Politics, Economics and other Stuff

Museum Questions

Inspired by the family's trek through Boston area museums -- the MFA, JFK Library, Peabody Essex Museum, ICA, visited in order of increasing child acceptance, tomorrow they get to go to a puppet theater -- some questions:

1. Did ancient Egyptian peasants expect an afterlife?  When did commoners start expecting an afterlife?  I know, what any of this means needs elaboration...
2. What's the deal with Jacqueline Kennedy's voice/accent?  She is pretty much a beauty ideal, but that voice would drive me crazy.  What is the cultural history of this kind of voice?  How was her voice perceived at the time?  How much was this her public voice only? 
3. What did Americans sell to China in the pre-1840s China trade?  When did opium and tea get going and how did America fit into that trade?  In general, what commodities were important by value, as opposed to their historical memorability?  How did the economics of long-distance trade come out in terms of covering ship construction costs?  There must be lots of data on family finances of trading families. 
4. How could the NYC-Albany passenger only steamship lines coexist with the railways?  What were the relative traffic volumes for passengers and freight?  Why take a steam ship if you could take a (faster?) train?  Where trains that awful?  I've always thought of passenger steamships as a Mississippi or Ohio river phenomena, but the Hudson was also important (see Vanderbilt). 
5. How does basic C-print technology work?  I.e. how did the world work before ink jet printers? I know the high school level explanation, but that doesn't really answer the question...like why didn't C-prints exist before the mid-1940s? 

Since when do historians (or anybody) think 486 pages is a big book?

Bernard Bailyn reviews Steve Pincus' 1688: The First Modern Revolution in the NYRB.  (electronic subscription only link, so I cannot cut and paste)  There are several remarks along these lines:

It is a big book, and Pincus offers some friendly advice.  Anticipating some readers' frailty in tackling his text of 486 pages...A reduced version of Pincus's book -- like the abridgment of Lawrence Stone's eight-hundred-page Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 -- would be an academic best seller.  

In general I hate abridged historical monographs that leave out the supporting evidence and make even less possible to evaluate the sort of evidence used to come up with the perspective of the book.  I know, often the evidence is extremely skimpy, unrepresentative, partisan and 2nd hand, but that's something I want to know about.    486 pages on the Glorious Revolution sounds more like a historiographical essay than a overarching monograph to me.  Still sounds like it could be good, but I'm a bit leary of what sounds like Pincus overselling rhetorical contrasts as real changes in knowledge (i.e. the same event can both be meaningfully peaceful and violent, depending on one's perspective and expectations). 

It's 664 page with end notes and index, but still, that's not long. 

Detroit

via Clusterstock, Urbanophile posts

1949:



2003:

Ernst Freund, Felix Frankfurter and the American Rechtsstaat: A Transatlantic Shipwreck, 1894-1932

Dan Ernst, Ernst Freund, Felix Frankfurter and the American Rechtsstaat: A Transatlantic Shipwreck, 1894-1932

From the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 through the New Deal, American legislators commonly endowed administrative agencies with broad discretionary power. They did so over the objections of an intellectual founder of the American administrative state. The American-born, German-educated lawyer and political scientist Ernst Freund developed an Americanized version of the Rechtsstaat—a government bound by fixed and definite rules—in an impressive body of scholarship between 1894 and 1915. In 1920 he eagerly took up an offer from the Commonwealth Fund to finance a comprehensive study of administration in the United States. Here was his chance to show that a Continental version of the Rule of Law had come to America. Unfortunately for Freund, the Commonwealth Fund yoked him to the Austrian-born, American-educated Felix Frankfurter, a celebrant of the enlightened discretion of administrators. Freund's major publication for the Commonwealth Fund, Administrative Powers over Persons and Property (1928), made little impression on scholars of administrative law, who took their lead from Frankfurter. Today the Rechtsstaat is largely the beau ideal of libertarian critics of the New Deal; few recognize that it is also part of the diverse legacy of Progressive reform.

Excess Civilian Deaths in the US Civil War Update

I finally found the footnote in McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom that states 50,000 civilian deaths for the US Civil War.  There is no documentation, except for a) laying out the claim that most 19th century wars have a much higher ration of civilian to military deaths (civilian deaths one to two times the number of military deaths), b) there don't seem that many civilian deaths in the documents McPherson knows, except for one typhoid outbreak in Wilmington.  I also found a statement by Drew Gilpin Faust from 2001 saying the current literature seems to run the risk of understating civilian death.  I should take a look at her current book, but I doubt she's going to do any demographic work, that's not the kind of work she does.  Who does?  This is not an obscure topic and it's not like there's no documentation -- we even have administrative records.  This should be a answerable question, unlike, say, civilian deaths in Russia during the Napoleonic Wars. 

If US Civil War civilian deaths are so low, why is this?  It seems weird.  Civil Wars aren't known for low civilian death rates and typhoid isn't unknown in the 19th century South. 

BTW, according to wiki, citing older sources with methods that aren't clear (are people just picking numbers that 'sound reasonable'?),  Napoleonic Wars "military deaths are invariably put at between 2.5 million and 3.5 million, [figures for] civilian death tolls vary from 750,000 to 3 million." I'd also not recognized the size of the 1813 'Völkerschlacht bei Leipzig' -- four days, 520,000 men fielded, 80,000-110,000 casualties, not clear how many died, may be around 50,000-60,000 or more, hard to tell in part since as usual typhoid spread among military casualties and civilians. 'Bei' is a bit of a misnomer, this is more 'all around and in' Leipzig.  Biggest land battle until WWI.

A 2004 article in the Wurzbg Medizinhist Mitt. claims a 1% civilian loss rate -- 250,000 civilian deaths in a population of 25 million -- from war associated typhoid in the winter of 1813/14.  Methods are unclear.  Wurzburg, Aschaffenburg, and Mainz hit in particular.  But why would you get war associated typhoid in these cities?  Taking care of wounded?  I can see lots of infected and parasite ridden people moving about. 

Update #1: the records situation may be less good than I'd hoped (but this would explain the lack of published papers). Troesken, Race, Disease, and the Provision of Water in American Cities, 1889–1921, JEH (2001) writes:

Although the United States was the first nation to introduce a regular census (taken decennially from 1790 onwards), vital registration was left to state and local governments. Consequently, it was instituted unevenly. A variety of churches kept parish records of baptisms, burials, and marriages, and these have been used to construct demographic estimates for the colonial period, especially for New England and the Middle Atlantic regions. Although some cities (e.g., New York, Boston, New Orleans, Baltimore, Philadelphia) began vital registration earlier in the 19th century, the first state to do so was Massachusetts in 1842. An official Death Registration Area (DRA) consisting of ten states and the District of Columbia was only successfully established in 1900, and data collection from all states was not completed until 1933. A parallel Birth Registration Area (BRA) was only instituted in 1915, and collection for all states was also achieved in 1933. There were also a significant number of “Registration Cities” outside the DRA and BRA were also included in the data reporting until 1933.1 The federal census did collect mortality information with the censuses of 1850 to 1900, but there were significant problems with completeness. The data do improve over time, and, after 1880, census information was merged with state registration data [Condran and Crimmins, 1979]. Nothing similar, however, was undertaken for birth data.

National Air and Space Museum

I ended up at the National Air and Space Museum since  a) parking on the Mall is hard, b) I didn't want to walk far in the rain once I found a place to park, c) as usual I got out of the house around 3 pm, leaving little time for a 2nd museum. 

The kids saw this museum with my wife a few weeks ago.  The main feedback, as I remember it, was 'boring'.  I see what they mean.  Also not aesthetically pleasing, dark and cramped.  The Chantilly installation is much better.  

Mostly it served as a reminder to me that I need to obtain a better understanding of the economic and technological constraints on aircraft engines.  Below the 1917/18 BMW IIIa engine, seemingly the best aircraft engine -- 200 hp with low vibration, a 'high altitude carburetor' that adjusted fuel mixture depending on pressure, and good ability to handle being turned about -- to come out of WWI.  I'd not recognized that BMW started off as a aircraft engine company, though now that I think about it I have some vague memories that I've heard this before.  Overall, a surprising amount of attention to German aircraft and engineering.  Does this reflect US aerospace industry recruitment? 

Very dark due to the rainy weather and with crappy lighting. Probably should have used flash, but I tend not to in crowds. 

Excess Civilian Deaths from the Civil War

I was looking around for casualty numbers for the American Civil War, and there is little out there on civilian casualties.  What were the excess civilian deaths from this war?  The ratio of military deaths from combat (including later effects of wounds) vs. non-combat related disease seems to be in the 1:2 area.  It's my understanding that less than 5% of African American Union deaths resulted from combat related causes.  How does this compare to European 19th century wars?  What did say Napoleonic Wars look like, or the US Revolutionary War?  Is this in part that the South was a tougher terrain to fight in back then?  All of which suggests there is lots of scope for excess civilian deaths. 

Don't get carried away with those high Roman population estimates

Not that this is necessarily news.

Razib writes:

Peter Turchin is at it again, Coin hoards speak of population declines in Ancient Rome (ungated version):

In times of violence, people tend to hide their valuables, which are later recovered unless the owners had been killed or driven away. Thus, the temporal distribution of unrecovered coin hoards is an excellent proxy for the intensity of internal warfare. We use this relationship to resolve a long-standing controversy in Roman history. Depending on who was counted in the early Imperial censuses (adult males or the entire citizenry including women and minors), the Roman citizen population of Italy either declined, or more than doubled, during the first century BCE. This period was characterized by a series of civil wars, and historical evidence indicates that high levels of sociopolitical instability are associated with demographic contractions. We fitted a simple model quantifying the effect of instability (proxied by hoard frequency) on population dynamics to the data before 100 BCE. The model predicts declining population after 100 BCE. This suggests that the vigorous growth scenario is highly implausible.

The figure to the left shows the reasoning. A simple model which related population size (dependent) to coin hordes (independent) was fitted before 100 BCE. The correlation between coin hordes to population size and political stability are well attested for many polities. In any case, using the model and projecting outward with the coin hordes known for the early imperial period a theory which suggests that multiplicative increases in census size during the Julio-Claudian age were a function of a shift in the accounting method (instead of simply males, including the whole household) was supported. The high count was already implausible on other grounds (e.g., if true, that means that Italy never attained the early Roman imperial population size until the mid-19th century), but that the model fits so well with the lower projections previously offered by other scholars is very suggestive. Contra extreme subjectivists some models of the past are probably right, and some are probably wrong.

Manassas National Battlefield Park

A very very nice park like landscape, in much better shape than I'd assumed given the debate about nearby development.  Stonewall Jackson and all that, not that I can keep the lore straight, but having visited the battlefield may help.  I've mostly stayed away from Civil War history...so why did it take the North so long to win given its material superiority?  The area of operations is almost static in Virginia for the first three years of the war.  I can think of the obvious explanations: a) the North was still mostly agricultural as well and war was not yet that material intensive, b) the South was large and softer in the West than in Virginia, c) mass losses were politically and militarily hard to take for the North, d) large operations from scratch take time, even years. 

And yes, it is setting in which one can even photograph trees. 

Update #1: since I could not remember (and it is not emphasized in the exhibits, not clear why), size of forces and losses in the First Battle of Manassas (First Battle of Bull Run), where most -- but not all - the photos below are from:

Union casualties were 460 killed, 1,124 wounded, and 1,312 missing or captured; Confederate casualties were 387 killed, 1,582 wounded, and 13 missing. ...Strength figures vary by source. Eicher, p. 87-88: 35,000 Union, 32,000 Confederate; Esposito, map 19: 35,000 Union, 29,000 Confederate; Ballard, 35,000 Union (18,000 engaged), 34,000 Confederate (18,000 engaged); Salmon, p. 20: 28,450 Union, 32,230 Confederate; Kennedy, p. 14: 35,000 Union, 33,000 Confederate; Livermore, p. 77: 28,452 Union "effectives", 32,323 Confederate engaged. Writing in The Century Magazine, adjutant generals James B. Fry cites 18,572 Union men (including stragglers not on the field) and 24 guns engaged, Thomas Jordan cites 18,052 Confederate men and 37 guns engaged.

Losses aren't as bad as I'd expected, but my standards may be different than those of the times.  Also what does 'missing or captured' mean here for Union forces?  How many walked away?   It's my understanding that desertions in the Union army were in the same order of magnitude as losses, but there are obviously reporting issues, both for desertions and losses. 

Update #1: Jody comments:

We were in Springfield this spring and the kids were intrigued by the "Civil War in Four Minutes" video there. Online, the music is more clearly overbearing, but in the small theater at the Lincoln Museum, it's not as easy to notice your emotions being played. In fact it was hard not to cry. The kids' first question: why does it look like the South is winning? My short answer: because the map zooms in on the south, so it looks like they've got all the territory, but they don't. Of course, that doesn't answer the question at all. I'm not an expert at all on the war, which is somewhat laughable (over-specialization), but if I had to guess, I'd say the war dragged on because of lack of political will for conquest in the north, extremely poor generalship (most of the best professional army men returned to their home states in the south), and the sheer physical challenges of re-taking southern territory. It took several years of economic strangulation (not to mention diplomacy in Europe to isolate the South) before physically re-claiming southern territory was realistic. And it took that long, too, to get generals capable of doing the job -- and then they did it by changing the "accepted rules" of warfare (although I've always wondered how much those rules had already gone out the window in Europe). One interpretation of the Emancipation Proclamation says that Lincoln had to do it because the "union men" had lost their will to fight for that cause by late 1862 and he had nothing left but to rally the abolitionists explicitly. I don't know if the letters from common soldiers support that assertion, but the Proclamation did bring in huge numbers of Black recruits and changed the motivations of black (slave) residents in southern territories, too. Did the Proclamation enable re-conquest, or signal that the generals were finally ready to do it? The classic (boring) test question, with the usual answer: a little of both. Or so I assume. I'm really wandering far from my comfort zone here. (Again, laughable. This is PRECISELY my period. But not my subject.) Oh, here's the video! http://www.maniacworld.com/civil-war-in-four-minutes.html Notice the moments in the video when there are no battles to speak of but the casualties are mounting fast. Typhoid in the camps, I assume.

Ordensburg Vogelsang

I had no idea the Ordensburg Vogelsang even existed.  Open to the public only since 2006.  It does look like something you'd find in a National Park.  (via Der Spiegel)

Fort McHenry

I drove up to Fort McHenry in Baltimore harbor today.  Nothing too exciting, more a very modest earthworks fort than I'd anticipated.  A big prison during the Civil War and a big hospital complex during WWI, but no buildings remain from those eras.  The British having longer range ship born artillery than Fort Henry during the bombardment in 1814 does seem like a serious military failure, even if it didn't prove decisive in this case.  The siege was basically a long-distance standoff with little damage, 25 hours of bombardment at a range of 1.5-2.5 miles with 1,500 to 1,800 shells.  Four US soldiers were killed out of a crew of around 1,000.  Total US deaths in the Battle of Baltimore were 24, mostly in a ambush east of Baltimore on the first day. 

Basically the engagement was a large British raid that ran into organized resistance and was aborted: a form of gunboat diplomacy.  Impressively low casualties for the number of men involved on both sides (>5,000 British, ~12,000 US).  

The large guns below are 8 or 10  inch Rodman guns from the Civil War.  The guns are labeled as 15 inch guns on a plaque, but they look like 8 or 10 inch guns to me and are identified as 8 inch on wikipedia.   

The Rodman guns' claim to fame is their production method:

Guns had been traditionally cast solid and the bore was bored out of the solid metal. With this traditional method, the gun cooled from the outside inward. Castings shrink as they cool. As each succeeding layer cooled it contracted, pulling away from the previously cooled metal creating voids and tension cracks. Rodman devised a method of casting where the gun cooled from the inside out, so that as cooling occurred, it created compression rather than tension. This resulted in a much stronger gun.

With Rodman’s method of casting, a cooling core was placed in the mold before casting. This core consisted of a watertight cast iron tube, closed at the lower end. A second, smaller tube, open at the bottom was inserted into the first. As the molten iron was poured into the mold, water was pumped through the smaller tube to the bottom of the larger tube. The water rose through the space between the two tubes and flowed out at the top. The water continued flowing as the metal cooled. To further ensure that the gun cooled from the inside out, a fire was built around the iron flask containing the gun mold, keeping the gun mold nearly red-hot. For an 8-inch Rodman columbiad, the core was removed 25 hours after casting and the flow of water continued through the space left by the core for another 40 hours. Over 50,000 gallons of water was used in the process. For larger guns, the cooling periods were longer and more water was used.

After cooling the gun the machining process began. The bore was bored out proper size, the exterior was turned smooth, the trunnions were turned on a trunnion lathe, and a vent was drilled.

On the other hand:

Rodman gun refers to a series of American Civil War-era columbiads designed by Union artilleryman Thomas Jackson Rodman. ...The Columbiad was a large caliber, smoothbore, muzzle loading cannon able to fire heavy projectiles at both high and low trajectories.^[1] This feature enabled the columbiad to fire solid shot or shell to long ranges, making it an excellent seacoast defense weapon for its day. Invented by Colonel George Bomford, United States Army, in 1811, columbiads were used by the United States coastal artillery from the War of 1812 until the early years of the 20th Century. Very few columbiads were used outside of the U.S. Army.

Rodman guns saw little, if any action during the Civil War. Two 10-inch columbiads were used in 1864 and 1865 in Union operation against Fort Sumter (Suter 1891, p. 117). It seems likely, due to the time period in which they were used, that these were Rodman guns rather than earlier model columbiads. Other reports of the use of 8-inch and 10-inch columbiads may refer to Rodman guns. The 15-inch Rodman guns were never fired in anger (Birkhimer 1884, p. 291,fn). The 20-inch Rodmans were only fired eight times in practice (Ripley 1984, p. 80). ...

After the Civil War, many columbiads remained in place at seacoast fortifications around the U.S. In the late 1870s several were rifled and tested for use against modern steel clad ships, with poor results. Strapped for funding, the post-war Army continued to carry smoothbore columbiads on inventory lists until after the Spanish-American War, when modern breech-loading rifled cannon replaced them. Today many columbiads are on display at Federal and state parks commemorating the 19th-century seacoast fortifications. Still others "guard" courthouses around the United States.

Many Some Americans remain obsessed by coastal defenses, for instance John Stilgoe. Photos shot using my 70-200mm lens, so no wide angle views, making my life a bit difficult. 

 

Cannon birds:

Etymology of Scientist

I'd not known this until I recently heard about it on the radio.  From wiki:

Social roles that partly correspond with the modern scientist can be identified going back at least until 17th century natural philosophy, but the term scientist is much more recent. Until the late 19th or early 20th century, those who pursued science were called "natural philosophers" or "men of science".^[3][4][5][6]

Philosopher and historian of science William Whewell coined the term scientist in 1833, and it was first published in Whewell's anonymous 1834 review of Mary Somerville's On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences published in the Quarterly Review. Whewell's suggestion of the term was partly satirical, a response changing conceptions of science itself in which natural knowledge was increasingly seen as distinct from other forms of knowledge. Whewell wrote of "an increasing proclivity of separation and dismemberment" in the sciences; while highly specific terms proliferated—chemist, mathematician, naturalist—the broad term "philosopher" was no longer satisfactory to group together those who pursued science, without the caveats of "natural" or "experimental" philosopher. Members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science had been complaining about the lack of a good term at recent meetings, Whewell reported in his review; alluding to himself, he noted that "some ingenious gentleman proposed that, by analogy with artist, they might form [the word] scientist, and added that there could be no scruple in making free with this termination when we have such words as sciolist, economist, and atheist—but this was not generally palatable".^[7]

Whewell proposed the word again more seriously (and not anonymously) in his 1840 The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences:

We need very much a name to describe a cultivator of science in general. I should incline to call him a Scientist. Thus we might say, that as an Artist is a Musician, Painter, or Poet, a Scientist is a Mathematician, Physicist, or Naturalist.

He also proposed the term physicist at the same time, as a counterpart to the French word physicien. Neither term gained wide acceptance until decades later; scientist became a common term in the late 19th century in the United States and around the turn of the 20th century in Great Britain

What did Irving Kristol do?

Irving Kristol, the 'founder' of neoconservatism, died this week.  Obviously lots of comments on this occasion.  I liked part of Bruce Bartlett's take, though I cannot quite tell how correctly Bartlett gauges the reasons behind Kristol's influence.  

Bruce Bartlett writes:

I didn't know Irving Kristol well, but I knew him for a long time. There are many people who can say the same thing. He was the central figure in the post-Watergate revival of conservatism and the Republican Party. Sadly, the "movement" that he created, neoconservatism, is pretty well dead. What goes by that name today bears no resemblance to Kristol's creation.

As is well known, Kristol was for many years a man of the left. But its excesses pushed him inexorably to the right. In the 1960s Kristol recognized that conservatism desperately needed to be grounded on serious social science if it hoped to influence public policy and, hence, politics.

Kristol founded a small quasi-academic journal called The Public Interest to build the foundation of a social science-based conservatism. I say "quasi" because, annoyingly to me, it refused to have footnotes or references in its articles.

One of Kristol's most important insights was that there were many academics who had generally liberal views, but came to conservative conclusions on some specific issues like crime, housing, race, labor, taxes and many others. He got them to write articles on these subjects, gradually building an impressive body of research that added depth and breadth to the conservative literature.

At the time, conservatism was very narrowly focused on anti-communism and futile efforts to repeal the New Deal. Conservative publications only published the work of people who were part of the movement and held conservative views on every issue. The idea of a "big tent" that included people who were conservative on only one or a handful of issues was foreign to the conservative philosophy in those days. You had to buy the whole conservative worldview on every issue or conservatives wanted nothing to do with you.

This led to the excommunication of libertarians, objectivists, atheists, isolationists and others that were part of the right, but held views on one or more issues that were inconsistent with the conservative positions of Bill Buckley and the rest of the National Review crowd. The extreme Catholicism of that crowd also tended to push Jews away from conservatism.

Kristol embraced these conservative Jews who felt uncomfortable among the dogmatic Christian conservatives. Eventually, he was joined by Norman Podhoretz, the longtime editor of Commentary, who pushed that magazine well to the right of its traditional base among liberal Jews.

The first clips of Kristol's articles in the Wall Street Journal that I have in my files date from 1976, so that's probably when I first became aware of his work. I don't remember when I first met him, but it was probably the following year when I was working for Jack Kemp, who was very much a devotee of Kristol's work. Just the other day I came across an old copy of The Public Interest on which Jack had circled an article listed on the cover for me to read.

It's important for people to understand that in those days neoconservatism was almost exclusively devoted to domestic, especially urban, issues. There was nothing in The Public Interest on foreign policy. Commentary was more foreign policy oriented, but other than having a special interest in Israel its foreign policy was pretty standard anti-communism. What we call neoconservatism today, which more closely resembles imperialism than anything else, was nowhere in evidence.

As Kristol slowly built the foundation of neoconservatism on solid social science research, it became clear that it needed a political outlet so that its policies could be implemented. Although many, perhaps most, early neocons were Democrats--Daniel Patrick Moynihan in particular--Kristol threw in with the Republicans. In the wake of Watergate they were more desperate and in need of intellectual firepower. This meant that there were many more opportunities for neocon ideas to advance within the GOP than among Democrats, who were going through a post-McGovern, post-Vietnam leftist phase that made them vulnerable to a conservative counterattack.

Kemp was really the central political figure in the neocon infiltration of the Republican Party. He brought along Dave Stockman, who had a number of articles in The Public Interest in the 1970s, and introduced Ronald Reagan to neocon ideas as well.

To make a long story short, Kristol was extraordinarily successful; so successful, in fact, that The Public Interest ceased publication in 2005. He felt that the journal had pretty much achieved all it set out to do and was no longer necessary. Its subscribers received copies of Commentary to fill out their subscriptions.

In the years since, it became clear that Kristol's decision was wrong. There is still a need for serious conservative social science research that has no other publication outlet. Commentary is now just a highbrow version of National Review, which is just a glossy version of Human Events, which has become a slightly less hysterical version of nutty websites like WorldNetDaily. The Wall Street Journal editorial page and the Weekly Standard, founded by Kristol's son Bill, just parrot the Republican Party line of the day.

The intellectual bankruptcy of conservatism today is even greater than it was when Irving Kristol founded The Public Interest in 1965. What passes for a conservative movement these days wears its anti-intellectualism as a badge of honor. But as Kristol correctly understood, right-wing populism has no future and fundamental changes in the direction of government policy must be based on serious research and analysis that is grounded on hard data; that is to say, reality.

Consumer Electronics Proliferation

The NYT writes:

The proliferation of personal computers, iPods, cellphones, game consoles and all the rest amounts to the fastest-growing source of power demand in the world. Americans now have about 25 consumer electronic products in every household, compared with just three in 1980.

Worldwide, consumer electronics now represent 15 percent of household power demand, and that is expected to triple over the next two decades, according to the International Energy Agency.

I want the data behind this claim, I want to see which consumer electronics devices have gone from an average of three per household to an average of 20 per household.  Three seems very low for 1980: one TV, one radio, one phone?  Or do phones not count?  Even in 1980 many people had more than on TV and one radio.  Multiple tape decks were also pretty standard.  The household I grew up in probably had five or so radios, including a semi-large stereo.  Ah, here is the IEA report, but not publicly posted.  Why? 

Indeed, I think we should end up getting a semi-large stereo in the near future. 

Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism

I was reminded of the role of ancient Crete in the modern mind recently when I was trying to read a children's book about natural catastrophes to the kids.  The peaceful, matriarchal and prosperous Minoans were contrasted with our ancestors, the violent, patriarchal and backward people of Mycenaean Greece.  Which sort of seems like it can't be the whole story...kid #1 in particular called the whole thing 'boring.'

From the reviews I've skimmed so far Cathy Gere's Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism seems like it could be a good read, the sort of book I enjoy if it manages to stay nuanced and avoid its own version of essentialism.  Just good descriptions of what actually happened in the construction of the image of ancient Minoan civilization would be what I want, that's the interesting part we can actually find out about. 

From the start of the NYRB's review:

The masterpieces of Minoan art are not what they seem. The vivid frescoes that once decorated the walls of the prehistoric palace at Knossos in Crete are now the main attraction of the Archaeological Museum in the modern city of Heraklion, a few miles from the site of Knossos. Dating from the early or mid-second millennium BC, they are some of the most famous icons of ancient European culture, reproduced on countless postcards and posters, T-shirts and refrigerator magnets: the magnificent young "prince" with his floral crown, walking through a field of lilies; the five blue dolphins patrolling their underwater world between minnows and sea urchins; the three "ladies in blue" (a favorite Minoan color) with their curling black hair, low-cut dresses, and gesticulating hands, as if they have been caught in mid-conversation. The prehistoric world they evoke seems in some ways distant and strange—yet, at the same time, reassuringly recognizable and almost modern.

The truth is that these famous icons are largely modern. As any sharp-eyed visitor to the Heraklion museum can spot, what survives of the original paintings amounts in most cases to no more than a few square inches. The rest is more or less imaginative reconstruction, commissioned in the first half of the twentieth century by Sir Arthur Evans, the British excavator of the palace of Knossos (and the man who coined the term "Minoan" for this prehistoric Cretan civilization, after the mythical King Minos who is said to have held the throne there). As a general rule of thumb, the more famous the image now is, the less of it is actually ancient.

From the end:

The final act in this drama, however, has seen a strange reversal. Soon after the 1960s, when the Minoans had been conscripted into the popular imagination as a prehistoric version of hippie culture (lilies pointing to the ancient equivalent of flower power), the archaeological mood changed. Some controversial discoveries close to Knossos of children's bones (carrying suspicious marks of butchery) raised the nasty possibility that the peace-loving Minoans had actually been human sacrificers. New research projects in the 1970s and 1980s focused on the networks of roads and fortifications with which the prehistoric elite of the palace of Knossos had strictly controlled their home territory—while scholarly attention also turned to the high- quality state-of-the-art weaponry that had generally been ignored in favor of Evans's "lustral areas," "bull dancers," "saffron gatherers," and lilies. So much for the pax Minoica.

Finally, I have always wondered about the cultural context in which Bachofen's 1861 Mutterrecht, matriarchal ancient Crete got a whole chapter, could become a path breaking work with wide influence.  It would be good to know more. 

The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000

Tyler Cowen recommends Chris Wickham's The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000. 

First recorded transcontinental crossing of North America, north of Mexico?

Hint: not Lewis and Clark. 

US President Herbert Huber

I'd not realized that Herbert Hoover was half ethnically German, with the mandatory, even for Obama, Irish admixture for US presidents, as well as some English:

His father, Jesse Hoover, was a blacksmith and farm implement store owner, of German (Pfautz, Wehmeyer) and German-Swiss (Huber, Burkhart) descent. His mother, Hulda (Minthorn) Hoover, was born in Norwich, Ontario, Canada of English and Irish (probably Scots-Irish) descent.

I'd always thought of Eisenhower as the only ethnically German US president. [Update: supposedly Nixon is half German by some counts on this mother's side, but That isn't obvious from the Milhous name, anglicized from Melhausen. Huber is any case is more than a few magnitudes more common than Melhausen.]

One pattern here is an ethnically German president about eight years after wars with Germany -- anything to that?  And did ethnic voting affect either the 1928 and 1952 presidential race? 

From reading page one of William E. Leuchtenburg's recent short biography of Hoover. 

Why did manned powered flight take so long to get off the ground?

From today's NYT:

Philippe Frutier/European Pressphoto Agency

Edmond Salis crossed the English Channel in the Bleriot XI on Saturday in a re-enactment of Louis Bleriot’s 1909 flight.

So why did powered flight take so long to get off the ground?  Why 1909 for something of this capability and not 1880?  I assume it has to do with weight to power issues of internal combustion engines, but again, what progress was made that moved things along from 1880 to 1909?  I assume it is some combination of materials technology and casting, but it would be good to know more. 

Update #1: the Wright brothers 1903 engine was 200 lbs with 12 horsepower, and it appears that it was a light engine that made the Wright brothers succeed first, with rapid improvement from there.  Not clear though why this sort of engine was hard to build before 1903. 

Bing Crosby

The WSJ writes in a review of Perfecting Sound Forever:

[By] the 1960s the record business was engaged in the wholesale manipulation of sound, an advance made possible by the Nazi invention of magnetic tape. The Magnetophon machine that enabled sound to be cut, spliced and edited without loss of verisimilitude was stolen at the end of World War II from a German radio studio by a G.I. named Jack Mullin. Shipped home to California, Mullin persuaded Bing Crosby, who suffered stage fright on live radio, that he could pre-record his show and put it out undiminished on air.

Wiki has a longer version of the story.  Crosby's importance seems to be that he was a high visibility beta tester and an investor in the technology.  What seems puzzling to me is the long lag between AEG bringing out the first machine in Germany in 1935 and the US use in 1947. 

Who fought in the Boxer Rebellion?

According to wiki, Allied forces employed against the Boxer Rebellion were:

Forces of the Eight-Nation Alliance (1900 Boxer Rebellion)
Countries	Warships (units)	Marines (men)	Army (men)
Japan	18	540	20,300
Russia	10	750	12,400
United Kingdom	8	2,020	10,000
France	5	390	3,130
United States	2	295	3,125
Germany	5	600	300
Italy	2	80
Austria–Hungary	1	75
Total	51	4,750	49,255

Auerbach

Newsweek writes about White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.  I didn't know that his father's brith name was Auerbach:

Emanuel's status as a near-native son gave some Israelis and Jews the impression he would be their guy on the Obama team—the pro-Israeli with the receptive ear. He had those golden Zionist credentials, after all: His father, Benjamin, had been a member of the Irgun, the right-wing Jewish militia that existed before Israeli independence. His Uncle Emanuel had been killed in a skirmish with Arabs back in the '30s, prompting the family to change its name from Auerbach to honor him. But some in the Jewish community have been disappointed.

If Emanuel's family is from Auerbach -- which did have a Jewish community -- this would make them pretty local from where I grew up.  But probably not, given the distribution of Jewish Auerbachs.  Not surprisingly, lots of small places with the name Auerbach. 

Here's the distribution of today's mostly non-Jewish Auerbachs, mostly in the Erzgebirge (i.e. southern Saxony):

'How David Beats Goliath' or putting Lawrence of Arabia in Context

Haroon Moghul writes a letter to the editor about Malcolm Gladwell's 'How David Beats Goliath' article in the New Yorker:

Gladwell uses the battle at Aqaba [in July 1917] between the Ottomans and Lawrence of Arabia and his ragtag Bedouins as an example of a dominant power successfully being challenged by an underdog. However, in the larger conflict, the Ottomans were the underdogs. Lawrence’s Bedouins were armed and paid by the world’s industrial and military superpower, the British, and served as just one piece of a global strategy that the Ottomans could not dream of matching. The British had the capability to pour huge, technologically sophisticated armies deep into the heartlands of the Ottoman state. And, while the Bedouins’ role in ripping up some rail lines should not go without mention, neither should Britain’s vast armies, including the hundreds of thousands of Indian and other non-British troops, who were the real reason the Ottomans lost. We must take into account as well Britain’s Navy, the world’s most formidable, which was able to channel resources to the Ottomans’ western border, allowing Lawrence’s Arabs to be resupplied without the possibility of Ottoman interference. It is rather a case of an Ottoman David versus a British Goliath, except that the British added their own David to keep things interesting.

Which reminds me about my previous post on British Force Levels in [Ottoman] Iraq, 1916-1920, which cites figures of 300,000 British combat troops and 300,000 supporting logistical and construction forces, mostly from India.  For instance, the Indian I and III Corps with 50,000 man defeat the Ottoman Sixth Army of 25,000 to take Baghdad on 10 March, 1917 at the Diyala River in the southwestern suburbs (incidentally the current deployment area of the 82nd Airborne).  So yes, not exactly David. 

The Cato Street Conspiracy

I've been completely unaware of the Cato Street Conspiracy.

'Undesirable inflations and deflations are never blamed on central banks'

Scott Summer sticks his neck out:

Undesirable inflations and deflations are never blamed on central banks by the consensus of expert opinion in the country affected, during the period when prices are actually changing.  Can you think of any counterexamples?

...with the benefit of hindsight the conventional wisdom does come around to blame the Fed or BOJ for undesirable inflations or deflations.  Those who didn’t live through the period with all the “non-monetary shocks” constantly in the headlines, can take a calm look at the falling price level on a graph, and ask themselves “why did the Fed let that happen?”  Then it becomes the Fed’s fault.   In some cases they develop indicators (i.e. M2 for the Great Contraction) that were not even used when the problem actually occurred.  Or they develop a better understanding of the distinction between real and nominal rates (for 1966-81.)  But at the time it always looks like something else is the cause.  And most often that “something else” is actually a symptom of the inept monetary policies.

The key wording here is 'during the period when prices are actually changing'.  Not all that surprising if mistakes are indeed, as they ought to be, unintentional. 

Not so clear this is actually true, but it is a good challenge. The late 1970s could be an important exception, as the tide of professional opinion about the slope and specification of the Phillips Curve shifted. 

Legal Questions

1. Why did anti-abortion statutes get passed in 19th century America if abortion was already illegal under common law as administered by state courts?  Did state courts start failing to convict for abortion or aiding abortion under common law?  Did other common law crimes pass away or get replaced by criminal statutes?   I ought to know this, but I don't...I even have Leslie J. Reagan, When abortion was a crime: women, medicine, and law in the United States, 1867-1973 somewhere in my basement.  Ah, now I see...just check the link. 

2.  Why don't prisoners held in Guatanamo have a right to a speedy trial or now a right to be released given the violation of this constitutional right?  Quick googling doesn't reveal the answer to this.  Hamdan did raise his right to a speedy trial with the Guantanamo tribunal but was denied speedy trial protections by the tribunal's legal adviser on the grounds that he was not entitled to full uniform code of military justice protections, which define the meaning of 'speedy trial' for persons it covers.  But that doesn't solve the constitutional issue. 

Update #1: Jody writes

Prisoners at Guantanamo are/were defined as enemy combatants -- as non-citizens, they weren't protected by the constitution; as non-POWs, they weren't protected by military law.

Another way of putting this: Cheney et al. came up with a formula whereby they could make the "law" do whatever they wanted it to do.

A friend emails from Germany:

In response to the second question: Isn't that what Guantanamo is all about? That being in Cuba and not on American territory, the Constitution doesn't apply. A legal loophole, so to say. And that the prisoners are not being called "soldiers", the Geneva Convention doesn't apply either! It all has to do with the legal gymnastics of the Bush administration. Hasn't this already gone to court in the US, or is my memory failing? Anyway, it makes people wonder here.

However, none of which answers the question: why speedy trial provisions of the constitution don't apply for trials conducted by US military tribunals or, if these provisions do apply, what the actual 'speedy trial' standard is and what the remedies are if the standard if violated.  The Bush Administration legal strategy was to put the internees in Guantanamo to prevent them from getting access to Article 2 US courts -- but that strategy has now failed (see Boumediene v. Bush 2008 striking down the relevant sections of the Military Commission Act of 2006 which removed access to US courts), internees can raise 6th Amendment claims if they are tried, and we have a new Administration.  So where do we stand in regards to speedy trial guarantees under the Constitution? 

I could see internees being held indefinitely (i.e. until the conflict is declared over by the Executive) and not being able to be freed by US Courts without an Executive order, but I cannot see any sentences being upheld.   Or rather, it would be somewhat surprising if sentences would be upheld.  Which should, I assume, have an effect on what policies this Administration pursues. 

BTW, 6th Amendment protections apply to all persons under US jurisdiction, not just US citizens.  The problem for aliens is that they can be administratively removed from US jurisdiction. 

Update #2: The WSJ reports:

The Obama administration is weighing plans to detain some terror suspects on U.S. soil -- indefinitely and without trial -- as part of a plan to retool military commission trials that were conducted for prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Which is pretty much what one would expect. 

What is the deal with these Sovereignty Resolutions?

Recent sovereignty resolutions in mostly southern states including Texa, South Dakota and Oklahoma and Georgia (full text) have gotten a lot of attention this week (Steve Benen,  Hertzberg, Kilgore, Hilzoy).   What's the deal here?  

As usual, I like Hilzoy's take:

it turns out that the Georgia resolution is a lightly modified version of Thomas Jefferson's Resolutions Related To The Alien And Sedition Acts. (Most of the resolution follows this version, but towards the end, it substitutes the eighth resolution, here.) It omits all references to the Alien and Sedition Acts themselves, as well as the part where Jefferson seems to say that states, rather than the federal government, have authority over "alien friends", and that the federal government has no right to imprison people who do not obey deportation orders. ...

This matters for the following reason. Jefferson wrote his Resolutions in 1798. At that time, it was still an open question how the Constitution was to be enforced, and, in particular, how the federal government was to be kept within its limits. In 1803, the Supreme Court decided Marbury v. Madison, which answered that question by holding that federal courts had the power to determine whether or not federal laws were constitutional. It did so on grounds similar to those that moved Jefferson:

"To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing, if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained? The distinction, between a government with limited and unlimited powers, is abolished, if those limits do not confine the persons on whom they are imposed, and if acts prohibited and acts allowed, are of equal obligation. It is a proposition too plain to be contested, that the constitution controls any legislative act repugnant to it; or, that the legislature may alter the constitution by an ordinary act.

Between these alternatives there is no middle ground. The constitution is either a superior, paramount law, unchangeable by ordinary means, or it is on a level with ordinary legislative acts, and like other acts, is alterable when the legislature shall please to alter it.

If the former part of the alternative be true, then a legislative act contrary to the constitution is not law: if the latter part be true, then written constitutions are absurd attempts, on the part of the people, to limit a power, in its own nature illimitable."

Jefferson and Justice Marshall were confronting a similar problem: the need to keep the federal government within constitutional limits. They proposed different solutions: in Jefferson's case, state nullification, in Marshall's, judicial review. When Jefferson wrote, his views were not "militia-minded moonshine and wacko white lightning". They were an attempt to answer a serious problem that had not yet been answered. His solution was, in my view, not the best one, but it was a serious answer to a serious question. 

It matters when you write something. The Articles of Confederation were not ideal, but when they were written, they were a real solution to a real problem. Proposing them now would be idiotic. Likewise, what makes the Georgia resolution a Kompletely Krazy Kocktail is that it parrots Jefferson's words as though we had not arrived at a solution to that problem nearly two centuries ago. But we have, and acting as though that solution does not exist, or as though it does not make state nullification both superfluous and a recipe for lawlessness, is absurd.

On the other hand, there is considerable history of states taking things into their own hands since 1803 as well, not for the most part in a positive way after 1860 (where I'm counting state resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act and related measures as a form of nullification, not sure it is technically)?  What are positive examples of nullification after then?  Redemption etc. aren't currently viewed that positively, are they?  Or is Redemption still seen a positive thing by people in the mainstream?   Did state sovereignty claims to judge the proper scope of federal powers play any positive roll for progressives?  Yes, federal diversity jurisdiction did play a role in the rise of the modern multi-state corporation and its labor relations. but I don't thing state sovereignty claims to nullify federal power here were every used with much effect.

Note that in Georgia the State Senate passed the Sovereignty Resolution 43-1, so it includes lots of Democrats and Blacks. 

Something calling itself the Tenth Amendment Center offers resources for sovereignty resolutions.  They point to supporting literature, for instance 'Judge' (New Jersey Superior Court Judge 1987-95 and Fox News personality) Andrew P. Napolitano, Dred Scott's Revenge: A Legal History of Race and Freedom in America, but I cannot tell from skimming what their main points are.  There are lots of emphatic declamations though. 

On the other hand, it is clear the federal court decisions on the scope of federal powers can be swayed, in part, by  state political pressures, just look at for instance Giles v. Harris (1903).  But does Texas really need to say that it will leave the Union if the Congress passes an assault weapons ban?  

Patna and the Maurya Empire

Looking at large pre-industrial cities in the world (see below), Patna shows up in 200 BCE as the 2nd largest city in the world with a population of around 350,000, right after Changan (i.e. Xian in China, capital of China for most of the time until the 10th century CE.) with a population of 400,000.  Both cities are bigger than any previous cities in history and in the same size category as Rome at its largest, with only Baghdad significantly surpassing this city size in the 9th century CE. 

I'd not realized where Patna is (Bihar, on the southern bank of the Ganges) nor that it was the capital of the Maurya Empire, which lasted from 321 to 185 BCE  and which was larger than I'd realized, both territorially -- encompassing most of north India including Pakistan today and at times large parts of south India and Afghanistan --  and populationwise, with figures cited up to 50 million (which may be in part modern overstatements, but even 30 million would be impressive).  The Roman Empire at its height seems to be estimated up to about 60 million, but I'd worry about overestimates by enthusiasts here as well (and what were the incentives for census takers?).  Finally, there is always the danger that one things of the Empire as having more local impact or control than is warranted (but the impact of imperial control can at times be astonishingly strong at times). 

Still, for its size, duration and urbanization, the Maurya Empire seems to get little recognition in popular culture.  Why is this?  Its most famous ruler appears to have been Ashoka the Great, with a reign from 273 to 232 BCE.  Also the first large Buddhist polity. The last Maurya ruler was overthrown by the Hindu Sunga in 185 BCE in the context of military intrusions from Indo-Greek kingdoms in the Afghan to Punjab area. 

A Discourse Addressed to an Infidel Mathematician

Mark Kleiman has a nice rant:

The spectacular success that resulted from the application of mathematics to natural philosophy in the era of Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz made the theologians look silly by showing that (1) sacred texts weren't very reliable guides to the physical world (2) it was possible to actually make genuine, palpable intellectual progress rather than trading arguments insults, and anathemas and (3) the heavens themselves yielded their secrets to mechanical, rather than spiritual, analysis.

Naturally, the theologians struck back. Unable to produce any actual knowledge in their own domain, their answer was to prove that scientific analysis was just as full of holes as their own beloved dogmas. Berkeley's The Analyst: A Discourse Addressed to an Infidel Mathematician is the masterpiece of this genre: what Orwell, two centuries later, was to call the "silly-clever" style of argumentation.

Berkeley pointed out, correctly, that the conceptual basis of the differential calculus was unsound; it waited for Dedekind and his colleagues in the late 19th century to finally build a secure intellectual foundation under the tremendous edifice that had been erected in the meantime. Berkeley's scorn is eloquent and magisterial:

"And what are these Fluxions? The Velocities of evanescent Increments? And what are these same evanescent Increments? They are neither finite Quantities nor Quantities infinitely small, nor yet nothing. May we not call them the Ghosts of departed Quantities?"

And yet, at the end of the day, the natural philosophers continued to be able to predict and explain more and more phenomena with increasing precision, and the theologians continued to trade arguments, insults, and anathemas, just as before. The natural philosophers were able to work signs and wonders at least as impressive as those attributed by the sacred texts to the Deity and His prophets and saints, with the added virtue of being current and actual rather than historical and mythical. Even Raising the Dead is now, under the less euphonious label of Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation, a routine bit of techne that can be learned by anyone who cares to learn it, without even a bit of esotericism to give it flavor.

Of course the theologians respond that their discipline isn't about all that foolish wonder-working, but considers the Ineffable Big Questions. But that's simply not consistent with Scripture: back when people actually believed, they naturally claimed for their faith the power to heal, and to move mountains. That was before penicillin and bulldozers.

But while the scientists and engineers continue to make progress, the theologians and their fellow obscurantists continue to mock. True to their sacred principle of never making intellectual progress, they continue to say what Berkeley said: "Your science is just as mysterious as our religion. So there!"

Like a joke that was funny the first time, the reiterations of this point suffer from rapidly diminishing marginal returns. So I have no idea why Stanley Fish considers Terry Eagleton's latest essay along these lines, Reason, Faith, and Revolution worth commenting on, or why Eagleton thought it worth writing in the first place. The NYT on-line summary ably captures the essence of the argument: "believing in technology and progress might be more superstitious than believing in religion."

More on Kleiman's blog. 

And I need to get around to putting up a blog post in (semi-) defense of certain types of religion. 

Taking a look at The Analyst: A Discourse Addressed to an Infidel Mathematician might also be interesting.  A quick google suggests that Berkeley did get off a good attack on the lack of rigorous foundations of calculus, something not remedied until much more recent history, for instance Judith V. Grabiner: “Berkeley’s criticisms of the rigor of the calculus were witty, unkind, and—with respect to the mathematical practices he was criticizing—essentially correct.”  Which suggests a less foundational and more pragmatic view both of physics and religion might give better answers.  

Update #1: Grabiner also writes in passing in another paper:

What then were the reasons for the deepened interest in rigor? One set of reasons
was philosophical. In 1734, the British philosopher Bishop Berkeley had attacked
the calculus on the ground that it was not rigorous. In The Analyst, or a Discourse
Addressed to an Infidel Mathematician, he said that mathematicians had no business
attacking the unreasonableness of religion, given the way they themselves reasoned.
He ridiculed fluxions— “velocities of evanescent increments’’—calling the evanescent
increments “ghosts of departed quantities’’ [11]. Even more to the point, he correctly
criticized a number of specific arguments from the writings of his mathematical
contemporaries.  ...
Since an adequate response to Berkeley’s objections would have involved recognizing
that an equation involving limits is a shorthand expression for a sequence of
inequalities—a subtle and difficult idea—no eighteenth-century analyst gave a fully
adequate answer to Berkeley. However, many tried. Maclaurin, d’Alembert, Lagrange,
Lazare Carnot, and possibly Euler, all knew about Berkeley’s work, and all wrote
something about foundations. So Berkeley did call attention to the question. However,
except for Maclaurin, no leading mathematician spent much time on the question
because of Berkeley’s work, and even Maclaurin’s influence lay in other fields.

Update #2: Jody comments about something I was a bit concerned with when I read Kleiman as well (and which ought to get into the semi-defense of religion -- or at least a demand for a realistic critique --  I'm promising):

I thought Fish was somewhat incomprehensible, but Eagleton's own point is apropos to something I'm pretty sure is wrong with Kleiman. To wit, I'm not sure I agree with Kleiman's assertation that "back when people actually believed, they naturally claimed for their faith the power to heal, and to move mountains. That was before penicillin and bulldozers." Medieval Europeans from Norway to Budapest knew that God didn't cure the plague at least 600 years before penicillin. They knew the Cathedrals didn't build themselves. This is in no way a defense of religious belief, per se, but it does go right to Eagleton, and his assertion that the "religious belief" stereotyped by the current atheists does a violent disservice to t he actual content and practice of most religious people for most of human history.

But what did "Medieval Europeans from Norway to Budapest" believe about God's power to heal?  What sources is Jody referring to here? 
Update #3: Jody follows up:

Well, in fairness, the plague provoked astonishing levels of anti-Semitic violence and a resurgence in the idea that God was punishing people for their sins, so I must concede that people responded to the Black Death in ways that ascribed a great deal of power to God.  But if you look at the actual texts produced by bishops and laypeople at the time, you'll see a variety of religious responses that is far less fundamentalist than Kleiman implies.  My citations are entirely out-of-date (I hate to be reminded how long ago I was at Oxford) but The Black Death By Rosemary Horrox has a typical undergraduate-level collection of primary-source excerpts.

For a 20th-century, pre-penicillin account of how the Black Death affected a newly Christianized Norway, you could do worse than Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy.  It's not history per se, but it reflects one strain of Catholic thought at the beginning of the last century, and how Roman Catholicism had been interpreting the Black Death for centuries.

In general, what I'm trying to criticize is the idea that all religion before the twentieth century was fundamentalist religion, and that people throughout Christian history in particular have always received the miracle stories of the Bible as predictive of how God will act in their own lives.  There's very little evidence to suggest that, either with regards to the Bible or to non-Biblical miracle stories.  (Many of the original collections of  Saints' lives were written and received as allegorical and instructional, not historical.)  Of course it's impossible to generalize about European Christian thought, either geographically or across classes, and there was undoubtedly plenty of magical thinking about God all over the place.  The cult of saints and relics was a major focus of popular piety during the middle ages.  But I would argue that, if you look at Chaucer's account of pilgrimage at least, the range of popular expectations about saints' relics and their healing powers was broader than Kleiman implies.  And that's before you talk about the difference between the theologians and the people.

Luther was probably the most saint-friendly of the reformers and I wouldn't be surprised if he'd written that keeping saints' reliquaries could remind people of how to lead Godly lives, but of course he thought that all saving power came only from God.  Most of the modern "healing shrines" of the Catholic church date from the middle of the nineteenth century and onward: they seem to me to be a fundamentalist reaction to modernity, not something that modernity overthrew.

There seems to be a strain of atheist philosophy popular right now that makes three claims about religious belief -- well, really, about Christianity: (1) Before scientific materialism, the Christian worldview in Europe was entirely fundamentalist and literalist; beginning with Galileo, this worldview began to crumble; (2) As the Christian worldview crumbled, a wishy-washy liberal/moderate Christianity arose and made new claims about the nature of God which had no precedent or power in the fundamentalist Christian past.  (3) Both of these forms of Christianity are bogus: the first because science has overthrown it, the second because it's a lame attempt to salvage Christian belief by abandoning the Real, Authentic Christianity that science destroyed.

As one of those lame, wishy-washy Christians, I've been vaguely amused for a while now that both the evangelicals and the atheists are convinced I'm wrong.  It's curious to me that both groups are sure that the only religion is a fundamentalist one.

FWIW, I don't think it's Eagleton who has the best book refuting (3) out at the moment -- although I think Eagleton's argument that there's always been an intellectually rigorous Christian theology, one not anchored in Creationist museums or a literal belief that God will re-grow legs and bulldoze the hills of Rome at a whim, is better than Fish's blog post by far.  Of course, I'm a Lutheran who was educated in Christian theology by Jesuits and the people they hired: I would believe that Augustine and Aquinas deserve my respect.

Still, I think (3) is best demolished by Bart Ehrman, in all his books, including the latest, "Jesus, Interrupted."  Ehrman shows that the Christian understanding of Biblical texts and of God's power was interpretive and theological right from the get-go, and that the earliest Christians understood their texts to be symbolic and non-literal in ways that evangelical or fundamentalist Christianity only began to reject at the end of the nineteenth century.  Fundamentalism isn't the thing science defeated; it's the response to science's challenge to religious belief.  Of course, Ehrman is an atheist now himself, but for reasons that have nothing to do with the criticisms lobbed by Kleiman.

It's not Kleiman's atheism I'm arguing against here--it's only his portrayal of what The Authentic Christian Church was and is that I reject. Let me emphasize that: I do not think that what I'm writing is in any way an argument against atheism.  It's only an argument against the idea that the only real Christianity for all of time has been a literalist, anti-scientific Christianity.

Update #4: David comments:

I agree with Jody that Kleiman is overstating the fundamentalism of pre-modern Christianity and I'm sure that people like Aquinas were not simple believers in magic and miracles but also had complex philosophical arguments to butress their religious beliefs.
But here's how I'd put Klieman's argument:
Christianity has 2 main selling points:
1- Magical stuff can happen. Miracles occur. The dead can be resurrected. The world will end in some kind of amazing way. Prayer works. Etc. etc.
2- We have a lot of important ethical insights too.
#1 and #2 have never been completely separated. Some theologians emphasize #1 more, some kind of minimize #1 and talk a lot about #2, but they never completely deny #1. Show me one major Christian theologian who totally denies the power of God to transcend the laws of science at certain times, maybe very rarely and only on very special occasions in the past, but not never. So it's wrong to portray Christianity (either modern or ancient) as totally wrapped up in #1 and against science, but it's also wrong to say that Christianity ever really takes point #1 off of their marketing materials and embraces scientific explainations for all natural phenomena. If it did so, it wouldn't be much of a religion anymore. It would be a collection of ethical principles, which is something else.
Put another way, it's fine to say that most Christians didn't believe in magical explanations for the Plague. It's something very different to say that Christians don't believe that faith healing ever occurs, that Christians don't believe that prayers are answered, that Divine intervention occurs, etc.. I'll grant Jody's point that many ancient Christians were highly intelligent and occasionally skeptical. But they still had a role for supernatural phenomena. They were just more selective in their use of the supernatural..
The point that Kleiman makes is that Christianity's point #1 is getting smaller and weaker all the time. As recently as a few hundred years ago, at least some of the assertions of magic seemed pretty robust. Without Neuroscience, the existence of the soul seems plausible, for example. But, as science moves forward and more and more unexplainable stuff gets explained, it seems harder and harder to believe that the laws of science can be or have ever been suspended where convenient and also that science can't explain what previously seemed mysterious and therefore possibly magical. Without some hocus-pocus Religion is pretty whimpy. You can take away the more vulgar hocus-pocus but if you're religious it seems that you can't get rid of all of it.
I'd add that all Religions have different versions of this magical part. Some more explicit and theatrical than others. The question that I'd ask any religious person is how do you know which magic to believe? Presumably, you think that the magic of the other religions is just silly tricks, just denying reality and "making stuff up" about the Tree Spirits, or Zeus, or the Fire God; but how do you know? What makes you so sure that your supernatural phenomena are real and that the other folks are just daft? How can you assert magic and then turn around and act like a skeptic?

Large Pre-industrial Cities

Because of a comment I heard on C-Span about Islamic economic history I went and looked at Christopher Chase-Dunn's list of historical urban sizes again.  Here are the six largest cities in the world from 200 B.C. to 1800 C.E., with estimated population in thousands:

Year		Largest City	Pop		2nd largest	Pop		3rd largest	Pop
-200		Changan	400		Patna	350		Alexandria	300
100		Rome	450		Loyang	420		Seleucia	250
361		Constantinople	300		Ctesiphon	250		Patna	150
500		Constantinople	400		Ctesiphon	400		Loyang	200
622		Ctesiphon	500		Changan	400		Constantinople	350
800		Bagdad	700		Changan	600		Loyang	300
900		Bagdad	900		Changan	500		Constantinople	300
1000		Cordova	450		Kaifeng	400		Constantinople	300
1100		Kaifeng	442		Constantinople	200		Kyoto	175
1150		Merv	200		Constantinople	200		Cairo	175
1200		Hangchow	255		Fez	200		Cairo	200
1250		Hangchow	320		Cairo	300		Fez	200
1300		Hangchow	432		Peking	401		Cairo	400
1350		Hangchow	432		Peking	400		Cairo	350
1400		Nanking	487		Vijayanagar	400		Cairo	360
1450		Peking	600		Vijayanagar	455		Cairo	380
1500		Peking	672		Vijayanagar	500		Cairo	400
1550		Peking	690		Constantinople	660		Vijayanagar	480
1575		Peking	706		Constantinople	680		Kyoto	300
1600		Peking	706		Constantinople	700		Agra	500
1650		Constantinople	700		Yedo	500		Peking	470
1700		Constantinople	700		Yedo	688		Peking	650
1750		Peking	900		Yedo	694		London	676
1800		Peking	1100		London	861		Canton	800
Year		4th largest	Pop		5th largest	Pop		6th largest	Pop
-200		Seleucia	200		Carthage	150		Rome	150
100		Alexandria	250		Antioch	150		Anuradhapura	130
361		Rome	150		Nanking	150		Antioch	150
500		Antioch	150		Teotihuacan	125		Nanking	150
622		Loyang	200		Kanauj	120		Prome	100
800		Constantinople	250		Kyoto	200		Cordova	160
900		Kyoto	200		Cordova	200		Alexandria	175
1000		Angkor	200		Kyoto	175		Cairo	135
1100		Marrakesh	150		Kalyan the Lat	150		Bagdad	150
1150		Fez	160		Marrakesh	150		Pagan	150
1200		Pagan	180		Kamakura	175		Angkor	150
1250		Kamakura	200		Pagan	180		Paris	160
1300		Paris	228		Kamakura	200		Fez	150
1350		Paris	215		Kyoto	150		Canton	150
1400		Paris	280		Hangchow	235		Tabriz	150
1450		Hangchow	250		Tabriz	200		Canton	175
1500		Hangchow	250		Tabriz	250		Constantinople	200
1550		Cairo	360		Hangchow	260		Paris	210
1575		Cairo	275		Hangchow	260		Paris	220
1600		Osaka	360		Kyoto	300		Hangchow	270
1650		Paris	455		London	410		Kyoto	390
1700		London	550		Paris	530		Ahmedabad	380
1750		Constantinople	625		Paris	556		Osaka	413
1800		Yedo	685		Constantinople	570		Paris	547

So what is there to notice here? First, the naming is a bit idiosyncratic, with cities showing up, it seems, under the name they make their first appearance under, for instance Constantinople continuing to be used for Istanbul even after 1453.  Beyond that:

1. It does make for a very non-Christian/European list.  Besides Constantinople no non-Islamic city is in the top 3 after the fall of Rome until London makes it to #3 in 1750.  Paris is the only other non-Islamic European city to make it into the top 6 before London shows up at #5 in 1650. 
2. These cities are not just the 'usual suspects' in China and the classic Islamic world.   Japan and the rest of Asia, Central Asia, South and Southeast Asia, also make appearances. 
3. Japan has a very strong presence of large cities after 800.  Kyoto makes its first appearance at #5 in 800 AD (probably a bit later than this) with a population of 200,000.  Kamakura, Osaka and Yedo/Tokyo also have have multi-century presence, with Yedo making it to #2 from 1650-1750 with 500,000-800,000 population.
4. South Asia is also on the list, but mostly with a city I've not paid much attention to.  Vijayanagar shows up in 1400 at #2 with 400,000 population and stays at this size until 1550 (and was at #12 in 1350 with a population of 100,000).  That's two hundred years of large urban existence in the late middle ages in the South Indian Deccan.  Besides Vijayanagar, the only South Asian cities to show up in the top 6 after antiquity are Ahmedabad in 1700 and Kaylan (near of Mumbai). Chase-Dunn lists lots of other South Asian cities in his data, but none make it into the top 6. 
5. Also surprising to me is the presence of more than one Southasian city in the top 6 in the world.  Besides Angor, there is also Pagan or Bagan, a former capital of Burma, at #4 in 1200 with a population of 180,000, in the data from 1100 to 1250. Prome or Pyay or Sri Ksetra in Burma is at #6 in 600 with a population of 100,000. 
6. Rome itself isn't doing too well after it undergoes the 'Crisis of the Third Century' and is in the under 200,000 population category by 300 AD at the latest.   

One obvious concern here is measurement error.  How do we know that Sri Ksetra had a population of more than 100,000 at its peak, not 20,000? The methodology seems to focus on city territory, which Sri Ksetra does have, but might it not be potentially misleading due to the presence of much agriculture within city walls?

The city was circular with walls enclosing an around of 46 km² (18 sq mi), making it the largest walled city in Southeast Asia during its peak. The city contained both housing and also farms, as evident from the remains of water ways and tanks which have been discovered.

Finally, a present day view of Bagan -- once, as mentioned above, at #4 in the world with a population a bit under 200,000.   Sacked Conquered by the Mongols in 1287, not to recover after more than 200 years as a major center of Buddhism.  

Trade Policy and the US Auto Industry

Robert Lawrence has a very nice outlook on why we are in our current situation:

Although we call the big three automobile companies they have basically specialized in building trucks. This left them utterly unable to respond when high gas prices shifted the market towards hybrids and more fuel efficient cars.

One reason is that Americans like to drive SUVs, minivans and small trucks when gasoline costs $1.50 to $2.00 a gallon. But another is that the profit margins have been much higher on trucks and vans because the US protects its domestic market with a twenty-five percent tariff. By contrast, the import tariff on regular automobiles is just 2.5 percent and US duties from tariffs on all imported goods are just one percent of the overall value of merchandise imports. Since many of the inputs used to assemble trucks are not subject to tariffs anywhere near 25 percent -- US tariffs on all goods average only 3.5 percent -- the effective protection and subsidy equivalent of this policy has been huge.  ....

What accounts for this distinctive treatment of trucks? An accident of history that shows how hard it is for the government to withdraw favors even when they have no sound policy justification.

It all comes down to the long forgotten chicken wars of the 60s.  In 1962, when implementing the European Common Market, the Community denied access to US chicken producers. In response after being unable to resolve the issue diplomatically, the US responded with retaliatory tariffs that included a twenty five percent tariffs on trucks that was aimed at the German Volkswagen Combi-Bus that was enjoying brisk sales in the US. 

Since the trade (GATT) rules required that retaliation be applied on a non-discriminatory basis, the tariffs were levied on all truck-type vehicles imported from all countries and have never been removed. Over time, the Germans stopped building these vehicles and today the tariffs are mainly paid on trucks coming from Asia. The tariffs have bred bad habits, steering Detroit away from building high-quality automobiles towards trucks and truck like cars that have suddenly fallen into disfavor.

So here we are. 

The Culture of Shaping Precedent

Daniel Larison writes:

[I]ronically, some of the defenders of the torture regime are making the best argument for the prosecution of past administration officials by their own invocations of past government illegalities. They are unwittingly reminding us that crimes unpunished today can easily become tomorrow’s conventionally accepted “correct” decisions. Every usurpation or instance of lawbreaking that is not challenged and reversed creates a precedent for the next round of usurpation and lawbreaking, and the fact that there is a non-trivial number of people in America who think that the illegal acts of Lincoln, FDR, Truman or others should have some mitigating effect on how we treat illegal acts under a more recent administration is one of the best reasons why crimes committed during the last administration must be investigated and lawbreakers must be prosecuted. Had many past administrations been scrutinized and their crimes investigated and punished, it is less likely that we would have to cope with an executive branch that acts as if it is above the law and which seems to be able to to break the law with impunity.

I have also wondered if one can get the same dynamic from the other side: pointing to past atrocities as moral failures and unsuccessfully trying to prosecute them as crimes can also create culturally important precedents that normalize these types of actions (which is a large part of my reaction to this historical literature: doing these things is part, potentially a necessary part, of the spectrum of standard behavior and not so damaging that we cannot arrive at a world like ours).  Which in part just points to the problems of a highly precedent based culture like the US without other cultural methods for dealing with standards of behavior. 

Building and Manning Great Walls in China

Why?  How?  How can doing this make military sense?  What other functions does it have?  What were the costs and how did the Chinese state finance them?  Why were several systems of walls built from 300 B.C. to 1600 C.E., four of them very major (in the multi-thousand mile category)?   

I've seen the claim the wall building got going pretty much with the establishment of a mature iron age in China a bit after 500 B.C. and that up to 1% of the (adult male?) population were used on the task under the Ming.  It also seems there was at times a lot of wall building domestically, during divided rule. 

Without further research, just speculating, it strikes me that wall building might be an good organizational purpose for a standing army during peacetime: observable, builds organizational capital, keeps people and officers out of trouble, and allows promotions to be based on results.  Which raises the question why we don't see more long wall building elsewhere (besides a bit, but much less so, by Rome). 

More later...

Update #1: Doug comments:

The Romans built roads, of course. They did this on a massive scale, as is well known. In Britain, they built about a kilometer a week for a period of 300 years, leaving about 12-15,000 km of paved roads at the end of their occupation. By comparison, that's a higher density of paved roads than is found today in a number of developing countries.

For what it's worth, engineering types sometimes refer to Roman roads (pejoratively) as "horizontal walls". They were massively over-built, based on today's understanding of road design...

As with China's walls, they were built under the supervision of armies, though often using slave and convict labor.

Update #2: it seems the Chinese also built extensive long-distance roads from 300 B.C. to about 700 A.D., slowing down after that.  Not as extensive as Rome, but still similar. 

Also, I'd not realized that Roman roads, for obvious reasons, stayed out of river valleys and were upland roads (in part along the big rivers, but up on the hillside and off the then much larger flood plain).  Not the way modern highway routing is done.  Also very true for where the Roman road was where I grew up. 

Longest Serving Weapons Platform in History?

With the delay in the next generation bomber program it looks like refurbished B-52s may be flying well into the 2030s, as has been expected for a while, or even later.  I believe this bomber is already the longest serving combat aircraft in history, with the first flight in 1952 and the currently serving B-52Hs built in 1961/62, making them 47 years old now. 

But no, there are others as well:

1) English Electric Canberra light bomber, first flight 1950, in service 1951, not clear when last produced, retired 2006 (still flown by Peru).  This aircraft had the first non-stop unrefuelled transatlantic crossing by a jet. The main bomber used on both sides in the Indian-Pakistan wars. 

The longest serving Canberra has a 1954 production date, with a final stint doing recon over Afghanistan in 2006 before retirement. No bomber role since 1970 in the RAF. The squadron now flies Predator and Reaper UAVs. 

So the current batch of B-52 isn't quite there yet, having to make it to 2013 to match the Canberra's record. 

2) the USAF's oldest KC-135 tanker is from 1955, for a current age of 53.  This may be the record for current inventory air force planes. 

3) the Russian Tu-95 bomber had its first flight in 1952, but the current Russian inventory is from 1980s and 1990s production runs, in a recon configuration.  Most well known for its current (?) naval aviation role.  Not clear when last employed as a bomber. 

4) the oldest C-130 retired in 2008 was produced in 1961.  

So the B-52H seems to be the oldest flying weapons platform in history, since the Canberra didn't serve that long as a bomber. 

The longest serving US Navy ship ever, the Kitty Hawk, retired this year after 48 years of service (1960-2009, laid down 1956). 

Atheist/Jewish Materialism vs. the Catholic Spiritual-Ethical View

I've been obsessing a bit about the current Catholic Church's attack on atheists.  My current state of mind is:

1. The Catholic Church ought to extend its ecumenical process to cover atheists as well, if it hasn't already done so.  The Church's current stance seems driven by caricature and distortion to an extent that isn't generally acceptable in ecumenical relations.  The Church ought to review how it is handling this matter to come up with a more truthful stance that lives up the the Church's aspirations.

2.  It strikes me that the Church's stance on atheism and atheists is reproducing some of the features of Catholic and also Protestant antisemitism in the 19th and first half of the 20th century.  While before 1945 German Christians could get worked up about Jewish Bolshevism as opposed to just Bolshevism, and then use this association to go after all Jews (or at least the annoying ones) in Germany, we now have the Catholic Church talking about atheist Communism and atheist Nationalsocialism, to use this against all atheists (or at least the vocal ones) in Germany.  As for the strengths of the association the Church is constructing here, the association between Communism and Jews is at least as strong as the association between atheists and Nazis (i.e. very partial: some Jews became Communists and Communism was much stronger in their lives than Jewish religious heritage, and most Communists were not Jews, similarly most Nazis were not atheists and those that were atheists were most shaped by Nazism and not atheism). The motives for the Churches and social elites for adopting this constructions of Jews appears in part to be the creation of polarization against a perceived enemy, to better create internal cohesion in the face of a changing environment and internal dissidents ('nationale Sammlungspolitik' before 1945), presenting reaction as the only possible response to social change, not one of many options (i.e. taking socialism and liberalism, both seemingly  compatible with non-reactionary versions of Christianity,  off the table). 

The contrasts drawn between Jews and Christians or Atheists and Christians are very similar, to the extent that I can tell from my limited exposure.  On the one side Jewish materialism or atheist materialism, on the other side the Christian spiritual-ethical world of love, creation and salvation by the one true god.  On the one side Jewish rule-bound clannish materialism or atheist scientistic materialism vs. Christian spiritual universal love.  We also have the contrast between the cosmopolitan Jew or atheist vs. the deeply rooted man with his local organic and necessarily Christian culture.  It would be nice to look into the exact parallels and differences in how these constructions work and where they come from, but it would take some actual reading to do so.  Paul Lagarde seems to be one of the leading lights for these constructions that were picked up widely in the second half of the 19th century.  

3. 19th and 20th century Antisemitism was explicitly conceived as a protest against social change perceived as imposed from the outside on communities and the Jews who took advantage this change to give themselves upward social and economic mobility and access to the public sphere (journalism, science and academia).   Current Catholic anti-atheism seems similarly conceived, as a protest against unjust and externally imposed capitalist and unethical change and the people who defend and promote it, as well as use these changes for upward social and economic mobility and access to the public sphere (journalism, science and academia). 

4. I'm not claiming that the Catholic Church has a history and doctrinal base that necessarily requires it to construct these distorted demonizations of Jews and atheists, but it is a possible construction the Church seems open to.  The Church could go elsewhere as well, I hope.  It might be worth giving it a try, though it might take more work to tread new ground that to rehash the past under a new heading. 

This post clearly needs more work, in particular trying to figure out more what is true beside just being plausible, but I thought I'd put it up.  One final issue: the fact that Christian and German antisemitism ended in a ethical and political disaster for Germany isn't an argument the the Church got its antisemitism fundamentally wrong, it could instead be that only elements malfunctioned in unforeseen circumstances, but that the strategy is actually superior to others available to the Church.  Nor does the analogy I construct above between the structure of antisemitism and anti-atheism, in itself, prove anything about the Church's anti-atheism.  Instead, this is all just a pointer to where to look further. 

The Zentrum Party and the NSDAP

Not that I'm going to write it up now, but Mixa's Easter sermon did inspire me to read around a bit about the Zentrum party in the 1928-33 period, though I'd like to read more.  The party faced a significantly challenging environment, but in terms of how things came out they don't look good, with a turn in a clerical right wing direction by 1928, before the Great Depression, and a tendency towards 'Nationale Sammlungspolitik' in concert with the NSDAP as the other large non-socialist party and a refusal to work with less strong bourgois parties against the NSDAP when push came to shove.  Anti-communism, anti-liberalism and anti-atheism ('Sittlichkeit' and all that, a Volksempfinden shared with large parts of the NSDAP is seems, phrased as anti-Jewish materialism in both cases) the desire to preserve and secure the Church's organizational powers, especially its presence in public schools, came far above support for a failing electoral democracy or a desire to keep the NSDAP out of power by non-democratic means.  At the same time the Church was very aware that the NSDAP was deeply problematic and pronounced bans on Catholics becoming members of the Party, but gave up on this stance and blessed the new order in 1933.  So we have complicity and compromise in the face of a good awareness of evil. 

I can see why things came out this way, but it is deeply ironic to be then subjected to Easter sermons about how the Catholic Church is the foundation for ethical choice while atheists are doomed to evil and error. 

And then there are the post-WWII ratlines to help seemingly bad parts of the Nazi regime establish new identities, run by Catholic clergy pretty openly doing this job.   It would be nice to know more, especially about how these clergy and the Church saw their role and purpose here.  This includes enough people that it is more than a few exceptions, for instance:

• Adolf Eichmann
• Franz Stangl
• Gustav Wagner
• Erich Priebke
• Klaus Barbie
• Edward Roschmann
• Aribert Heim
• Andrija Artuković
• Ante Pavelić
• Walter Rauff
• Alois Brunner
• Josef Mengele

Also it appears lots of connections between Rom and fascists remnants in Croatia. 

Again, I can see how these things happen -- running the Catholic Church in Europe 1914-50 is a hard and difficult job --, but they ought to develop a better story line about what happened than what Mixa is propagating.  This sort of thing makes me wounder how the Church learns, or fails to learn, from its history. 

US Representative doesn't understand the EU or its history

Since I'm in a ranting mode, here's a story on NPR just now:

President Obama lifted restrictions on travel and sending money to Cuba on Monday, but not everyone is happy with the move.

Reps. Lincoln Diaz-Balart and Mario Diaz-Balart, Cuban-American brothers who represent Miami in Congress, issued a joint statement Monday calling it "a serious mistake." ....

"The people need freedom," [Lincoln] Diaz-Balart tells NPR's Robert Siegel. "And just like the European Union — at that time called the Common Market — told Spain during its 40 years of Franco, Portugal during its 50 years of Oliveira Salazar: 'You cannot be a part of Europe until you're democracies,' we say Cuba will not have access to the billions of dollars in the U.S. market until it's a democracy. And it's very important for that kind of international solidarity."

Ahm, I'm pretty sure the EEC allowed remittances and travel to Spain and Portugal before 1975.  Where did Lincoln Diaz-Balart pick up this analogy?  Using EEC policy towards Spain and Portugal as a model for how to deal with Cuba would suggest pretty rapid liberalization of remittances, immigration and travel. 

And though for some bizarre reason NPR doesn't mention it, the Diaz-Balart brothers are Republican. 

Ah, we here are, lots of movement before democratization in Spain in 1975:

Portugal entered trade talks with the EEC in 1970 and reached a trade treaty in 1972, again before democratization in 1974/75. And Portugal is a founding member of NATO, so it didn't exactly lack political integration with the West. 

On reflection, I assume Lincoln Diaz-Balart is just being fundamentally disingenuous here and having a little fun, due to some sort resentment at the EU or Spain for its Cuba policy, or the EEC's policy toward Franco's Spain. 

Finally, this may be an example of Truth vs. Plausibility: Arguing in Public. 

"Eine Gesellschaft ohne Gott ist die Hölle auf Erden"

Die Welt reports on bishop Walter Mixa's -- chief Catholic Priest of the Bundeswehr -- Easter sermon:

Der Augsburger Bischof Walter Mixa hat vor einem zunehmend aggressiven Atheismus in Deutschland gewarnt. "Wo Gott geleugnet oder bekämpft wird, da wird bald auch der Mensch und seine Würde geleugnet und missachtet. Eine Gesellschaft ohne Gott ist die Hölle auf Erden", sagte der Militärbischof in seiner Osterpredigt in der Augsburger Marienkathedrale.

Atheisten versuchten die Realität der Auferstehung von den Toten und der Erlösung vom Bösen in das Reich der Mythen und der Fantasie zu schieben. Wer aber dem Menschen den Glauben an Gott nehme, nehme ihm das Wichtigste im Leben, sagte Mixa. Wer den Glauben an den menschgewordenen, am Kreuz gestorbenen und von den Toten auferstandenen Christus leugne, wende sich letztlich gegen das Heil des Menschen.

"Die Unmenschlichkeit des praktizierten Atheismus haben im vergangenen Jahrhundert die gottlosen Regime des Nationalsozialismus und des Kommunismus mit ihren Straflagern, ihrer Geheimpolizei und ihren Massenmorden in grausamer Weise bewiesen", sagte der Augsburger Bischof. Immer seien in diesen Systemen die Christen und die Kirche besonders verfolgt worden.

Auch in der Gegenwart würden durch gottlose Verhaltensweisen in allen Teilen der Welt Menschen wirtschaftlich und moralisch ausgebeutet, wenn etwa Kinder zum Kriegsdienst oder Frauen zur Prostitution gezwungen würden, wenn gerechter Lohn verweigert werde oder Menschen an Hunger sterben müssten. Ohne christlichen Glauben gebe es dauerhaft keine wahre Menschlichkeit, sagte Mixa.

Also

„Ohne Gott ist alles erlaubt“, zitierte Mixa den russischen Dichter Dostojewski. Wo der christliche Glaube schwinde, komme deshalb nicht das „helle Licht irgendeiner fröhlichen Aufklärung“ zum Vorschein.

I'm never sure what to make of stuff like this.  At some level you'd expect the Catholic Church to claim that all atheists are inherently and essentially extremely evil, but still...it does raise the question about what one should do when an institution and its leaders, even or especially if it is because they are confused about how the world works, put you on their enemy list. 

Finally, to be picky (and I'd be happier if I had the full text of the sermon, not just press accounts), what's the deal with 

Immer seien in [den gottlosen Regimen des Nationalsozialismus und des Kommunismus] die Christen und die Kirche besonders verfolgt worden.

What special persecution of Christians as Christians and the Church is Mixa talking about?  I can see incidental persecution of Christians and a general suppression of the autonomy of large non-Party organizations, but 'special' persecution of the Church?  How about the special persecution of the Handwerksverbaende?  I'm sure parts of their leadership were taken down as well. Indeed, the Third Reich seems to have carved out a special zone of autonomy and cooperation with the two main Christan churches, more so than for any other non-Party organizations. 

And since Mixa cannot claim Hitler was a philosophical atheist -- a bad and fallen Catholic maybe, or a charismatic leader of a new form of religion, but that doesn't amount to philosophical atheism--,   Mixa calls Hitler a 'practicing atheist' despite the fact that the appeals in Nazi Germany to faithless rationalism were, well, limited.  Nor is there isn't any evidence I'm aware of that Hitler denied, as Mixa puts it, 

den Glauben an den menschgewordenen, am Kreuz gestorbenen und von den Toten auferstandenen Christus leugnete.  

though there are pretty strong indications that Hitler didn't like what the Catholic Church made of Jesus. Hitler doesn't deny Jesus' divinity, he was going to take it away from the Catholic Church.  But he did not get there by 1945. The vast majority of Nazis were Christians in the two main German Churches and never considered themselves atheists, philosophical or practical. 

Dealing with fascism wasn't the Catholic Churches most glorious hour -- which doesn't make the Church particularly bad compared to other organizations, but it seems odd to try to claim a special heroic victim role here. In 1933 fascism does appear to be seen by the Catholic Church as less of a threat than communism and less bad than the now apparently vanquished liberalism.   In 1933 the Catholic Zentrum party in the Reichstag voted 72 out of 74 for the Ermächtigungsgesetz, providing the biggest pro-Hitler voting block after the NSDAP and a sufficiently large voting block to have voted down the law, with Zentrum suspicion about the NSDAP and Hitler in part overcome by sympathy for their anti-communist actions and in part by promises of Church autonomy in the new regime, as well as a recognition of the new power realities in Germany.  Indeed, I'd not be totally surprised if even by the late 1930s many high level Catholic functionaries still thought of godless liberalism and communism, not fascism, as the main enemy of faith, though by 1937 Hitler seems to be setting off the Church's alarm bells quite strongly, especially as a result of Catholics leaving the Church in Germany, but this is not due to the abolition of democracy in 1933 but rather due to the radicalization of nationalism and the threat this posed the supranational Church in subsequent years. Some more evidence would be nice, but that's my sense of it.   And what was the Church's stance on Franco's Spain?  From all that I know the Church only started complaining about the lack of political parties or lack of electoral democracy after Vatican II. 

See the 1937 Pius XI.'s  Enzyklika Mit brennender Sorge for the Church's complaints at the time.  (Englich version)  The Church does seem quite alarmed by the movement to bring German Catholics into a 'positive German Christianity' beyond Rome. 

To finish, when did electoral democracy become something the Catholic Church deems obligatory or which the Church strongly suggests?   Or does it depend on circumstances -- which would be an understandable view? 

Shorter Mixa: vote for Hitler as a deeply problematic but necessary ally in the struggle against atheist communism in 1933 and then complain about how atheists caused the Nazi problem. I can see how the Catholic Church would support a vote for Hitler in 1933, but don't turn around and then blame me for it. 

Update #1: why not quote Hitler's speech on March 24, 1033, on the passage of the Ermächtigungsgesetz:

Gleichlaufend mit dieser politischen Entgiftung unseres öffentlichen Lebens wird die Reichsregierung eine durchgreifende moralische Sanierung des Volkskörpers vornehmen. Das gesamte Erziehungswesen, Theater, Film, Literatur, Presse, Rundfunk, sie werden alle Mittel zu diesem Zweck sein und demgemäß gewürdigt. Sie haben alle der Erhaltung der im Wesen unseres Volkstums lebenden Ewigkeitswerte zu dienen. Die Kunst wird stets Ausdruck und Spiegel der Sehnsucht und der Wirklichkeit einer Zeit sein. Die weltbürgerliche Beschaulichkeit ist im raschen Entschwinden begriffen. Der Heroismus erhebt sich leidenschaftlich als kommender Gestalter und Führer politischer Schicksale. Es ist Aufgabe der Kunst, Ausdruck dieses bestimmenden Zeitgeistes zu sein. Blut und Rasse werden wieder zur Quelle der künstlerischen Intuition werden. Es ist Aufgabe der Regierung, dafür zu sorgen, daß gerade in einer Zeit beschränkter politischer Macht der innere Lebenswert und der Lebenswille der Nation einen um so gewaltigeren kulturellen Ausdruck finden. Dieser Entschluss verpflichtet zur dankbaren Bewunderung unserer großen Vergangenheit. Auf allen Gebieten unseres geschichtlichen und kulturellen Lebens muss die Brücke von dieser Vergangenheit zur Zukunft geschlagen werden. Die Ehrfurcht vor den großen Männern muss der deutschen Jugend wieder als heiliges Vermächtnis eingeprägt werden. Indem die Regierung entschlossen ist, die politische und moralische Entgiftung unseres öffentlichen Lebens vorzunehmen, schafft und sichert sie die Voraussetzungen für eine wirklich tiefe Einkehr religiösen Lebens. 

Die Vorteile personal-politischer Art, die sich aus Kompromissen mit atheistischen Organisationen ergeben mögen, wiegen nicht annähernd die Folgen auf, die in der Zerstörung allgemeiner sittlicher Grundwerte sichtbar werden. 

Die nationale Regierung sieht in den beiden christlichen Konfessionen die wichtigsten Faktoren zur Erhaltung unseres Volkstums. Sie wird die zwischen ihnen und den Ländern abgeschlossenen Verträge respektieren. Ihre Rechte sollen nicht angetastet werden. Sie erwartet aber und hofft, dass die Arbeit an der nationalen und sittlichen Erneuerung unseres Volkes, die sich die Regierung zur Aufgabe gestellt hat, umgekehrt die gleiche Würdigung erfährt. Sie wird allen anderen Konfessionen in objektiver Gerechtigkeit gegenübertreten. Sie kann aber nicht dulden, dass die Zugehörigkeit zu einer bestimmten Konfession oder einer bestimmten Rasse eine Entbindung von allgemeinen gesetzlichen Verpflichtungen sein könnte oder gar ein Freibrief für straflose Begehung oder Tolerierung von Verbrechen. Die Sorge der Regierung gilt dem aufrichtigen Zusammenleben zwischen Kirche und Staat; der Kampf gegen eine materialistische Weltanschauung, für eine wirkliche Volksgemeinschaft dient ebenso den Interessen der deutschen Nation wie dem Wohl unseres christlichen Glaubens.

Hitler sounds more in concert with Mixa than with materialist atheists to me. 

Update #2: I googled to see reactions to Mixa's speech, and the response is pretty close to 100% negative.  There are potential supporters out there who just post the news report of the speech without comment, but I didn't see any support. 

I do see the comment that Mixa claiming that

Atheisten versuchten die Realität der Auferstehung von den Toten und der Erlösung vom Bösen in das Reich der Mythen und der Fantasie zu schieben.  Wer den Glauben an den menschgewordenen, am Kreuz gestorbenen und von den Toten auferstandenen Christus leugne, wende sich letztlich gegen das Heil des Menschen.

is somewhat anti-semetic and anti-Muslim as well, not just anti-atheist, since Judaism and Islam deny the resurrection of Christ (though not the coming resurrection with the Day of Judgment) as well. 

This whole episode reminds me of the view that institutions seeking the one and only way to human salvation or "das Heil des Menschen" are a dangerous and potentially totalitarian project, be they Nazi, Soviet or Christian. I'm up for institutions trying to solve human problems while leaving dubious 'this way is the only way' salvation projects to the private realm. 

To close, one of those aggressively atheist cartoons:

'John Bingham and the Background to the Fourteenth Amendment'

Legal history Blog posts a pointer to a new Finkelman article:

Paul Finkelman, Albany Law School, has posted an article, John Bingham and the Background to the Fourteenth Amendment. It appeared in the Akron Law Review(2003). Here's how it begins:

Legal scholars have long debated the "original intent" of the Fourteenth Amendment, especially Section one, which has been the driving engine of the national expansion of civil rights and civil liberties for the past half century or more. 1 Lawyers comb the records of the Thirty-ninth Congress, certain they will find some Rosetta stone that will explain such terms as "privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States," "due process of law" or "equal protection of the laws."

While exploring the records of Congress can be useful, the debates in Congress do not tell the whole story of the origin and meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. These debates may not even tell the most important story. Two other stories may be a better guide to what the members of Congress, and especially John Bingham, the primary author of Section one of the Fourteenth Amendment, had in mind when they wrote the Amendment. An understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment begins not in Congress, but in the history leading up to the Civil War. The first crucial story in understanding the Fourteenth Amendment is the striking changes in the law of race relations that took place in the North - especially in Bingham's home state of Ohio - in the dozen or so years before the Civil War began. The second story is about the South, and the legal repression and brutal racial violence that took place there immediately after the Civil War ended.

These two stories compliment each other. The first gives insight into the legal and political history that shaped Bingham's thoughts about race and his aspirations for a racially just society. The second helps understand what Bingham was struggling against in drafting Section one of the Fourteenth Amendment, and thus illuminates what he hoped the Amendment would accomplish.

Adorno and Horkheimer as Gay Baiters?

The FAZ has a write-up of what seems to be a recent flare-up in the story, which I don't think I've heard of before, that Adorno and Horkheimer, heroes of some on the academic left, used Golo Mann's homosexuality to keep him from getting tenure at Frankfurt on multiple occasions in the late 1950s and early 1960s.   Tilmann Lahme, just out with a Golo Mann biography, concludes with

In den Worten Marcel Reich-Ranickis, der, ohne Kenntnis der Details der Affäre, den Kern der Feindschaft erfasst haben dürfte: „Sie haben zwar mit seiner Homosexualität argumentiert, aber eigentlich wollten sie keinen Mann als wichtigen Professor in Frankfurt haben, dem man keinerlei Nazi-Vergangenheit nachsagen konnte. Golo Mann war ein völlig unabhängiger Mann mit einem großen Namen. Adorno und Horkheimer wollten regieren und auf keinen Fall einen solchen Mann neben sich haben.“

Adorno and Horkheimer are struggling for intellectual dominance by instrumentally using claims of Nazi-sympathies, antisemitism and it seems also homosexuality, all sustained by personal antipathies from struggles to get into the same life boats during the late 1930s. 

This Year's Bancroft Prizes

via Legal History Blog:

Winners of this year's Bancroft Prize for exceptional merit in the fields of American history, biography and diplomacy are Thomas G. Andrews for Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press); Drew Gilpin Faust for This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf); and Pekka Hämäläinen for The Comanche Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press).

I'd noticed the Gilpin Faust book -- who could not, given her visibility and the marketing, and the popular appear of the topic, so I'm a bit reluctant to even crack This Republic of Suffering -- and the Hämäläinen book, but I'd totally missed the Andrews book, which is more up my alley. NPR has an interview with Andrews. Another part of the context for the US entering WWI? 

Non-consensus in European Demographic History?

I ran across the standard view this morning skimming Goran Therborn in the NLR:

The established picture suggests that there was no ‘new’ European growth curve from the late 15th century—that would occur two centuries later—but rather a recuperation from the devastations of the fourteenth-century Plague. According to such works as Livi-Bacci’s Europa und seine Menschen, or Wrigley and Schofield’s Population History of England, European demographic movements were largely governed by, or related to, food prices and real wages. A uniquely flexible system of late marriages, which kept a significant proportion unwed, operated west of a Trieste–St Petersburg line, following the frontier of mediaeval Germanic settlement.

Which reminded me of the review of Greg Clark's book Farewell to Alms by Robert Allen in the most recent JEL.  Allen is extremely critical of the neo-Malthusian outlook on European demographic history, citing in particular Lee and Anderson 2002:

Other tests estimate structural versions of the Malthusian model with more complicated response functions. These models reveal longrun equilibrating behavior, and the findings are much less kind to Malthus’s views. In general, there is no evidence of a positive check and only weak and limited evidence of a preventive check. Ronald Lee (1980, pp. 541, 547), for instance, concluded a generation ago that “wages account for only about 15 percent of the variance in [population] growth rates, so that most of the variation is exogenous.” Lee firmly rejected the Malthusian model: “There is a notion that social mechanisms cause population to grow and decline in response to changes in productive capacity, in such a way as to keep incomes close to a culturally defined standard of well-being. And some who reject this model as descriptive of the present still believe it is appropriate for the past. In fact it is a poor description of both.” Lee and Anderson (2002) have revisited the question using state space methods and came to similar conclusions. “Very little of the longterm variation in either fertility or mortality appears to be explained by variations in wages” (Lee and Anderson 2002, p. 213). Instead, vital rates moved exogenously. The limited feedback from the wage to population means that the half-life of response to shocks was over one century.2 “Even though fertility, mortality, and wages were all endogenous in a Malthusian system, each nonetheless moved with sufficient independence that it could exert a strong exogenous causal force on the others, even over periods measured in centuries” (Lee and Anderson 2002, p. 216). These results are broadly confirmed by Crafts and Mills (2008). They find some evidence for a preventive check between 1541 and 1640 but none thereafter and no evidence for a positive check. Their analysis confirms that exogenous shocks were the main determinant of population change.
For most of the twentieth century, the demography and economy of the Middle Ages were interpreted in a Malthusian framework (Hatcher 1977; Hatcher and Bailey 2001). Campbell (forthcoming) has recently criticized this approach with arguments that parallel the view of Lee and Anderson. Campbell, for instance, denies that there was feedback from the wage rate to population. He contends that it evolved exogenously, and he has linked mortality crises like the Black Death to weather fluctuations revealed by Greenland ice cores rather than to “overpopulation.” A particular puzzle for medievalists is why the high real wages of the fifteenth century did not cause the population to rebound as Malthus would have expected. The answer is that it was driven by exogenous shocks.

So time to read Lee and Anderson 2002, since I tend towards a Clark and Wrigley and Schofield world view.  An incorrectly specified structural time-series model is going to find statistically insignificant dynamics, so the issue here is going to be if the imposed structure rules out plausible models and why that structure is useful for testing the neo-Malthusian view in the first place.

Ah, some of this may be a different interpretation of the same results problem, with people misreading the original Wrigley and Schofield results as a stronger Malthusian feedback than warranted.  For instance, Craft and Mills 2007 write

Wrigley and Schofield (1981) relied on informal inference using graphs, but their view of the workings of the pre-industrial English Malthusian economy was largely confirmed by Lee and Anderson (2002) using Kalman-filter econometric methods to analyze the real wage series of Phelps-Brown and Hopkins (1956) and the demographic series of Wrigley and Schofield (1981). The results obtained by Lee and Anderson (2002) were that from 1600 to 1795 population growth at 0.47 per cent per year, driven by technological progress at a similar rate, was consistent with a constant level of real wages, that fertility responded positively and mortality negatively to wages with elasticities of 0.12 and −0.08, respectively, that the intercepts in these fertility and mortality equations varied greatly over time such that most of the changes in vital rates were unrelated to changes in wages, while the system only returned to the Malthusian equilibrium slowly, the half-life of a shock being 107 years.

But overall Crafts and Mills have results that look pretty non Malthusian:

1) Wages ceased to be Malthusian at the end of the 18th century, after which they exhibited strong trend growth (Figure 7 and Table 2). This confirms earlier findings.

2) Our analysis was unable to find evidence of a positive check at any time during the period 1541 to 1800 and the preventive check cannot be found in samples drawn after the mid-17th century (Tables 4, 6 and 7). These results are much less supportive of the fundamental Malthusian relationships between fertility, mortality and real wages than earlier work. In this sense the Malthusian economy was not very Malthusian after all.

3) The economy was characterized by weak homeostasis up to the mid-17th century. Subsequently, equilibriating tendencies were extremely weak and the half-life of a shock is estimated at 431 years (Table 7).

4) Population in 1800 was about three times the mid-16th century level and this demographic growth was underpinned by an absorption rate based on an expanding demand for labour that averaged a little under 0.5% per annum (Table 8). This result is very similar to earlier work.

5) There is nothing to suggest that technological progress was accelerating long before the end of the Malthusian period and thus there is no explicit evidence of the positive feedback between population size and technological progress that is a key feature of unified growth models (Figure 13 and Table 8).

Looks like this might be worth looking into more, in particular I am not all clear on why this shift in perspective -- if it is actually happening -- is occurring.  This shift in interpretation doesn't seem driven in any obvious way by new data or a method to address a question that couldn't be addressed satisfactorily before. 

This new perspective does seem to motivating new models like Voigtländer and Voth, The Three Horsemen of Growth: Plague, War and Urbanization in Early Modern Europe

How did Europe overtake China? We construct a simple Malthusian model with two sectors, and use it to explain how European per capita incomes and urbanization rates surged ahead of Chinese ones. Productivity growth can only explain a small fraction of rising living standards. Population dynamics – changes of the birth and death schedules – were far more important drivers of the long-run Malthusian equilibrium. The Black Death raised wages substantially, creating important knock-on effects. Because of Engel’s Law, demand for urban products increased, raising urban wages and attracting migrants from rural areas. European cities were unhealthy, especially compared to Far Eastern ones. Urbanization pushed up aggregate death rates. This effect was reinforced by more frequent wars (fed by city wealth) and disease spread by trade. Thus, higher wages themselves reduced population pressure. We show in a calibration exercise that our model can account for the sharp rise in European urbanization as well as permanently higher per capita incomes in 1700, without technological change. Wars contributed importantly to the ’Rise of Europe,’ even if they had negative short-run effects. We also examine intra- European growth, using a panel of European states in the period 1300-1700. Estimation results suggest that war frequency can explain a good share of divergent fortunes within Europe as well.

Or, from the same authors, How the West Invented Fertility Restriction

Early modern Europe was unusually rich by 1700, compared to the rest of the world. We argue that the ’European Marriage Pattern’ (EMP) contributed to this phenomenon. By raising the marriage age of women, and ensuring that a substantial proportion remained celibate, the EMP reduced fertility by up to 40%, and raised average wages by a quarter. We present a model that explains how fertility limitation evolved. We emphasize changes in the production structure of the agricultural sector following the 14th century Black Death. Rising wages after 1349 translated into greater demand for ’luxury products’, such as wool and meat. Their production was subject to economies of scale, making it profitable for large farms to hire outside labor. It was also land-using and labor-saving. Women’s wages increased, and a period of working as a servant became a common feature of the life cycle of European women. Marriage was thus delayed, and fertility reduced. The Black Death thus set into motion a virtuous cycle of higher wages and fertility decline that contributed to unusually high per capita incomes.