Tag Archives: History

I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 16- 23 February 2024

Posted on March 9, 2024 | 1 comment

Revisionist History This episode The IT Revolution creeped me out a bit and made me angry. It’s sponsored by T-mobile for Business, so it’s no surprise that his guests, two Chief Information Offices for different enterprises (one a hospital, the other a farm-machinery franchise network) talked positively about the changes that will come about from 5G. The hospital CIO lost me when she kept insisting that patients were consumers and customers, and that they all want access and self-service. Having just tried to make an appointment for a screening test and the insistence that I create a 15 character password, I was in little mood for self-service. She lauded the idea of Artificial Intelligence listening in on a consultation between specialist and patient (oops, consumer) and automatically scheduling your follow up appointments for you. Now that’s powerlessness- not only are you a cog in their machine, but it’s not even a human controlling it! Grump.

History Extra Love and Marriage in Austen’s Era This episode features Rory Muir is the author of Love and Marriage in the Age of Jane Austen (Yale University Press, 2024). He points out that there was often a large age gap between men and women when they married (largely because men had to work to get the money in order to get married) and 12-25% of English people did not marry at all. The slur of “old maid” only applied to poor people: wealthy single people had a rich, good life. Weddings were always held in the Anglican church for legal recognition, and usually before 12.00 noon followed by a wedding breakfast. It was possible to obtain a licence from the Archbishop of Canterbury that would allow you to marry at any time of the day, in whatever place. It was necessary to be 21 years old and have parents’ permission to marry, after the Banns had been read, so this caused a surge of elopements, particularly to Gretna Green over the order, where women of 12-14 years could be married. Honeymoons were usually held at a house of a friend, and it was common for a parent or friend to accompany the honeymooning couple. If the marriage was unhappy, there were few legal protections. There were only a total of 100-odd divorces in the fifty years between 1750-1800. Couples could separate, but not re-marry.

Dan Snow’s History Hit The City of Alexandria Well blow me down, the city of Alexandria is in Egypt! I always thought it was in Greece! It was founded by Alexander the Great, and it was a planned city, complete with a sewerage system and uninhabited space, located as a key node for the Eastern/Mediterranean trade. It was said to be the first city to reach a population of a million, and was known as a liberal, multicultural city, the site of the Lighthouse of Pharos and the Library of Alexandria. With the rise of Christianity and then the Islamic conquest of Egypt, it became less tolerant. The Muslims feared attack by water, so they shifted their capital inland but Alexandria remained unique in that it was IN Egypt, but not seen AS Egypt. (So perhaps me not knowing that it was in Egypt isn’t such a sin after all). Episode features Islam Issa, Professor of English at Birmingham City University and author of ‘Alexandria: The City that Changed the World’.

The Rest is History Britain in 1974: State of Emergency (Part 1) Dominic Sandbrook, one of the presenters of this podcast, has written several books about 20th century Britain, so this series of four episodes on Britain in 1974 is right up his alley. 1974 has been claimed as the worst year in post-War British history with the collapse of the social-democratic consensus, retreat from empire (albeit without any serious consequences), deindustrialization and inflation. After the failure of the Wilson Labor government, Tory Prime Minister Edward Heath took over. Despite being a Tory, he was from a humble background, but he himself was spoiled as a child and socially insecure, having adopted a patrician accent to hide his background. He was seen as a modernizer, in the mould of Kennedy. But he faced strikes, most particularly by the miners, who had not struck since 1926. In 1973 the Heath government adopted “Stage 3” which involved limiting pay increases unless a threshold for inflation was reached, in which case wages would go up automatically. They thought the threshold would never be reached, but it was with the OPEC Oil embargo. So for the fifth time in 3 years, the government declared a state of emergency when the coal miners went on strike, imposing a 3 day working week, no heating, no television after 10.30. Much as occurred with COVID recently, the government was blamed for the measures they took. Then the IRA bombings started on the mainland. The leader of the union movement offered Heath a ‘once-off’ offer that any rise granted to the miners would not extend to other workers (I don’t know how he could promise that) but Heath refused. Eventually he called an election at the end of February 1974.

The Daily El Salvador Decimated Gangs. But at What Cost? I’ve been horrified by the photographs of shaved, skinny, humiliated prisoners and overcrowded prisons in El Salvador, but many people in El Salvador embrace these policies for the success they have brought in eliminating the gangs that made the country unliveable. In this episode, even a mother whose son was -it seems- arrested while innocent and held incommunicado for two years still accepts that her son’s life is the cost for peace in the country. There’s a series about Bukule on Radio Ambulante that I must listen to one of these days (it’s not exactly relaxing listening to a podcast in Spanish!)

Being Roman (BBC) Rome’s Got Talent This time Mary Beard takes us to a tombstone, set high up on a wall bordering a busy street. It’s a tombstone- well, a replica really- for 11 year old Sulpicius Maximus who died soon after appearing at the Roman games of 94AD in a poetry competition in front of Emperor Domitian and 7000 other people. His parents had been slaves, and Sulpicius knew that education was his ticket to social mobility. Apparently the poem that he made up on the spot (the rules of the competition) seemed to draw on a legend from the past, but perhaps it had a message for his parents (i.e. “back off, Mum and Dad”) to which his parents were completely oblivious. The original tombstone, which today stands in a museum in a disused powerstation had been incorporated into the city walls, and was only re-discovered when the Italian Nationalists blew the walls apart in 1870, revealing the pieces of the tombstone.

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‘An Intimate History of Evolution: The Story of the Huxley Family’ by Alison Bashford

Posted on January 28, 2024 | 2 comments
2022, 419 P & 60 pages of notes

Sometimes you just have to shut a book when you reach the end and say “Wow!” That’s what I did when I finished reading Alison Bashford’s An Intimate History of Evolution, a dual biography of Thomas Henry (T. H.) Huxley and his grandson Julian Huxley that also drew in all the ‘little’ Huxleys as well. Not that there was anything ‘little’ about this family: it lay at the heart of 19th and 20th century British intellectual life, with links that extended to other illustrious families of science and letters like the Arnolds, Darwins, Galton and Wells.

While family biographies are nothing new, Bashford shapes her approach through two particular Huxley family members: T. H. Huxley (often known as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’) born 1825, and his grandson Julian, born 1887. This jump between generations, largely skipping the intervening generation, breaks up the linear progression of the narrative:

The younger man constantly fashioned himself after his Victorian grandfather, pursuing those signature Huxley knowledge-quests, some profound, others simply grandiose. They were both remarkable and both, on occasion, tortured. Writing these natural scientists together permits a kind of time-lapse over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, precisely because they were so similar. We might even think of them as one very long-lived man, 1825-1975, whose vital dates bookended the colossal shifts in world history from the age of sail to the space age; from colonial wars to world wars to the Cold War; from a time when the Earth was 6,000 years old according to Genesis, to a time when it was 4.5 billion years old, according to rock samples returned from the Apollo missions.

p. xxiii

T. H. Huxley was born into an “educated but struggling and socially declining” family (p.xxx) and had only two years of formal education before being thrown on his own resources as an autodidact. He was apprenticed to anatomists in the family, but did not complete his medical degree. He joined the navy and was made Assistant Surgeon on H.M.S. Rattlesnake, which embarked on a voyage of discovery and collection in Australia and New Zealand. (Actually, there are several references to Australia in this very English biography- perhaps reflecting Alison Bashford’s current position at UNSW). His work on jellyfish and other marine creatures gained him admission to the Royal Society but despite the acclaim he received for this work, he still had to fight for his position as professor of paleontology and natural history at the Royal School of Mines. His grandson, Julian, had a much easier path. His father, Leonard, had benefitted from the upward social and financial mobility of his father, and so Julian attended Eton and then Baillol College at Oxford from 1906. He, too, studied marine life, but he made his scientific name in his study of grebes (birds). He was invited to set up a Department of Biology at Rice University before World War I intervened, and he later moved to Kings College London as Professor of Zoology. He resigned this position to work with H.G. Wells and his son on a book The Science of Life before travelling to East Africa to continue his ornithological work . He returned to London to take up a position running the London Zoo in 1935, followed by a role in the creation of UNESCO and the WWF. He was a fore-runner to David Attenborough in popularizing the natural sciences and conservation through radio and television broadcasts and documentaries.

But both men’s work was broader than this. Their shared interest in evolution, albeit separated by the discoveries in the decades between their work, involved them in the intense debates of their times. Darwin’s theory of evolution (which T. H. Huxley was not initially convinced by, despite later becoming one of its major exponents) led to explorations and assertions about Homo Sapiens, anthropology, political biology and finally led to eugenics, of which Julian was a leading figure although distancing himself from its use in Nazism. Julian looked forward to transhumanism: a landscape that we have yet to traverse.

Both men were interested in the psychic and spiritual realm, particularly in later life. T. H. Huxley coined the religious term ‘agnostic’, meaning a humble ignorance and openness to further knowledge rather than its more hard-edged nature today. He approached the Bible as a historical document, and during his life wrote as much on Biblical themes (albeit critically) as he did on some of his natural science interests. He enjoyed jousting on religious matters with his sister-in-law, Mary Augusta Ward nee Arnold, who as well as writing rather dire ‘improving’ literature and being active in the anti-suffrage movement, was also a strong supporter of women’s education and settlement houses as part of the social reformist movement. His grandson Julian also developed an interest in neo-romanticism and was attracted to the ideas of the Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin with whom he shared a quest towards cosmic unification.

But both men shared the family inheritance of mental illness, in particular an immobilizing depression which saw Julian committed to psychiatric hospitals at various times during his life. This combination of family brilliance and family mental illness is perhaps what gives the title – An Intimate History of Evolution its unusual adjective. Here the theory of inheritance becomes personal.

The structure of the book reflects Bashford’s rejection of a single line of chronological narrative. The book is divided into four parts thematically: Genealogies; Animals; Humans and Spirits, and although dealing first with T.H. and then Julian in each of these themes, the timeline and focus does jump from one man to the other. Nor does the book focus on them alone: the women of the family, particularly T. H.’s wife Henrietta, Mary Augusta Ward, Julia Arnold are also referenced throughout. Other Huxleys especially Julian’s brother Aldous, and the religious writer Francis Huxley are also present. Bashford captures well the network of knowledge and intellectual influence which shaped, and in which the whole family moved.

Bashford’s own grasp of T. H. and Julian Huxley’s work is impressive. As a historian of science, she traces the contours of their scientific work, making it intelligible – and even, when you’re reading about jellyfish, interesting. She is just as comfortable teasing out their philosophical and religious work, which does become rather esoteric at its edges. It is not a particularly easy read, although I made it harder for myself by stopping for about a fortnight to read other things. But she is talking about big ideas – indeed, the biggest of ideas- and as a reader you have to work as well. She is writing about a family who were a tour de force in their intellectual milieu, and this book is Bashford’s own tour de force of biography, science, philosophy and history as well. Brilliant

My rating: 10/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

Read because: I heard a podcast on it.

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I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 1-8 December 2023

Posted on December 23, 2023 | 1 comment

Conversations (ABC) Academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert was imprisoned for 804 days in an Iranian prison after being arrested at the airport as she was leaving a conference. In Kylie Moore-Gilbert’s freedom fight she talks about her long period of imprisonment, initially in solitary confinement, and then in a series of women’s prisons. She conveyed so well the crushing nothingness of solitary confinement, and her bewilderment at not being able to speak the language and feeling completely cut off from the outside world. The bravery of some of her fellow prisoners in reaching out to her is amazing, as it put all of them in great danger.

The Rest Is History Episode 386 The Fall of the Aztecs 3: The City of Gold. Backtracking a bit, Dominic and Tom reiterate that we really don’t know what Malinche’s role is all this. She hated the Atzecs, and certainly historian Camilla Townsend plays up her agency. We can’t trust the Spanish diaries because everything is written to protect their own actions. Because they’re “cos-playing the Greeks and Romans”, everything is filtered through a classical lens. Certainly Cortez has no idea what he’s facing- is he brave, or crazy? On his trip inland he crosses over the borders of the Tlaxcalans who, unusually among the surrounding tribes, did not pay tribute to Montezuma. They attacked Cortez but his revenge attack at night was violent and ultimately effective. He’s in effect marketing his power here, and after three weeks the Tlaxcalans welcome him into their city where they wine and dine them. The Tlaxcalans recruit the Spaniards, rather than the other way around, and together they go off to sack the Tlaxcalan’s enemies the Cholulas, then they turn towards Mexico. They stop above the valley, marvelling at the city which dwarfs Seville. They are getting mixed messages from the Aztecs: they give them presents but then say that Montezuma is too busy to see them. On 8 November the Spaniards clatter along the causeway with the Tlaxcalan’s (Montezuma’s enemies) and are met by Montezuma himself. It’s implausible that Montezuma would have just given in – this is probably Spanish rationalization after the event. Montezuma puts them up, although there’s no mention of what happened to all the Tlaxcalans. The Spanish really don’t know whether they’re guests or prisoners.

History in the Bible. I’m preparing for the Christmas service at our Unitarian Universalist fellowship, where I’ll be considering the historical context in which the nativity story takes place. I’ve been listening to my Rome podcasts for some years now (as you know) and so I’ve been looking at King Herod and the political situation in Judea for my presentation. In 2.19 What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us? Australian podcaster Garry Stevens looks at the context into which Jesus was born. King Herod the Great died in 4BC, which is a bit inconvenient for numbering the years supposedly from the birth of Christ (BC/AD in the old nomenclature). For the past 60 years the Romans had dominated the Mediterranean, introducing Greek culture and social systems. The elimination of pirates by Pompey meant that ship transport could become more important, thus drawing Judea into the Roman economic system. Under the patronage of the Romans, Herod the Great supplanted the squabbling Maccabean rulers in 37 BCE to construct a kingdom about the same size as the old kingdoms of Israel and Judah, together with territories in Syria that had never been part of the old Hebrew remit. Thus, the subjects were both Gentile and Jewish. The Romans were pious, and because they recognized that their own Pantheon was borrowed, they accepted the presence of other religions. However, they would not tolerate human sacrifice, insurrection or the suspicion of private (as distinct from public) assemblies – all of which the early Christians challenged (at least symbolically), I guess. At the time of St Paul, the Roman Empire numbered about 50-60 million people, 4-5 million of which were Jews. About 1/2 million of these Jews (or 10% of the total population) of these lived in Judea. As a point of comparison about 7 million live in Israel today. The Romans gave an overarching political structure, but the Jews had their own structures beneath them. It was a theocratic rule. The temple, which Herod reconstructed, was more like a clubhouse than a synagogue, acting as a place of communal meeting and teaching. Prayer was not a feature of Judaism until medieval times.

This was interesting, so I went back to Episode 2.17 Recovering the Bible Up until about 1850 there had not really been much progress in biblical revelation since medieval times. The archeological jigsaw had been reassembled, but there had been no new discoveries of manuscripts. But then came a slew of discoveries: Tischendorf’s discovery of the mid-4th century Codex Sinaiticus at a Syrian monastery at Mt Sinai in 1844; Ethiopian parabiblical books in the 1880s, then the Books of Peter in a monk’s grave bringing a whole new testimony of Christian diversity in the early years. In 1947 the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 12 caves near Qumran in the West Bank – whole scrolls, not just fragments. Discoveries were on hold during the Arab-Israel War, and the last cave wasn’t explored until 2017. The scrolls comprised Old Testament Books, para-biblical texts and sectarian (probably Essene) texts, all Jewish rather than New Testament. The scrolls are significant for their quantity (1000); their antiquity from the early roman empire; and for their contribution to a new aspect of Judaism.

Episode 2.18 Modern Debates: Scandal of the Dead Sea Scrolls looks at the 40-year blockage of access by Catholic conservatives, who sat on the discoveries and would not allow other researchers to see them. The scrolls were discovered in Qumran Cave when it is was under Jordanian rule. Jordan instituted an international panel and sent the scrolls to the Rockefeller museum in Jerusalem. As Edmund Wilson reported in the New Yorker in 1955, when controversy arose over interpretation and authorship, the cabal on the panel battened down the hatches and stopped publishing, took the scrolls to Paris and refused access to all other researchers. In 1969 the Jordanian government became impatient with the delay, but after the Israeli war, renewed support was offered to Robert De Vaux, one of the original discovers. Publication continued at a glacial pace until in 1991 Huntington Library published its microfilms, finally pushing the cabal to release their own. Once they were published, it showed that Jesus was just one of many messianic figures at the time.

History Extra 1950s Britain: Everything you wanted to know. This episode features Alwyn Turner. I was born in the 50s but am only really aware of the 1960s onwards. This podcast argues that all the changes that blossomed in the 1960s (Carnaby Street, Beatles etc) were budding during the 1950s. During that decade the average age of the population was in the 30s, but their politicians were all old men with an average age in the 70s. Food rationing continued until the 1950s but the English diet was beginning to change with Elizabeth David beginning to publish her cookbooks which drew on European food tastes. The Goons started in 1951 and were a real marker between the ‘youth’ who loved them and the older generation who didn’t find them funny at all (Hmm. I don’t find them funny either). It was a decade of low unemployment, the introduction of the NHS, slum clearance and the introduction of new technology (TV, fridges, washing machines). With the Suez Crisis, Britain realized that now US was calling the shots, and that UK didn’t control their own foreign policy any more.

99% Invisible Long Strange Tape is about the history of the cassette tape. Who would have thunk you could have a whole podcast episode on cassettes? Well, Marc Masters has a whole book about cassettes called High Bias. In this episode he talks about the group The Grateful Dead, whose live shows were different every time, thereby attracting a whole cadre of taping fans who would swap tapes of the shows among themselves. At first they smuggled in reel-to-reel recorders, but once cassettes came along and the Grateful Dead realized they couldn’t stop people taping, they embraced it. Although cassettes have been largely superseded today, they are still popular in U.S. prisons. Visitors are allowed to bring in see-through cassettes, but not CDs because CDs could be broken and fashioned into weapons. (Ironically, you’re allowed to bring in a can of ring-pull tuna- as if THAT couldn’t be made a weapon). Streaming is starting to be allowed, but only songs with a PG rating. How sickening- a 14 year old can be imprisoned for life without parole, but as a 40 year old he can only download PG songs.

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‘The Little Community’ by Robert Redfield

Posted on December 30, 2008 | Leave a comment

redfield2

1962, 168

I read this book alternating between a feeling of  “Toto,  I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore” and “Aha!!”.   I felt like Dorothy because this book is steeped in the language, methodology and publications of anthropology.  It took a number of important studies of little communities, including those written by the author himself, and examined the ethnographic methodology and questions  they utilized.  These studies were all unfamiliar to me, and because of the publication date of the book (1962), they were all fairly dated.  The book was not so much about the content of these studies, as of the role of the anthropologist and his/her methodology in that study.

But when I felt “aha!” was when he spoke about the nature and limits of the “little community”.   His “little community” has four qualities, that may exist in different degrees:

  1. it is distinctive-  where the community begins and ends is apparent
  2. it is small enough that it can be a unit of personal observation that is fully representative of the whole
  3. it is homogenous and slow changing
  4. it is self sufficient in that it provides all or most of the activities and needs of the people in it.

So does Port Phillip count as a “little community”? I’ve been conscious all along of the small size of Port Phillip- about 5000 people (although there’s no hard and fast population figures).  But was there a clear sense of “we?”. I rather think there was, in the push towards Separation from New South Wales, and distancing Port Phillip from the penal origins of Van Diemens Land and Botany Bay. Certainly, the Port Phillip press tried hard to foster a sense of  “we” (although I think that provincial presses always do this).  I think that the relatively late date of settlement indicates that geographically it was a separate entity to the two older colonies.

Redfield speaks about a “typical biography” among members of a little community- the life-path that most people in the community followed. Prominent, middle-class, public-oriented men can be traced quite easily through their involvement in different organisations in Port Phillip.  I think that you could probably construct a typical biography for Port Phillip during  the 1840s that would be triggered by a migration, involve an economic enterprise of some sort,  a financial setback, and the building of a home.  In fact, I’m about to embark on “Letters from Victorian Pioneers” and I’ll see if I can find the barebones  of a typical biography for Port Phillip there.

But Redfield warns that the descriptor of “little community” doesn’t fit comfortably with a society undergoing rapid change, especially a frontier society.   I think that whatever homogeneity there was in Port Phillip was challenged as the 1840s went on.   Change was rapid, and becoming even more so.  As such, perhaps the term “little community” is of limited usefulness in describing Port Phillip, but as he says, the question is not so much “Is this community a little community?” but “In what ways does this community correspond with the model of a little community?”

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David Roberts PATERNALISM IN EARLY VICTORIAN ENGLAND

Posted on August 6, 2008 | 1 comment

1979, 278 p

One of the frustrations that I’ve faced in trying to understand Judge Willis has been to try to understand his mindset. Why did Port Phillip society of the time find him so unacceptable and demand his dismissal? Was he too radical? Was he too conservative? Was he neither of these things? This book focusses on early Victorian England which, although a hemisphere away from Port Phillip, was the milieu that informed the thinking of colonial judges and civil servants and was the lens through which their patrons and superiors back in the metropole viewed their actions.

In this book, Roberts attempts the heroic in trying to define and illustrate the workings of an unnamed-at-the-time set of varying beliefs and attitudes which he, along with other 20th historians, identifies as ‘paternalism’. He argues that, bolstered by Romanticism and literature, paternalism reached its apogee in 1844. It’s a slippery concept, though, despite his attempts to pin it down through analysis, for example, of the backgrounds of the contributors to the major ‘paternal’ journals and quarterlies of the day, or by the speeches and voting patterns of ‘paternalist’ MPs in the 1840s. He divided these parliamentarians into 6 categories: the Romantics, The Peelites, The Churchmen; the Country Squires; The Whigs and the Anglo-Irish, but even he admits that there is no consistency between their espoused position in speeches, and their actions. Paternalism, it seems, is only one of several influences. In fact, his concept is so hemmed in by qualifications and disclaimers that you start to wonder if what he is describing exists at all.

But, despite his difficulties in defining it, he posits that after 1848 ‘it’ was no longer functional: rendered less relevant by the rise of urbanisation, a self-conscious middle and working class and the mid-century intellectual developments of science, rationalism, empiricism and belief in progress.

I’m not sure that this book has taken me much further in understanding Judge Willis. It’s interesting that his major patrons are categorized as either Peelites or Whig paternalists- but I’m not really sure yet what, if anything, that means.

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Rose Tremain RESTORATION

Posted on July 30, 2008 | 2 comments

1989, 371p

I have rather mixed feelings about historical fiction.  On the one hand, it was probably historical fiction that led me to my love of history in the first place, and the type of history that attracts me always has a strong human and imaginative thread to it.  When there is a basic fidelity to the setting and the mentalities of the main characters, then I love it.  It can be playful with the facts, but not earnestly wrong.  I really relished Peter Mew’s Bright Planet set in- surprise, surprise- 1840s Port Phillip, and Patrick White’s historical fiction (e.g. Fringe of Leaves, Voss ) is solidly grounded in research and yet nuanced and sophisticated in its themes.

But I have my reservations too.  I agree with Inga  Clendinnen (my heroine) with her qualms over Kate Grenville’s The Secret River and the issue of historical fiction attempting to contribute to a historical debate. I am annoyed when something is just plain wrong- the research has been done and exhibited, but it’s WRONG! I dislike the arrogance of projection of modern mentalities onto characters set in the past.  I sometimes feel as if the story is suffocated by meticulous research that the author can’t bear to let go of.

Which leads me to Rose Tremain’s Restoration.  It is set, as you might guess, in Restoration England, complete with Charles II, the Great Fire and the Plague.  There’s a certain predictability about this- of course they are all such write-able events that no author writing a book set at the time could resist them!  I thought that Tremain captured the voice of a 17th century male writer well, and my admiration for it increased even more when I returned, as I do from time to time, to www.pepys.diary.com to read Samuel Pepys’ diary entry for the day.

But of course, ventriloquism is not the same as creation, and it added to my sense that I was reading a set piece, with hackneyed settings and events and a reproduction of a 17th century voice.  This probably sounds more scathing than I mean it to be: I enjoyed it well enough, happily persisted to the end, but I only rate it as a  ‘good enough’ read.

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