Author Archives: residentjudge

The Rest is History Lord Byron: Scandal, Sex and Celebrity Part 2 Byron’s first big hit was “Childe Harolde’s Pilgrimage” which is in effect an autobiographical account of his travels during the Napoleonic War in Europe. He had first proposed writing a research project called “Sodomy Simplified” but he was talked out of it- good advice, I reckon. He escaped into the gay underworld, and sailed to Greece which was then under Turkish occupation, then on to Albania where he was fascinated by Ali Pasha. He saw himself as a future saviour of Athens, where Elgin was busy collecting his marbles. At the time, Athens was in ruins, and only 10,000 people lived there. Elgin’s plan at first was to make casts of the sculptures in order to conserve them, but once he’d had the scaffolding built etc, he decided to take them. No one objected. It took Elgin 10 years to remove them, and Byron’s friend Hobhouse saw it as an act of rescue. Byron, however, was outraged and mocked Elgin – he’d be horrified to think that they were still in the British Museum today! He finally returned home to England at the age of 23. His mother and several friends had died in the meantime, and he was restless.

Emperors of Rome. I haven’t listened to this for ages. I’m never going to catch up on all the episodes I’ve missed, so I’ll just catch their most recent series of podcasts on the Catiline conspiracy. It seems an apposite time to think about conspiracies, because our world is full of them today. Episode CCXX: A Disordered Mind, the Catiline Conspiracy I starts by pointing out that our sources for the Catiline Conspiracy mainly spring from the pen of Cicero, his enemy and Sallust who wrote twenty years after the event. Catiline was from a very patrician and aristocratic family, but they weren’t particularly wealthy. He had grown up during the Social Wars and the Sulla/Marius civil war, and there are suggestions that he and his family benefitted from the property confiscations that took part as part of these. But that wasn’t the worst thing he was accused of: instead there were a string of putative murders of two brothers-in-law and his son, accusations of incest with the daughter of his mistress, marrying for looks instead of money and having sex with a vestal virgin. In the end, the only one he faced court for was on a charge of extortion, and he bribed his way out of it. It’s interesting though- in 65BC Cicero actually contemplated being on his defence team, so even though he ended up Catiline’s sworn enemy, it wasn’t black and white at the time.

Rear Vision (ABC) U.S. Presidential Elections: Are They Democratic? This was actually broadcast on 4 February 2024, but it seemed to be pretty relevant at the moment, too. The Electoral College, devised in 1787 was intended to replicate Congress in terms of state representation, as a way of getting all the states on board. ( I’ve never heard it mentioned, but ‘colleges’ were in use in British Guiana in the early 1800s as well, drawing on a Dutch model, even though British Guiana was by then a British colony.) The Electoral College in US was not democratic, because it could over-ride the elections of its representatives if they were deemed unsuitable. In the 1960s there were calls for more representation, so conventions and caucuses became more important. Caucuses are party-controlled events, but the Constitution did not foresee the involvement of parties at all. The primaries are run by the parties in conjunction with the state government, and delegates are only bound in the first round of voting. You can see where Trump was getting his wriggle-room last election- and scope for him to do the same thing again.

The Rest is History Lord Byron: Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know (Part 1) I don’t think I’ve read any Byron at all but I know who he is. It’s the 200th anniversary of his death this year. He was the first international celebrity- when he died in Greece during the War of Independence, they rather facetiously liken him to the idea of Taylor Swift dying in Ukraine. He had an influence on later writers: the Brontes (Heathcliff, Rochester), vampires, Dorian Grey. Byron himself had a club foot (talipes). He was born to a mother who had married for the second time, and his step-father went through all the family money, and even though he inherited a castle at the age of 10, it was a ruin. He was brought up by his Calvinistic nursemaid, who sexually abused him (so much for the Calvinism). He was sent to Harrow where he was bullied, then he went to Cambridge. Then he lost weight and became handsome. He was attracted to boys rather than men, and is often the way, became aggressively heterosexual when he left Cambridge. As a lord, he was entitled to sit in the House of Lords. He had Whig sympathies but did not align himself with them, and so he delayed giving his maiden speech and was politically inactive. Impatient with such passivity, he decided to travel to the East.

99% Invisible Fact-Checking the Supreme Court An anti-gun group Moms Demand Action found that when the Supreme Court had knocked back a concealed-carry law because there was no pre-1900 precedent, there was in fact an 1892 precedent, in amongst the archives of a small Orange County courthouse. Their archival detective work didn’t change anything, but it does raise the question: who fact-checks the Supreme Court? This episode goes through the changes in legal thinking from Oliver Wendell Holmes who encouraged judges to draw on their experience; to Louis Brandeis who introduced the idea of facts, through to legal realism and the rise of the ‘amicus brief’. The current Supreme Court of America is wedded to the idea of “history and tradition” (which they seem to have thrown out the window when considering Presidential immunity) but what if the history and tradition is wrong? Really interesting.

Dan Snow’s History Hit In The Opium Wars Episode 2 Dr Jeremiah Jenne, a professor of Late Imperial and Modern China, and Dan follow up on the other opium wars that followed the Treaty of Nanking. In 1856 the Chinese seized ‘The Arrow’, a ship under a British flag (although this is disputed) which led on to the Second Opium War. This time the French joined in, and once again the British won, leading to the Treaty of Aigun which forced China to legalize opium and open up to missionaries and foreign traders. This was at an anxious time for Britain: the Indian mutiny was under way, America was heading towards Civil War and Russia was circling. The emperor refused to sign the treaty, so in 1860 the British and French returned, this time looting the Imperial Summer Palace and punishing the emperor. This was in effect the end of the 19th century opium trade, which was finally ended in 1907. The wars might have been over, but they formed the bedrock of Communist Party historical narrative right up to today, pointing to a century of humiliation which only now has been overcome.

The Rest is History Luther: The World Torn Apart (Part V) Luther had lit the fire, and now it was out of control. The Peasant Wars took on Luther’s strategy of appealing to the Bible, and more zealous preachers than Luther banned music, the mass, etc. The one man who could have quashed it all, Charles V, was distracted by political events elsewhere, as the culture wars turned into massacres. Luther, leaving behind his monk’s vows, married a former nun and tried to distance himself from the violence. He owed everything to the Elector of Saxony, and he could not be part of this bloodshed, even if he had wanted to. The Reformation that he had invoked spawned atheism, secularism and individualism. What if he had never lived: would there still have been a Reformation? Tom thinks that, in this case, Luther himself did make a difference.

You’re Dead to Me (BBC) Emma of Normanby. Never heard of her, but she was actually the wife of two kings (Aethelred and Cnut – better known as Aethelred the Unready and King Canute) and mother to two more, Harthacnut and Edward the Confessor. She was of Scandinavian origin, and on her second marriage to Cnut she had to negotiate a lot of jostling for the crown between half-brothers. In the end, she got two of her sons to share the throne, although she always claimed that she was ruling too. An encomium written to bolster her position likened her to Augustus, and drew on Roman and Greek history to legitimize her influence. In the end, her son Edward the Confessor turned against her, accused her of treason and stripped her of her land, although he later relented and gave it back again. But from here on, she was sidelined by her son. Features Professor Elizabeth Tyler and comedian Jen Brister (haven’t heard of either of them)

Dan Snow’s History Hit The Early Years of the British Empire Being brought up Australian, I tend to think of the British Empire as all that red on the maps of the world. But in its earliest days of empire, Britain (or rather, England) lagged behind the Spanish and Portuguese first of all, then the Dutch, then finally Britain at the rear. The episode features David Veevers, the author of The Great Defiance: How the World Took on the British Empire. At first, the British empire was the province of privateers, although there were connections with the crown as well. He emphasizes the fightback of the indigenous people, who kept the early colonists clinging to the coastline, unable to penetrate further and he reminds us that the East India Company was actually defeated. By the end of the 18th century, Britain had become better armed and was a stronger entity after the Act of Union. The accumulation of land was slow at first, but then continued apace.

The Rest is History: Luther: The Battle against Satan (Part 3) After questioning the idea that Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the cathedral, Tom and Dominic take up the story three years later, when he burns the Papal Bull in Wittenburg, precipitating a crisis. The Roman Church was asserting its authority, and Luther was defying the fundamental teaching of the church i.e. that sinners can pay for release from Purgatory. Moreover, the Ottomans were threatening Vienna at the same time. Printing had been around for 100 years, but Luther was a master of self-promotion and good at public events like book burning etc, which took place in the midst of parades of student floats and a carnivalesque atmosphere. The 95 theses were printed in German and Latin. The Holy Roman Empire was weak, with the aging Holy Roman Emperor expected to die soon, and the position of Luther’s protector Frederick of Saxony was very powerful because he would be electing the successor. Luther denied reason, philosophy and canon law- all the intellectual areas that the Church had branched into- and insisted that we go back to the Bible. Luther himself (did you know that his real name was Luder?) had his own ‘born again’ moment, and with all the bombast of the born-again, declared that others were not Christians because they had not done the personal work of believing. In October 1518 Luther was summoned to meet the Inquisitor Cardinal Thomas Cajetan in Augsberg. Ever the publicity hound, Luther walked there drawing crowds as he went. He and Cajetan had three meetings, but in the end Luther was released from his vows. Then followed a saturation-bombing of pamphlets written by Luther and on 3 January 1521 Luther was excommunicated by the new Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

Mary Beard’s Being Roman (BBC) Episode 7: The Whistleblower takes us to Britain in 61CE and the repression of Boudicca’s revolt. Procurator (i.e. finance officer) Gaius Julius Classicianus is appalled by the harsh repression meted out by the local Governor. So he dobs on him, and advises the rebels to wait until a new Governor is sent out, and they might get bigger terms. Classicianus has a huge tomb in the British Museum

All in the Mind (ABC) How to Help a Conspiracy Theorist: An Ex-Believer and an Expert Weigh In. This episode has three participants: Jane, a mother who has lost her son to conspiracy theories; Professor Karen Douglas, a researcher who studies them; and Brent Lee from the Some Dare Call It Conspiracy podcast. Jane is walking on eggshells with her son, and Professor Douglas had some suggestions about meeting him on neutral ground and curtailing the conversation. Brent Lee was the most interesting, especially when he described how his beliefs were shaken. He had believed Pizzagate etc. as being a satanic child sacrifice conspiracy, but when Sandy Hook happened, he just couldn’t believe that the parents were crisis actors, and it didn’t fit in with his child sacrifice scenario. He described his conspiracy beliefs as being like Jenga blocks, where you could reject one or two elements, but eventually the whole thing came tumbling down. All three spoke about the importance of maintaining contact, no matter how difficult it is.

Some Dare Call It Conspiracy. After hearing All in the Mind, I hopped across here. As a historian myself, I was attracted to History is Written by the Whiners: Neil Oliver Dismantled What? Handsome young Scots historian Neil Oliver, striding across the heather, the wind in his hair. Oh dear. He seems to have gone “off”. I’m not even game to watch any of his YouTube videos lest the Algorithm Gods decide that I’m actually interested in what he’s saying. That said, I wasn’t particularly enamoured of the snide comments by the presenters of this podcast, Brent Lee and Neil Sanders. The name-calling and snarkiness seemed unnecessary.

New York Times Podcast I listened to this so long ago that it is now completely overtaken by events! Inside Trump’s Search for a Running Mate Trump takes up so much oxygen that we haven’t really heard about who is going to have as Vice President. Michael Bender, a political correspondent for The Times, explains that this time round, Trump demands absolute loyalty (which he feels he didn’t get from Mike Pence), doesn’t want anyone who is going to cause him any problems, and definitely doesn’t want anyone who is going to overshadow him. As far as Bender is concerned, the front runners are: 1. J. D. Vance (author of Hillbilly Elegy), who criticized Trump in 2016 but was his supporter by 2020 when he became a Senator. He’s a good media performer, but there’s a risk that he will be too good and overshadow Trump. 2. Marco Rubio. Even though Rubio was very critical of him during his first term, he has since become an important behind-the-scenes worker and a good attack dog. 3. Doug Burgum from North Dakota, another rich white man, who made his money through Microsoft. He’s in his mid-60s and a rather mediocre media performer, and very anti-abortion and conservative. Wait and I see, I guess.

History Extra: Breastfeeding in the Middle Ages features historian Hannah Skoda. She points out that in the Middle Ages, breastfeeding was more about loving relationships within the wider family, rather than between mother and child. Colostrum was seen as poisonous, and breast feeding only began three days after birth and tended to last for two years. It was done casually, and there was no routine. If milk was insufficient, there was pap (a mixture of grain and water), a wet nurse or milk sharing between close acquaintances. Wet nurses were often slave women – remember that there was slavery in Europe. Florence stands out as an example where at the Foundling Hospital, women fed the abandoned children – although there is some evidence that they were actually the mothers themselves who couldn’t afford to keep their children (a practice that the hospital frowned upon). It was believed that breast-feeding worked as a contraceptive, which was a problem for wealthy women and especially their husbands, who relied on her reproductive fecundity.