temporarily) barred from the polls by an overzealous and over-racist town council. Colchester was by then one-third black, almost all of them fugitive slaves from the American south, and among them were George and Mildred McCoy, Kentucky slaves who’d traveled to Colchester via the Underground Railway “terminus” in Detroit. In Colchester, their second child—of eleven—was Elijah McCoy, born on March 27, 1843. He and all the other McCoy brood were educated in Colchester, but in 1859 the family decided to move back to America, not too far, just to Ypsilanti, but George went instead to Scotland (Edinburgh) to undertake an apprenticeship and to gain certification as a railway engineer. Clearly the McCoys were a family of some resource, for in Michigan George and Mildred established themselves as tobacconists and cigar makers. George soon rejoined them and worked first for the Michigan Central. There, because of his race, he was first taken on in a menial job, but his employers thought again. That’s because, setting up a machine shop near the McCoy family home, George began to tinker. And in a long lifetime, McCoy’s tinkering made him at least moderately famous and at least moderately comfortable. He began with an automatic lubricator for steam railway engines (US Patent 129,843, 1872) and by the time he was severely injured in a motor car crash (in 1922; the accident killed his wife, Mary Delaney) George McCoy had taken out 57 US patents in total, mostly having to do with lubricating systems but including the folding ironing board and the whirling lawn sprinkler. In 2011, the Black Rep in St. Louis memorialized him by staging a new play, The Real McCoy, a catching phrase that probably did not originate with George but rather, in the early 1850s, as a Scottish advertising slogan. ©

[Stanley]

My job is to write about Chicago, and I can only do it here. Nelson Algren to Simone de Beauvoir, circa 1948.

I fear there are several competitors for the title of “Great American Novelist I Have Yet to Read,” but among them Nelson Algren and Wallace Stegner stand out for the number and span of friends astonished at my neglect. My delay may owe to indecision, whether between authors said to be very different or because the lists of astonished friends are also different (if not mutually exclusive). Today we go with Nelson Algren, because his birth date was March 28, 1909, but also because I discovered (only last year!!) that among the great loves of Algren’s life was Simone de Beauvoir. It was strange pairing. One might call it absurd, even existential. It left behind a cache of letters, now at Ohio State University, some of them published (A Transatlantic Love Affair) in 1998. Their mutual passion was at its most intense between 1947 and 1951, but even then they could meet only briefly, each of them too deeply rooted in their natural environments or, more accurately, their favored discomfort zones (Algren in Chicago, de Beauvoir in Paris) to sacrifice self for society. The affair persisted though, including trips to Mexico and North Africa, until dissolving in mutually expressed bile in the mid 1960s. Reviews and extracts suggest that de Beauvoir found in Algren a sort of antitype, not only a bit of the rough but also an un-American American, and that these were roles he was content to play, but it’s just a guess, awaiting further reading. For Algren, the Parisian promised a kind of alternative existence, even perhaps (and very oddly) domesticity. What’s fascinating is the evidence that their relationship, in its newness and its peculiarity, is thought to have influenced their writing, not least de Beauvoir’s essay The Second Sex (1949) and Algren’s novel, The Man with the Golden Arm, for which he won the National Book Award in 1950. I’ve read de Beauvoir, long ago, but as far as unread novelists go I may start with Stegner rather than Algren. After all, my mother gave me Angle of Repose, long ago, and it still reposes, unread, on my shelves. ©

[Stanley]

It’s ridiculous to talk so much about [sex], when it doesn’t count for anything. Dora Carrington to Mark Gertier, 1916.

Exactly who made bobbed hair a leading fashion among young English ladies of advanced ideas is disputed, including the déclassé notion that it was women at war work, 1914-1918 (long hair and metal lathes do not mix). But ‘the bob’ came in earlier, perhaps thanks to the very arch young society dame, latterly Diana Cooper, Viscountess Norwich), who seems to have bobbed her hair as a child, and then kept it so into her racy puberty. She was striking enough to make a fashion, but another candidate was Dora Carrington, painter, whose portraits, love affairs, and bobbed hair did so much to help define the “Bloomsbury Group.” Dora Carrington was born on March 29, 1893, in comfortable circumstances (the English “middle class” was then sharply defined) and quickly learned to be a rebel, first against her mother, a former governess who tried to be that with her children. She continued her rebellion at art school where she took lovers, perhaps starting with the established young artist Mark Gertier. His portrait of Dora (aged 19) shows a young woman of erect bearing and strongly held opinions who is observing rather than being observed, and on whose head is the very definition of a shock (I use the term advisedly) of dark, bobbed hair. Dora left the Slade School in 1914 already the friend of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, and Lady Ottoline Morrell. And Gertier of course, although the love of her life was Lytton Strachey, with whom (and with her new husband, Ralph Partridge) she set up house near Hungerford, Wiltshire. Strachey’s homosexuality made it an unusual ménage, but “unusual” was the way of things with the Bloomsbury set, and many pictures survive of al fresco dining at Ham Spray House, Dora, Strachey, and Partridge presiding and their very interesting friends partaking of tea or petit dèjeuners on checked tablecloths. Idyllic it was, but it ended in early 1932, first with Strachey’s death and then, two months later, with Dora’s suicide, perhaps a final act of rebellion. ©

[Stanley]

It is difficult to exaggerate the adverse influence of the precepts and practices of religion upon the status and happiness of woman. Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner

If anyone was ever defined by their name, it was Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner (born in London on March 30, 1858) whether her father, the freethinker Charles Bradlaugh, meant to name her after the original Hypatia, the 4th-century philosopher-mathematician, or Charles Kingsley’s popular Hypatia (1853), a romantic treatment of Hypatia’s life and martyrdom. The family sent Hypatia (and her sister Alice) to private school, but she learned as much from the French exiles, dissenters from the Second Empire of the bourgeois Napoléon, who crowded her home and from her father’s crew of (mainly) middle-class radicals that included (after her mother’s death) the eccentric Annie Besant. While Charles and Annie were being prosecuted for publishing a book on birth control (1876-78), Hypatia kept house for her dad and continued her higher education, catching it where she could (not an easy task at the time), and became knowledgeable in several fields, including chemistry and (of course) mathematics. Amidst lecturing on those subjects (at London’s Hall of Science), Hypatia wrote and spoke on freethought, and in 1883 she and Alice were elected vice-presidents of the National Secular Society. Now married to Arthur Bonner, she turned to motherhood (and the writing of children’s books) for a time, but was never far from the heart of various Victorian and Edwardian radical causes. Her life in general exhibited that strange combination of radicalism and respectability that was a characteristic of a large wing of the Liberal Party (her father became a Liberal MP before his death in 1891 and she in 1921-34 a respected London magistrate). Hypatia Bonner never sought the martyrdom of her namesake, in 415 CE stripped naked and torn to shreds by Christian monks, but nor did she ever desert the causes of radicalism, reform, and secularism until sidelined from public agitation—by a failing voice—after 1924. In 1935, her ashes were buried in her father’s grave, after she had traveled a fitting full circle. ©