Category: History

*The Philosophy of Modern Song*

Yes the author is Bob Dylan, and I give this one a thumbs up.  You can buy it here.  Here is one bit:

A-Wop-Bop-A-Loo-Bop-A-Wop-Bam-Boom.  Little Richard was speaking in tongues across the airwaves long before anybody knew what was happening.  He took speaking in tongues right out of the sweaty canvas tent and put it on the mainstream radio, even screamed like a holy preacher — which is what he was.  Little Richard is a master of the double entendre.  “Tutti Frutti” is a good example.  A fruit, a male homosexual, and “tutti frutti” is “all fruit.”  It’s also a sugary ice cream.  A gal named Sue and a gal named Daisy and they’re both transvestites.  Did you ever see Elvis singing “Tutti Frutti” on Ed Sullivan?  Does he know what he’s singing about?  Do you think Ed Sullivan knows?  Do you think they both know?  Of all the people who sing “Tutti Fruitti,” Pat Boone was probably the only one who knew what he was singing about.  And Pat knows about speaking in tongues as well.

And:

The Grateful Dead are not your usual rock and roll band.  They’re essentially a dance band.  They have more in common with Arie Shaw and bebop than they do with the Byrds or the Stones…There is a big difference in the types of women that you see from the stage when you are with the Stones compared to the Dead.  With the Stones it’s like being at a porno convention.  With the Dead, it’s more like the women you see by the river in the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou?  Free floating, snaky and slithering like in a typical daydream.  Thousands of them….With the Dead, the audience is part of the band — they might as well be on the stage.

Or how about this:

Bluegrass is the other side of heavy metal.  Both are musical forms steeped in tradition.  They are the two forms of music that visually and audibly have not changed in decades.  People in their respective fields still dress like Bill Monroe and Ronnie James Dio.  Both forms have a traditional instrumental lineup and a parochial adherence to form.

Bluegrass is the more direct emotional music and, though it might not be obvious to the casual listener, the more adventurous.

This is one of the better books on America, and one of the best books on American popular song.  But then again, that is what you would expect from a Nobel Laureate in literature, right?

Who are the best Ukraine predictors?

Here is a new reader request:

– Which kinds of people are likely to be best able to predict how events in Ukraine will unfold? Ukrainians? Political scientists? Superforecasters?

I have to go with the superforecasters, but that said, I wish for them to have the following training:

1. Have visited Ukraine and Russia, as many times as possible.

2. Have Ukrainian and Russian friends.

3. Well-read in Russian literature, and a sense of how imperialistic so many of the Russian intellectuals and writers have been.

4. Some understanding of how the KGB perspective in Russia differs from the views of the military, all as it might reflect upon Putin and his decisions.

5. Well-read in the general history of war, in addition to the history of the region.

I am not sure you want actual Ukrainians or Russians, who tend to be insightful but highly biased.  It is noteworthy to me that Kamil Galeev, who has had a good predictive record, is from Russia but is a Tatar rather than an ethnic Russian or Ukrainian.  I would downgrade anyone, as a forecaster, who took “too much” interest in the Russia/Trump issue.  They might be too skewed toward understanding events in terms of U.S. domestic politics.  Overall, would you do better taking Estonians or professional political scientists on this one?  I am not so sure.

*A Man of Iron*

The author is Troy Senik and the subtitle is The Turbulent Life and Improbably Presidency of Grover Cleveland.  Here is one excerpt:

At the age of forty-four, the only elected office Grover Cleveland had ever held was sheriff of Eric County, New York — a role he had relinquished nearly a decade earlier, returning to a rather uneventful life as a whorkaholic bachelor lawyer.  In the next four years, he would become, in rapid succession, the mayor Buffalo, the governor of New York, and the twenty-second president of the United States.  Four years later, he would win the popular vote but nevertheless lose the presidency.  And in another four, he’s become the first — and to date, only — president to be returned to office after having been previously turned out.

His normal work hours were from 8 a.m. to 3 a.m. (p.31).  And he was broadly libertarian:

He would be the final Democratic president to embrace the classical liberal principles of the party’s founder, Thomas Jefferson.  Cleveland believed in a narrow interpretation of the Constitution, a limited role for the federal government, and a light touch on economic affairs.  To casual observers, such an approach is often mistaken for do-nothing passivity…that epithet, however, represents a fundamental misunderstanding of his presidency.

…Over the course of his two terms, this led to an astonishing 584 vetoes, more than any other president save Franklin Roosevelt…In his first term alone, Cleveland vetoed more bills than all twenty-one of his predecessors combined.

I am happy to recommend this book, you can buy it here.  I am also happy to recommend the new book by Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, New Yorker coverage here.

My Conversation with the excellent Walter Russell Mead

Here is the audio and transcript, here is the summary:

He joined Tyler to discuss how the decline of American religiosity has influenced US foreign policy, which American presidents best and least understood the Middle East, the shrewd reasons Stalin supported Israel, the Saudi secret to political stability, the fate of Pakistan, the most likely scenario for China moving on Taiwan, the gun pointed at the head of German business, the US’s “murderous fetishization of ideology over reality” in Sub-Saharan Africa, the inherent weakness in having a foreign policy establishment dominated by academics, what he learned from attending the Groton School, and much more.

Here is one excerpt:

COWEN: How would you change or improve the training that goes into America’s foreign policy elite?

MEAD: Well, I would start by trying to draw people’s attention to that, over the last 40 years, there’s been an enormous increase in the number of PhD grads engaged in the formation of American foreign policy. There’s also been an extraordinary decline in the effectiveness of American foreign policy. We really ought to take that to heart.

COWEN: Do you think of it as an advantage that you don’t have a PhD?

MEAD: Huge advantage.

COWEN: How would you describe that advantage?

MEAD: I don’t really believe in disciplines. I see connections between things. I start from reality. I’m not trying to be anti-intellectual here. You need ideas to help you organize your perceptions of reality. But I think there’s a tendency in a lot of social science disciplines — you start from a bunch of really smart, engaged people who have been thinking about a set of questions and say, “We’ll do a lot better if we stop randomly thinking about everything that pops up and try, in some systematic way, to organize our thinking of this.”

I think you do get some gains from that, but you see, over time, the focus of the discipline has this tendency to shift. The discipline tends to become more inward navel-gazing. “What’s the history of our efforts to systematize our thinking about this?” The discipline becomes more and more, in a sense, ideological and internally focused and less pragmatic.

I think that some of the problem, though, is not so much in the intellectual weaknesses of a lot of conventional postgrad education, but simply almost the crime against humanity of having whole generations of smart people spend the first 30, 35 years of their lives in a total bubble, where they’re in this academic setting, and the rule . . . They become socialized into the academy, just as much as prisoners get socialized into the routines of a prison.

The American academy is actually a terrible place for coming to understand how world politics works. Recently, I had a conversation with an American official who was very proud of the way that the US had broken the mold by revealing intelligence about Russia’s plans to invade Ukraine, and pointed out how that had really helped build the NATO coalition against Russian aggression, and so on.

So far as he goes, it’s true. But I said, however, if you really look at the total message the US was projecting to Russia in those critical months, there were two messages. One is, “We’ve got great intelligence on you. We actually understand you much better than you think.” It was shocking. I think it shocked the Russians. But on the other hand, we’re saying, “We think you’re going to win quickly in Ukraine. We’re offering Zelenskyy a plane ride out of Kyiv. We’re pulling out all our diplomats and urging other countries to pull out their diplomats.”

The message, actually the totality of the message that we sent to Putin is, “You are going to win if you do this.”

And this, on what makes for talent in the foreign policy arena:

…you can’t know too much history. A hunger for travel. I think too many foreign policy types don’t actually get out into the field nearly as much as they should. Curiosity about other cultures. A strong grounding in a faith of your own, which can be a secular ideology, perhaps, in some cases, but more often is likely to be a great religious tradition of some kind.

A very good conversation.  And I am happy to recommend Walter’s new book The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People.

That was then, this is now — Iranian edition

Women protestors were part of the constitutional movement from its earliest stages.  They facilitated the strikes, lent their moral and financial support to the constitutionalists, and defended them physically against the forces of the shah.  In 1905 women reportedly created human barriers and protected the ‘ulama who had taken sanctuary at the Shah ‘Abd al-‘Azim Shrine from the armed government forces.  In the summer of 1906, when nationalists obtained sanctuary at the garden of the British legation, several thousand women gathered to join the strikers.

That is from Janet Afary’s quite interesting The Iranian Constitutional Revolution, 1906-1911, Grassroots Democracy, Social Democracy, & the Origins of Feminism.

The forgotten Pilsudski?

For many, Pilsudski’s real significance lay in the role he played in halting a Bolshevik conquest of Europe in 1920. The British statesman Lord D’Abernon most dramatically expressed this idea when he referred to the 1920 Polish-Soviet War as one of the eighteen decisive battles of world civilization.  “The history of contemporary civilization knows no event of greater importance than the Battle of Warsaw, 1920″…

In his evaluation of the Polish victory in 1920, historian Norman Davies noted: “Had Pilsudski and Weygand failed to arrest the triumphant advance of the Soviet Army at the Battle of Warsaw, not only would Christianity have experienced a dangerous reverse, but the very existence of Western civilization would have been imperiled.”  And in the field of military history, the plan that Pilsudski and Rozwadowski devised for the Battle of Warsaw is counted among the twenty-five wars in world history revealing “tactical genius in battle.”

That is from the new and very useful book Jozef Pilsudski: Founding Father of Modern Poland, by Joshua D. Zimmerman.  Here is Wikipedia on the Polish-Soviet War.

Petrov Day!

Today we honor Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov whose calm actions and general humanity helped to prevent a nuclear war on September 26th, 1983. The NYTimes reported the events on Petrov’s death in 2017.

Early on the morning of Sept. 26, 1983, Stanislav Petrov helped prevent the outbreak of nuclear war.

A 44-year-old lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defense Forces, he was a few hours into his shift as the duty officer at Serpukhov-15, the secret command center outside Moscow where the Soviet military monitored its early-warning satellites over the United States, when alarms went off.

Computers warned that five Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles had been launched from an American base.

“For 15 seconds, we were in a state of shock,” he later recalled. “We needed to understand, ‘What’s next?’ ”

The alarm sounded during one of the tensest periods in the Cold War. Three weeks earlier, the Soviets had shot down a Korean Air Lines commercial flight after it crossed into Soviet airspace, killing all 269 people on board, including a congressman from Georgia. President Ronald Reagan had rejected calls for freezing the arms race, declaring the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” The Soviet leader, Yuri V. Andropov, was obsessed by fears of an American attack.

Colonel Petrov was at a pivotal point in the decision-making chain. His superiors at the warning-system headquarters reported to the general staff of the Soviet military, which would consult with Mr. Andropov on launching a retaliatory attack.

After five nerve-racking minutes — electronic maps and screens were flashing as he held a phone in one hand and an intercom in the other, trying to absorb streams of incoming information — Colonel Petrov decided that the launch reports were probably a false alarm.

As he later explained, it was a gut decision, at best a “50-50” guess, based on his distrust of the early-warning system and the relative paucity of missiles that were launched.

Colonel Petrov died at 77 on May 19 in Fryazino, a Moscow suburb, where he lived alone on a pension. The death was not widely reported at the time. 

*Indigenous Continent*

The author is Pekka Hämäläinen, and the subtitle is The Epic Contest for North America.  Rich with insight on ever page, might it be the best history of Native Americans?  At the very least, this is one of the two or three best non-fiction books this year.  How is this for an excellent opening sentence:

Kelp was the key to America.

Here is another excerpt:

Spain had a momentous head start in the colonization of the Western Hemisphere, but North American Indians had brought Spanish expansion to a halt; in the late sixteenth century there were no significant Spanish settlements on the continent — only petty plunder regimes.  North America was still essentially Indigenous.  The contrast to the stunning Spanish successes in Middle and South America was striking: how could relatively small Native groups defy Spanish colonialism in the north when the formidable Aztec, Inca, and May Empires had fallen so easily?  The answer was right in front of the Spanish — the decentralized, kinship-based, and egalitarian political regimes made poor targets for imperial entradas — but they kept missing it because the Indigenous nations were so different from Europe’s hierarchical societies.  They also missed a fundamental fact about Indigenous warfare: fighting on their homelands, the Indians did not need to win battles and wars; they just needed not to lose them.

The general take is that pushing out the Native Americans took longer than you might think, and also was more contingent than you might think.  The decentralized nature of North American Indian regimes was one reason why the Spaniards made more headway in Latin America than anyone made in North America.

To be clear, I am by no means on board with the main thesis, preferring the details of this book to its conceptual framework.  Too often the author heralds the glories of a Native American tribe or group, and along the way lets it drop that they numbered only 30,000 individuals, as was the case for instance with the Iroquois.  If you didn’t know the actual history of this world, and had read only this book, you would be shocked to learn that Anglo civilization was on the verge of subjugating one-quarter of the world.  Or that England had learned how to “take care of Ireland” in the seventeenth century, and it was only a matter of time before similar techniques would be applied elsewhere.  And it is not until p.450 that the author lets on how much technological progress the Westerners had been making throughout; somehow that part of the story is missing until the very end.

I cannot quite buy that “The Native Reservations were a sign of American weakness, not strength,” though I can see how they might be both (p.408).

Yet I think you can simply put all this aside and still get full value — and then some — from this book.  Among its other virtues, it is an excellent treatise on the 17th century and its energetic, exploratory nature.  Or for another example, I loved the p.152 discussion of whether Indians wanted the settlers to fence in their animals (the fences cut off travel paths for deer and other hunted animals, though the fences kept the settlers’ animals from destroying native crops).  The discussions of equestrianism are consistently excellent.

In the first twenty years of the United States, fights with Indians absorbed 5/6 of overall federal expenditure (p.343).

Here is a good NYT story about the book and its reception.  I would say that a Finnish white guy even tried to pull this off is a positive signal about its quality, at least these days.

As recently as 2019, his epic Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power was an MR “best book of the year.”  You don’t have to buy the whole story, and so I conclude that Pekka Hämäläinen is one of the more important writers of our time.

A White Supremacist Under Every Bed

AlphaHistory: The Red Scare (1947-57) was a decade-long period of intense anti-communist paranoia in the United States. During this period, millions of ordinary Americans were paralysed by an irrational fear of ‘Reds under the bed’ – the belief that thousands of communist agents and sympathisers were secretly living amongst them, plotting or waiting to overthrow the government.

Today, we live under the White Supremacist Scare, the irrational fear that there is a white supremacist under every bed. An email sent to the parents of University of Virginia students, for example, warns that “events have occurred on Grounds that have been cause for concern” and “the nature and timing of these events have caused some to speculate that they are linked or part of a larger pattern of racially motivated crimes…”. Here is one such event:

Last weekend, several community members reported that a flag bearing a symbol that looked either like a crown or an owl, depending on how the flag is held, was left on the grass near the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers. That same person also left a check for $888.88 that was ultimately delivered, as a surprise, to a student’s room, and the check had the same symbol that was on the flag. As rumors swirled around this bizarre set of events, some speculated that the flag represented a white supremacist organization and that the check was somehow a targeted act of intimidation against a student of color.

A crown! An owl! A check for $888.88! Heil Hitler! It seems odd that giving a check to someone is “targeting” a person of color. But no matter. Logic isn’t important here. What else could this mean but white supremacy? Bear in mind that this is a university where streaking the lawn is a tradition and there are weird numbers, signs, and sigils all over campus.

The UVA police and the FBI—yes, the FBI!—were called in to investigate (n.b. there isn’t even a hint of any crime!). And they got the culprit! Of course, what they discovered was entirely banal. Does it even matter?

“…we discovered that he is part of an organization focusing on micro-philanthropy that occasionally engages in random acts of kindness to current students.”

Moreover, the UVA administration is advertising their investigation, as if how seriously they took this potential threat is a credit to the organization instead of an embarrassment of poor judgment and fevered imagination.

What should I ask Ken Burns?

I will be doing a Conversation with him, here is the beginning of his rather formidable Wikipedia entry:

Kenneth Lauren Burns (born July 29, 1953) is an American filmmaker known for his documentary films and television series, many of which chronicle American history and culture. His work is often produced in association with WETA-TV and/or the National Endowment for the Humanities and distributed by PBS.

His widely known documentary series include The Civil War (1990), Baseball (1994), Jazz (2001), The War (2007), The National Parks: America’s Best Idea (2009), Prohibition (2011), The Roosevelts (2014), The Vietnam War (2017), and Country Music (2019). He was also executive producer of both The West (1996), and Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies (2015). Burns’s documentaries have earned two Academy Award nominations (for 1981’s Brooklyn Bridge and 1985’s The Statue of Liberty) and have won several Emmy Awards, among other honors.

His forthcoming book is the lovely Our America: A Photographic History.  So what should I ask?

The End of History (of Philosophy)

Hanno Sauer on why philosophers spend far too much time reading and writing about dead philosophers:

What credence should we assign to philosophical claims that were formed without any knowledge of the current state of the art of the philosophical debate and little or no knowledge of the relevant empirical or scientific data? Very little or none. Yet when we engage with the history of philosophy, this is often exactly what we do. In this paper, I argue that studying the history of philosophy is philosophically unhelpful. The epistemic aims of philosophy, if there are any, are frustrated by engaging with the history of philosophy, because we have little reason to think that the claims made by history’s great philosophers would survive closer scrutiny today. First, I review the case for philosophical historiography and show how it falls short. I then present several arguments for skepticism about the philosophical value of engaging with the history of philosophy and offer an explanation for why philosophical historiography would seem to make sense even if it didn’t.

A devastating example:

Consider Plato’s or Rousseau’s evaluation of the virtues and vices of democracy. Here is a (non-exhaustive) list of evidence and theories that were unavailable to them at the time:
  • Historical experiences with developed democracies
  • Empirical evidence regarding democratic movements in developing countries
  • Various formal theorems regarding collective decision making and preference aggregation, such as the Condorcet Jury-Theorem, Arrow’s Impossibility-Results, the Hong-Page-Theorem, the median voter theorem, the miracle of aggregation, etc.
  • Existing studies on voter behavior, polarization, deliberation, information
  • Public choice economics, incl. rational irrationality, democratic realism
The whole subsequent debate on their own arguments…When it comes to people currently alive, we would steeply discount the merits of the contribution of any philosopher whose work were utterly uninformed by the concepts, theories and evidence just mentioned (and whatever other items belong on this list). It is not clear why the great philosophers of the past should not be subjected to the same standard. (Bear in mind that time and attention are severely limited resources. Therefore, every decision we make about whose work to dedicate our time and attention to faces important trade-offs.)

This is obviously true so I think the more interesting question is why do philosophers do this?

Hat tip: Jason Brennan

Hermann Goering on the American war effort

At first, however, we could not believe the speed with which your Merchant Marine was growing. Claims of eight to 10 days to launch a ship seemed fantastic. Even when we realized it referred to the assembly of prefabricated parts, a mere 10 days to put it together was still unthinkable. Our shipbuilding industry was very thorough and painstaking, but very slow, disturbingly slow, in comparison. It took nine months to build a Danube vessel.

Here is the entire (previously overlooked) interview.  Via D., interesting throughout.

*Magnificent Rebels*

The author is the excellent Andrea Wulf and the subtitle is The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self.  The focus is on the German group of thinkers who worked together in or near Jena, including the Schlegels, Novalis, Schiller, Goethe and Schelling, with a later cameo from Hegel.  This is one of my favorite books of the year, but note it focuses mostly on their personal stories and not so much on their ideas.  Perfect for me, but not the ideal introduction for every reader.  And their ideas are hard to explain!  Their emphasis on imagination and subjectivity has been so absorbed into the modern world it can be hard to grasp their revolutionary nature at the time.  Context is that which is scarce.  Recommended nonetheless.

*Second City: Birmingham and the Forging of Modern Britain*

By Richard Vinen, do not forget that the Lunar Society (subject of the very first MR post!) was based there.  Here is one excerpt:

What has come to be called the Birmingham or Midlands Enlightenment brought together an unusually curious and energetic group of men…Joseph Priestly and William Hutton epitomized the atmosphere of optimism, uninhibited enquiry and material prosperity some associated with Birmingham in the eighteenth century.  The former was a minister of religion, though mainly known to posterity as a scientist; the latter was a well-to-do bookseller, though mainly known to posterity as a writer, particularly as the author of the first history of his adopted city.  Both men, however, came ot have less happy memories of Birmingham than those implied by the quotations above because both their houses were burned down in the Church and King riots of 1791.

Strongly recommended to all those who care about such things, you can order here.