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Looks like this thread got transferred to the wrong forum. (Also, what the heck is going on with trysail?)
 


"Universal suffrage can only mean in plain English the government of ignorance and vice."



-Charles Francis Adams (for those who don't know, grandson of John Adams, son of John Quincy Adams)
North American Review, July 1869.
As quoted by T. J. Stiles in
Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America
New York, N.Y. 2015​



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...The massive scar under the bandana on Robinson's hairless pate seems to have made a deep impression on Hunt, as if a symbol, in puckered flesh, of what lay further up the Missouri. Old photographs of scalping victims— survivors were more common than is thought— call to mind circus clowns in the utterly bald, peeled-bare top of the victim's head, with frizzed tufts of hair protruding on the sides and a narrow fringe of locks running above the forehead.

Hunt surely also heard how it had been done. To scalp, the perpetrator typically turned his victim— dead or alive— facedown on the earth. With a knife— a stone knife in the pre-European days, and metal thereafter— he scored around the top of the head, cutting through the scalp to the underlying bone of the skull. Seizing a forelock of hair in his hand and placing one knee in the victim's back, the perpetrator then gave a sharp upward jerk and ripped the large flap of scalp with its hair intact clean off the victim's skull. Victims who were still alive at this point later reported that the tearing sounded like "distant thunder." The blood loss, of course, was considerable, but stanching factors, such as cold or the raggedness of the tear, could constrict the blood vessels quickly and slow the loss...

...Whatever it meant for survivors, for Native American tribes the act of a scalping held special meaning beyond simple vengeance. This close personal contact with the enemy and the removal of part of his person allowed the victor to absorb the victim's power. Once removed, the fleshy underside of the scalp was scraped clean and stretched over a wooden hoop. This was mounted on a tall shaft and displayed aloft as a ceremonial trophy. Though some suggest that Europeans first introduced scalping to Native Americans, other evidence indicates the practice existed long before white men arrived in Sioux or Blackfeet territory. Archaeologists digging near this same section of the Missouri discovered a massacre site from tribe-against-tribe warfare that dates to the 1300s. It contains nearly five hundred human skeletons. According to archaeological interpretation, most of the skulls display the stone-knife scores of scalping...
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-Peter Stark
Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire, A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival
New York, N.Y. 2014.​

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John Jacob Astor's attempt to establish a West Coast fur trading post is a little-known and largely forgotten episode in the very earliest days of U.S. continental exploration and expansion.

Following closely (1810-1814) on the heels of the Lewis and Clark expedition (1804-06), Astor spent gargantuan amounts funding contemporaneous trans-continental colonizers and a Cape Horn-rounding ship in an effort to create a fur trading post at the mouth of the Columbia River.

The book is interesting on a number of levels. It is, by necessity, something of a biography of John Jacob Astor (ever wonder about the origins of the fortune that underlay the Waldorf Astoria?) The fur trading business was as much responsible for the penetration of the interior of the North American continent as any other factor. Furs that could be purchased with $2 worth of beads and pots could be sold in China for thousands of dollars. There's lots to read and learn about the Canadian voyageurs of the Hudson's Bay and Northwest Companies. The book is a good account of the second well-documented crossing of the American continent by adventurer/explorers.

Stark's prose is a little rough in places. The entrancing nature of the story bails him out.



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"...So he marched his men most of the night and flung them into battle when— as a number of Indians notes— they were so tired their legs shook when they dismounted. As usual, he did only minimal reconnaissance, and convinced himself on no evidence whatever that the Indians must be running away from him, not towards him. The highly experienced scouts who were with him— the half breed Mitch Bouyer and the Crows Bloody Knife and Half Yellow Face— all told Custer that they would die if they descended into the valley where the Indians were. None of them, in all their many years on the plains, had ever seen anything to match this great encampment. All the scouts knew that the valley ahead was for them the valley of death. Half Yellow Face, poetically, told Custer that they would all go home that day by a road they did not know. The fatalism of these scouts is a story in itself. Mitch Bouyer, who knew exactly what was coming, sent the young scout Curly away, but then himself rode on with Custer, to his death..."
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-Larry McMurtry
Crazy Horse
New York, N.Y. 1999.​

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If there's anybody qualified to write about the American West, it's Larry McMurtry.

Surprisingly little is known about Crazy Horse's life and that, of course, makes him a difficult subject for any biographer. Rather than fill lots of pages with speculation, McMurtry acknowledges the paucity of solid information and wrote a comparatively brief book.




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"Unfortunately it's all very boring and amicable and terribly grown-up. "

Big Little Lies - Liane Moriarty
 


"...War had unmade the world. Four years of bloodshed had paved the American landscape with gravestones. At least 620,000 soldiers had died (360,000 Union, 260,000 Confederate), more than the combined total of all the nation's other wars, before and since. Were the United States to suffer an equivalent toll at the start of the twenty-first century, almost six million people would be dead.

The South lay in ruins. Farms and villages along the paths of the major armies had been wrecked. Cities ranging from Jackson, Mississippi, to Columbia, South Carolina, from Atlanta to Richmond, were smoldering ruins. Basic infrastructure such as levees, roads, and bridges had gone unrepaired or had been destroyed by raiders from both sides. The financial capital of the rebel states had been annihilated as well, spent on arms and supplies, or converted into now worthless-Confederate bonds and currency. Across the region land values fell, crops went unplanted, workshops were unmanned.

As for slavery, the great wheel that drove the South's economy, advancing Union armies and the Emancipation Proclamation had knocked it loose, and it would soon be smashed to pieces. On January 31, 1865, the U.S. House of Representatives approved the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution; once ratified by the states, it would abolish slavery completely, without compensation or qualification. An enormous portion of the South's wealth had once been measured in human bodies, and now it would disappear..."
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-T. J. Stiles
Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War
New York, N.Y. 2002.​

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I first stumbled on T. J. Stiles when I picked up his most recent book, The Trials of Custer, an unusual biography of the eponymous George Armstrong Custer. I'm glad I did.

Stiles' biography of Jesse James is the book that brought him notoriety— and with good reason. It is thoroughly researched, well documented and well written. The reader will gain insight into the ulcer that was Missouri from 1850-1876 and, for those unfamiliar with the Second Civil War (a/k/a Reconstruction), an understanding of that greatly neglected formative period.

Not many people are acquainted with the horrific atrocities and nearly unconstrained total war conducted by the guerillas/irregulars in Missouri both before and after the well-known conflict of 1861-1865. The successful resistance to Reconstruction resulted in what was essentially attainment of many Southern goals culminating in 1876.


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" David was struggling with what he would later term 'an unbearable moral conflict'. He was torn between loyalty towards his father on the one hand, and what the school told him was doing the right thing on the other. Sherborne instilled in its pupils ethics of honour, decency and duty, and never telling fibs. By contrast, Ronnie co-opted his sons as accomplices, so that they were covering up his deceits, making excuses for him, keeping creditors at bay. At school David was being trained to run an empire; at home he was helping to diddle widows out of their pensions. His attempt to reconcile the two, as he would later admit to Thompson, 'nearly drove me mad'. "
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-Adam Sisman
John le Carré: The Biography
New York, N.Y. 2015.​

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I know the feeling as I was subjected to similar pedagogical indoctrination.

I've long admired John le Carré's novels for their realistic examination of the ambiguities and uncertainties that individuals encounter within large organizations.

I was first introduced to his work by a statement made by the managing partner of a prominent law firm who made reference to them. I had, of course, heard of le Carré because of his commercial success but I'd never sampled his wares, incorrectly assuming that it was lightweight pulp. I couldn't have been more wrong.

Sisman's biography was written with le Carrè's cooperation. It is thoroughly researched and revealing. I'd always wondered about le Carré's background. I'd assumed he was your standard English public schooler. That assumption was also wrong.


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" On May 8, 1778, the frigate Porcupine arrived at Philadelphia with dispatches for William Howe's replacement as commander in chief, Sir Henry Clinton. Clinton must abandon the city that his predecessors had devoted almost half a year to conquering. Five thousand British troops were to be dispatched from America that summer for an operation against French St. Lucia. Soon to become a skeleton of its former self, the British army in North America must be consolidated in New York.

Now that France had recognized the United States, what had previously been a colonial rebellion had become a world war. In the months ahead, Britain would find itself besieged on fronts as far away as India and as close to home as the English Channel as the focus of the conflict shifted from North America to the sugar-rich islands of the West Indies. As difficult as it may be to believe today, Britain's islands in the Caribbean were of considerably more economic importance in the eighteenth century than all of the American colonies combined.

There was nowhere in the world where money could be made at such a staggering clip as the Caribbean. In 1776 the British West Indies generated 4.25 million pounds of trade, almost three times what had just been made by Great Britain's East India Company. France was just as dependent on her Caribbean possessions, which accounted for more than a third of all her overseas trade. If Britain could scoop up a few more of these precious islands from the French, it might provide a way to pay for what had so far been a financially ruinous war. Britain was even considering giving up entirely on its American possessions so that it could concentrate what resources it still had left to fighting the French. For Philadelphia's loyalists, it was almost beyond comprehension: after a mere eight-month British occupation, they were about to suffer the same reversal of fortune that their counterparts in New Jersey and Boston had already experienced and get handed back to the patriots. "
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-Nathaniel Philbrick
Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold and the Fate of the American Revolution
New York, N.Y. 2016.​

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Very few people comprehend how immensely valuable the West Indies were in the latter half of the eighteenth century.

Similarly, few are aware of the extraordinary accomplishments of Benedict Arnold toward securing United States' independence. His military successes were critical at Saratoga and that victory played a large part in the decision of France to recognize the U.S. and join the conflict.

Arnold was not alone in his disgust and contempt for the politicians of the Continental Congress and the general public. Arnold had suffered both physically (he would never regain the proper use of his wounded leg) and financially. He become convinced that the war was bound to end in disaster.

Philbrick is, as always, highly readable and well-informed. The book will give you a different perspective on both Arnold and the Revolution.


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" Lawrence was one of those difficult people who nearly always had to find their own way of doing things, and he turned a deaf ear to any differing opinion, however eminent the source. He would always prefer to fail by doing something his own way than to succeed by doing it somebody else's way: Lawrence never yielded willingly to anybody. Some of the most terrifying episodes in Seven Pillars of Wisdom are those in which Lawrence describes his experiences as a largely self-taught demolitions expert, casually dealing with guncotton and detonators, and using his own rule of thumb to determine how much explosive he needed to destroy a train or demolish a bridge. Typically, Lawrence presents these scenes as comedy, and notes that the bigger the bang, the more the Arabs were impressed. This was no doubt true, but he risked death time after time as rails, rocks, and pieces of locomotive rained down around him...

...Certainly the Ottoman Empire in 1913 was, of all the uneasy places in the world, the one in which fearsome threats, anger, and hatred between the subject races of the empire and their masters, and a terrifying mixture of cynicism, corruption, and brutality at the top, seemed most likely to produce a conflagration. Turkey was balanced at the edge of an abyss, having lost all its possessions in North Africa and Europe; its rulers were determined to hold out for the highest price in the event of war between the great powers rather than risk neutrality and being left out of the spoils of victory, and they were always acutely aware that the majority of Turkey's population consisted of subject races— Arabs, Armenians, Kurds, Jews, Christians— who had in common nothing except a desire to get rid of the Turks as overlords and masters. Lawrence, who understood the situation better than most, can hardly be blamed for enjoying himself in his own way for as long as possible...

...Warfare and politics, of course, are a different matter; in both, duplicity is a weapon, and Lawrence used it expertly...

...Lawrence, like an experienced seducer, had a different persona for everyone whose affection or admiration he wished to conquer (toward those whom he did not wish to conquer he could be downright rude), and yet no persona of his was false— they all coexisted within him, and fought for dominance. Hence the confusion of most professional soldiers who had known and admired him during the war, such as Colonel A. P. Wavell (later Field Marshall the Earl Wavell, GCB, GCSI, GCIE, CMG, PC), at the many controversies surrounding Lawrence after the war, and indeed, after his death, as well as the very different portraits of Lawrence drawn in the early biographies of him by authors who knew him well, and to those whose books he contributed. Liddell Hart, Lowell Thomas, and Robert Graves might as well have been writing about three different people, Liddell Hart presenting the reader with a military genius, Thomas presenting a flamboyant and romantic scholar-hero, and Graves presenting a heroic adventurer in the tradition of Burton and Gordon...

...Deciding on Iraq's borders was a more difficult question. The western border with Syria was fixed by a previous agreement with the French, the southern border was an invisible line in the sand between Iraq and the vast empty desert ibn Saud claimed, and the eastern border was that of the old Ottoman Empire with Persia; but to the north was the territory inhabited by the Kurds, Arabic-speaking non-Arabs, supposedly of Indo-European descent, who passionately desired an independent Kurdistan. Unfortunately for them, the grand prize of Iraq from the British point of view was Mosul, right in the middle of the Kurdish homeland, with its rich oil deposits. Accordingly, commercial interests and realpolitik combined to create a country with a Shiite majority, a Sunni king, a disappointed Kurdish minority, and a small but wealthy and cosmopolitan class of Jewish merchants in Baghdad... "
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-Michael Korda
Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia
New York, N.Y. 2010.​

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An extraordinary biography of an extraordinary man by an extraordinary author.

David Lean's film, Lawrence of Arabia, likely forms the sum total of most people's knowledge of T. E. Lawrence. It may be one of the very few commercially successful films that is largely factual.

I was always curious about Lawrence. This book satisfied that curiosity (and then some). I didn't appreciate that just how brilliant he was. He possessed "far end of the curve" intelligence.

I haven't read Seven Pillars of Wisdom because the evaluations I've seen tend to downplay it. I didn't know that Lawrence had controlled its publication, had forgone all profits (assigning them to a trust to benefit veterans and their families) and that a mere 1,000 first editions were all that originally issued (to subscribers). Today, one of those first editions will command a six figure price. I also did not know that Revolt In The Desert was the abridged version of "Seven Pillars." I possess a 1940 edition of Lawrence's 1932 translation of Homer's Odyssey among several other translations of the work.

Both Korda and his quotations of Lawrence's depictions of war are graphic and sobering. There was no quarter given and atrocities were routine. With good reason, the Arabs never left any wounded to be captured by the Turks.

If you are interested in Lawrence or the Middle East, you should read this book. Korda has done a magnificent job of research and writing.


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" ...Alexandra told Rasputin about Nicky's plans and the starets bombarded him with telegrams. Rasputin was not acting out of megalomania: he was fighting for his life here. Drinking heavily, he had 'no doubt they'll kill me. They'll kill Mama and Papa too'*...


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* One of those who cooked for Rasputin during the Great War was a chef at Petrograd's luxurious Astoria Hotel who went on, after the Revolution, to cook for Lenin and Stalin. He was Spiridon Putin, grandfather of President Vladimir Putin."
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-Simon Sebag Montefiore
The Romanovs: 1613-1918
New York, N.Y. 2016.​

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Many, if not most, are familiar with the later Romanovs, their downfall and murder. Other than that and a few rulers such as Peter the Great and Catherine the Great who have been the subjects of recent well-known biographies, I knew virtually nothing about the history of the family and its rise to power.

I've read (and own) one previous work by Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar and, thus, knew him to be a thoroughly well-informed and erudite historian and writer.

Though it can be a bit tedious and ponderous in places, this book didn't disappoint. It's history on a grand scale with the usual murder, intrigue, mayhem and horror.


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"...Yurovsky ordered two chairs brought in. Alexandra sat on one and Nicholas 'gently set his son in the second in the middle of the room,' then 'stood in front so that he shielded him,' Botkin stood behind the boy, while the steady Tatiana was directly behind her mother's chair with Anastasia behind her. Olga and Maria leaned on the wall behind. The room, thought Yurovsky, 'suddenly seemed very small.' Announcing he was off to fetch the truck, he left them. 'The Romanovs were completely calm. No suspicions.'

Outside, Ermakov told the driver to back the truck into the courtyard and gun the engines to drown out the noise of the shooting. As the truck revved, Yurovsky led the executioners into the room.

Yurovsky ordered the prisoners to stand. 'In view of the fact that your relatives continued their offensive against Soviet Russia,' he read from a scrap of paper, 'the Praesidium of the Ural Regional Soviet has decided to sentence you to death.'

'Lord oh my God,' Nicholas said. 'Oh my God, what is this?'

'Oh my God! No!' came a chorus of voices.

'So we're not to be taken anywhere?' asked Botkin.

'I can't understand you,' Nicholas told Yurovsky. 'Read it again please.' Yurovsky read it again. 'What? What?' stuttered Nicholas.

'This!' Yurovsky drew his pistol and fired it directly into Nicholas's chest. All ten of the killers aimed at the ex-tsar, firing repeatedly into his chest which exploded in blood. 'I shot Nicholas and everyone else shot him too.' Quivering with each shot, with vacant eyes, 'Nicholas lurched forward and toppled to the floor.' The barrage hit Botkin and the servants who collapsed, but scarcely anyone had fired at the rest of the victims who, frozen with terror, were just screaming. It was pandemonium. Yurovsky shouted orders, but the shooting was 'increasingly disorderly,' the crack of gunfire so deafening, the smoke and dust so thick, that no one could see or hear anything. 'Bullets were flying around the room.' One of the shooters was wounded in the hand. 'A bullet from one of the squad behind me flew past my head,' recalled Yurovsky, while those in front were burned.

Alexandra was crossing herself. She had always believed that she and Nicky would be, as she wrote long before, when they were newlyweds, 'united, bound for life and when life is ended, we meet again in the other world to remain together for all eternity.' As her hand was raised, Ermakov fired his Mauser point-blank at her head which shattered in brain and blood. Maria ran for the double doors at the back so Ermakov drawing a Nagant from his belt fired at her, hitting her in the thigh, but the smoke and clouds of plaster were so dense that Yurovsky ordered a halt and opened the door to let the shooters, coughing and spluttering, rest as they listened to 'moans, screams and low sobs' from within. Only Nicholas and Alexandra, and two of the servants, were dead. Leading the assassins back into the room, Yurovsky found Botkin getting up and, placing his Mauser against the doctor's head, he pulled the trigger. Spotting Alexi still frozen in his chair, white face splattered with his father's blood, Yurovsky and his deputy Nikulin fired repeatedly into the thirteen-year-old, who fell but lay moaning on the ground until the commandant called for Ermakov, who drew his bayonet.

As Ermakov stabbed frenziedly, blood squirting in an arc, poor Alexi was still alive, protected by his diamond-armoured shirt, until Yurokovsky, drawing his Colt, shoved Ermakov out of the way and shot the boy in the head. Olga, Tatiana and Anastasia was still untouched, huddled together screaming. 'We set about finishing them off.' As Yurokovsky and Ermakov stepped over the bodies towards them, they scrambled, crouched and covered their heads. Yurokovsky shot Tatiana in the back of the head, spattering Olga in a 'shower of blood and brains'; next the blood-drenched Ermakov kicked her down and shot her in the jaw. But Maria, wounded in the leg, and Anastasia were still alive, crying out for help. Ermakov wheeled round to stab Maria in the chest, but again 'the bayonet wouldn't pierce her bodice.' He shot her. Anastasia was the last of the family moving. Slashing his bayonet through the air, Ermakov cornered her but, stabbing manically against her diamond-armoured bodice, he missed and hit the wall. She was 'screaming and fighting' until he drew another pistol and shot her in the head. Now berserk with intoxicated bloodlust, Ermakov spun back to Nicholas and Alexandra, wildly stabbing first one then the other so hard that his bayonet cracked bones and pinned them to the floorboards...
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-Simon Sebag Montefiore
The Romanovs: 1613-1918
New York, N.Y. 2016.​

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I just finished Dr. Larrie D. Ferreiro's Brothers In Arms: American Independence and The Men of France and Spain Who Saved It (New York, NY 2016).


I've always known that Cornwallis' surrender at Yorktown never would have happened were it not for the overwhelming presence of Rochambeau's French army and deGrasse's French fleet. I've always known the colonists received massive financial assistance from Louis XVI's France— but I never knew that virtually ALL of the revolutionaries' arms, gunpowder and other war materiel came from French and Spanish arms merchants trading through the West Indies.


Those arms merchants were, of course, largely driven by the prospect of making a profit. They took huge financial risks by extending credit to the fledgling U.S. Several of them were subsequently bankrupted as a result.


You can watch Ferreiro talk about his book at: https://www.c-span.org/video/?422727-2/larrie-ferreiro-discusses-brothers-arms

The C-Span description:
Brothers at Arms Professor Larrie Ferreiro talked about his book Brothers at Arms: American Independence and the Men of France and Spain Who Saved It, in which he recalls the assistance that France and Spain provided the colonists during the Revolutionary War, which included close to the equivalent of $30 billion today and 90 percent of all guns employed by the Continental Army during the War.
Click to expand...



Both the book and his talk are well worth your time.




(worthwhile trivia learned: Neil deGrasse Tyson is a direct descendant of French admiral Francois Joseph Paul, Comte de Grasse)

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-Peter Cozzens
The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West
New York, N.Y. 2016.​

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The best history of the subject since Dee Brown's Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee. Read it.

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"... The antique, bewhiskered Habsburg Kaiser, who had reigned since 1848, travelled in a gilded carriage drawn by eight white horses, manned by postillions decked out in black-and-white trimmed uniforms and white perukes, escorted by Hungarian horsemen with yellow-and-black panther furs over their shoulders. Stalin would not have been able to miss this vision of obsolescent magnificence— and he was not the only future dictator to see it: the cast of twentieth-century titans in Vienna that January 1913 belongs in a Tom Stoppard play.* In a men's dosshouse on Meldemannstrasse, in Brigettenau, another world from Stalin's somewhat grander address, lived a young Austrian who was a failed artist: Adolf Hitler, aged twenty-three.

In Vienna, both Hitler and Stalin were obsessed, in different ways, with race. In this city of antiquated courtiers, Jewish intellectuals and racist rabble-rousers, cafés, beer halls and palaces, only 8.6 percent were actually Jews but their cultural influence, personified by Freud, Mahler, Wittgenstein, Buber and Schnitzler, was much greater. Hitler was formulating the anti-Semitic völkische theories of racial supremacy that, as Führer, he would impose on his European empire; while Stalin, researching his nationalities article, was shaping a new idea for an internationalist empire with a central authority behind an autonomous facade, the prototype of the Soviet Union. Almost thirty years later, their idealogical and state structures were to clash in the most savage conflict of human history.

The Jews did not fit in either of their visions. They repelled and titillated Hitler but irritated and confounded Stalin, who attacked their 'mystical' nature. Too much of a race for Hitler, they were not enough of a nation for Stalin.

But the two nascent dictators shared a Viennese pastime: both liked to walk in the park around Franz-Joseph's Schönbrunn Palace, close to where Stalin stayed. Even when they became allies in the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, they never met. Those walks were probably the closest they ever came... "
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-Simon Sebag Montefiore
Young Stalin
New York, N.Y. 2007.​

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I have yet to read anything by Simon Sebag Montefiore that wasn't highly readable, thoroughly researched and erudite. His multi-volume biography of Stalin was fascinating as I knew virtually nothing of Stalin's youth and formative influences.

Montefiore was educated at Harrow and Cambridge (where he received his Ph.D.)




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"...[Dan] De Quille's first bit of advice, which Clemens would carry with him the rest of his career, was wise, if succinct: 'Get the facts first, then you can distort them as much as you like'...

...The temple visit inspired Twain to reflect on the blessedly simpler times before the swarms of Christian missionaries had arrived in the islands to 'make the natives permanently miserable by telling them how beautiful and how blissful a place heaven is, and how nearly impossible it is to get there.' The missionaries had shown the native Hawaiian 'how in his ignorance, he had gone and fooled away all his kinfolks to no purpose; showed him what rapture it is to work all day long for fifty cents to buy food for the next day with, as compared with fishing for pastime and lolling in the shade through eternal summer, and eating of the bounty that nobody labored to provide but nature. How sad it is,' Twain concluded, 'to think of the multitudes who have gone to their graves in this beautiful island and never know there was a hell! Privately, he groused in his notebook that 'more row [has been] made about saving these 60,000 people than [it] would take to convert hell itself.'... "
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-Roy Morris, Jr.
Lighting Out For The Territory: How Samuel Clemens Headed West and Became Mark Twain
New York, N.Y. 2010.​

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I've read a lot of Twain over the years and have a decent collection of his works (including a couple of first editions). When I saw this book on the library's shelf, it occurred to me that I really didn't know that much about Twain's youth and early years. After thumbing through the book, I realized that I'd read and greatly enjoyed Roy Morris' earlier biography of Ambrose Bierce (Ambrose Bierce: Alone and In Bad Company).

This book proved to be an engaging read and highly informative. I heartily recommend it.




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What mountain? What's going on up there?

From Writing Poetry, Williams and Sweeney.
 


" 'Corruption is too often the consequence of great prosperity and for the last twenty-two years we have been visited with the temptation of that state, as no people ever were before.' [said John Quincy Adams] An all too prosperous America had become an embodiment of material self-indulgence. Through the agency of parties, politics had become a vehicle of corrupt self-interest. 'That some relaxation from the virtues of our earlier age has followed cannot be denied, and party spirit the most infectious of all corruptions of a free people has undoubtedly tainted the political morality of almost all the public men now the leaders of the Union.' [Adams again] There is 'little to choose between them. To purify and refine their characters, the trial of adversity must come, as I have no doubt it will, and that will sift the wheat from the chaff and restore many of the principles of Republican virtue, proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence.'...

...The next year, in Baltimore for the Articles of Confederation debates, Adams recorded a striking difference between 'the Manners of Maryland' and the culture of New England. Maryland's agrarian society has 'but few Merchants. They are chiefly Planters and Farmers.' Most important, 'the lands are cultivated, and all Sorts of Trades are exercised by Negroes...which has occasioned the Planters and Farmers to assume the Title of Gentlemen, and they hold their Negroes and...all labouring People and Tradesmen, in such Contempt, that they think themselves a distinct order of Beings. Hence they never will suffer their Sons to labour or learn any Trade, but they bring them up in Idleness or what is worse in Horse Racing, Cock fighting, and Card Playing.' The South's slave owners, he concluded, consider themselves 'a distinct order of Beings,' superior to those who value the Puritan work ethic...Northerners were not and could never be, in Southern eyes, 'gentlemen.' A gentleman did not work for a living...

...'Any people anywhere,' Lincoln proposed to the House, 'being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better.'...

...With the responsibility of governing in a crisis, Lincoln and Seward had decided that the government had no obligation to provide justice to slaves. They were property. The Constitution protected property. It did not protect slaves as human beings. The founding document provided a legal rather than a moral blueprint, and the Declaration's clain that 'all men are created equal' was not an absolute. For Lincoln and most white Americans, it depended on one's definition of 'equal'...

...The post-assassination Lincoln took on a greatly amplified importance to much of the American public, probably the president most deeply reviled in his lifetime and most highly regarded after his death. The image of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator has contributed to both. It has flattened out our history, especially the history of slavery in American, and allowed many Americans to take refuge under the vast Lincoln umbrella: the Great Emancipator freed the slaves. He did not. He was as much a follower as a leader; a cautious politician who, when he did emancipate the slaves in the Confederacy, in fact freed no slaves at all: they were still slaves under Confederate rule...

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-Fred Kaplan
Lincoln and the Abolitionists: John Quincy Adams, Slavery, and the Civil War
New York, N.Y. 2017.​

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I didn't realize just how much of a racist Lincoln was. He had no desire to free the slaves, did not believe a mixed race society possible and was a strong advocate of forcible expulsion/colonization of blacks to Africa or South America.

Kaplan has written an interesting book that's worth reading.


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"...Barely half the inhabitants [of Japan in 1946] had a roof over their heads. One in five had tuberculosis. On all sides in the capital were ruined buildings, broken water mains and sewage drains, shattered schools. There was no public transportation: all the buses were destroyed; the trolley lines and their cars had been obliterated. There were the daily degradations and humiliations of the American occupation; there was a pervasive lack of work and its kin: a want of money and widespread beggary and destitution. There was also, or so it seemed, a collapse of society's moral fiber, with gang warfare, prostitution, thievery, and black marketeering pasted onto a national sense of remorse, guilt, resentment, and a deeply felt, unfocused, and chance-directed bitterness.

Yet, for all that, as 1946 got shakily under way, something curious happened: the Japanese people began to ready themselves, though they knew it not, to rise up and display a mettle quite unimagineable in its scope, heft, and range. And the Pacific Ocean was the theater in which this display was to be most vigorously mounted.

In those first few months after the surrender, the country was gripped by a spasm of self-repair, of make-do and mending, of precipitous institutional about-faces and adaptations. Factories that had weeks before been making war materials switched their production lines to start making items needed not by generals and admirals, but by the bone-tired civilians and by the ragged menfolk returning from the battlefields. So bomb casings became charcoal burners, sitting neatly upright on their tail fins and helping households get through that first bitter winter. Large-caliber brass shell cases were modified as rice containers, while tea caddies were fashioned from their smaller shiny cousins. A searchlight mirror maker turned out flat glass panes to repair thousands of Tokyo windows; and for country dwellers, a fighter plane engine piston maker turned his factory to building water pumps. A piston ring fabricator named Soichiro Honda took small engines used during the war as radio generators and strapped them onto the frames of Tokyo's bicycles...

...In a series of secret U.S. Navy experiments that were begun in the early 1960s, a flotilla of antique warships was used to drag sensitive magnetometers back and forth across those Pacific ridge summits that had been found off the Oregon coast. Scientists then analyzed the recordings, and carefully noted the traces of magnetism that had been detected in the rocks below. What they found quite astonished them, as the submarine rocks displayed, with an elegant and instantly understandable symmetry, the record of the already know phenomenon of the earth's magnetic field reversal.

Every fifty thousand years or so, and for no certain reason, the direction of magnetism of the planet abruptly changes: compasses that point to the north suddenly point to the south, to put it simply..."
​


-Simon Winchester
Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers
New York, N.Y. 2015.​

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Simon Winchester has written a bunch of engrossing and best-selling books. The man is brilliant and a bit of a polymath. This isn't his best work, by any means, but it's entertaining and worth a read.


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Good to see you keeping this thread going Try. Well done!

There aren't 10 sentences on p 28 of my nearest book but the title of the poem there is The Grauballe Man, in Seamus Heaney's North.
 
In this connection David Harvey notes that the critical focus of much work in the new geographies "is on the process of becoming through which people (and geographers) transform themselves through transforming both their natural and social milieus."
Ciaran Carson Space, Place, Writing.
 


"...The two men that Photius chose for the mission to Moravia were brothers. They had grown up in Thessalonica, the empire's second city, which although still a Greek city had been surrounded by Slavic settlers. Slavic was heard in Thessalonica as often as Byzantine Greek.... The dialects that would eventually resolve themselves into the various Slavic languages had not yet done so. Slavs could still understand each other wherever they had settled, and so the brothers would be able to communicate effectively in Moravia.

The younger of the two, whose given name was Constantine but who is known to history by his later monastic name of Cyril, had been born around 825...

Cyril and Methodius accepted the mission, but they didn't leave for Moravia right away. Cyril spent the winter preparing for the assignment by inventing an alphabet that could be used to spread the Gospels in Slavic. The new alphabet, called Glagolitic, contained forty letters. Many were based loosely on either Greek or Hebrew letters, but many also appear invented from scratch. By the time they left Byzantium in the spring of 863, the brothers had used Cyril's new alphabet to translate a selection from the Gospels for use in a Slavic liturgy. This new written language would be called Old Church Slavonic...

The biggest development of Symeon's reign was a new Slavonic alphabet, ironically called Cyrillic, which originated in Bulgaria decades after Cyril's death and may have been invented by Methodius' disciple Clement of Ohrid (though most scholars now doubt this). Based much more closely on Greek letters, it was also far simpler than Glagolitic, and now began rapidly to replace it in Old Church Slavonic literature..."
_______________
Like the German kaiser, the Slavic word tsar comes from the Byzantine imperial title caesar, roughly "deputy emperor." That, of course, had originally been the family name of the first Roman emperor, Augustus Caesar and his adoptive father, Julius Caesar.
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-Colin Wells
Sailing From Byzantium: How A Lost Empire Shaped The World
New York, N.Y. 2006.​

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A truly fascinating topic and book. It is not easy reading but the effort required is worth it. This is important history to which you were probably never exposed.

Now you know the etymology and history of Cyrillic and tsar.


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"...These were the years when the prince was often seen in Paris. In Montmartre, at the Moulin Rouge (opened in 1889), he was accosted by the cancan dancer Louise Weber, who jeered, 'Ullo, Wales! Est-ce que tu vas payer mon champagne?' (Will you pay for my champagne?)

Le Chabanais, founded in 1878, was a palace of sex decorated lavishly in a variety of styles, including Moorish, Japanese, and Louis XVI. The room Bertie used was known as the Hindu chamber, emblazoned above the bed was his coat of arms. The prostitutes with their frizzed black hair, long drawers, corsets, and bare breasts, seem to twenty-first century (female) eyes strangely lacking in allure, but Bertie undoubtedly visited. He was watched by the Paris police, who kept files on his movements. The copper bath that was filled with champagne while he consorted with prostitutes (anything less erotic than sitting in a cold and sticky champagne bath seems hard to imagine) still exists. Appropriately, it was bought by Salvador Dali. The prize artifact in Bertie's room was the seat of love, which he allegedly commissioned in about 1890. Exactly what permutations the complicated design of stirrups and supports was designed for is hard to see, but when it was later exhibited to visitors, they were told, 'He stepped in there as if he were going to a stall.'..."
​


-Jane Ridley
The Heir Apparent: A Life of Edward VII, The Playboy Prince
New York, N.Y. 2013.​

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Given his mother's neurotic parenting, occasional bizarre behavio(u)r and her flagrantly manipulative on-again, off-again favoritism, it's a bit of a wonder that Edward VII turned out to be halfway sane at all. Notwithstanding the reputation of Victorian England, sexual promiscuity was commonplace among the aristocratic class. The number of male syphilitics and other STD sufferers is amazing; Lord Randolph Churchill, Albert's father (Ernest I), brother Ernest (II) Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and Edward VII's son Albert Victor ("Eddy"). STD disease was rife.




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This was quite a challenge for her.

S Palmer (ed), Introduction to Counselling and Psychotherapy.
 

But when it came to specific measures, there was deep disagreement about how fast and how far to move.

 



"...By the end of 1933 the new Roosevelt administration was actively looking for reasons to ignore any bad news about the Soviet Union. The president's team had concluded that developments in Germany and the need to contain the Japanese meant it was time, finally, for the United States to open full diplomatic relations with Moscow. Roosevelt's interest in central planning and in what he thought wer the USSR's great economic success— the president read Duranty's reporting [in the New York Times] carefully— encouraged him to believe that there might be a lucrative commercial relationship too...

***
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...The Canadian interview project evolved into a major documentary: 'Harvest of Despair' won awards at film festivals and appeared on Canadian public television in the spring of 1985.

In the United States the public broadcaster's initial reluctance to show the film— it was feared to be too 'right wing'— became controversial. PBS finally broadcast the film in September 1986 as a special episode of 'Firing Line,' the programme produced by the conservative columnist and National Review editor William Buckley, and followed the broadcast with a debate between Buckley, the historian Robert Conquest, and the journalists Harrison Salisbury of The New York Times and Christopher Hitchens, then of The Nation. Much of the debate had nothing to do with the famine itself. Hitchens brought up the topic of Ukrainian anti-semitism. Salisbury focused most of his remarks on Duranty..."
​


-Anne Applebaum
Red Famine: Stalin's War On Ukraine
New York, N.Y. 2017.​

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Stalin deliberately starved an estimated 4½-5 million Ukrainians to death in 1932-3. Applebaum's book leaves little doubt and documents the facts.




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