BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

Robin Hood, Robin Hood, riding through the glen. Robin Hood, Robin Hood, and his band of men. Disney lyric from the 1950s.

Robin Hood: Men in Tights. Title of a Mel Brooks film, 1993.

The word ‘forest’ is itself an invasive species, imported into English—and into England. William the Conqueror, aka William the Bastard or, after 1066, King William I, used the word and the concept to establish royal reserves on which he (and his best nobles and favored bishops) could engage in the hunt or the chase. The idea has survived a long time. As a 1598 law book stated the matter, a “forest” was waste land set aside and “privileged for wild beasts and fowls . . . in the safe protection of the king, for his princely delight and pleasure.” But not for the delight and pleasure of the beasts, nor for ‘common’ usage. So King William and his forests disrupted Anglo-Saxon traditions by which wild (uncultivated and unenclosed) lands were, if not fully open to hunting, fishing, and fowling, then at least for gathering firewood and fodder, for pasturing pigs (who, like deer, fed much on nuts), and for many other rural pursuits, not all of them decent. Within the next century, William and his successors had set aside roughly one-third of southern England as royal forests and laid down increasingly stiff and brutal penalties even for trespass, let alone for cutting hay grass, and poaching was forbidden on pain of death or, worse, torture. This became a grievance so widespread as to give birth to the Robin Hood legends and, doubtless, a few actual Robin Hoods and their fair maidens. King Richard, he of the Lion’s Heart, and then his bad kid brother, King John, were great offenders. John, known in his youth as John Lackland, was especially energetic in making England’s forests into absolute preserves for him and his best friends. As is well known, those who were not his best friends took umbrage at John’s more general abuses, which led to the Barons’ Revolt and then, famously, Magna Carta, England’s great ‘charter of rights’ for those rich enough to enjoy them, signed and sealed at Runnymede in June 1215. What is less well appreciated is that King John was also forced, on November 6, 1217, in London, to issue the Charter of the Forest. This charter (in 1297 it was joined with Magna Carta in the ‘Confirmation of Charters’) gave back to the common people of England (at least those commoners who qualified as freemen) the right to gather wood, burn charcoal, cut peat, and run their pigs. It even removed the death penalty for poaching. Some provisions of the Charter of the Forest remained in force until the 1970s, and the whole thing is seen as basic to the widespread right of access that still characterizes English land laws and general attitudes—note the “Great Trespass” of 1932 . And some royal forests still exist, including large parts of Robin’s Sherwood. ©.

[Tripps]

Once again Uncle Bob exposes the great lack of historical knowledge that I possess. I'd say 'lacuna' but some might think that a bit pretentious.

Try this Richard the Lionheart for more information than you really need. Awful to think that issues mentioned are still a factor in the Middle East today.

This puts the current problems in the region into some proportion -

On 2 July, Richard deployed his own siege engines — which he named Bad Neighbor and God’s Own Catapult — and they managed to penetrate a huge hole in Acre’s walls.

The Christian armies began rebuilding the city, while Saladin collected money to pay for the ransoms of the prisoners. By August, Richard the Lionheart had grown impatient waiting for Saladin to pay the full amount, and executed 2700 Muslim prisoners. In response, Saladin executed all of the Christian prisoners in his camp. The Lionheart’s execution of Muslim prisoners was referred to as the “Massacre at Ayyadieh”.

I think I'd rather stick with the Disney version - or the red cloth bound Beacon Reader books from primary school, of fond memory.

[Stanley]

I agree with you David!
I haven't received yesterdays anniversary note. I shall drop Bob a line.....

[Stanley]

Not your weak and frail woman.

Though the sex to which I belong is considered weak you will nevertheless find me a rock that bends to no wind. Queen Elizabeth I.

The colony of Virginia was named in honor of Queen Elizabeth I, and we should probably let it stand that Elizabeth was, indeed, ‘the virgin queen.’ At any rate, she certainly never married, thus ending the Tudor dynasty, and thus (also) generating a rumor industry about her love life (Did she? Didn’t she?) that has kept publishers busy for almost five centuries. It’s an argument about nothing much. Elizabeth I reigned for decades, infuriated two or three popes, enticed monarchs and several crown princes, and managed a religious establishment that, by hook and crook, made England indubitably Protestant. If you are looking for a truly scandalous history, you’d do better to pick Elizabeth’s childhood friend, Lettice Knollys, born near Oxford on November 8, 1543. By birth she was Elizabeth’s cousin, and of a safely Protestant noble family, rich too, and well-bred enough to become one of four ‘ladies of the bedchamber’ when Elizabeth was crowned in 1559. Aged 17, she married Walter Devereux, soon to become 1st earl of Essex, and embarked on a troubled career that involved three marriages, several sexual affairs (real and rumored), a rumor that she’d poisoned the 1st earl (probably untrue), a suspicion that she’d encouraged her son (2nd earl of Essex) in his treason of 1601 (ill-meant and probably ill-founded), and gotten herself expelled from Elizabeth’s court. Rumor had it that the queen was jealous of Lettice’s beauty. Perhaps so, but Elizabeth was certainly infuriated by her cousin’s marriages without royal consent, never mind her affairs. Through it all, Lettice Knollys moved from being countess of Essex to being countess of Leicester, dowager countess twice, and all the while maintaining control of her Knollys inheritance and her marriage jointures. That control was sometimes tenuous, particularly during the Essex troubles of 1601 (during which her third husband was also executed), but Lettice found the going easier in the reign of Elizabeth’s chosen successor, James Stuart. She was readmitted to court, found innocent of wrongdoing against either of her first two husbands, and lived out her long life in comfortable retirement, usually as houseguest to her grandson the 3rd earl of Essex, holding her own court at Drayton Bassett (in Staffordshire), and walking at least a mile each day. When Lettice died, aged 91, on Christmas Day 1634, she was widely mourned as the last of the Elizabethans, a noble survivor of a great era. She wanted to be buried with her second husband, at Warwick, the lover with whom she may have plotted to poison her first husband. But probably not. ©.

[Bob sent the missing one.....}

Jam and Jerusalem

Jam and Jerusalem. A popular saying about the Women’s Institute (WI) of England and Wales.

The United Kingdom did acquire a female prime minister in 1979, and then another in 2016, but neither represented a fundamental advance in gender equality. Both became political leaders through palace coups, the ‘palace’ in question being the Conservative Party. Elsewhere in the 20th century the more common way forward for women was through public service, not political leadership. One could hardly find a better example of this than Gertrude Mary Denham. She was Lady Denham by virtue of her 1903 marriage to Lord Denham, but her public services would her a “Lady” in her own right in the Order of the British Empire, an honor first granted in 1920 and then added to in 1938 and 1951. Before all that, she was Gertrude Mary Pearson, born in London on November 7, 1884. Her father was then a leading Liberal politician, MP and business entrepreneur who himself graduated to the peerage (as 1st Viscount Cowdray) in 1910. By that time his only daughter was well on her way, not only as wife to Lord Denman and mother to two children, but in public service, first (as a matter of course, perhaps) working for the Liberal Party. Soon, however, she branched out, or flowered, into more general Good Works. Perhaps the World War helped her to overcome her shyness, but she was well (mainly self) educated, and her enthusiasms for golf and tennis probably helped, too. After wartime service for soldiers’ institutes and charities (for which she got her first CBE), she became ever more closely identified with the love of her life, the Federation of Women’s Institutes, in its origins an imperial (indeed, Canadian) invention. While helping the WI to transfer out of its wartime role within the Ministry of Agriculture, she was elected its chairman, a post she held for nearly 30 years. In my mind’s eye, the Women’s Institute remains indubitably English and aggressively “County,” full of tweeded ladies of considerable stature and commanding voices, but it had a presence in Wales, too, and under Lady Denham’s leadership it became full to bursting with good causes, not least her vision of helping women to gain experience of democratic meetings and public purpose. Some of these meetings could be stormy, teacup-style, and they’ve made good material for drama and satire, but under her leadership it grew to an astonishing 8000 chapters. At her retirement, the WI’s training school was renamed Denham College. Whether Lady Denham would have approved of the WI’s recent (2017) welcome to transgender women is an interesting question (probably so, I think), but her labors certainly deserved her 1951 recognition as Dame Grand Cross of the British Empire (GBE). ©.

[Stanley]

Coups or farces?

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Karl Marx, from “The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoléon,” 1852.

Thus Marx brilliantly speared and spiked the palace coup that brought on France’s Second Empire. Engineered—if that’s the right word—by a man who was only the nephew of the ‘real’ Napoléon, it seemed to be only an opéra bouffe imitation of the (First) French Empire. It had a longer run, to be sure. Louis Napoléon held court for 19 years, while his uncle (proclaimed “Emperor Napoléon” in 1804, lasted only a decade in power. But Napoléon I’s reign of power really began earlier, on the 18thBrumaire, année 7, or as we would have it today, November 9, 1799. It was indeed a coup d’état of far greater drama—and tragedy—than Louis Bonaparte’s of 1851. France was in crisis. Its revolutionary armies, in the field in distant places, were fighting too many enemies with indifferent success while, at home, its revolutionary republic was in shambles. The “Jacobins,” who had vaulted into power during, and as a result of, the great “Terror” of 1793, had been displaced by an earlier coup (30th Prairial, or June 18), and the establishment of “The Directory,” a five-man board headed by Emmanuel Sieyès. During the intervening period (up to 18th Brumaire) there had been a fair amount of farce—even Marx would have had to admit it—with people changing alliances as fast as later players in the classic “French farces” would change beds. Several of them were generals, a few who wanted to revive the revolutionary La république, some who wanted to restore the Jacobins, others (like Bernadotte) thinking imperially, and even reactionaries thinking of bringing back the Bourbons. But the eventual winner, the short man who would tower over them all, was indeed Napoléon Bonaparte. His army’s successes (in the faraway Levant) had made him into a popular hero and, doubtless in his own 0mind, a man of destiny, and with the clever help of his brother Lucien, he would enter in to the ruins—on the next day, actually, the 19th Brumaire, and proclaim himself “consul,” an interesting echo of Julius Caesar’s coup that had ended the Roman Republic 18 centuries previously. There were in fact three consuls, but in retrospect that seems to have been a mere formality. Napoléon’s further military successes, his unerring sense of public drama, and his popularity with the Paris mob, made his later enthronement as “emperor” inevitable. And if we except the blood streaming down his very own face on 18th Brumaire, it was bloodless. Some said he had scratched his own forehead, but that vicious rumor would soon be declared lèse-majesté. As old Louis XIV had famously put it, a century earlier, “l’état: c’est mois.” ©.

[Stanley]

A moral tale.

My picture is my stage, and men and women my players exhibited in a dumb show. William Hogarth.

As an undergraduate historian interested in 18th-century Britain I ‘knew’ William Hogarth as a skilled maker of satirical prints. He lampooned the vices of the poor and the pomposities of the rich, and his mastery of the caricature made him seem the grandpapa of the modern political cartoonist. His more famous series (e.g. “The Harlot’s Progress” and “The Rake’s Progress”) made him out to be a moralist, too, but one whose moral outrage was democratically directed. So in the “Harlot” series a vicar of the church studiously ignores Moll Hackabout’s first downfall. All that was worth knowing, but Hogarth was much more than a caricaturist with a cutting edge. William Hogarth was born in London on November 10, 1697, his father an insufficiently paid and ill-respected schoolmaster. So Hogarth acquired some knowledge of the classics and some real-life experience of an emerging class structure. Instead of following in his father’s scholarly footsteps, he enjoyed mimicking his elders, caricaturing them in the flesh perhaps, and he decided to make his way as an honest craftsman, a silversmith’s apprentice. He learned how to charge enough to make ends meet, dared enough to elope with his master’s daughter, and gained self-respect enough to set up his own workshop when he was only 23. There’s a presentiment of Benjamin Franklin in all this, “poor boy makes good,” etc., but Ben would make his way in a new society. Hogarth’s world was older, one in which simple virtue seemed to count for less. So in his continuing story of self-improvement there was a hint of anger. As Hogarth moved from engraving silver to engraving his sketches, he also learned how to paint. Taught himself, really, eschewing the usual way of copying the Old Masters and seeking to make himself a New Master, with his own style and his own message. In the process, he became a popular portraitist, especially with London’s rising middle classes. No doubt he tempered his tendency to mimicry and satire (why insult one’s patrons?) but the ability to caricature is also the ability to bring out good character, and we can imagine that Hogarth’s portraits pleased his subjects. In what might be called “Hogarth’s Progress” he became not only an accomplished artist but an articulate spokesman in favor of a British (or English?) art tradition, a kind of declaration of independence from continental culture. Hogarth’s satirical prints may have originated in the frustrations of his youth, but they came at the end of a career with many high points about which I remained ignorant for far too long. ©

[Stanley]

The characterful trimmer.

True virtue hath ever been thought a Trimmer, and to have its dwelling in the middle between two extremes; that even God Almighty Himself is divided between His two great attributes, His Mercy and His Justice. In such company, our Trimmer is not ashamed of his name. George Savile, Marquess of Halifax, 1682.

One reason that democracy is an ideal form of government is the perverse one that a democracy can’t produce an ‘ideal’ result. Here I’m agreeing with Winston Churchill, not Churchill the war hero but as the politician salving his wounds after his crushing defeat in the 1945 General Election. Democracy, he reflected, was the worst form of government . . . until he considered all the other forms of government that had ever been attempted. It’s good advice. In elections, democracies pay obeisance to the principle of “majority rule,” but in actual government democracies are tainted by compromises. These ‘deals’ almost always smell of horse trading, log-rolling, back-scratching, or, to put it plainly, your tit for my tat. In a system such as exists in the USA, with dark money rip-tiding into politicians’ pockets, ‘stink’ might be a better word than ‘smell.’ So when I look for the historic origins of the American system, I find them not in theorists like John Locke or radical idealists like the ‘commonwealthmen’ of the Puritan tradition, but in politicians like George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax. He was born in Yorkshire on November 11, 1633, and inherited a baronetcy when his father was killed in action fighting for King Charles I in the English Civil War. Perhaps this taught the child caution, but in all his politicking under the restored monarchies of Charles II and James II, he cannot be accused of cowardice. Indeed Savile (raised to the peerage in 1667) took many risky positions, some “principled.” He defied, in turn, chief ministers like Lord Clarendon and the Earl of Danby. He fell out very badly with opposition leaders like Lord Shaftesbury. But perhaps worst of all (certainly riskiest), Halifax enraged the later Stuarts: first Charles II over that king’s cozying up to Louis XIV of France, and then to James II over James’s conversion to Catholicism. Once allies, Halifax and James fell out over Halifax’s support of the Test Act (1673), an alienation that went sourer when James succeeded to the throne in 1685. But for these risks, Halifax always took out an insurance policy of some sort, and so remained at the center of politics. During this time he wrote a political classic, “The Character of a Trimmer” (1682) and it’s Halifax the Trimmer who deserves our respect. Or, if we cannot bring ourselves to venerate the ‘Trimmer,’ then at least we can see in him some of the human frailties of democratic systems. If our ship of state is to stay afloat, we all need to trim—at least sometimes. Right now, the Republican caucus in the House of Representatives needs to learn the very democratic art of trimming. ©

[Stanley]

Founding the National Negro Opera Company

Who are the happiest people? The ones with the most interesting thoughts. Madame Lillian Evanti.

In 1932 the music critic of the Washington Post reviewed a solo concert. Headlined “Mme. Evanti Wins Acclaim of Capital,” the critic elliptically identified Evanti’s race (her one spiritual “proved Negroid in no particular”) but she was known already to D.C. music lovers, and the concert venue, the Belasco, was one of the few local theaters that featured black singers and (moreover) allowed integrated audiences. But Mme. Lillian Evanti was no stranger to segregation. She’d been born in DC in 1890, while the city (and its congressional overseers) were still erecting legal apartheid as a jerry-built replacement for its history as a slave city. Her baptismal name was Annie Wilson Lillian Evans, and there’s little reason to doubt her race consciousness. Her paternal grandfather had been an operative in the Underground Railway, and her father was principal of the (segregated) Armstrong Manual Training School. Despite its name and its “tech” purpose, her formal musical training began there. She continued at Howard University as a music major, graduating in 1907 (and soon marrying her Howard professor, Roy Tibbs. For the next 13 years she sang, here and there, in the US, but always as a black singer and always at black venues. Eager for experience and frustrated by American racial conventions, Lillian Tibbs secured further training, changed her name to the more European-sounding Lillian Evanti, and enjoyed a successful career singing lead roles in provincial opera houses (in several nations). She also sang in a duet concert, in Paris, with another self-exiled American, Marian Anderson, matching her soprano with Anderson’s contralto. With her European experience, Lillian Evanti returned to the USA to try to break the racial barrier. She auditioned several times for the Metropolitan Opera in NYC (the last time in 1946) but was never hired. She sang at the Belasco, and in 1934 she was the second black singer to perform at the White House (at Eleanor Roosevelt’s request—the first black singers, the Fisk University choristers, had performed there in 1881). And it was with Eleanor’s blessing, and in partnership with several other black singers, that Madame Lillian Evanti founded the National Negro Opera Company on November 12, 1941. Its HQ was in Pittsburgh, and its first public concert, headlining Mme. Evanti and four others, was at the Syria Mosque, a Shriners venue. The NNOC lasted until 1962. Mme. Evanti outlived it, but never sang at the Met. She did appear, however, in the leading ranks of the 1963 March on Washington. She died, festooned with other honors, in 1967. ©

[Stanley]

Hollywood and Highbrow Culture?

Over the years, I have been subjected to many indignities, all for the sake of Art. If I ever catch him, I'm going to kill the guy. Bob Hope

Hollywood, caught between the box office bottom line and its fitful claims to high culture status, has forever had a problem with “Art.” When Walt Disney asked his workforce to suggest titles for a cartoonish film “of high quality,” many of the 1800 nominations evoked this tension, perhaps none better than ‘Highbrowski by Stokowski.’ This doubtless came from one of Walt’s many underpaid workers, possibly a frustrated unionizer. In any case, self-mockery was not yet the vogue in Tinseltown, so the front office plumped instead for Fantasia, and it was under that name that the film premiered in New York’s Broadway Theater on November 13, 1940. The film’s production story, however, recommends that we think of it as Highbrowski by Stokowski. Disney had already toyed with classical soundtracks fitted to cartoon action in a series called “Silly Symphonies.” In these, whatever theatergoers heard, what they generally saw was animated slapstick. “Silly Symphonies” owed as much to Vaudeville as to Vienna. But Walt Disney aspired to something higher, better, showcasing “the best of our medium” and using the talents of our “finest men.” The first result was The Sorcerers’ Apprentice, scheduled for 1938 release as a short, starring (visually) Mickey Mouse and (aurally) Leopold Stokowski conducting a catch-as-can orchestra of 85 Hollywood musicians. It was soon evident that production costs could never be met by a short (Mickey, though a mere celluloid rodent, wasn’t actually free labor; with Stokowski and his orchestra costs ballooned to over $2,000,000 in today’s $$s). So The Sorcerer’s Apprentice was grown into Fantasia, partly in order to make the idea profitable. Paul Dukas’s music to the Goethe poem (“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”) became the third of a six-act epic featuring compositions by Tchaikovsky, Bach, Stravinsky (Walt was ‘with it’ in modernist music), Ponchielli, Beethoven, Mussorgsky, and finishing (quite serenely, given all the previous sturm und drangexcitement) with Schubert’s Ave Maria. Of course production costs now exploded, and other difficulties (perhaps the lower brows of the paying public but certainly the war in Europe) meant that Fantasia did not quickly recover its expenses. Besides Stokowski (who withdrew his offer to do it for free) and his players, the total Fantasia payroll grew to 1,100 individuals, some of them overpriced, so it took postwar releases to make Fantasia, eventually, into one of the more profitable Hollywood spectaculars. And of course Mickey Mouse got no commission payments. The film is still worth seeing, and don’t forget to take your ears along with you. ©.

[Stanley]

The gardens at Giverny.

When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you, a tree, a house, a field, or whatever. Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow. Claude Monet.

There are no lines in nature: only color. Edouard Manet.

I never took a course in art history, but both my undergraduate roommates did. Then I married an student of the finer arts. I blame all three of them, equally and indifferently, for my lifetime confusion between Edouard Manet (1832-1883) and Claude Monet, born on November 14, 1840. But of course the confusion is mine alone, though aided and abetted by the devilish similarities between their names. Perhaps Paris was confused too, for both artists first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1865, where by custom artists’ works were arrayed not by subject of style but alphabetically, by surname. But their Salon entries were quite different: Monet’s two seascapes stood next to Manet’s Olympia, a nude of a very naked woman, so unabashedly unclothed that she outraged the critics. There is every reason to think that Manet intended to outrage, and the painting has been seen as a satire on the classic nudes by Titian (Venus) and Goya (the Maja Desnuda). Manet was the older artist, and born of the much higher bourgeosie. Monet originated in the petit bourgeoisie. Both men had displeased their elders by pursuing artistic careers, but of the two Manet could much easier afford the critics’ outrage. But it was Claude Monet’s seascapes, painted in plein air on the Channel coast near Le Havre, that held within them the real seed of “impressionism.” His revolutionary use or (better) translation of light—and seeming rejection of line—would soon mark him as a radical, and at later Salons he fared less well. Many of his paintings were rejected. Some years he didn’t even submit, and in 1882 he joined—some would say he led—the “Impressionist” anti-Salon that launched the school. Of course impressionism was, and remains, an astounding success, so as a style it had many fathers (not to mention a couple of mothers), but if the only two candidates for parenthood were Claude Monet and Edouard Manet, it is Monet who would win the laurel wreath. Manet has a better claim to be one of the parents of modernism in art, and should be content with that. At least I think so. And our tour of Monet’s gardens house at Giverny constitutes my evidence. ©.

[Tripps]

The artist Manet cropped up here last year, and I put up a picture of him "Portrait as a Flaneur"which I described as a self portrait. I was wrong - I learn today that it was painted by one Henri Fantin-Latour. I remain fascinated by the word "flaneur". They can't touch you for it. Remarkably the picture has been viewed 249 times to date - by far a 'personal best' which continues to surprise me.

Worth posting again I'd say. . . .

Flaneur Manet.jpg

[Stanley]

Not your average Christian king.

There will always be an England . . . 1939 song by Ross Parker and Hughie Charles.

If you’re ever asked (say at some future Trivia Night?) when England became Christian, the safest answer is “I’m not sure, but it was well before there was an England.” Beyond that it’s thin ice and stony ground, upon which only foolish farmers would cast their seed. Even before the fall of Rome, some (perhaps quite a few) of the inhabitants of the imperial province of Britannia had acquired various versions of Christianity, but from the fall of Rome the southern half of the island fell prey to successive waves of invaders (Saxons, Jutes, Angles, etc.), not to mention occasional forays of Celts and Picts from their remaining strongholds in fringe territories we now know as Cornwall, Wales, and Scotland. These conquerors or raiders were rarely Christian, and once established in “England” as this or that small kingdom or warlord they typically and bloodily fell out amongst themselves. Various princes always arose to feed off the scraps, and their princes or leaders sometimes became Christians, if for tactical reasons. The picture is further confused by later chroniclers who (whether they were Anglo-Saxon or Norman) invented past legends to suit their present purposes. What we can say with some degree of certainty is that the last really successful pagan prince was called Penda. He was born in Mercia, circa 600AD, and of a family noble enough to claim descent from Woden, a Supreme Being who was, apparently, of the same ethnic stock. Penda reigned for about 30 years and died on November 15, 655AD. If he died by the sword, which seems likely, he’d come to power the same way and then lived and reigned by the sword, too. The list of competing nobles and kings that Penda defeated and then dispatched is pretty long, first to gain power and then to keep it. Once recognized as ruler of Mercia, he set about the other usual business of early Anglo-Saxon kings, marrying his siblings and children off to the right sorts of people, in Mercia or close enough by to be useful friends. Overall, even for a pagan, he had a fearsome reputation, but he was tolerant to Christians within his realm—as long as they lived by Christian principles. If these Christians’ actions strayed from their professions, however, Penda could be merciless in his justice. This last trait makes me think that Penda might be of use today, in American politics. Alas!! Penda looks to me like one of those pagan princes who died too early. ©.

[SCG note. Sometime in the early 1970s BBC aired a film called 'Penda's Fen' and it was so popular they repeated it almost immediately. It can still be found by a search of their back catalogue and is well worth the effort....]

[Stanley]

My own little free republic. Mary Mann on her schoolroom.

I shall go wherever I am asked to participate for freedom. Mary Tyler Peabody Mann.

When her husband (aged 63) died in 1859, Mary Peabody Mann returned to Massachusetts where, perhaps as a grieving, she began work on The Life and Works of Horace Mann. Published in three volumes, it mentions her only once, and then not by name, as his second wife. So she was; but she had not been an anonymous helpmeet-wife, nor did she live out the rest of her life as a grieving widow. She was a power in her own right. Mrs. Mann was born Mary Tyler Peabody on November 16, 1806, the middle of the three remarkable Peabody sisters of Salem, MA: Elizabeth (1804-1894), Mary, and Sophia (1809-1871). They grew up in a nice, almost grand, brick-built house, but theirs was a life of genteel poverty. Their parents were both school teachers, never a very remunerative position, and although their father (a Harvard graduate) took up dentistry, his obsession with preventative oral health kept him from the moneyed side of that trade. So the sisters helped with the family school (which met in that house) and became independent-minded, Elizabeth as a pioneer educator of very young children, Sophia as a painter and the wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Mary got her wings tutoring rich people’s children in colonial Cuba, but returned to New England where she fell in with the educational schemes of her elder sister and of Horace Mann. He was then married, so her love and admiration for him had to be kept under wraps, but when his first wife died Mary became Mrs. Mann (1843). They took their honeymoon in Europe, traveling with another newlywed couple, Samuel and Julia Ward Howe. Typically, the four made a tour of European reformers, notably in education (in which Horace had already made a name for himself). The Howes’ marriage turned out to be an unhappy one, certainly for Julia, but within the Mann household Mary ruled, overseeing the scientific rearing (and diets) of their children, writing under her own name, consorting with other leading Transcendentalist reformers, and with all that serving as Horace’s secretary and agent while he reformed (or invented) public education, then went to congress, and finally moved to Ohio as the first president of the pioneering Antioch College, a subversive place that pushed higher education for young women, for people of color, and for any young white man who could stand the heat well enough to stay in the kitchen. After Horace’s death, Mary continued her reform career (often as partner to Elizabeth but also as author of reform tracts and prominent defender of Native American tribes) until she died in 1887. ©

[Stanley]

Opens November 17, 1869

Today, we actually achieve true sovereignty, true dignity, and true pride. President Nasser, speaking at Alexandria on the nationalization of the Suez Canal Company, July 26, 1956.

A canal connecting the Indian Ocean with the Mediterranean Sea might have been the eighth wonder of the ancient world, and a couple of Egyptian pharaohs (at widely separated times) almost managed it. Given their pyramids and their other marvels (not least their power to command labor) one might almost think they should have done it. After all, it is almost a water-level route. But when the ‘first’ Suez was completed (in the 12th Dynasty, circa 1850 BCE) it ran only to the Nile Delta (at Zagazig) , and worked well only when the Nile was in flood. It was soon abandoned, partly for fear of the effect of Red Sea salt on the fertile soils of the delta, and so it was left to a later imperialism—specifically, an Anglo-French consortium—to finish the task. The Suez Canal Company was better equipped technologically but perhaps less able to command the labor of thousands. This modern Suez Canal was ten years in the making, and opened on November 17, 1869. Running from Port Said on the Mediterranean to Port Tewfik near Suez, it instantly cut the trade route from Europe to south Asia by 6,000 miles (or a good two weeks for even the fastest of the steamers then available), so it was a pretty good deal as well as a remarkable undertaking in financial, technical, and political terms. The politics of it were greatly complicated by the then ambiguous status of Egypt itself, already struggling for autonomy within or independence from the Ottoman empire but, at the same time, an important prize in the imperial competition between European powers. The new canal, of course, made Egypt even more important, while the money it generated added the usual human vices to the mix. But it worked. Originally a one-laner for most of its 120 miles (with some passing places of course), the canal and therefore its adjacent territories became ever more enticing temptations, the more so during the two World Wars, then the Cold War, and the rise of Egyptian nationalism. Not to mention the cupidity of English, American, and Dutch oil companies in gaining access to the ‘new’ oil fields of Arabia and Persia. So it was no small matter when a fully-independent Egypt nationalized the Suez in 1956, provoking one of Britain’s last, least-principled and most disastrous imperial adventures, the so-called Suez crisis. Since then the canal has been greatly improved, allowing two-way traffic throughout and modern port facilities at both ends and now taking almost 100 ships daily. The Suez today would surprise even the pharaohs. And it is still a prize for the taking, which renders it dangerous as well as marvelous. ©.

[Stanley]

One incentive to write about Southern California was that it was so neglected . . . I wanted it to be taken seriously..
Geography is destiny. Esther McCoy.

The idea that we are made by our landscapes and climates did not originate with Esther McCoy, who was born way too late for that (November 18, 1904). She used it as motif, organizing theme, for her histories and critiques of southern California’s distinctive brand of architecture. This was not the garish, ersatz, commercial architecture of Los Angeles’s urban boulevards, where the building becomes its own advertisement (for whatever is sold within). Instead McCoy focused our attention on avant garde domestic architecture. Her favorite houses were those which opened themselves to a (mainly) balmy and dry climate, made the outside part of their living space, houses whose habitants enjoyed the views looking out, houses that (often) used great expanses of glass to enable the outside to look in. Her houses are indeed case studies of geography as destiny. But it was an odd fulfillment for a woman born in the banks of the Red River in the desperately poor southwestern corner of Arkansas. Such a person had to escape her first destiny in order to recreate herself, so McCoy’s route to her eminence as architectural historian and critic was a long one, and rather circuitous. It began early, when her family took her away from Horatio, Arkansas to the Kansas prairie where women like the radical Mary Ellen Lease had already made a splash, then to a local university where McCoy fell in love with writing. She finished her education, but not her learning, with a graduate degree at Washington University of St. Louis. From there, where else could an aspiring writer go but New York City, where she fell in with Theodore Dreiser (as his researcher-editor) and wrote short fictions for the up-and-coming New Yorker magazine. In 1932, all that was interrupted by a medical diagnosis recommending a warm, dry climate, so Esther became an Angeleno. There she continued to write (eg. detective stuff), and it was as an accomplished writer that she was hired by an architectural firm. Like any good writer, McCoy got into her subject and began, from 1945, to write as scholar and critic rather than as a paid publicist. Her big project was the five “Case Study Houses”, but her book on that (1960) was only the tip of a massive berg of architectural reviews, lectureships, and exhibitions that made her and, more, her subject both respectable and important. Her industry survives as a huge collection of essays, notes, photos, and films, now housed in Washington, DC, as part of the Smithsonian collection. She died, a child of a particular geographical destiny, in Santa Monica, in 1989. ©

[Stanley]

Who's a woman, then?

My strength comes from my team and my family. They let me be what I was, let me be happy. South African middle-distance runner Caster Semenya, whose “femaleness” was supported by Elizabeth Ferris, MD, of the British Olympic Committee.

Elizabeth Ferris was born a dairyman’s daughter on November 19, 1940, but was brought up in Soho, a not-very-salubrious part of central London. This was not a likely origin for a diving champion, but despite a disastrous beginning (her first lesson began with a belly-flop) that is what she became, winning her first national title at 17, the next year doing well (at the 3-meter springboard) in the European and then the Commonwealth Games. Of course the 1960 Olympics beckoned, not least because it had been forever since a British woman diver had competed successfully at that level. And so it was that, at Rome, Ferris took the Bronze medal, finishing just behind an East German and an American. After that, Ferris continued to compete nationally and internationally for a few years. She did well, not spectacularly, but her achievements were made more remarkable because, at the same time, she was qualifying as a medical doctor. Her University of London medical degree came in 1965. After her required internship (at the Middlesex Hospital), she practiced in the National Health Service in London and Gloucestershire. After the quick failure of her first marriage, she wed a university lecturer, birthed and mothered a daughter, and continued her medical career. But she never lost interest in sports, particularly in the issue of women’s competitions. When she had competed at Rome, women accounted for only 20% of the Olympic athletes, and the Olympic Games were administered by men both at the national and international levels. One might add that these were conservative men, who not only believed women incapable of certain sports, but who were insistent that sportswomen should be, well, ‘feminine.’ One might even say they were over-sensitive on both points, thus demonstrating that consistency is not necessarily a virtue. As a medical doctor and a sportswoman, Ferris began to attack the problem at several points, not least the questions of female strength and endurance, but also taking aim at the Olympic committee’s antediluvian definitions of womanhood, which she characterized as “genetically anomalous.” Thanks to Ferris’s untiring efforts, both in Britain and at the International Olympic Committee, more and more sports were open to more and more competitors who believed themselves to be women. Nearly perfect parity was achieved for the London Olympiad of 2012. Sadly, Elizabeth Ferris had succumbed to breast cancer (mainly, but not exclusively, a female disease) three months before the opening ceremony. But at London, her achievements were recognized and duly celebrated. ©

[Stanley]

The monstrous regiment of women.

God knows, brother, what a life I lead. It is no small thing to bring a young nation to a state of perfection. Mary of Guise, 1557.

The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, by John Knox (1558), the Scots rabble-rouser, had as its main target Mary I of England, whose third sin (besides being female and a queen regnant) was her Catholicism. Knox’s argument was with John Calvin, another Reformer, who had argued that, under certain circumstances, it was OK to bend one’s knee to a female. Their argument was biblical and metaphysical, but politics soon rendered Knox’s tract irrelevant. Queen Mary I’s death brought her Protestant sister Elizabeth onto the English throne. And then in 1560 another Mary bit the dust, Mary of Guise, who had become not queen regnant but queen regent of Scotland, exercising power on behalf of her daughter, whom we now call Mary, Queen of Scots. Knox had not included Mary of Guise in his trumpet-blast, partly because she was only queen regent, but mainly because he had hoped to browbeat her into accepting a Protestant settlement in Scotland. But in her Knox met his match. Here was one woman who could not be browbeaten into anything. Mary of Guise was born in France on November 20, 1515, eldest daughter of a dynastic marriage between two families who would write much of early modern French history, a Guise (father) and a Bourbon (mother). At 19, she was married off to an eminent duke and quickly produced two male heirs (the main business of any dynastic marriage). That might have been that, but the duke died. Mary, again a valuable dynastic property, was quickly wed to King James V of Scotland, thus strengthening the “auld alliance” between France and the northern kingdom, and again proceeded to produce children. But no male child survived. When James V died (in 1542), he left a widow and a six-day old daughter, Mary, Queen of Scots. Now Mary of Guise came into her own. Wisely refusing to marry Henry VIII of England, she plunged into Scottish politics, war with Henry VIII (a “rough wooing,” indeed), and dynastic negotiations. That she even survived was a miracle. But she proved an accomplished and courageous ruler, often in defeat, occasionally in victory, but always steadfast in her Catholicism and in protecting her daughter’s interests. In 1559 we find her in command of an army. But her heart gave out. Early in the summer of 1560, she died in Edinburgh castle, aged only 45, after a truly extraordinary life. As fate (and the Reformation) would have it, she could not be buried in Scotland. Instead, her lead-lined coffin took her home to France where a Catholic priest, no doubt taking John Knox to task, proclaimed her a proper heir to Judith, a biblical queen who had saved her kingdom from the Assyrians. ©

[Stanley]

NOT Gresham's Law.

Bad money drives out good money. NOT by Thomas Gresham.

In high school civics I identified “Gresham’s Law” as one of the products of the New Deal. An innocent error: but my friends didn’t let me live it down. Among my memorabilia is a plaque, badly engraved, identifying Gresham’s Law as receiving FDR’s signature in March, 1933. Gresham’s Law (that a devalued currency will drive “good” money out of circulation) was of course the invention of Sir Thomas Gresham, eminent entrepreneur of the Tudor age. Except, I am pleased to announce, it wasn’t. Nor, of course, by FDR. It was invented in 1857 by a Scots economist who was much more obsessed about “inflation” than Gresham ever was, and very anxious to identify sound money with the “gold standard.” Thomas Gresham was a genius at currency manipulation, but silver was his game and public credit his problem: specifically the public credit of the English exchequer and the ability of the Tudors to borrow money in Antwerp and Frankfurt. Thomas Gresham was born sometime in 1519, the son and nephew of prominent wool merchants who were already lending money to the Tudors (Henry VII and then Henry VIII). They were also acquiring the polish of gentility, and to acquire more of that valuable currency Thomas was sent to Cambridge before coming home to London and a freemanship in the Mercers’ Company. Thomas continued the family’s trade, and its lending, becoming more expert in the workings of the Antwerp bourse. The profligacies of Henry VIII’s reign, then the disorders of Edward VI’s and Mary I’s years, made it ever more difficult to obtain loans in Antwerp. This was not helped by the literal debasement (with tin) of England’s silver coinage. Gresham proved a genius at keeping English sterling afloat—and flexible enough to survive the abrupt transition back to Catholicism under Queen Mary. Mary might burn Protestant churchmen, but she couldn’t afford to burn the Protestant Gresham. It wasn’t until Mary’s death that, Gresham was once again able to get loans at good rates and put Elizabeth and her age on a sound bottom and a steady course. Meanwhile, Thomas Gresham continued his family’s quest for gentility, acquiring country estates and (from Elizabeth) a knighthood. But with the death of his only son, in 1564, Thomas Gresham turned to philanthropy to achieve immortality, including the building of a new Royal Exchange. That would burn down in the Great Fire of 1666, but Thomas’s last bequests (he died on November 21, 1579) have proven enough to keep his uncle’s “Gresham College” afloat. Even today, it’s an institution that doesn’t suffer from grade inflation, partly because it gives no grades: a variant on Gresham’s Law. ©

[Stanley]

Another Nottingham legend.

If there is a single figure who—Janus like—links mediaeval and modern Nottingham, then it is surely her. From a 1997 scholarly article on Agnes Mellers.

Today ‘Nottingham Forest’ plays football in England’s Premier League. The club has had its glory days, notably during the reign (1975-1982) of Brian Clough, but football fame passes quickly, and Clough has gone to myth. An older local legend is that of Robin Hood who, with his Merry Men, lived in Nottingham Forest, a royal preserve dating from the Norman Conquest. Early in the 13th century, they poached royal deer and robbed from the rich. Thus they infuriated Bad King John and his even worse Sheriff of Nottingham. Robin hailed from Locksley, at the northern edges of Nottingham Forest, and among his men was ‘Little John,’ so named for his gargantuan physique. Robin may be remembered in the name of Nottingham’s new city hall, ‘Loxley’ House. More certainly, the basso bell in the 200-foot clock tower of the magnificent ‘old’ city hall, an 8-foot high monster with the deepest tone in all of England, was called ‘Little John.’ But the whole Robin Hood story was an invention dreamed up two centuries after King John, and ever since improved upon (or, often, not) by legions of writers and film makers. But if you want a Nottingham legend based on a real person, better to choose Agnes Mellers. Her generosity is founded on fact, her founding of Nottingham High School. She was named (as “Agnes Mellers, widow”) in Henry VIII’s royal patent of November 22, 1512, and the patent, a bountifully illustrated parchment, can be read in the school’s library today. It gave the force of royal law to Dame Agnes’s will, dated earlier in 1512, where she laid down some requirements for her school: new, of course, but “ever more to endure.” Its “boys” were to be taught in Latin (and then, for the smarter lads, Greek) but also in religion. One master was to ensure the daily repetition (“with an high voice”) of the “Credo in deum patrem, etc.” And Dame Agnes paid for it, too, with cash gifts and various rent-producing properties, mainly town buildings but including her stone quarry at nearby Ancaster. “Agnes Mellers, widow,” did intend her school to be for boys, but it went coeducational in 2015, only 500 years on. Maybe she would have approved, but maybe not. Agnes did intend a “free schole”, which certainly didn’t last. Today most students are fee-paying, their places privileged. But her endowment still exists, and is the main support of the school’s scholarship program for poor pupils of the city, of whatever gender. Since we don’t know too much more about Agnes Mellers, there’s plenty of room left for embroidery, for the making of a ‘real legend’ and a better one, perhaps, than Robin Hood’s. ©.

[Stanley]

Astrologer and astronomer.

If the Lord Almighty had consulted me before embarking on the Creation, I would have recommended something simpler. Often attributed to Alfonso X of Castile, 1221-1284.

I’ve recently been reading about the medieval kings of England, to reconfirm my notion that they were (on average) a thuggish lot. At a glance, Alfonso X of Castile (born on November 23, 1221) was cut from the same cloth. He browbeat his nobility, sucked dry his peasantry, made war with his neighbors, fathered a respectably large brood and then used them to make good marriage treaties with other dynasts at home and abroad. As if to perfect the parallels, Alfonso X then died while engaged in a civil war with his second son Sancho. And he did construct a dynastic connection with the English crown, arranging a marriage between his half-sister and Prince Edward ‘Longshanks’, the heir apparent of King Henry III. To make that one stick, Alfonso renounced his claim to Gascony in France, but to back up his candidature (in the 1250s) as king of all the Germans Alfonso nearly bankrupted Castile. A cookie-cutter king? But there was another Alfonso X, ‘Alfonso the Wise’ (“el Sabio”). This Alfonso might make war on his Moorish neighbors, but he brought Moorish scholars into his court and made much of their learning. There, at court in Toledo, Muslim philosophers rubbed shoulders and traded ideas with other wise men of other faiths, Jews included. And over it all Alfonso (of course a “most Christian” king) presided. But there’s a good deal of evidence that he participated. He wanted his court to shine and sparkle. A poet and composer, Alfonso was also a lawmaker, a mathematician (geometer, to be more exact), and above all he was an astronomer. However, it was the 13th century, and it wouldn’t be at all accurate to call him a scientist. His stargazing was too intimately tied up with his astrology and his hope that astrology’s predictive powers would help him in the extension of his kingly power. But he was also entranced by Ptolemy’s calculations on the heavens’ structures and motions. One reason Alfonso had both Jewish and Muslim scholars at court was to get from them an accurate rendition of Ptolemaic texts which, on consideration, Alfonso found much too clever and complex. Surely his God would have made a simpler, more elegant universe. To push this idea, this Castilian king created the so-called Alfonsine tables. Those exist still, and some believe that (much later) they would help Copernicus to make his astronomical revolution. There’s much more debate over the real provenance of Alfonso’s quotation (see above) about “something simpler.” But it’s a catching idea, and helps to explain the continuing interest in Alfonso X as a most unusual, and very complicated, medieval monarch. ©.

[Stanley]

The Bootlegged Newspaper and the Great Migration.

No greater glory, no greater honor, is the lot of man departing than a feeling possessed deep in his heart that the world is a better place for his having lived. Robert Sengstacke Abbott.

Robert Abbott’s life began on St. Simon’s Island, Georgia, on November 24, 1870. But it took shape before that. His birth father, Thomas, was of the local slave aristocracy, the majordomo of a planter’s mansion and proud of his Ebo ancestry. His mother Flora, was thought to be of an inferior status. Her freedom had been purchased by her father, a mere skilled mechanic in nearby Savannah. So when Thomas died his family decided to remove Flora from the picture by suing for Robert Abbott’s custody. Flora fought them with the help of John H. H. Sengstacke, a mixed-race man whose father, a German sea captain trading to Savannah, had been so horrified by slavery that, at auction, he bought an enslaved woman, freed her, then married her. After defending Flora’s right to keep her infant son, John Sengstacke married her. In gratitude, Robert became Robert Sengstacke Abbott, and began to make his own story by learning how to print a newspaper (his father was minister in the Congregational mission church, and published the Woodville Times). After a college education at Hampton Institute, Robert earned a law degree at the Kent Law School in Chicago. Finding life difficult as a black lawyer, he founded a newspaper, using his childhood skills and learned talents, his landlady’s permission, and (he always claimed) five cents in capital. Robert Abbott made his creation into the most successful of Chicago’s black newspapers. It was (and is) The Chicago Defender. It defended the interests of its growing readership, which was overwhelmingly black. But its readers never saw themselves described as ‘black,’ or ‘Negro,’ or ‘colored.’ In The Chicago Defenderthey were “the Race,” the living center of the news. Abbott was most famous for urging southerners of the Race to leave lyncherdom and travel north to freedom, now by the overground railway, by automobile, on foot if necessary. Abbott’s emissaries were Pullman porters, and they carried The Chicago Defender south on The City of New Orleans (or any one of a dozen southbound night trains), to sell it or give it away. Readership grew faster than subscription lists, for the paper went freely from hand to hand to spite southern legislatures’ efforts to ban it. Abbott himself became a millionaire, and a generous one, not only for his Sengstacke and Abbott cousins in Germany and Georgia but also for that landlady who had, in 1905, let him use a room to crank out his very first Chicago Defender. His was an interesting life, and an exemplary one. Robert Abbott’s search for equality in life succeeded, and on several levels. His search for equality in spirit took him, in 1934, into Bahá’í. ©

[Stanley]

You can take a girl out of Salford, but you can't take Salford out of the girl.

Women never have young minds. They are born three thousand years old. Sheila Delaney.

In my freshman English, required reading included ‘classics’ (e.g. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) but also a brand new play, then only 5 years old, Look Back in Anger. I didn’t know much about drama, but even I could tell that this was no Shakespeare. I’d ‘done’ Julius Caesar and Macbeth in school, and though neither of the principal characters was wholly admirable, each possessed enough nobility to become a “tragic” figure. John Osborne’s Jimmy Porter had none of that. He delivers good lines, mordant to a fault, bitter to the end, but he’s a victim when the play begins and he stays one to the infantile last scene with his long-suffering wife (and Alison was no Lady Macbeth). Thus I was introduced, at a tender age, to the “Angry Young Men” of literature. They produced good stuff, and not only Osborne, not merely grim. Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim is hilarious, furious, and liberating. But little did I know that there was also an “angry young woman” of the same generation, and with much the same view of the world. She was Sheila Delaney, born into a working-class Irish family in Manchester, ironically (it would later be said) in the “Hope” Hospital, Salford, November 25, 1938. Later she would alter her name to ‘Shelagh,’ more authentically Irish and more self-consciously rebellious. And she had cause to rebel. Like so many working-class kids she failed her ’11 plus’ exams and was shunted off to the aptly-named “Secondary Modern” sector. As her teachers recognized something more in her than mere anger, she was translated into a grammar school. There she learned to express in words the limitations imposed on her by her sex and her class. Such a cultivar was she, and one that might bear sour fruit; instead she produced a new drama, A Taste of Honey. Only a taste!! Delaney later told her daughter that the play was inspired by a Manchester performance of Waiting for Godot (when Delaney was a theater usherette). Her play was first staged by a theater cooperative in Salford. Almost immediately, it put Delaney on the map. The play moved to London, then Broadway, collecting awards all the way and making Delaney everyone’s angry young woman. It was a part she played well, and fruitfully, for the rest of her life, expanding her talents into short fiction, screenwriting, and even a couple of brief forays into acting. Perhaps her most characterful work was a short film, The White Bus, a vehicle in which a number of pompous misfits “observe,” as if on a tour, the realities of life in a northern industrial suburb. I have yet to see it, but I want to think of it as providing a way for Shelagh Delaney to see herself as others had mistaken her. Delaney died at home in 2011, cared for by her daughter, Charlotte. ©

[Tripps]

The birthday has been noted elsewhere with a photo - good film - especially Dora Bryan.

Shelagh Delaney.jpg

[Stanley]

Battlefield surgeon.

I don’t wear men’s clothes; I wear my own clothes. Mary Edwards Walker.

So said Mary Walker when she was arrested, in New Orleans, for going about in trousers and a top hat. She was at that time (1870) the only woman to have been awarded the (new) Congressional Medal of Honor, for her battlefield valor in the Civil War. That was taken away from her in 1916, by a congress dominated by southerners (and anti-suffragists), but then in 1979 restored to her by another southerner, President Jimmy Carter. In belated recognition of Mary’s valor (and of her steadfast support of women’s rights), her old home town, Oswego, NY, erected a life-size memorial statue of Mary Walker, speaking at a lectern. In bronze, she wears ‘her own clothes,’ but less outrageously than in New Orleans: bloomers gloriously unhid by a short skirt. Her last word on the subject (in 1919, aged 87) was to insist to be buried with her medal of honor and in her own clothes, for she was not a woman to be fiddled around with by mere congresspeople. And why should she be? Mary Edwards Walker was brought up to be herself, born in Oswego on November 26, 1832. Her parents (Alvah and Vesta) were already committed abolitionists and, with their large family, not averse to the utopian notions then sweeping the Northern states. So they set up their own school, called it a Free School, and admitted boys and girls indifferently. There, from an early age, Mary wore bloomers, joined in the boys’ work (a sort of tuition-in-kind), and got a good enough education to start teaching school in a neighboring town. Good enough, too, to enter Syracuse Medical College as its second (behind Elizabeth Blackwell) female student. After her MD, she married another doctor, but it didn’t stick, and so when the Civil War came she volunteered as a medical officer for the Union Army. She was turned down, of course, but went to the battlefields as a volunteer. There her competence and courage won her a place as an official surgeon. There she continued to serve, other than a brief spell inside a Confederate prison where, of course, this panted woman was suspected of being a spy. Why else would she wear trousers? After the war she continued to agitate for female freedom, continued to dress outrageously, and even opened her house as a refuge for others of her persuasion. But the main branches of the suffrage movement were dominated by women who chose to argue that the vote would not damage “femininity” as it was then understood. They didn’t want a woman in trousers standing at their lecterns: far too “mannish.” So Mary Edwards spoke over her own lecterns. She remains the only woman to have been awarded the Medal of Honor. For her bravery. ©

[Stanley]

A gentleman and a scholar.

There are no races; there are only populations. William White Howells,

In my teaching I avoid the use of “race” as an organizing concept. This is not to deny the importance of “racism” in US history. That poison has been distilled, concentrated, used by those who have insisted on “race” as a scientific concept, and that human variations (of intelligence or musicality or speed) are best explained as ‘racial.’ An early example of this nonsense was Dr. Josiah Nott’s cranial fixation. Nott (1804-1873) was a surgeon, in several ways a ‘real’ scientific pioneer. He was also an Alabama slaveowner who needed to justify slavery. So, ‘scientifically,’ he excavated a Mobile slave cemetery to measure its skeletal crania. Unsurprisingly, he espied a pattern which convinced him that enslavement was the best fate that someone of African descent could expect. Slaves’ brains were smaller and less differentiated than the brains of their owners. Eureka!!! Nott was inspired by the nonscience of phrenology and motivated by his need to defend racial slavery. Nott kept most of his ‘black’ skulls, and so we now know that he was measuring his own racism, not a “race.” But Nott’s ideas lived on, in one form or another, and were still strong on American campuses in the early 20thcentury. That’s when William White Howells (born in New York on November 27, 1908) began his anthropology career with his Harvard PhD. Indeed one of his Harvard mentors, Roland Dixon, had just published The Racial History of Man. And then, of all things, young Howells began research measuring the crania of 15 different “races.” But Howells, though well-born into America’s WASP aristocracy, was inspired by science, understood statistics, and was also guided by Franz Boas’s devastating review of Dixon’s book. In White’s first book, and then more thoroughly in later studies, he found no significant variations in skull capacities between “races.” The most significant variations were those within discrete populations (Asian, Melanesian, African, European, etc.). And White took a lead from physiologists on the question of whether the brain size of homo sapiens was a determining factor in human intelligence or adaptability. So Howells was more than ready to take on Carleton Coons when the latter’s The Races of Man hit the bookshelves in 1962. I was made aware of that debate by my Psych 1 professor at Penn. For me, it’s Howells as teacher that strikes the stronger note. In his first real faculty job, at Wisconsin in the 1930s and 1940s, William White Howells played a leading role in creating the undergraduate “liberal studies” program. As his memorialists at the National Academy of Science wrote in 2005, William White Howells “was truly a man of many excellent parts.” ©