Category: History

While Woodrow Wilson Was President of Princeton, “No Blacks Were Admitted”

(p. A1) PRINCETON, N.J. — Few figures loom as large in the life of an Ivy League university as Woodrow Wilson does at Princeton.

. . .
But until posters started appearing around campus in September, one aspect of Wilson’s legacy was seldom discussed: his racist views, and the ways he acted on them as president of the United States.
The posters, put up by a year-old student group called the Black Justice League, featured some of Wilson’s more offensive quotes, including his comment to an African-American leader that “segregation is not humiliating, but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you,” and led to a remarkable two days at this genteel (p. A17) campus last week.
. . .
Perhaps best known for leading the United States during World War I and for trying to start the League of Nations, Wilson as president rolled back gains blacks had made since Reconstruction, removing black officials from the federal government and overseeing the segregation of rank-and-file workers.
Raised in the South, he wrote of “a great Ku Klux Klan” that rose up to rid whites of “the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant Negroes.”
During Wilson’s tenure as president of Princeton, no blacks were admitted — “The whole temper and tradition of the place are such that no Negro has ever applied,” he wrote — though Harvard and Yale had admitted blacks decades earlier. Princeton admitted its first black student in the 1940s.

For the full story, see:
ANDY NEWMAN. “At Princeton, Woodrow Wilson, a Heralded Alum, Is Recast as an Intolerant One.” The New York Times (Mon., NOV. 23, 2015): A1 & A17.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date NOV. 22, 2015.)

Humans Suffered from Plague by at Least 5,000 Years Ago

(p. D4) Historians and microbiologists alike have searched for decades for the origins of plague. Until now, the first clear evidence of Yersinia pestis infection was the Plague of Justinian in the 6th century, which severely weakened the Byzantine Empire.
But in a new study, published on Thursday [Oct. 22, 2015] in the journal Cell, researchers report that the bacterium was infecting people as long as 5,000 years ago.

For the full story, see:
“Archaeology: Plagues Said to Have Hit During Bronze Age.” The New York Times (Tues., OCT. 27, 2015): D4.
(Note: bracketed date added.)
(Note: the much shorter online version of the story has the date OCT. 22 (sic), 2015, and has the title “In Ancient DNA, Evidence of Plague Much Earlier Than Previously Known.” The passage quoted above is from the online version.)

The academic article mentioned in the passages quoted above, is:
Rasmussen, Simon, Morten Erik Allentoft, Kasper Nielsen, Ludovic Orlando, Martin Sikora, Karl-Göran Sjögren, Anders Gorm Pedersen, Mikkel Schubert, Alex Van Dam, Christian Moliin Outzen Kapel, Henrik Bjørn Nielsen, Søren Brunak, Pavel Avetisyan, Andrey Epimakhov, Mikhail Viktorovich Khalyapin, Artak Gnuni, Aivar Kriiska, Irena Lasak, Mait Metspalu, Vyacheslav Moiseyev, Andrei Gromov, Dalia Pokutta, Lehti Saag, Liivi Varul, Levon Yepiskoposyan, Thomas Sicheritz-Pontén, Robert A Foley, Marta Mirazón Lahr, Rasmus Nielsen, Kristian Kristiansen, and Eske Willerslev. “Early Divergent Strains of Yersinia Pestis in Eurasia 5,000 Years Ago.” Cell 163, no. 3 (Oct. 2015): 571-82.

Dogged Dreamers Developed Deadly Dirigibles

(p. C7) “Dirigibility” means the ability to navigate through the air by engine power, unlike balloon flight, which is captive to the wind. Beginning and ending with the Hindenburg vignette, C. Michael Hiam gives in “Dirigible Dreams” a concise but comprehensive history of the airship and its evolution. With style and some flair, Mr. Hiam introduces a cast of dogged visionaries, starting with Albert Santos-Dumont, a Brazilian whose exploits from 1901 onward usually culminated in our hero dangling from a tree or a high building, shredded gas bags draped around him like a shroud. For all of these pioneers, problems queued up from the outset: Insurance companies, for example, refused to quote a rate for aerial liability. (Try asking your broker today.) And to inflate the craft the engineers were stuck with hydrogen, since non-flammable helium was too scarce and hot air has insufficient lifting force.
. . .
In 1929, British engineers pioneered a giant dirigible–at 133 feet in diameter, Mr. Hiam notes, it was “the largest object ever flown”–powered by six Rolls-Royce Condor engines. But too many died as the still-flimsy crafts plunged to the ground in flames. His Majesty’s secretary of state for air perished in a luxurious airship cabin on the way to visit the king’s subjects in India. One by one, nations gave up their dirigible dreams, especially after 35 souls burned to death on the Hindenburg in Lakehurst, N.J., one of the first transport disasters recorded on film. After that tragedy, commercial passengers never flew in an airship again, and by the start of World War II just two years later “the airship had become entirely extinct.”

For the full review, see:
SARA WHEELER. “Inflated Hopes; Early airship experimenters found that insurance companies refused to quote rates for aerial liability.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Oct. 18, 2014): C7.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review was updated on Oct. 23, 2014.)

The book under review, is:
Hiam, C. Michael. Dirigible Dreams: The Age of the Airship. Lebanon, NH: ForeEdge, 2014.

In 13th Century England, William Marshal Defended Property and Brokered Magna Carta

(p. C7) On Saturday, May 20, 1217, two armies gathered outside Lincoln, a walled cathedral town in the northeast Midlands of England. One was a party of barons loyal to the French prince Louis the Lion, who had come to batter down the walls of the town’s large stone castle. The second party was there to relieve the siege. It was led by an energetic 70-year-old: William Marshal, earl of Pembroke, the most famous knight of his time and one of the most storied men in Christendom. Marshal was the official guardian of the 9-year-old English king Henry III, whom Louis was aiming to replace. Lincoln was one of the most important strategic military bases in England, controlling the major roads between London, York and the southwest. The fate of a kingdom really did rest in William Marshal’s hands.
According to a 19,000-line verse biography, written in old French during the 1220s and commissioned by Marshal’s son, the aged hero prepared his men for a battle with a barnstorming speech. “Those men have seized and taken by force / our lands and our possessions,” he cried. “Shame upon the man who does not strive, this very day, to put up a challenge / . . . if we beat them, it is no lie to say / that we will have won eternal glory / . . . I can tell you that they will come to a sticky end / as they descend into Hell.” Then Marshal was astride his horse and at the front of the charge. He was so excited that he nearly rode off to fight without his helmet on.
. . .
Marshal was one of the few loyal men left at the end of John’s reign, and in June 1215 he helped broker Magna Carta, the document that (temporarily) mollified the king’s opponents by granting them a long list of legal rights and privileges. John died the next year, and the now-elderly Marshal was appointed as guardian to Henry III. He reissued Magna Carta as a political manifesto, rather than a peace treaty, which helped to begin the charter’s long and legendary afterlife. He won the battle of Lincoln, and then he died. His corpse was wrapped in silk that he had brought home from a journey to the Holy Land.

For the full review, see:
DAN JONES. “The Servant of Five Kings; One of the few men who remained loyal to King John, William Marshal helped broker Magna Carta.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Jan. 10, 2015): C7.
(Note: ellipsis between paragraphs added; ellipses internal to paragraph, in original.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Jan. 9, 2015.)

The book under review, is:
Asbridge, Thomas. The Greatest Knight: The Remarkable Life of William Marshal, the Power Behind Five English Thrones. New York: Ecco, 2014.

Biography of Muhammad Documents Oldest and Youngest of His 12 Wives

(p. C6) The Prophet Muhammad might justly be described as the Jekyll and Hyde of historical biography. For centuries, he has been “alternately revered and reviled,” as Kecia Ali, an associate professor of religion at Boston University, notes in her excellent overview of the abundant literature. As a result, Muhammad presents two violently incompatible faces to the historian. For devout Muslims, relying both on the Quran and the vast corpus of sacred traditions, the hadith, he serves as the unimpeachable model for human behavior, not only in matters of faith and ritual but in the most humdrum aspects of daily life, from marital and business relations to personal hygiene, including even the proper use of the toothpick. For non-Muslims, drawing on the same sources, he has been viewed from the earliest times as lustful and barbarous, as a raving impostor aping the ancient prophets; nowadays he is further charged with misogyny and pedophilia. The contrast is so stark as to appear irreconcilable.
. . .
Two of the book’s best chapters deal with the most prominent of Muhammad’s 12 or so wives: the saintly Khadija, a Meccan businesswoman 15 years older than he; and the more spirited–and controversial–Aisha, the child-bride who became Muhammad’s “favorite wife” in later years. For both Muslim and non-Muslim biographers, Khadija represents a model wife. She is Muhammad’s comforter in moments of doubt or distress–an “angel of mercy,” according to the modern Egyptian biographer Muhammad Husayn Haykal–and their household is an abode of domestic felicity. Much is made of the fact that Muhammad took other wives only after Khadija’s death.
His marriage to Aisha is another matter altogether. She was only 6 years old when she became engaged to Muhammad, but he considerately postponed consummation of the marriage until she was 9. Though earlier critics said surprisingly little about this marriage–they seemed not even to note the anomaly of the couple’s ages–modern commentators have denounced it roundly, accusing Muhammad of pedophilia. Muslim biographers squirm to defend it, and some quibble over whether the bride was in fact only 9 when she was ushered into the marriage bed (to which she also brought her childhood toys, according to traditional accounts). A recent biography by one Abdul Hameed Siddiqui even goes so far as to praise the union with the fatuous remark that by marrying an older man, “the bride is immediately introduced and accustomed to moderate sexual intercourse.” For pious Muslims, the marriage raises a painful dilemma. For non-Muslim polemicists, Ms. Ali says, the marriage and its presumed consummation are reasons to vilify Islam generally–to believe that “all of Islam and every Muslim is tainted.”

For the full review, see:
ERIC ORMSBY. “Ways of Looking at the Prophet; Devout Muslims see him as the model for human behavior. Non-Muslims have seen him as lustful, barbarous or worse.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Jan. 10, 2015): C6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Jan. 9, 2015.)

The book under review, is:
Ali, Kecia. The Lives of Muhammad. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.

Most Early Christians Blended in as Ordinary Romans

(p. C9)The earliest Christian building excavated anywhere in the Roman Empire, the famous house-church of Dura-Europos (now under the enlightened protection of Islamic State), dates to the mid-third century. Literary sources, both Christian and non-Christian, make it abundantly clear that Christian communities grew up everywhere in the Mediterranean in the 150 years after Jesus’ death: Think of the famous congregations of Corinth, Colossae and Ephesus, vividly evoked in Paul’s letters. But to the archaeologist these communities are completely invisible. Where are they?
In his lively new book, “Coming Out Christian in the Roman World,” Douglas Boin offers an answer. Early Christian writers like St. John of Patmos or Tertullian of Carthage rejected any hint of compromise with the Roman imperial state or with their non-Christian neighbors: “No man,” warned Tertullian grimly, “can serve two masters.” But there is no particular reason to think that Tertullian’s views were widely accepted at the time. Fundamentalist zealots often have the loudest voices. In fact, it seems, most early Christians were quite happy to rub along quietly with the Roman world as they found it. They served in the Roman army, honored the emperor and even participated in pagan sacrificial ritual. Their archaeological invisibility is easy to explain: Aside from their personal convictions (revealed every now and then in their choice of graffiti), most early Christians were just ordinary Romans.

For the full review, see:
EVAN HEPLER-SMITH. “Rome at the Crossroads; Apart from their convictions, most early Christians were just ordinary Romans. They served in the army, honored the emperor and even participated in pagan sacrificial ritual.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., March 21, 2015): C9.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 20, 2015.)

The book under review, is:
Boin, Douglas Ryan. Coming out Christian in the Roman World: How the Followers of Jesus Made a Place in Caesar’s Empire. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2015.

Starting in Late Middle Ages the State Tried “to Control, Delineate, and Restrict Human Thought and Action”

(p. C6) . . . transregional organizations like Viking armies or the Hanseatic League mattered more than kings and courts. It was a world, as Mr. Pye says, in which “you went where you were known, where you could do the things you wanted to do, and where someone would protect you from being jailed, hanged, or broken on the wheel for doing them.”
. . .
This is a world in which money rules, but money is increasingly an abstraction, based on insider information, on speculation (the Bourse or stock market itself is a regional invention) and on the ability to apply mathematics: What was bought or sold was increasingly the relationships between prices in different locations rather than the goods themselves.
What happened to bring this powerful, creative pattern to a close? The author credits first the reaction to the Black Death of the mid-14th century, when fear of contamination (perhaps similar to our modern fear of terrorism) justified laws that limited travel and kept people in their place. Religious and sectarian strife further limited the free flow of ideas and people, forcing people to choose one identity to the exclusion of others or else to attempt to disappear into the underground of clandestine and subversive activities. And behind both of these was the rise of the state, a modern invention that attempted to control, delineate, and restrict human thought and action.

For the full review, see:
PATRICK J. GEARY. “Lighting Up the Dark Ages.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., May 30, 2015): C6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 29, 2015.)

The book under review, is:
Pye, Michael. The Edge of the World: A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe. New York: Pegasus Books LLC, 2014.

Spread of Robots Creates New and Better Human Jobs

(p. A11) The issues at the heart of “Learning by Doing” come into sharp relief when James Bessen visits a retail distribution center near Boston that was featured on “60 Minutes” two years ago. The TV segment, titled “Are Robots Hurting Job Growth?,” combined gotcha reporting with vintage movie clips–scary-looking Hollywood robots–to tell a chilling tale of human displacement and runaway job loss.
Mr. Bessen isn’t buying it. Although robots at the distribution center have eliminated some jobs, he says, they have created others–for production workers, technicians and managers. The problem at automated workplaces isn’t the robots. It’s the lack of qualified workers. New jobs “require specialized skills,” Mr. Bessen writes, but workers with these skills “are in short supply.”
It is a deeply contrarian view. The conventional wisdom about robots and other new workplace technology is that they do more harm than good, destroying jobs and hollowing out the middle class. MIT economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee made the case in their best-selling 2014 book, “The Second Machine Age.” They describe a future in which software-driven machines will take over not just routine jobs–replacing clerks, cashiers and warehouse workers–but also tasks done by nurses, doctors, lawyers and stock traders. Mr. Bessen sets out to refute the arguments of such techno-pessimists, relying on economic analysis and on a fresh reading of history.

For the full review, see:
TAMAR JACOBY. “BOOKSHELF; Technology Isn’t a Job Killer; Many predicted ATMs would eliminate bank tellers, but the number of tellers in the U.S. has risen since the machines were introduced.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., May 21, 2015): A11.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 20, 2015.)

The book under review, is:
Bessen, James. Learning by Doing: The Real Connection between Innovation, Wages, and Wealth. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015.

“The Great Fact” of “the Ice-Hockey Stick”

(p. 2) Economic history has looked like an ice-hockey stick lying on the ground. It had a long, long horizontal handle at $3 a day extending through the two-hundred-thousand-year history of Homo sapiens to 1800, with little bumps upward on the handle in ancient Rome and the early medieval Arab world and high medieval Europe, with regressions to $3 afterward–then a wholly unexpected blade, leaping up in the last two out of the two thousand centuries, to $30 a day and in many places well beyond.
. . .
(p. 48) The heart of the matter is sixteen. Real income per head nowadays exceeds that around 1700 or 1800 in, say, Britain and in other countries that have experienced modern economic growth by such a large factor as sixteen, at least. You, oh average participant in the British economy, go through at least sixteen times more food and clothing and housing and education in a day than an ancestor of yours did two or three centuries ago. Not sixteen percent more, but sixteen multiplied by the old standard of living. You in the American or the South Korean economy, compared to the wretchedness of former Smiths in 1653 or Kims in 1953, have done even better. And if such novelties as jet travel and vitamin pills and instant messaging are accounted at their proper value, the factor of material improvement climbs even higher than sixteen–to eighteen, or thirty, or far beyond. No previous episode of enrichment for the average person approaches it, not the China of the Song Dynasty or the Egypt of the New Kingdom, not the glory of Greece or the grandeur of Rome.
No competent economist, regardless of her politics, denies the Great Fact.

Source:
McCloskey, Deirdre N. Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Woodrow Wilson Violated Free Speech

I viewed part of a CSPAN presentation on June 27, 2015 by Margaret MacMillan, based on her book The War that Ended Peace: The Road to 1914. (It was probably a rebroadcast.) The presentation seemed serious, well-informed, and judicious in trying to be fair and balanced to Woodrow Wilson. MacMillan is more sympathetic to Wilson than I am, but she made it quite clear that he enacted serious violations of free speech.

MacMillan’s book is:
MacMillan, Margaret. The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914. New York: Random House, 2013.