Category: History
Why did the Federalist Party collapse?
I am not sure what prompted me to read up on this topic, but here is part of one of the dizzying answers I found:
When the votes were counted, Jefferson and his running mate Aaron Burr had both received seventy-three electoral votes; John Adams had obtained sixty-five, while Pinckney, his running mate, had sixty-four. The one remaining vote had gone to John Jay. The Federalists had denied one vote to Pinckney to insure that he would not obtain the presidency instead of Adams. The Republicans, however, had blundered in this respect. The Constitution provided merely that the candidate with the largest number of electoral votes should become President. As it was, Jefferson and Burr were tied. The election went into the House of Representatives where the Constitution provided that a state’s vote would be cast by a majority decision of its representatives. Since the Federalists controlled six states and had divided control in two states, they could prevent the election of either Republican – and over the bitter opposition of Hamilton they contemplated throwing their support behind Burr. They hoped to break the Republican ranks and secure themselves from “the fangs of Jefferson.” Hamilton pressed for the election of Jefferson, his old rival, insisting that Burr had the inclinations of a Caesar whereas Jefferson, despite his democratic fanaticism, would conserve the established order. But the Federalists, ignoring the urgent protests of Hamilton, persisted in a course that threatened to complete the Federalist debacle. Hamilton saw himself in “the awkward situation of a man who continues sober after the company are drunk.” Burr did nothing to simplify their task, to cooperate by private word or deed.
And that is only part of the story. Here is a simpler and indeed too simplistic account:
The Federalist party had the perception of favoring the upper class, and as a result they began to lose support of the general population. The Democratic and Republican parties started focusing on issues that appealed more to the “common man”, and as a result began to sway voters away from the Federalist party until it finally ceased to exist.
I’ll let you know what else I learn about this topic.
Elizabeth S. Eisenstein has passed away
She wrote the classic book The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, still worth reading. Here is the NYT obituary. The Washington Post obituary introduced me to another side of her life:
A year after retiring, Dr. Eisenstein achieved a different sort of professional peak, earning her first No. 1 ranking in tennis — as a member of the U.S. Tennis Association’s 65-and-over division.
Betty Eisenstein, as she was known on the court, played her first adult tournament in 1973, the year she turned 50. She lost — to International Tennis Hall of Fame member Dorothy “Dodo” Cheney — but quickly found her footing in a sport that she had played only briefly as a girl.
Dr. Eisenstein landed on the cover of Washington City Paper in 2005, under the headline “The Assassin.” Though 82 and standing only 5-foot-2, she was said to move “like a kid”: “She makes her opponent work so hard and hit so many extra shots that all the body blows eventually catch up to her,” the writer, Huan Hsu, said of her lethal drop shot.
Churchill and His Money
That is the subtitle, the proper title of David Lough’s new book is No More Champagne. I had not known the extent of the story here, namely that Churchill had appalling standards for money management and exercised extremely poor judgment over most of his adult life. Here is one bit from the opening:
…Churchill had recently inherited his great-grandmother’s Irish estate, transforming the erstwhile entrepreneur into a propertied landlord for the first time in his life — a rentier, as his wife Clementine put it.
To her intense disappointment, Churchill consumed the entire inheritance within a decade — by underestimating the cost of converting his new country home at Chartwell, by gambling more than he ever let on and by losing heavily in the Wall Street Crash of 1929…
In fact Churchill resigned from the Conservative front bench in the 1930s so he could earn more money as a writer and to some extent make up for these losses; that was one reason why he developed such a vivid writing style. He ended up borrowing about $3.75 million in current dollars. And there is this:
…during the decade, he gambled heavily enough on his holidays to lose an average of £40,000 each year in today’s money.
I enjoyed this sentence from the book:
Churchill was conscious that as chancellor of the exchequer his financial habits would have to change.
And this:
After the war, when taxes on income reached an eye-watering 97.5 per cent, Churchill rarely considered any business proposition unless his advisers assured him that he could present it to the Inland Revenue as a capital receipt, which would escape tax, rather than as income.
During the war, Churchill in fact challenged tax rulings from Inland Revenue on his various filings, and typically the rulings were in his favor. Over time, Inland Revenue stopped bothering his claims and assessments. Churchill had ongoing skirmishes with the tax collectors for over forty years and, believe it or not, he won most of them.
Recommended, an interesting book. The topic of politicians with money problems could indeed use more study.
The culture that is German, with reference to Umberto Eco
Or should that be “was Germany”?
Reviewing Mr. Eco’s fourth novel, “Baudolino” (2000), in The New York Times, Richard Bernstein wrote that it “will make you wonder how a storyteller as crafty as Mr. Eco ended up producing a novel so formulaic and cluttered as this one.”
Set amid the religious disputes and wars of the 12th century, “Baudolino” became the best-selling hardcover novel of all time in Germany and a commercial success elsewhere in the world.
That is from his NYT Jonathan Kandell obituary. The Name of the Rose remains my favorite, with Foucault’s Pendulum being the other one I enjoyed very much.
Two new books on Syria and ISIS
Charles R. Lister, The Syrian Jihad: Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and the Evolution of an Insurgency.
Fawaz A. Gerges, ISIS: A History.
I have only browsed them, and I do not feel qualified to judge the details of the contents. Nonetheless each seems more serious and better documented than the other extant writings on these topics which I have seen.
The political legacy of American slavery
Forthcoming, Journal of Politics, from Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, and Maya Sen:
We show that contemporary differences in political attitudes across counties in the American South in part trace their origins to slavery’s prevalence more than 150 years ago. Whites who currently live in Southern counties that had high shares of slaves in 1860 are more likely to identify as a Republican, oppose affirmative action, and express racial resentment and colder feelings toward blacks. These results cannot be explained by existing theories, including the theory of contemporary racial threat. To explain these results, we offer evidence for a new theory involving the historical persistence of political and racial attitudes. Following the Civil War, Southern whites faced political and economic incentives to reinforce existing racist norms and institutions to maintain control over the newly free African-American population. This amplified local differences in racially conservative political attitudes, which in turn have been passed down locally across generations. Our results challenge the interpretation of a vast literature on racial attitudes in the American South.
The past still matters…
Russia fact of the day
Russian mammoth ivory exports have been increasing steadily, averaging approximately 17 tonnes per year for 1991-2000 and averaging 60 tonnes per year for 2001-2013.
It is estimated that the mammoth ivory beneath the tundra has the potential to cover several hundred years’ worth of current elephant ivory sales.
Toward a savanna theory of happiness?
We propose the savanna theory of happiness, which suggests that it is not only the current consequences of a given situation but also its ancestral consequences that affect individuals’ life satisfaction and explains why such influences of ancestral consequences might interact with intelligence. We choose two varied factors that characterize basic differences between ancestral and modern life – population density and frequency of socialization with friends – as empirical test cases. As predicted by the theory, population density is negatively, and frequency of socialization with friends is positively, associated with life satisfaction. More importantly, the main associations of life satisfaction with population density and socialization with friends significantly interact with intelligence, and, in the latter case, the main association is reversed among the extremely intelligent. More intelligent individuals experience lower life satisfaction with more frequent socialization with friends. This study highlights the utility of incorporating evolutionary perspectives in the study of subjective well-being.
That is from Li and Kanazawa, via Neuroskeptic, file under speculative.
Claims about Woolly Mammoths
In a working paper released in December 2015, the economists Naima Farah and John R. Boyce find that the discovery and exchange of mammoth tusks is having a serious effect on the market for living elephant tusks. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, they write, tusks from dead mammoths, found in the frozen Siberian tundra, have risen to account for as much as 20 percent of all ivory production. Crunching the numbers, they conclude, “Mammoth ivory trade may be saving elephants from extinction.” In the long run, however, it may be too optimistic to believe that such a laissez faire solution can forestall wild elephant extinction.
Most of the article, by Greg Rosalsky, deals with how researchers are using data (!) to determine whether woolly mammoths did indeed fall prey to the tragedy of the commons.
*The American Slave Coast*
I very much liked this lengthy but highly readable book by Ned and Constance Sublette, subtitled A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry, and that subtitle does indeed reflect the emphasis. Here are a few of the things I learned from it:
1. Barbados took in more African slaves than did the entire United States; Alex had a related post on the size of American importation.
2. President James Polk speculated in slaves, based on inside information he obtained from being President and shaping policy toward slaves and slave importation.
3. In the South there were slave “breeding farms,” where the number of women and children far outnumbered the number of men.
4. The price of a slave peaked in his or her late teens. There was another price spike upwards at about age eight, when child mortality declined.
5. Much of the University of Virginia was built by slaves; is anyone calling for those buildings to be torn down?
6. Quite possibly the sugar plantations model, including for slave deployment, stems from São Tomé, starting in the late 15th century.
7. George Mason wanted to cut off the African slave trade into Virginia, although the authors suggest many people supported this view because they wished to increase the value of the stock of slaves already in the state. I could not tell whether this was Mason’s motive or not.
8. The Anglo-American settlers of Louisiana were primarily from Kentucky.
9. In the time of slavery, the South was generally considered to be less anti-Semitic toward Jews than the North.
Recommended, here is the Amazon link. And here is Jason Kottke on the book. And here is a good Malcolm Harris review.
*The Confucian-Legalist State*
1. The subtitle is A New Theory of Chinese History, and volume one has just been translated and published from the Chinese.
2. The author, Dingxin Zhao, now is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago.
3. The book has a curious 19th century air to its intellectual influences. The main argument uses Herbert Spencer to revise Michael Mann, a 20th century British sociologist who wrote on the sources of power. Lamarckian ideas are deployed frequently.
4. The Western model has had four independent power sources: states, churches, aristocracy, and the urban bourgeoisie.
5. Neither merchants nor religion had much of a strong, independent role in early Chinese politics. Only the state and the aristocracy were powerful actors.
6. In the model of this book, the dual forces of competition and institutionalization drive historical change. More than anything else, individuals maximize power.
7. The empowerment of economic power by ideology is the most fundamental feature of modernity.
8. “Three pivotal institutions of Western Zhou origin exerted an enduring impact on the history of China: the Mandate of Heaven, the kinship-based “feudal” system, and lineage law.” (p.79)
This is not an easy work to parse, but it is a book of substance and it reflects a considerable amount of careful thought.
When will mass incarceration end?, America fact of the day
The break in the prison population’s unremitting growth offers an overdue reprieve and a cause for hope for sustained reversal of the nearly four-decade growth pattern. But any optimism needs to be tempered by the very modest rate of decline, 1.8 percent in the past year. At this rate, it will take until 2101 — 88 years — for the prison population to return to its 1980 level.
And this:
Other developments should also curb our enthusiasm. The population in federal prisons has yet to decline. And even among the states, the trend is not uniformly or unreservedly positive. Most states that trimmed their prison populations in 2012 did so by small amounts — eight registered declines of less than 1 percent. Further, over half of the 2012 prison count reduction comes from the 10 percent decline in California’s prison population, required by a Supreme Court mandate. But even that state’s achievement is partly illusory, as it has been accompanied by increasing county jail admissions.
Three states stand out for making significant cuts in their prison populations in the past decade: New York (19 percent), California (17 percent), and New Jersey (17 percent). The reductions in New York and New Jersey have been in part a function of reduced crime levels, but also changes in policy and practice designed to reduce the number of lower-level drug offenders and parole violators in prison. But the pace of reductions in most other states has been quite modest. Moreover, 22 states still subscribed to an outdated model of prisoner expansion in 2012.
Resistance to anesthesia in the 19th century
That is the topic of a new paper by Meyer R and Desai SP, here is the abstract:
News of the successful use of ether anesthesia on October 16, 1846, spread rapidly through the world. Considered one of the greatest medical discoveries, this triumph over man’s cardinal symptom, the symptom most likely to persuade patients to seek medical attention, was praised by physicians and patients alike. Incredibly, this option was not accepted by all, and opposition to the use of anesthesia persisted among some sections of society decades after its introduction. We examine the social and medical factors underlying this resistance. At least seven major objections to the newly introduced anesthetic agents were raised by physicians and patients. Complications of anesthesia, including death, were reported in the press, and many avoided anesthesia to minimize the considerable risk associated with surgery. Modesty prevented female patients from seeking unconsciousness during surgery, where many men would be present. Biblical passages stating that women would bear children in pain were used to discourage them from seeking analgesia during labor. Some medical practitioners believed that pain was beneficial to satisfactory progression of labor and recovery from surgery. Others felt that patient advocacy and participation in decision making during surgery would be lost under the influence of anesthesia. Early recreational use of nitrous oxide and ether, commercialization with patenting of Letheon, and the fighting for credit for the discovery of anesthesia suggested unprofessional behavior and smacked of quackery. Lastly, in certain geographical areas, notably Philadelphia, physicians resisted this Boston-based medical advance, citing unprofessional behavior and profit seeking. Although it appears inconceivable that such a major medical advance would face opposition, a historical examination reveals several logical grounds for the initial societal and medical skepticism.
File under “@pmarca bait.”
Hat tip goes to Neuroskeptic.
The men who collect dinosaurs
‘I’m just starting out as a collector,’ Sebastian begins. ‘I only own prehistoric shark teeth and I have a fossil of a prehistoric squid from way before the dinosaurs, and I got a Utahraptor bone shard I think from my kindergarten teacher, she’s an amateur palaeontologist who first got me into dinosaurs, and I have dinosaur poop but I think you should put in the word “coprolite”. That’s the technical term.’ He thinks some more. ‘Oh, I have mosasaur teeth, that’s a very cool prehistoric aquatic reptile. Imagine owning a T rex though! I would like to own any complete dinosaur, I don’t care which one.’
To my surprise, Sebastian doesn’t see an emotional difference between owning dinosaur toys and owning real dinosaurs, and he hints at a dimensionless state he enters using imagination. ‘If I look at a toy giganotosaurus, it feels the same as looking at a real giganotosaurus, which I have only seen once in a museum. I really see the same thing when I’m looking at my toy. I forget that the real dinosaur is way bigger. My toy is just as big in my mind.’
That is from an interesting Laurie Gwen Shapiro Aeon article, hat tip goes to Anecdotal.
Larry Summers reviews Robert Gordon
Many rightly wonder about mis-measurement of productivity as new products become available and quality improves. Gordon is compelling in arguing that productivity growth is indeed significantly underestimated. He is also more persuasive than I expected in arguing that, if anything, this understatement was greater decades ago than it has been recently. In part this is because there were more of these transformational changes that are inherently hard to assimilate in standard frameworks. In part it is because the statisticians do a much better job than they once did of taking account of quality change.
And:
The question of how to square developments that are large enough to have a major impact on wage and employment patterns with the paucity of measured productivity growth looms for future research.
Do read the whole thing, again my review of Gordon is here.