This week was so busy that Friday being here already seems like a shock, not that I am complaining.  Below are some links to keep you busy until the end of the day – that is if you aren’t already busy enough!  (Though there is always time to procrastinate.)

An interview with one of our favorite blog editors, Emily Bobrow.

Google’s Eric Schmidt on what the web will look like in 5 years.

How little people eat breakfast.

Tiny Fey’s favorite 30 Rock moments.

Check out Poetry Speaks.

Happy 40th birthday Sesame Street.

Congratulations to Girls Write Now on being honored at the White House!

Watch OUP author Michael Sandel lead the most popular course in Harvard’s history.

Walt Whitman twitterized? Sacrilege!

Drawing NYC from memory.

As a New Yorker I feel it is necessary to celebrate the Yankee victory.  Go Yanks!

Hey Jude, a flowchart.

Richard Barrios has lectured extensively on film, served as a commentator on numerous DVDs, and co-hosted a series on Turner Classic Movies. He currently lives outside Philadelphia. His book, A Song in the Dark: The Birth of the Musical Film, 2nd edition, illuminates the origins of the movie musical from the smash hits of The Singing Fool and Sunny Side Up to bizarre flops like Golden Dawn and Cecil B. DeMille’s Madam Satan. In the original post below, Barrios looks at the 10 worst musical films ever made.

Musical films, as most of us are aware, are among the greatest mixed blessings in American art. They can be transcendent and glorious at times, and quite often they can be inept, foul, and obnoxious. On a few choice occasions, some individual movie musicals can offer us all these at once. They are part of our lives and our culture and our subconscious, and yet often we are not permitted to adore them unreservedly; they have let us down too often for that.

While I was writing my history of the early movie musical, I was struck again and again by the trial-and-error nature of how the musical was born, and how the mistakes counted for as much as the successes. The two coexist steadily, especially in early musicals, which usually lack the smooth-grained professionalism of later efforts. The filmmakers learned as much from what they got terribly wrong as what they did correctly, and sometimes more so. The resulting films demonstrate this so vividly that, as a historian, I found myself steadily compelled to reflect on both sides of the coin. This naturally sets aside the entire fact that the dogs are often a great deal of fun to write about.

Fourteen years after Oxford first published it, A Song in the Dark now sings anew in an extensively revised and updated second edition. In celebration, I’ve compiled a “Ten Worst” list—technically, it’s “Eleven Worst”—that spans nearly the entire 80-plus year history of musical films, with the genre’s most odious cinematic mistakes and annotations of how and why they got that way. While it may strike some as a somewhat perverse celebration of musicals to offer a list of their worst achievements, I remain gleefully unapologetic. We all learn from our errors, and if they should not be celebrated they must still, ever, be recalled. Naturally it all must remain subjective, much like politics and religion, and I hope that readers will feel free to compose their own lists as well. As a palate-cleanser, I promise a “Ten Best” list in the near future.

The Singing Fool (1928)
A major film, in fact the biggest sensation of its time. Far more important in many ways than The Jazz Singer, beloved by many millions, one of the highest-grossing films made prior to Gone With the Wind. Alas, all this history and triumph don’t count for much when you just try to sit through it today. The annoying technique—back and forth between silent and “talkie”—is the least of it. The most is Al Jolson, who redefines “star ego” for all time. For anyone wondering why The Jazz Singer is shown so frequently and this follow-up so seldom, spend a few minutes communing with Jolson and his excesses, and you’ll know. If you were ever inclined to like the song “Sonny Boy,” seeing it introduced here, and driven into the ground with bathetic repetition, will cure you.

Golden Dawn (1930)
Seldom has terrible ever been this irresistible. A monstrosity of a Broadway operetta—think Emperor Jones meets Rose-Marie—transferred to the screen with all its excesses utterly intact, and for good measure it’s almost as racist a tract as The Birth of a Nation. Stalwart British soldiers try to keep the peace in East Africa, and the native heroine is considered a goddess because she wasn’t born black. There’s lots more, including a fearful idol who resembles a Smurf, a put-upon cast who somehow manages to keep straight faces, and songs such as “My Bwana” and “Africa Smiles No More.” Until you’ve seen and heard a darkly made-up Noah Beery sing “The Whip Song,” you don’t know from bad taste.

Down to their Last Yacht (1934)
Have you ever seen a film destroy itself while it runs through the projector? Behold, then, this ridiculous indigent-millionaires-meet-randy-Pacific-islanders concoction, so incoherent that it appears to be slabs of several unrelated movies glued together. Sidney Blackmer (Ruth Gordon’s husband in Rosemary’s Baby) stars as one of the most ill-at-ease musical heartthrobs in history. There are lots of jokes about cannibals and sex, and if it had been made in recent years there probably would’ve been a song about Viagra. The climactic number, an enormous and incoherent “South Sea Bolero,” seems to have been done by Busby Berkeley while high on drug-spiked papaya juice. Depression audiences weren’t fooled, and Yacht lost so much money that the angry studio fired the producer.

Rosalie (1937)
Overblown, overpriced, overstuffed, overproduced, overlong, overeverything. There’s a teeny princess-meets-commoner story, which is buried under so many tons of rotten MGM meringue that watching it gives you a headache. Eleanor Powell was an incredibly skillful tap dancer, but this thing doesn’t give her enough opportunities to redeem tons of excess and inertia. Nor are Ray Bolger and the beautiful Ilona Massey treated well, while Cole Porter’s songs range from wonderful (“In the Still of the Night”) to stupid (the title song). And chunky, placid Nelson Eddy as a college football star? In what universe?

Panama Hattie (1942)
Ann Sothern, a talented and appealing performer, wasn’t a good fit for Ethel Merman’s stage role. Strike one. Most of Cole Porter’s Broadway songs are cut or mangled, and replaced with lesser work. Strike two. And the strike three nail in the coffin is some interminable and boring slapstick relief involving Red Skelton and a haunted house. Only Lena Horne emerges unscathed, probably because she’s only given two songs and no role in the wretched script. The producers reshot and tinkered with the film, and must have felt redeemed when wartime audiences, eager for escapist relief, made it a hit. Just remember that the public isn’t always right.

Pal Joey (1957) and Can Can (1960)
Sure, Frank Sinatra was a great singer and could be a fine actor, but these two Broadway adaptations were made around the time he decided that he would only need to do one take of any scene. The results of such a blasé lack of commitment? A pair of lavish, worthless dinosaurs. Pal Joey lost all the nasty cynicism, and many of the Rodgers/Hart songs, that made it so striking and innovative onstage, and Can Can—set in 1890s Paris—is about as French as a small order of McDonald’s fries. Some of the other performers do try, but Frank’s phone-it-in Rat-Packy attitude sabotages them. Definition of a dispiriting experience: watching an expensive movie whose center is occupied by a star who doesn’t give a damn. Listen to the soundtracks, and skip the rest.

Paint Your Wagon (1969)
The late 1960s was rife with expensive and bloated musical blockbusters that were totally out-of-step with the time. This was the worst of all of them, and further proof that even an accomplished stage director like Joshua Logan shouldn’t necessarily be allowed near a movie camera. There’s a dumb Gold Rush plot, Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood and poor Jean Seberg form a musical ménage-a-trois, both men do their own vocals (alas!), and the whole thing comes off like a suburban dad trying to pass as a hippie. Lerner and Loew’s Broadway show deserved better, but as Lerner was co-producer he doesn’t rate a pass. With overblown rubbish like this, no wonder audiences turned to films with smaller budgets, bigger brains, and less music.

Lost Horizon (1972)
A debacle that deserves its near-legendary reputation, this abomination spelled finis to the film career of producer Ross Hunter. There had already been a failed attempt at a Broadway musical version of Frank Capra’s classic romance, but this one, with painful songs by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, was worse. Poor Peter Finch and Liv Ullmann head a worthy, completely misbegotten all-star cast, and the details, script, and musical numbers are all minor classics of wrong-headedness. Choicest detail: the shelves of the Shangri-La library, supposedly a repository for the world’s finest literature, upon which can be clearly seen a number of Readers Digest Condensed Books.

Showgirls (1995)
Perhaps not a musical in the conventional sense of the word, but why pass up any opportunity to call out this classic backstage stinker? Trying oh, so hard to be a scorching erotic exposé, it succeeds in being asinine, juvenile, and very funny. Writer Joe Eszterhas cribbed his plot from All About Eve and his dialogue from old issues of True Confessions and Hustler, forming a worthy setting for Elizabeth Berkeley’s star-breaking acting and hysterical (lap) dancing. Given the appalling musical numbers, it’s somewhat of a surprise to note that Marguerite Derricks is the credited choreographer, not St. Vitus. It’s all cheaper, in every sense of the world, than a trip to Vegas, and if you’re in the right mean mood a whole lot more fun. Viewing note: the hilarity is even greater if you have a pitcher of Cosmopolitans.

Glitter (2001)
Mariah Carey’s high-powered, multi-octave vocalism is not to all tastes, but at least it demands a certain amount of respect. Then there’s her acting… As with Rudy Vallee, Kate Smith, Johnnie Ray, and many other pop singers, she tries to make the leap onto the big screen and fails utterly. A downtrodden-waif-makes-good saga, this is a glaring of example of old, bad wine poured into a new, cheesy bottle. Nobody wins, Mariah can’t read lines and isn’t photogenic, and the single worthy moment is a shot—one of its final screen appearances—of the World Trade Center. It was fortunate that Chicago came along the following year to rescue movie musicals after Glitter nearly killed them.

IGNOMINIOUS MENTION

Mother’s Boy (1929), The Lottery Bride (1930), Take a Chance (1933), George White’s 1935 Scandals, Anything Goes (1956), Song of Norway (1970), Man of La Mancha (1972), Mame (1974), At Long Last Love (1975), A Chorus Line (1985), From Justin to Kelly (2003)

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In his play Measure for Measure Shakespeare makes mention of a garden surrounded by a brick wall. By his time the word brick had been part of the English language for almost 200 years.

It seems to have been brought to England by Flemish construction workers in the 1400s who worked with a newfangled building material that English speakers didn’t have a name for.

By the time of Samuel Johnson the word brick was so familiar that he used it without thinking in relating an opinion about Shakespeare.

Johnson said that anyone who tried to explain Shakespeare “by select quotations, will succeed like the pedant in Hierocles, who, when he offered his house to sale, carried a brick in his pocket as a specimen.”

If you’ve been following podictionary you’ll know that this sent me off in search of whatever Hierocles was.

Hieroclese was a Greek scholar who lived in Alexandria about 1500 years ago and who many people—including Samuel Johnson—credited as being half of the comedy duo Hierocles and Philagrius.

Modern scholars aren’t really sure if the joke book attributed to these two actually had anything to do with them but there is indeed an old joke book from which Samuel Johnson pulled that old chestnut; although in the edition I saw it was a stone not a brick that the homeowner had in his pocket.

Just to show that (other than bricks) there isn’t really anything new under the sun I came across articles on the web that point to Hierocles and Philagrius as being the originators of the Monty Python dead parrot sketch.

• Customer: “The slave you sold me died.”
• Merchant: “By the gods, he never did such a thing when he was with me.”

Compared to that, bricks are relatively new.

Etymologically some sources at least believe that the word brick is related to the word break and that originally bricks were not whole units but broken pieces.

Perhaps more speculatively, the theory goes that it was bakers who broke up their dough to bake loaves who used a similar word for these broken-off portions, and that this word found itself being applied to the material that was baked into bricks.

Continuing on from our Historical Thesaurus week, I’m delighted to be able to bring you another wonderful original post from Professor Christian Kay, who headed up the project. Today she tells us about one of her favourite sections of the HTOED: kinship. You can read her previous OUPblog post here.

One of my favourite sections for browsing in HTOED is 03.01 Society/the community. As with all sections of HTOED, this one proceeds from general concepts through more specific ones, such as 03.01.01 Kinship/relationship, to the very specific, such as 03.01.01.03.01.03 Mother. (One of our reviewers compared our numbering system to “Scandinavian telephone numbers”, but we find it the best way to keep track of complex hierarchies of ideas.) In addition to the usual fascinating array of words, sections like these reflect hundreds of years of changing social history.

The lists of synonyms show that kinship, and the obligations it imposes, has been important since Anglo-Saxon times. As might be expected, words for basic family relationships have remained stable: modern English words like mother, father, son, daughter, brother, sister can be traced directly back to Old English. However, even in this area there are surprises: the Old English eam has been replaced by French-derived uncle, and there appears to be no word for aunt at all.

While this situation might come as a relief to some – I think particularly of P.G. Wodehouse’s character Bertie Wooster, terrorized by a platoon of formidable aunts – it has a straightforward explanation. If we look down 03.01.01.03.07 Aunt to its sub-categories, we find that there were in fact two Old English words for aunt, denoting a maternal and a paternal aunt respectively. There was also a word for a paternal uncle, and it is possible, though scholars disagree about this, that eam originally meant a maternal uncle. (In HTOED we hedge our bets by putting the word under both Uncle and Maternal Uncle.) Nephews and nieces were also distinguished by the side of the family they belonged to.

Systems like this were common in European languages and still survive in some of them, such as the Scandinavian languages. So why not in English? The answer to this question, as to others about English, is the Norman conquest of 1066, which introduced many French words along with changes in the legal system. One feature of the new system was primogeniture, whereby property passes to the oldest son rather than being divided among all the children. The important line of descent is thus from father to son, with the linguistic effect that there is no longer any great need for terms which distinguish, for example, maternal and paternal uncles. Primogeniture has the advantage of preserving large estates intact, though it may seem unfair in other ways: English novels are full of younger sons who have to make their own way in the world, and of daughters whose marriage prospects are blighted by lack of dowry.

Although some kinship terms are very precise, others are fuzzy in meaning. Here we can think of our own usage, where uncle can mean the husband of one’s aunt or a family friend as well as a blood relation (and other things). A glance at the HTOED index will reveal a similar fuzziness in other terms, such as father-in-law, classified under its original meaning of ‘step-father’, or sister classified with ‘sister-in-law’. Such examples sound a warning for readers of older literature: a word may not always mean what it appears to mean. In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, for example, published in 1813, Mr Darcy has written to his sister, Georgiana, telling her that he is engaged to Elizabeth Bennett. The story continues: “The joy which Miss Darcy expressed on receiving similar information was as sincere as her brother’s in sending it. Four sides of paper were insufficient to contain all her delight, and all her earnest desire of being loved by her sister.”

Why does she use the word sister when she plainly means “sister-in-law”? The explanation may be that people then often lived in bigger groups than we do nowadays; unmarried women would live with their parents, or, failing them, being in need of a male protector, with the family of a brother or a married sister or aunt. There was no need to distinguish between sisters and sisters-in-law in the family circle, so the term sister tended to be used for both relationships. A similar vagueness can be heard nowadays with reference to step-sisters or half-sisters.

Nuggets of social history can also be found by looking at recent additions to the kinship categories. Before the twentieth century, people don’t seem to have found it necessary to distinguish the extended family (first recorded in 1942), since most families were extended. We can also speculate about the factors behind weekend father (1962), or pram-pusher for a young mother (1935). Many terms come in from psychology, such as mother-substitute (1943) or sibling (1903), supplying a gap for a term covering both brother and sister. The range of colloquial, and possibly less respectful, terms for one’s parents also increases, including dad and daddy as early as 1500, American terms like poppa (1897) and paw (1903; also common in Scots), and the rhyming slang pot and pan (= “old man” = “father”) in 1906. Parallel categories for other relatives reveal a similar range of expressions to the kinship browser.

Roger Scruton is currently Research Professor for the Institute for the Psychological Sciences where he teaches philosophy at their graduate school in both Washington and Oxford. He is a writer, philosopher, and public commentator and has specialized in aesthetics with particular attention to music and architecture. In his book Beauty, Scruton explores various notions of beauty and comes to the conclusion that beauty is not determined by subjective feelings, but universal values that are rooted in rational thought. In the following excerpt Scruton  discusses beauty in the form of art.

A century ago Marcel Duchamp signed a urinal with the name ‘R. Mutt’, entitled it ‘La Fontaine’, and exhibited it as a work of art. One immediate result of Duchamp’s joke was to precipitate an intellectual industry devoted to answering the question ‘What is art?’ The literature of this industry is as tedious as the never-ending imitations of Duchamp’s gesture. Nevertheless, it has left a residue of scepticism. If anything can count as art, what is the point or the merit in achieving that label? All that is left is the curious but unfounded fact that some people look at some things, others look at others. As for the suggestion that there is an enterprise of criticism, which searches for objective values and lasting monuments to the human spirit, this is dismissed out of hand, as depending on a conception of the art-work that was washed down the drain of Duchamp’s ‘fountain’.

The argument is eagerly embraced, because it seems to emancipate people from the burden of culture, telling them that all those venerable masterpieces can be ignored with impunity, that TV soaps are ‘as good as’ Shakespeare and Radiohead the equal of Brahms, since nothing is better than anything and all claims to aesthetic value are void. The argument therefore chimes with the fashionable forms of cultural relativism, and defines the point from which university courses in aesthetics tend to begin – and as often as not the point at which they end.

There is useful comparison to be made here with jokes. It is as hard to circumscribe the class of jokes as it is the class of artworks. Anything is a joke if somebody says so. A joke is an artefact made to be laughed at. It may fail to perform its function, in which case it is a joke that ‘falls flat’. Or it may perform its function, but offensively, in which case it is a joke ‘in bad taste’. But none of this implies that the category of jokes is arbitrary, or that there is no such thing as a distinction between good jokes and bad. Nor does it in any way suggest that there is no place for the criticism of jokes, or for the kind of moral education that has an appropriate sense of humour as its goal. Indeed, the first thing you might learn, in considering jokes, is that Marcel Duchamp’s urinal was one – quite a good one first time round, corny by the time of Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes and downright stupid today.

By Anatoly Liberman

A reader commented on my recent statement that Engl. good and god are unrelated and noted that this statement, in addition to being counterintuitive and undemonstrable, can even lead to schisms. Being a peaceful man, I am very much against all kinds of hostilities. Nor do I think that the history of words should interfere with faith to such an extent as to result in religious wars. But god and good are indeed unrelated, and I decided not to wait for the last Wednesday of November, when my monthly gleanings are due, and to say what is known about the origin of the words in question as early as possible (now people say only to not wait; for me such a split infinitive is worse than a schism).

Good has transparent etymology: gather and -gether are related to it. Their root means “fit, suitable.” This circumstance is borne out by numerous cognates in and outside Germanic. That is “good” which has been “fixed,” “assembled,” “put together” in a proper way. By contrast, the origin of god is debatable, which does not mean that we know nothing about its derivation. But before I come to the point, let me say that already long ago the proximity of good and god (in the other Germanic languages the two words also sound alike) gave rise to the conclusion that such a striking similarity in sound cannot be fortuitous. Here are three quotations dated 1589, 1606, and 1637 respectively. I have borrowed them from the book Folk-Etymology by the Reverend A. Smythe Palmer (1883). His etymologies should be treated with caution (though, naturally, he explains why good and god are unrelated), but his collection of examples is excellent. I have partly modernized the spelling of the originals.

“If that opinion were not [that is, if the opinion that god and good are related proved false], who would acknowledge any God? The very Etimologie of the name with us of the North partes of the world declaring plainely the nature of the attribute, which is all one as if we said good [bonus] or a giver of good things.” (1589) “God is that which sometimes Good we nam’d, / Before our English tongue was shorter fram’d.” (1606) “An indifferent man may judge that our name of the most divine power, God, is…derived from Good, the chiefe attribute of God.” (1637)

It could not escape the readers’ notice that I spelled god with low case g. I did it for a reason. The concept of God, of one Supreme Being, was alien to polytheistic religions. The further back we step into the past, the clearer it becomes that at one time people believed in multitudes of beings controlling our fate. Those invisible spirits were revered, worshipped, or propitiated, if you will, to prevent them from making humans ill. Language has preserved multiple traces of that state of mind. Elves possessed arrows and caused back pain (lumbago): their victims were “elf-shot.” Dwarfs, if my etymology of the word dwarf is correct, made people dizzy (“*dwysig”; the asterisk means that such a form has not been attested; the Old English word was dysig, with *w lost before long y), while trolls seem to have made the inhabitants of the earth “droll” (that is, ridiculous, behaving like buffoons, crazy). The situation with the gods (in the plural!) is especially clear. The Greek for “god” is theos. We find the same root in enthusiastic, or “possessed by a god,” which could mean “deranged” or “divinely inspired.” (Engl. enthusiastic is from French; Greek is its ultimate source.) The Germanic gods made one “giddy” (Old Engl. *gydig—a close parallel to enthusiastic). One can see that the spirits above were not thought of as good. The contrary is true.

With the advent of Christianity, dwarfs, trolls, elves, and the pagan gods, along with witches, giants, revenants, and the rest survived in folktales and superstitions. Even before that they descended from their heights and became anthropomorphic. Originally the singular form god did not exist in the Old Germanic languages; only the plural did. Three grammatical genders were distinguished: masculine, feminine, and neuter. The form of the word for “gods” was neuter plural, the most typical choice for designating such multitudes. Some other modern Indo-European words for “god” are unlike god: compare Greek theos, Latin deus, and Slavic bog. It may be that god does not even have a Germanic etymology. Perhaps the early Germanic-speakers borrowed it from the indigenous population of the lands on which we find them in the historical period. However, since in this case the pre-Indo-European substrate that could have lent god to Germanic is beyond reconstruction (substrate being a technical term for a language submerged in the language of later settlers), reference to it by a language historian is tantamount to an admission of final defeat. Hence the many attempts to find an Indo-European cognate of god. Any “thick” dictionary will inform us that god can be compared with two Sanskrit words: one meaning “to invoke,” the other “to pour.” Today most etymologists prefer the second hypothesis and interpret “pour” as “libation” (in the process of sacrifice), but the idea of invocation also has learned supporters.

My opinion does not weigh more than either of those two, but I believe that both conjectures are wrong. The primitive “gods” may have been invoked or sacrificed to, but the main thing about them was that they were feared. That is why I share the idea of Karl Brugmann, a great German scholar, who was active in the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century. He also found only a Sanskrit word to guide him, namely the adjective ghoras “awful, frightening.” According to him, Greek theos had the same origin. If he had been right, the result would have been illuminating, but, as it turned out, theos is not related to the Sanskrit adjective, and Brugmann’s etymology lost interest in the eyes of his colleagues. Yet even though theos and god do not belong together, it does not follow that god and ghoras should be kept apart. I think they possibly are, but hardly anyone will side with me. Likewise, I am in the absolute minority in my conviction that Slavic bog “god” is related to such English words as bug, bogy(man), and their kin. The inherent weakness of the etymologies cited above—from “invoke,” “pour,” and “frightening”— is (apart from the uncertainty of our word’s Indo-European provenance) that a single putative cognate of the Germanic word turns up so far from Germanic, in the language of Ancient India. A search for a better solution continues. Not long ago god was represented as the sum of the particle g- “that one” and an old root meaning “upward.” There also are several older etymologies that have been rejected as untenable, because they are untenable. Of the four words—theos, deus, bog, and god—only deus poses no problems: it is related to Zeus’s name and refers to a bright sky; here we are dealing with a primitive sky god.

After the conversion to Christianity, a word for “God” became necessary, and it had to belong to the masculine gender. This is indeed what happened: the singular was abstracted from the plural, and the neuter yielded to the masculine. Whatever the etymology of god may be, god and good are not related. I should also say that reference to intuition, if intuition means an undisciplined emotion, should be avoided. Etymology is a study of word history and presupposes a professional look at the development of sounds, grammatical forms, and meaning in many languages. “Intuitively,” deus and theos are two variants of the same word, but they are not. The term folk etymology covers suggestions of the theos-deus and god-good type: the temptation to connect look-alikes is irrepressible, but, unless we choose to remain in pre-scientific etymology, it should be resisted. Although “scientific etymology” stumbles at every step, there is no need to make it limp even more by burdening it with naïve medieval hypotheses. I sincerely hope that no schism will be the result of this post.

Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe by Stuart Carroll tells the story of three generations of treacherous, bloodthirsty power-brokers. It is the sensational saga of the House of Guise, one of the greatest princely families of the sixteenth century, or indeed of any age. In the short excerpt below, Stuart Carroll talks about the run-up to the infamous Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572.

Paris was not only sixteenth-century Europe’s largest city; it was its first metropolis. To wander the warren of streets behind its medieval walls was to experience such a bustle, noise and stench that it was compared to an entire province. Everywhere the visitor was reminded of its extraordinary Catholic heritage: its 300,000 souls were crammed into nearly 300 streets, divided into 39 parishes and served by 104 churches and monasteries; its conservative and celebrated university was spread over 49 colleges on the city’s Left Bank.

As he left the Louvre at 11 am on Friday 22 August 1572, Gaspard de Coligny paid little attention to his surroundings. He had just attended a council meeting, chaired in the absence of the king and the Queen Mother by the Duke of Anjou, and as he walked along was absorbed in reading an important piece of business. He did not return the hostile looks of the locals. At 55 he was the kingdom’s most experienced politician and soldier and used to the menacing gazes of Catholics. The curious were kept at a distance by a dozen bodyguards. His serious expression, penetrating gaze and white beard lent him a gravity that was out of place amid the gaiety of a rejuvenated court. Even his enemies respected his courage and piety. He was often compared to his contemporary, François de Guise—France’s ‘two shining diamonds’. Better educated than the friend who became his bitterest enemy, he was a good Latinist and maintained a journal (since lost) for posterity. Like Guise, the admiral spread fear among his enemies. There was an uncompromising element in his character which suited him well to Calvinist discipline. In war he knew the value of cruelty and terror as a weapon. To the Protestants this made him a hero, and the leadership was in awe of him. That morning he was making the short walk to his lodgings in the rue de Béthisy. Soon after he turned into the rue des Poulies a single shot rang out from a hundred feet away. Protestants placed their trust in providence for good reason: at the very same moment the shot was fired Coligny stopped and turned suddenly, and the shot missed his vitals, fracturing his left forearm and taking off an index finger. His men immediately rushed to the house from where the shot had been fired and tried to force the door, but the assassin had planned well. The house had a rear door that opened onto the square in front of Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois church, where a horse was awaiting him.

Coligny was not killed by the bullet; he would have lived. And yet within forty-eight hours he was murdered. Several days of anarchy followed in which between at least 2,000, and perhaps as many as 6,000, Protestants were butchered. Upwards of 600 houses were pillaged. The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre is the greatest imponderable of sixteenth-century history. The barbarity with which defenceless women and children were massacred has echoes of the horrors of the twentieth century—horrors that were literally unspeakable: such was the cruelty and terror of those August days that very few were ever able to set down in words what they had seen or experienced. The task of the historian is made all the more difficult because the sources that survive, written amid the confusion or put together much later in an attempt to shift the blame, are even more than usually partial and suspect. Over the centuries a plethora of suspects and motives have been put forward. Older interpretations rested on Catherine’s reputation as a wicked Italian Queen schooled in the dark political arts of Machiavelli. Coligny’s assassination, it is claimed, had been planned years before and was the signal for a premeditated programme of extermination. Catherine [de Medici], it is claimed, was driven insane by maternal jealousy. Coligny was increasingly powerful at court and threatened to supplant her in her son’s affections, and so she employed the Guise to eliminate the admiral. This conjecture relies more on xenophobia and misogyny than hard evidence. In fact, the evidence for Coligny’s pre-eminence is rather thin: in the year before his death he was at court for a total of only five weeks. In a major reinterpretation in 1973, Nicola Sutherland argued that an assassination was inconsistent with Catherine’s larger political aims. Catherine had spent more than ten years trying to preserve the peace by balancing the Catholic and Protestant factions, and there is little reason to believe that she would suddenly abandon these consistently held policies and order the death of the Protestant leader, let alone a more general policy of extermination. If not Catherine, then who? Sutherland claimed to have uncovered an international Catholic conspiracy, involving Spain, the Papacy, and the Guise. The Spanish scenario is plausible. In the summer of 1572 Coligny was pressing for immediate intervention in the Low Countries. Philip II of Spain and the Duke of Alva wished him dead. Once again, however, the evidence is flimsy. Spanish policy was tempered by realpolitik, recognizing that the admiral was a force for division and therefore contributed to France’s present weakness. There are other suspects and motives: the Duke of Anjou, the Italians on the council, or a combination of the two—all have their accusers. Charles IX has recently been rehabilitated as an idealistic philosopher-king who, fearing that his dream of concord was about to be shattered, played a decisive role in planning Coligny’s murder. Fresh clues have been gleaned from the prosaic (rising grain prices) to the esoteric (the neoplatonic environment of the court). One benefit of recent research has been to uncouple the plot to kill Coligny from the general massacre that followed. Few historians would now argue that the plotters had a premeditated plan to murder thousands. In order to understand the Massacre we must first answer the riddle of Coligny’s death. Only then will we begin to uncover the link between aristocratic conspiracy and mob violence.

Dennis Baron is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois. His book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, looks at the evolution of communication technology, from pencils to pixels. In this post, also posted on Baron’s personal blog The Web of Language, he looks at an the 40th birthday of the internet.

I began writing this online message 40 years to the minute when the internet went live.

At 7:00 pm on Oct. 29, 1969 UCLA computer scientist Leonard Kleinrock, who organized the internet’s first day, had one of his programmers, Charley Kline, send a message from his computer at UCLA’s engineering school to his colleague Bill Duvall, who was sitting at a second computer at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Palo Alto. Kline typed LOG, one slow character at a time, and Duvall’s computer was to supply the IN to form the complete command, login, which would connect the machines. Duvall was also connected by telephone to Kline, and he reported each letter as it got through. First the “L,” then the “O.” But when Klein typed the “G,” the Stanford computer crashed. That makes LO the first electronic message.

A month later, the University of California at Santa Barbara joined the first computer network, called ARPANET, the Advanced Research Projects Network, and in December, the University of Utah was added. Eventually the loose configuration of computers at research facilities around the country, and then around the world, came to be called the internet, or as Dr. House would have it, the interweb.

120 years earlier, Henry David Thoreau, skeptical of the telegraph — which we sometimes refer to in retrospect as the Victorian internet — wrote in Walden, “Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”

The telegraph succeeded despite Thoreau’s complaint, but Samuel Morse, the telegraph’s inventor, thought Bell’s telephone was just a pretty toy. Morse was convinced that no one would want an invention that was unable to provide a permanent, written record of a conversation. These minutes from a Western Union meeting clarify concerns that no one would use the telephone to communicate anything important: “Bell’s instrument uses nothing but the voice, which cannot be captured in concrete form. . . . We leave it to you to judge whether any sensible man would transact his affairs by such a means of communications.”

And so not everyone was excited when UCLA spoke to Stanford. Kleinrock has noted the almost prophetic nature of that first message, “Lo,” as in “Lo and behold.” But except for programmers, most people in 1969 had little use for one computer, let alone two hooked together. What could these machines — electronic brains or electronic toys — possibly have to say to one another?

The internet may be 40 years old today, and no one reading this post would dream of starting their day without checking email, Facebook, and one or more online news sources, but until the 1990s few people used the Net. For all anyone knew, it was little more than a series of tubes.

In the time-honored tradition of distrusting new communications devices, in those early days computer giant IBM and telecom monopolist AT&T saw no future for networked computers and refused to bid to develop that first Interface Message Processor. In order for the internet to spread, they reasoned, managers would have to type. Even computer programmers wrote with pencil and paper, not on their mainframes, which were designed to crunch numbers, not words. Typing was for secretaries and the odd hunt-and-peck writer who didn’t have access to the typing pool.

Several things helped the internet take off when it finally did, not in 1969 but in the 1990s. Affordable, user-friendly personal computers, like the 1984 Apple Macintosh; easy-to-use email programs like Eudora (1988) that worked like word processors; and browsers like Mosaic, launched in 1993, which enabled ordinary people to search the web without a computer science degree. Without those developments, the Net would have remained the province of researchers and nerds instead of a welcoming home for almost 1.7 billion people around the world, everyone from honest citizens like you and me, to stalkers and spies, dollar-hungry marketers, hate-mongers, pornographers, and Nigerian scammers.

Talking about the internet’s birthday, Kleinrock told CNN, “We didn’t anticipate the level of the dark side we see today. The culture of the early Internet was one of trust. . . . I knew every user on the Internet in those early days.” Back in 1969 no one suspected that the internet would even have a dark side. But no one knew, either, that along with “What hath God wrought,” and “Mr. Watson — come here — I want to see you,” and “Fiat lux,” “LO” would go down in history as the start of a great communications revolution whose dark side is but a minor annoyance compared to the enlightenment and the fun-filled hours it brings to us, and allows us to bring to others.

And no one suspected, back in 1969, that an infinite number of monkeys sitting at an infinite number of computers would produce, not “Hamlet,” but HamBASIC.

Peggy Pascoe is Professor of History and Ethnic Studies at the University of Oregon. Her book, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America, has won two awards from the Organization of American Historians: the Lawrence Levine Prize for the best book on American cultural history and the Ellis Hawley Prize for the best book on political economy or American institutions. In the post below she looks at the actions of Justice of the Peace Keith Bardwell.  Read her previous OUPblog post here.

Louisiana Justice of the Peace Keith Bardwell refuses to marry interracial couples. He’s been doing so for years, but it wasn’t until October 2009, when he refused to marry Beth Humphrey and Terence McKay, that his actions attracted attention.

Appalled by Bardwell’s practice of checking with every couple who comes before him to see if they are interracial, then insisting that interracial couples go to other justices of the peace for their wedding ceremonies , Humphrey and McKay, the ACLU, the NAACP, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, and Louisiana Senator Mary L. Landrieu have all called for Bardwell’s resignation.

Bardwell insists he hasn’t done anything wrong. “It is my right,” he said, “not to marry an interracial couple.” He doesn’t even understand why Humphrey and McKay were offended by his refusal. “I’m not a racist,” he insists. “I try to treat everyone equally.”

“In some parts of this country,” a friend of mine commented wryly, “it’s still the 1930s.” For most of American history, Bardwell’s refusal to marry an interracial couple would have been standard public policy. Laws against interracial marriage were, in fact, America’s longest-lasting and most fundamental form of race discrimination.

After the first such law was passed by the colony of Maryland in 1664, miscegenation laws thrived for the next three centuries. By the 1930s, 30 states banned interracial marriage, many of them prohibiting whites from marrying Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and American Indians as well as blacks.

Courts justified these laws by insisting that interracial marriage was “unnatural,” a claim that became so pervasive that by 1958, 94 percent of Americans told pollsters they opposed interracial marriage. Judges claimed that because the laws punished both the black and white partners to an interracial marriage, they affected blacks and whites “equally.” Like Keith Bardwell, they persuaded themselves that equality somehow demanded that public officials refuse to marry interracial couples.

The U.S. Supreme Court exposed the absurdity of this line of thinking in the 1967 case of Loving v. Virginia, which declared Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage unconstitutional. “There can be no doubt,” Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, “that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the Equal Protection Clause.” Ever since the Loving decision, refusing to marry an interracial couple has been—and despite Bardwell’s protestations, still is—a clear denial of constitutional rights.

In the forty years since Loving, there has been a historic turnabout in public opinion; today most whites and blacks tell pollsters they approve of interracial marriage. There has also been a steady increase in interracial marriages, which now number in the millions. According to some estimates, in 2005 as many as 7% of American married couples were interracial, though the number of marriages between whites and blacks stood at a much more modest 422,000.

Yet it would be a mistake to assume that attitudes like Bardwell’s can be safely consigned to the past. A significant segment of several state populations still refuses to recognize that interracial marriage is a legal right. In 1999 and 2000, when South Carolina and Alabama finally got around to removing bans on interracial marriage from their state constitutions, the public vote was roughly 60 percent for removing the bans and 40 percent for leaving them in the state constitutions.

In other words, Keith Bardwell is entirely wrong, but he’s not entirely alone. Perhaps this helps explain why he’s gotten away with his outrageous behavior for so long. In the end, though, it only makes it all the more important that he be removed from public office. The disappointed bride, Beth Humphrey, said it best. “He doesn’t believe he’s being racist,” she said, “but it is racist.”

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at local elections. See his previous OUPblogs here.

As we follow the NJ and VA gubernatorial races, and the special election for the 23rd congressional district in New York (NY23), the debate has overwhelmingly been about whether or not these races are wind vanes for the electoral weather to come.

So some thoughts in this vein, before the main point of this post. Obama is campaigning hard for NJ Governor Jon Corzine because he needs to show errant Democratic members of Congress that he still has coat-tails. If Corzine pulls off his re-election bid, members of Congress seeking a presidential endorsement in 2010 will at least think twice about voting against the president in 2009. If both Creigh Deeds and Corzine lose (and in the former’s case, it is practically a foregone conclusion) in their respective gubernatorial races, then the rationale for party unity suffers and it is every politician for her/himself here on out. If this happens, Obama will face an even more recalcitrant Democratic aisle of Congress than he does now.

Meanwhile, with the exit of Dede Scozzafava from the race in NY23, the conservative movement looks set to shake up the Republican establishment, as Sarah Palin has promised. The soul-searching of the Republican Party continues; may the most powerful faction win.

Notice that none of these observations pay any attention to local concerns and local consequences. The significance of these races is entirely predicated on their potential impact on the balance of power in Washington, DC. When the punditry agrees without acknowledging that they do, their consensus is worth examining. There was a time when all politics was local. When the media establishments were not yet centralized in a few major outlets and the coverage of issues nationalized. A time when voters came out to vote for candidates at the local and state levels. Such races did not depend on huge television advertising budgets or endorsements by nationally elected officials, and they were not seen merely as divinizing tea leaves for the future but as important contests in their own right.

Today, voter turnout for local and state elections is paltry, and turn-out off-year elections is abysmal. An army of national media, however, has descended in Virginia and New Jersey and even in upstate New York, to cover the races not for the benefit of local and state residents, but for the impact it will have on the balance of power in Washington. Even conservative, states-rights oriented politicos understand that all local politics is national. (The revealing contrast is the high turnout for national elections in Europe and the low turnout for elections to the European parliament owing to the different balance of power between the center and its confederal parts in Europe.) Power resides in Washington, not in states, cities, or communities, because Washington’s potential reach into every state and locality is extensive. Even those who want to invert this balance of power have been compelled to concentrate their attention and energies to the Federal City. We are all Federalists now.

Politics is no longer local because the return to turn-out is minimal at the state and local levels. In the 19th century, local party workers toiled to get the vote out because there were patronage jobs to be earned if their candidate won. Parades, torch-light processions, rallies, barbeques, banners, buttons, and insignia got people worked up and ready to go to polling booths. Contrast this level of enthusiasm for a 22 year old voter in Virginia who had voted for Obama last year. “Politics is boring,” he said. “I know Obama is making changes, but it takes so long to make things happen.” And that is why he is probably not going out to vote next Tuesday.

The lesson to be learned in next week’s contests is not what they will predict about the future, which will be endlessly debated even if only time will tell, but what they reveal about the transformation of American democracy, which time has already told.