The new George Lucas produced film RED TAILS reminds American audiences of the heroics of the African American pilots in the Tuskegee training program. In historian J. Todd Moye’s book FREEDOM FLYERS: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II, Moye captures the challenges and triumphs of these brave pilots in their own words, drawing on more than 800 interviews recorded for the National Park Service’s Tuskegee Airmen Oral History Project. In an excerpt from the book, here is one of their stories:

Horace Augustus Bohannon required no introduction to Jim Crow. The tenth of ten children born into very poor circumstances in Atlanta, Georgia, he knew all about racial segregation and unequal treatment long before he
came of age. “You knew that you didn’t go that way because that was white only, and you know that you’re supposed to be reserved—or preserved—over here. But that’s the way we came up. We had to learn to live with it,” Bohannon remembered. “Somewhere early in life, my mother got us to understand that if you live right, you could do well despite the segregation laws and so forth.” They could survive, if not thrive, even in the unjust system if they followed her simple piece of advice: “You do right.”

Bohannon’s family suffered terribly in the Great Depression, so he got the first of many jobs at the age of eight. His favorite childhood assignment was as a helper on a laundry truck, because the laundry service made pickups and deliveries at Candler Field, Atlanta’s airport: “Once you got there, there were these pilots standing around talking,” Bohannon recalled. “You didn’t get to touch the airplanes, but you were at least in the audience, listening to them talk, which I enjoyed.” The truck’s driver, “a full-fledged Georgia cracker, filled up with all the things that his father had taught him,” noted Bohannon’s interest, took pity on him, and tried to talk the boy out of what was quickly becoming his life’s dream. “Horace, I know you like that stuff, but I think you’re wasting your time,” Bohannon remembered the man telling him. “There is no chance in the world that you could ever work around them or be one of the pilots.”

“I did not argue with him, but I like to look back on it today, and I wish I could see that same man,” Bohannon said before he died in 2003. “He didn’t mean to be destructive; he just thought he was doing me a favor to say, ‘Don’t even dream about it.’ I never quit dreaming about it.” Bohannon worked his way through Booker T. Washington High School in Atlanta and went on to study at Lincoln University just outside of Philadelphia. When Lincoln began a program to train civilian pilots, Bohannon “wasn’t far back in the line of students that went down to sign up. It was so exciting,” he recalled, “because there was something new every day. I don’t care who you were; there was always something that you didn’t know, about flying, about the whole world.”

Bohannon dropped out of college after his junior year and returned home to earn money. A friend in Atlanta let him know about Tuskegee Army Air Field (TAAF), the military base under construction about a day’s drive away, in Tuskegee, Alabama. Tuskegee Institute had been training civilian pilots for a number of years and had just opened Moton Field, a primary flight training base it operated under contract for the Army Air Corps (AAC). Now the War Department was building TAAF from scratch on the outskirts of town.

The idea of building an air base intrigued Bohannon. He found a job at TAAF as a carpenter’s apprentice. Then almost as soon as he got to Tuskegee, he learned of a program in the works to train black instructor pilots for the incoming cadets. Bohannon used the skills he had learned in civilian pilot training to pass the entrance exam for that program, and he began the training course. When the program was unexpectedly interrupted, he found work driving the station wagon that ferried aviation cadets back and forth from their living quarters at Tuskegee Institute to Moton Field and later was hired as the timekeeper in the control tower, tabulating cadets’ flight times.

In March 1943, unable to save enough money to allow him to return to Lincoln, Bohannon quit his job at Moton Field and went back to Atlanta to drive a cab. By September he had saved enough money to resume his studies and was back in Pennsylvania. Once there, he found out that he had been drafted into the Army. He turned back around and reported to Fort Benning, Georgia, in October. He applied for transfer and was accepted into the flying corps, transferred to Keesler Field for basic training, and made his way back to Tuskegee as a flight cadet. Bohannon was surprised at how well he took to military life, but he did, mainly because “in the Army Air Corps you got to know just millions of people who had dreams and desires and so forth.” He cherished the camaraderie he developed with the cadets he met there, young men like Charles Johnson Jr., whose renowned father was the president of Fisk University in Nashville; Mitch Higginbotham, whose first cousin A. Leon Higginbotham would become a distinguished attorney and federal judge; and “Pokey” Spaulding, whose family managed the North Carolina Mutual Insurance Co. in Durham, North Carolina, one of the most prosperous black businesses in the country. At the outset of the program, the AAC only accepted cadets who had completed at least two years of college, so the Tuskegee training program drew from the black elite. Pilot Roscoe C. Brown Jr. may have been correct when he said, “The Tuskegee Airmen were probably the most talented group of African-American men ever brought together in one place.”

Sixty years later Bohannon could still recite the “dodo” verses he was forced to memorize as a cadet. If an upperclassman asked, “What time is it?” he had to stand at attention and say, “ ‘Sir, the inner workings and hidden mechanisms of my poor chronometer are in such a sad state of discord with the great sidereal movement by which all time is commonly reckoned that I cannot with any degree of accuracy give you the correct time. However, without fear of being too wrong or too far off, I will say that it is fifty-eight minutes, twenty-two seconds, two ticks of a tock past the hour of four, sir!’ Oh, we had a good time,” he recalled.

Bohannon remembered December 20, 1944, the day he graduated from the cadet program, as one of the proudest of his life, because he got to show his family around TAAF. “Papa came, and of course on guard at the gate were a black sergeant, a black corporal, a black private. The whole military is black,” Bohannon said. “As he drives up through there, they find some other men doing their work—all over the place, except for the very top cadre of officers, we’re all black. And that place was clean, orderly. I wish you could have seen it.” His family was impressed.

J. Todd Moye is an Associate Professor of History and the Director of the Oral History Program at the University of North Texas and author of Freedom Flyers: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II. A historian of the American civil rights movement, he directed the National Park Service’s Tuskegee Airmen Oral History Project from 2000 to 2005. He consulted on Double Victory, the Lucasfilm documentary about the Tuskegee Airmen.

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‘Of all styles he loved most to be named honest, and hath of that an hundred letters so naming him’, wrote Ben Jonson’s Scottish friend, William Drummond, after Jonson had visited him at his castle at Hawthornden on the River Esk, seven miles south of Edinburgh, in 1618.  ‘Honest’ seems a reasonable word to use in relation to Jonson’s character.   Those closest to him complained at times that he was vain, egotistical, boastful, a bit of a bully, and that he drank too much, but never accused him of deceit.  But it’s possible none the less to sense a certain strain within this reported self-description.  If you’re an honest man, why would you need a hundred letters testifying to this fact?  Why would you want not merely to be honest, but to be named as honest?

One possible explanation could be that you were required to appear in a court of law or before some other tribunal where your integrity, challenged by others, needed to be formally vouched for.  Throughout his career Jonson was indeed in constant trouble with the authorities, and obliged repeatedly to assert that his satirical writings weren’t seditious, that they weren’t aimed at particular persons, and weren’t likely to endanger the security of the state.  One of his first theatrical ventures, a now-lost comedy called The Isle of Dogs, written in collaboration with Thomas Nashe and performed at the Swan theatre in 1597, landed him and two fellow-players in Marshalsea prison on charges of sedition and ‘lewd and mutinous behaviour’, and provoked an edict from the Privy Council declaring that all theatrical activity in London should be henceforth suspended — as for several months it was — and that all London playhouses be ‘plucked down’: as happily, in the end, they were not.  Had the edict been fully carried out, the world would never have seen such works as Hamlet and King Lear and Macbeth and The Tempest, Volpone and The Alchemist, The Changeling and The Revenger’s Tragedy: plays from the richest theatrical period England has ever known.

A year later Jonson was back in jail again on a charge of manslaughter, having killed in a sword-fight one of the players with whom he’d been imprisoned the previous summer. Expecting soon to be hanged, he rashly converted to Catholicism, but was released after pleading benefit of clergy: an archaic legal device which allowed for a stay of execution if you could prove you were literate by reading the first verse of Psalm 51 (or if you were cunning, by committing that verse to memory).  In the years that followed, Jonson was in renewed trouble with the authorities.  He was hauled before the Privy Council on charges of ‘popery and treason’ for his tragedy of Sejanus; summoned to the Consistory Courts for recusancy (failing to receive the Anglican communion); and clapped in jail once more for his comedy Eastward Ho!, written in collaboration with his friends George Chapman and John Marston, that contained some glancing satire on the powerful Scottish members of James’s court.  ‘The report was they should then had their ears cut and noses’, Jonson later told his friend William Drummond, but once again he and his collaborators managed to escape the expected punishment.  Throughout the latter part of his career, Jonson – now England’s most celebrated writer — was quizzed by the civil and religious authorities about a number of his plays, and brought before the Attorney-General on suspicion of having written verses in praise of John Felton, the assassin of Charles I’s favourite courtier, the deeply unpopular George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham.  All of these charges Jonson managed successfully to deflect and to deny.

The Gunpowder Plot

Never was Jonson’s reputation more endangered than in relation to a business in which he was to become curiously entangled soon after his release from prison following the Eastward Ho! affair.  On or about 9 October 1605 Jonson attended a supper party at a hostelry in The Strand known as The Irish Boy, in the company of a number of discontented fellow-Catholics, who were deeply concerned about James’s failure to meet the high expectations with which members of their community had welcomed him to England in 1603.  These men were now planning an extreme act of terror, plotting to blow up the House of Lords on 5 November – less than a month away – on the occasion of the state opening of Parliament, thus destroying King James, Prince Henry, and leading ministers of the crown.  Jonson’s companions at this supper included Robert Catesby, Francis Tresham, Thomas Winter, John Ashfield, Sir Josceline Percy, and Lord Mordaunt: all ring-leaders in the Gunpowder conspiracy.  What was Jonson doing in their midst?

Could he have been trying to dissuade the conspirators from their desperate act?   Or could he (some have less generously asked) have been acting as a spy for Sir Robert Cecil, who was soon to lead the commission of enquiry into the Plot, and to recruit Jonson’s services in another capacity?  How ‘honest’ were his dealings at this delicate moment?  After reading the anonymous letter left at the house of the Catholic peer William Parker, Lord Monteagle, warning of an impending coup, King James had the Parliament building searched.  Thirty-six barrels of gunpowder were discovered, stacked behind the firewood in the cellars.  A tall man loitering nearby was immediately arrested.  He gave his name as John Johnson, saying that he was a Catholic from Netherdale in Yorkshire.  He freely confessed that it had been his intention to blow the building sky-high and the royal family and their counsellors ‘back to Scotland’, but refused to say any more, or give the names of any of his co-conspirators.

James was impressed by the courage of John Johnson – whose true identity, as Guido Faux or Guy Fawkes was soon to be revealed – but determined to break his resolve.  He ordered that Fawkes be sent to the Tower of London, where ‘the gentler tortures are to be first used unto him, et sic per gradus ad ima tenditur, [‘and so by degrees moving up to the worst’], ‘and so God speed your good work’.  Meanwhile a suitably compliant Catholic priest would need to be recruited to persuade the suspect that it was his moral duty now to disclose to his interrogators further details relating to the Plot. To help with this task the services of Ben Jonson were recruited.  On 7 November Jonson received a warrant from the Privy Council instructing him ‘to let a certain priest know (that offered to do good service to the state) that he should securely come and go to their Lordships, which they promise in the said warrant upon their honours’.  The following day Jonson wrote to Robert Cecil, reporting that he’d been unable to locate the priest in question, who may have been one Father Thomas Wright, a former Jesuit who is thought to have been the priest who originally had converted Jonson to Catholicism, or another Catholic priest with whom Jonson and the leading conspirator, Robert Catesby, were well acquainted, a certain Father Thomas Strange.  Wright did eventually turn up to testify, perhaps as a result of Jonson’s efforts, but his presence was no longer needed, for Guy Fawkes’s resolution by this stage had broken, thanks to the tortures (gentle or otherwise) that had been administered by his interrogators in the Tower of London, and had freely made his confessions.

I believe it is unlikely that Jonson was acting as a spy for Robert Cecil.  Jonson was deeply contemptuous of the whole system of espionage that Elizabeth had put in place under Francis Walsingham, which he hoped had been banished by James (though it had not been).   He had a personal loathing of particular spies, such as Robert Poley and Henry Parrot who are mentioned by name in one of Jonson’s best-known poems, ‘Inviting a Friend to Supper’, as not being present at the table to which he is inviting his unknown guest.  None of Jonson’s contemporaries ever hinted at the possibility of his acting for Cecil, a man whom Jonson privately despised, or of his betrayal of members of the faith to which he continued loyally to belong for another seven years.  It’s more likely that Jonson, in common with many other English Catholics at this time, was deeply shaken by the proposed events of 5 November, the nearest equivalent in the early modern world to the actual events in recent times of 9/11.  He was a patriot in the modern sense of the term (as one who loves his country), a sense of which incidentally he’s the first known English user.  He was a supporter of the Stuart dynasty, no lover of Catholic Spain (against whose armies he’d fought as a young man) and had no wish to see King James or the young Prince Henry blown sky-high or back to Scotland with Fawkes’s gunpowder. He was eager after the discovery to assert his loyalty to the King, which he did in a number of epigrams and other writings as well as in his efforts to assist the commission of enquiry.  His very survival, professionally and literally, depended on his ability in these perilous times to parlay, to negotiate between parties holding sharply conflicting beliefs, to protect himself though the arts of silence and accommodation; to project an image of himself as a man who never changed and never wavered, who ’of all styles loved most to be named honest’.

Ian Donaldson is Honorary Professorial Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of Ben Jonson: A Life.

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November 13, 354

Augustine of Hippo born

On November 13, 354, in a small town named Tagaste in Roman Numidia (modern Algeria) near the port of Hippo (now Annaba), Augustine—one of the preeminent early Christian thinkers—was born. Though his mother was a devout Christian, he was not baptized as an infant.

As a child and young teen, Augustine proved a ready scholar. While his family owned land, they could not afford further studies. However, a wealthy man from Tagaste paid Augustine’s expenses for more advanced study in Carthage. Three years later, the young man returned to Tagaste and opened his own school; soon after, he moved to Carthage to teach rhetoric. He gained some success, had a son with the young woman he lived with, and became attracted to the dualistic religion of Manichaeism. In 384, he moved to Italy and gained a teaching post in Milan. By this time, he had lost interest in Manichaeism but was in the midst of a period of intense spiritual turmoil. After two years of professional success and this inner tumult, he resigned his position and prepared himself to adopt Christianity. Baptized by Ambrose, bishop of Milan, in 387, he soon suffered the death of his mother and his son. (The son’s mother he seems to have cast aside.) Back in Africa, Augustine became a priest in 391 and was named bishop of Hippo just five years later.

For the next 35 years, he became one of the leading thinkers of the Church. His Confessions, written around 400, recounts his own spiritual journey and celebrates God’s glory. He played significant roles breaking the Donatist and Pelagian heresies, thereby helping shape orthodox Roman Catholic beliefs. His masterwork, The City of God—written in the wake of the sack of Rome by Visigoths led by Alaric—is an extensive argument against paganism and offers a vision of the true destiny of the world as the unfolding of God’s will. Ironically, he died not long before invading Vandals captured Hippo and Carthage, putting his homeland into non-Roman—and non-orthodox Christian—hands.

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I have been pondering these questions recently in the course of researching and writing the biographical memoir for the British Academy of the distinguished and influential historians of science Rupert Hall (1920-2009) and his wife Marie Boas Hall (1919-2009). Before the 1939-1945 war history of science was practiced almost exclusively by scientists of one form or another such as Charles Singer (1876-1960) in England and George Sarton (1884–1956) in the United States. They, and others, tended to tell a triumphalist story of the rise of cumulative positive scientific knowledge, including, in some narratives, its vanquishing of religious beliefs. Such writers paid little, if any, attention to the social and cultural contexts of science and they insisted that only someone trained in science could write its history.

Such a position rapidly became unsustainable in the post-1945 world following the unleashing of the power of the atom. Some saw this as yet another triumph for science, especially in its peaceful applications; others became profoundly concerned that scientists had provided the means by which the world might be destroyed. Either way it became essential to understand how scientific knowledge related to society, politics and culture. The key question was how had the study of natural phenomena, previously undertaken by a relatively few individuals, at an even smaller number of locations, come to deliver such power.

Ever since the sixteenth century, scientific practitioners, following Francis Bacon (1561–1626), had been offering the prospect of control over the world by the increase of natural knowledge. On a Marxist reading, for instance by scientists such as Desmond Bernal (1901-1971) and Joseph Needham (1900–1995), this was precisely what had happened, but historians, such as Herbert Butterfield (1900 –1979) and Rupert Hall, saw very little contribution made by science to technology until fairly recent times. Hall thus concentrated on science in sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and in his PhD thesis on seventeenth-century ballistics (1949) and his classic book The Scientific Revolution, 1500-1800: The Formation of the Modern Scientific Attitude (1954) argued that scientific knowledge had its own history of internal development illustrating for that period, at least, science was largely untainted by technological associations. Furthermore, Hall, in his subtitle, provided an answer to question where was the origin of modern science and thus its power.

This answer goes a long way to explain why in the post-1945 period historians of science concentrated such enormous efforts on understanding the development of science in the period roughly from the birth of Nicholas Copernicus (1473) to the death of Isaac Newton (1727). Although it could be read (and was) as an heroic story of a very small number of individuals creating modern science, nevertheless the deeper a subject is studied (as it has to be when so much effort is concentrated on one topic and period) the more its contexts, however unintentionally, will be uncovered. Eventually this called into question the entire notion that there ever was such a thing called ‘The Scientific Revolution’. But, more importantly, it was realised that the historical methods which had been developed to understand science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, could be applied to much later periods and by the 1980s and 1990s nineteenth and twentieth century studies of science had come well to the fore.

These, of course, addressed issues that were directly relevant to the modern concerns and some of the work made uncomfortable reading for modern scientists. A study of Newton’s alchemy could never have been seen as threat to modern science; a study suggesting that gravity waves was a complex social construct which threw into doubt, for example, notions of objectivity or that there existed an external world, struck at what scientists saw were key parts of their practice. The rows that ensued was especially fierce in the United States (where it was dubbed the ‘science wars’), but they had a more moderate impact in Europe, though there were moments of drama, such as at the 1994 Annual Meeting of the British Association at Loughborough (chaired by Hall), the fallout from which provided the Times Higher Education Supplement with copy for weeks thereafter.

To complicate matters further, the discipline of history of science was caught up in the cultural rows from the 1950s onwards on how the humanities and the sciences related. The issues were most trenchantly expressed in the 1959 Rede lectures, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution by C.P. Snow (1905–1980), who incidentally had been a significant figure in Hall’s early life. The lecture was a symptom of the problem rather than any sort of causal factor since many of the history of science departments and programmes that came into existence in the 1960s in British and American universities had their origins in the 1950s. Nevertheless, history of science rapidly came to be seen as a ‘bridge’ between the cultures, since on one reading they combined both.

If one intention of expanding the history of science had been to reduce criticism of science, by the 1980s it had clearly failed – the Halls’ department at Imperial College was closed in 1980 on the grounds that it was not financially viable. The subject was made to pay the price of expectations that had been foisted on it from outside and which had very little to do with the initial concerns of its practitioners. The Public Understanding of Science movement, which began in the mid-1980s, was entirely dominated by scientists, and with much the same policy aims which had been forced on the history of science. It too equally failed to deliver and spectacularly crashed in the late 1990s amidst the arguments surrounding BSE, GMOs and MMR.

In conclusion, history of science can provide insights and inform current concerns, but that should never be its main goal. It should aim to understand how scientific knowledge relates to the society and culture in which it is produced. In turn that suggests that its primary practitioners should be those who have trained in history. The notion that only scientists should write the history of science, as the pre-1939 generation wanted, is a bit like suggesting that only politicians should write political history.

Frank James is Professor of the History of Science at the Royal Institution and regarded as one of the leading Faraday scholars in the world. He studied history of science at Imperial College where he received his PhD on the development of spectroscopy in the nineteenth century. His main research is editing the Correspondence of Michael Faraday, of which five volumes (out of six) have so far been published. His most recent book is a new edition of Faraday’s The Chemical History of a Candle.

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In the video below, Professor Longerich talks about how Himmler’s personality shaped the SS.

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Peter Longerich is Professor of Modern German History at Royal Holloway, University of London, and is the founder of the College’s Holocaust Research Centre. One of the world’s leading authorities in the Third Reich and the Holocaust, he has published widely on the subject, including Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (2010).

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From time to time I mention the unsung heroes of English etymology, but only once have I devoted a post to such a hero (Frank Chance), though I regularly sing praises to Charles P.G. Scott, the etymologist for The Century Dictionary.  Today I would like to speak about Joseph Wright (1855-1930).  He was not an etymologist in the strict sense of this term, but no article on the origin of English words can do without consulting The English Dialect Dictionary he edited.  This multivolume masterpiece contains thousands of local words, whose existence reveals unsuspected and unexpected ties between the words all of us know and their “provincial” kin.  Wright first attempted to offer tentative etymologies in his entries, but then, most wisely, gave up this practice.  The descent of the words with which he dealt is often so obscure that guesses would have done the users only harm.  Sometimes the source of a rural word is evidently French or Scandinavian, but in most cases no clue suggests itself.  Those who are in the habit of looking up origins in our “thick” dictionaries may have noticed how often the etymological comments there run no further than “dialectal” or “slang,” as though such references meant anything. English contains thousands of words about whose origin absolutely nothing is known, because many of them came from the creative brain of an imaginative person now dead for centuries, or the coinage was triggered by a sound symbolic impulse or a joke (word creation and humor is a most promising topic). Too bad, we are usually unable to reconstruct the evanescent processes that resulted in the birth of a word, short-lived and geographically restricted or durable and used in several counties.

The life of Joseph Wright should serve as an inspiration to anyone who wants to understand the meaning of the phrase self-made man.  A Yorkshire lad (born as the seventh son of a wool weaver), who became fully literate by the age of fifteen, ended up as an Oxford professor of comparative philology, the author of exemplary textbooks of Greek, Gothic, Old and Middle High German, Old and Middle English.  But, as noted, his main achievement was The English Dialect Dictionary (it ends with a book-length supplement on English dialect grammar), a mammoth enterprise, which he, not a rich man, partly financed and which he considered to be his main contribution to linguistics.  He married his former student ([Elizabeth] Mary Lea, 1863-1958), who later co-authored his books on the history of English, though, according to her own statement, she was mainly responsible for collecting data.  In 1932, that is, soon after her husband’s death, she brought out a two-volume book titled The Life of Joseph Wright, 720 pages in all, supplied with a splendid index.  Not only is this book valuable because it is based on the author’s unique knowledge of the subject but also because Mary Wright quoted numerous documents and letters in it.  Even the slightly hagiographic tone of the exposition does not spoil it.  In her book Rustic Speech and Folklore, she also recounts their walks and scholarly pursuits in Yorkshire.  For Joseph Wright, Standard English was a foreign language, and after a stroke he tended to relapse more and more into the dialect of his childhood and youth.  But even much earlier his little son used to tease him when he heard his father pronounce a word like Puck with the vowel of put. Mary Wright reported that the last word of her dying husband was dictionary.  One need not concoct a pseudo-psychological story around this episode.  Joseph Wright was not only aware of Mary’s compiling his biography but he also helped her do the work, and dictionary was his “last will and testament.”  His mind was unaffected by the pneumonia that carried him away, and he wanted to remind his wife that the production of the dictionary should be described as the defining event of his life.

Wright’s career was brilliant, but his life was far from unclouded.  The son and the daughter the couple had died in childhood, and the son’s death was particularly tragic: apparently, he was stung by an insect that had fed on poison, and blood poisoning killed him in a matter of hours.  When he was born, his elder sister, also quite small at the time, called her brother “boy,” and that is why he was known to everybody not as Willie but as Boy.  The girl died of pneumonia several years later.  They never overcame the grief, even though they continued to work with the same dedication.  But living children are more meaningful than dead languages.  Mary Wright did not mention the event that could not have brought unmitigated joy to Joseph.  As a young man, he went to Heidelberg, studied there, learned German very well indeed, and returned home.  Back in England, he wrote the first ever grammar of an English dialect and was invited to teach at Oxford, where the main figure in linguistics was the great Max Müller, a man universally admired at the peak of his career and universally mocked during the last years of his life and after his death.  Both verdicts were unjust.  Wright’s position was that of a lecturer, but later he was promoted to deputy professor.  Finally, Oxford instituted a chair of comparative philology.  At that time, advertisements for such positions could be seen in England more rarely than a blue moon.  There were two contenders: Joseph Wright and Henry Sweet (the latter is the prototype of Henry Higgins).  When Wright applied for deputy professorship, Sweet wrote a warm recommendation letter for him.  Now they were rivals.  The chair went to Wright.  Sweet felt terribly insulted and did not forgive the world for its treatment of him.  As a man of ideas, he was better qualified for the job than Wright’; yet the outcome had two beneficial consequences for scholarship: Sweet, in order to sustain himself, continued to produce his excellent books (published by Oxford University Press!), while Wright may never have completed his dictionary without getting the position.  To think of the choice Oxford had: Joseph Wright or Henry Sweet!  Anyone in present day academia may remember the last search in which he or she participated.

Not everybody knows that we owe the existence of the English Dialect Society to the indefatigable Walter W. Skeat, who did a great lot of editing for it and participated in its meetings in different towns.  His support for Wright’s work was vital.  Today everybody extols the dictionary, but at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century no one was in a hurry to back it up with grants.  At all times, people send good wishes much more readily than checks (cheques).  The dictionary opens with the following dedication:

“To the Rev. Professor W.W. Skeat, Litt.D. D.C.L., Founder and President of the English Dialect Society, Editor of ‘Chaucer’, ‘Piers Plowman’, and ‘The Bruce’, the unwearied Worker in the varied Field of English Scholarship, to whose patient industry and contagious enthusiasm in connexion with laborious task of accumulating dialect material the possibility of compiling an adequate Dictionary of English Dialects is mainly due.”

Skeat wrote in his testimonial: “After the work had… been at a standstill for at least a couple of years (if I remember rightly), I was so fortunate as to discover in Dr. Wright the only man capable of undertaking the task.”  And now a longer quotation from the biography:

“In the autumn of 1899 Professor (now Sir) Israel Gollancz was raising money for a portrait of Professor Skeat, ‘and also to found a University Prize—a Skeat University Prize for English’.  In a letter thanking Joseph Wright for ‘a generous subscription’ he said, Nov. 27, 1899: ‘S. has done so much for English.  Perhaps he never did a better thing than when he got you to edit the Dialect Dictionary.  He could not have imagined, however, that it would be so glorious an achievement.  God bless you for it!’” (p. 415).

The picture of Joseph Wright in his native Thackley graces the frontispiece of volumes 1 of The Life of Joseph Wright.  The portrait of Skeat is, I think, the one for which Gollancz was raising money in 1899.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

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• As a French soldier in WWI, under enemy fire, Blum saved important works of art and for his bravery received the Croix de Guerre.

• As editor of the Parisian literary journal Gil Blas, Blum singlehandedly arranged for the publication of Marcel Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann (Swann’s Way) by the publisher, Bernard Grasset.

• After the death of Serge Diaghilev, René Blum brought back to life the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, engaging the greatest talents in ballet in 1932.

• René Blum oversaw the extraordinary performances of young Balanchine’s early works in 1932, the symphonic ballets of Leonide Massine that rocked the dance scene, as well as the classical pieces of Michel Fokine.

• Blum saved many dancers and choreographers from the ravages of World War II by selling his company to American entrepreneurs in 1940.

• When a prisoner at Drancy, the infamous concentration camp near Paris, he gave lectures on French literature and ballet to distract the others from their pain and hunger.  He behaved heroically before he was murdered at Auschwitz.

Judith Chazin-Bennahum, a former ballet dancer, is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Theatre and Dance at the University of New Mexico. She is author of Rene Blum and The Ballets Russes: In Search of a Lost Life.

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In the quiz below, you’ll find a series of quotes from Truman Capote (left). Try your luck at pairing them up with the people listed (right). Answers at the bottom.

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Answers:
1. – e | 2. – j | 3. – c | 4. – f | 5. – a | 6. – h | 7. – g | 8. – d | 9. – b | 10. – i

By Ian Ker

Oxford University Press recently published my new book, G. K. Chesterton:  A Biography.  The reviews remind me of the reviews I received when OUP published my biography of John Henry Newman more than twenty years ago, although the kind of reviewer who is asked to review a life of Chesterton is quite likely to be a very different kind of reviewer from the reviewer who would review a life of Newman.  However, there are similarities between the responses to the two books and they have caused me to reflect on the kind of biography I try to write.

First and most obviously, I am not a popular biographer:  I am not just interested in the ‘story’ of my subject’s life.  A reviewer who wants that kind of life is going to be annoyed because my biographies are academic critical biographies and therefore are not going to be short. I have described the two biographies I have written as intellectual and literary lives.  They are ‘lives’ because they attempt to bring their subjects to life; they are not simply studies of their writings.  Nevertheless the only reason I have for writing the lives of writers and thinkers like Newman and Chesterton is because I think they are important writers and thinkers and I assume that is, if not the only, certainly the, or a major part of, the reason why anyone would wish to read their biographies.  I therefore do attempt to bring to life both their thought and their writings for the reader. A reader of a biography of Jane Austen, say, can be assumed to have read all the relatively few novels she wrote, but very few readers of a biography of Newman and Chesterton can be assumed to have read anything more than a tiny portion of their voluminous works.

I can give a personal illustration of this ordinary reader.  I am at present reading a hefty, nine hundred and fifty page biography of John Ruskin.  Now Ruskin’s personal life is certainly interesting if only because of his disastrous marriage to Effie Gray and his unhappy love for Rose La Touche.  But the reason I wanted to read what purports to be an academic rather than popular life was because I wanted to know more about Ruskin’s voluminous writings, of which I have only read a very small fraction.  But while this is a hugely detailed personal biography, the author frustratingly does not introduce me into Ruskin’s writings in the way I was hoping he would.  He may make Ruskin as a man come alive, but he does not attempt to make him come alive as a writer.

I would want to emphasise the word ‘alive’.  A biography which is not simply interested in the ‘story’ of the subject’s life is not therefore entitled to be boring.  An intellectual and literary biographer must be discriminating and selective.  I am, in particular, very suspicious of what I call the lazy block quotation which enables the biographer to switch off at the expense of the reader.  That certainly doesn’t mean I am against quoting.  On the contrary, the subject of the biographer can only come alive if their voice is heard, whether their conversational voice (which usually means quoting from letters) or their voice as a writer.  But quotation should be highly selective and discriminating and the long indented quotation needs prior justification.  The reader needs persuasion against the temptation to skip!

Some reviewers are going to dismiss the kind of biography I write as what they call hagiography.  It is dismissed as old-fashioned biography because it seeks to praise rather than detract.  Such reviewers are, of course, inconsistent:  they expect a biographer of Hitler to write the opposite of hagiography and would be scandalized if the biographer sought in any way to justify his persecution of the Jews.  Now I certainly don’t try and hide any damaging evidence nor am I totally uncritical:  thus, in the case of Chesterton, I am very clear that he is not a major novelist or poet; I am also quite candid about the ways in which he was selfish as a result of being spoiled as a child, and I do accept that there is some justification for the charge of anti-Semitism.  But – and this is another respect in which I differ from many contemporary biographers – I am not interested in what I would call idle speculation (generally of a sexual nature) in order to present a critical ‘revisionist’ portrait.  The Victorians liked to have heroes, we like to pull people down from their pedestals – and the biographer who fails to do that will certainly be branded as a hagiographer.  But I can’t conceive of writing a biography of someone I don’t admire as a person and as a writer and thinker.

Ian Ker has taught both English literature and theology in universities in the United States and Britain, where he currently teaches in the Oxford University theology faculty.  He is the author and editor of more than twenty books on Newman, including John Henry Newman:  A Biography, as well as the author of The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845-1961. His latest book is G. K. Chesterton: A Biography.

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Welch, Eileen Watts

(March 28, 1946–),
activist, educator, and business and administrative leader, was born Constance Eileen Watts in Durham, North Carolina, to Constance Merrick and Dr. Charles DeWitt Watts. Dr. Watts was North Carolina’s first black surgeon, and it was his outspoken advocacy that would serve as a catalyst for the merger in 1976 of the all-black Lincoln Hospital and the all-white Watts Hospital into a single, multiracial entity, the Durham Regional Hospital. In addition to being the granddaughter of Dr. Aaron M. Moore, one of the founders of Durham Mutual Insurance Company and Durham’s first black doctor, and John Merrick, a prominent black entrepreneur, Constance Merrick Watts was a public force in her own right, lecturing, speaking, and serving a notable term as the head of Moore’s popular Durham Colored Library. “As an adult,” said Welch in a 2004 speech, “I am much better able to understand and appreciate the accomplishments of my ancestors, of which there are many” (Welch 7). These accomplishments in business, health care, and education, would ultimately be echoed by achievements in her own life in those fields.

In 1964, Eileen Watts graduated from Hillside High School, which was, at the time, still an all-black institution. Four years later, while her father was fighting to make integration and the promise of the 1964 Civil Rights Act a reality in health care, Watts graduated from the historically black Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. She left Spelman, however, with the intention of pursuing a career as an elementary school teacher, rather than choose a careeer in the medical professions like her father. Twenty-two years old, she returned to Durham briefly during the summer of 1968 to marry James “Jim” Welch; they were joined on July 13, 1968 at St. Joseph’s African Methodist Episcopal Church in Durham (New York Times, 69). It was the beginning of a long, happy marriage; in later years, Mrs. Welch affectionately related how her family “adopted” Jim (Welch 1). Shortly after the wedding, the young couple returned to their new home in Atlanta, where Welch began work. Her stint teaching the third grade was cut short, however, by Jim getting drafted into the army to serve in the Vietnam War, which forced the pair to uproot and move to Arlington, Virginia. The couple had two sons, born in 1970 and 1972, and Eileen Welch put her career on hold for a time to raise them.

However, it wasn’t long before Welch refocused on a professional career. A few years after her second son was born, she decided to start her own small business in Virginia’s Fairfax County, a move that kept her schedule flexible and put her communication skills to work. Book Art, Ltd, a for-profit bookstore, quickly grew into a chain, and it was not long before Welch began to reap a tidy profit. From this point on, she permanently altered the trajectory of her work, now focusing on her entrepreneurial talents. She began a second venture a few years later known as Publishers Network, Ltd, which worked closely with individuals and government agencies in its sale of “special-order publications.” Local officials and businessmen took note of her deft aptitude; in 1983, it was her turn to be drafted, in this case as the manager for the Reston (Virginia) Employment Service. She served seven years in this position before being recruited by the INOVA Health System, based in Falls Church. In nearly no time at all, Welch came from being a stranger in town to being a leading and popular administrator. Her employers at INOVA encouraged Welch to work on her M.B.A. in her spare time. In 1995, she received her degree from George Mason University.

Just as Welch’s plans had changed over the course of nearly two decades, so had her hometown. In 1996, she came back with her husband when Duke University offered her a position as a Director of Development for its small, ambitious nursing program. Over the next several years, she flitted through a variety of positions, from Director of Development to Associate Dean for External Affairs to, finally, Assistant Dean for Development, remaining in the same role: fundraiser. Like her great-grandfather Aaron Moore, she was not at all shy about forging partnerships and making connections, growing to be a close friend of Mary T. Champagne, the dean who “resurrected the school of nursing.” (Yee). Together, they worked tirelessly to raise funds for a new building to consolidate the nursing students and provide more training and communication with the nearby Duke University Medical Center. Proposed in 2002, the completion of the building seemed unlikely just over a year later, but like her father, Welch prevailed through iron-clad perseverance. Like her mother, Welch also cleverly utilized community connections, inheriting her mother’s position as head of the Standford L. Warren Public Library (formerly the Durham Colored Library) and involving herself as a member of organizations like the Triangle Community Foundation and the Rotary Club. Mary Champagne retired in early 2004, and the building was dedicated in 2005.

Shortly before the building dedication, in the summer of 2004, Dr. Charles Watts, Welch’s father, passed away. In the wake of his death, Welch increasingly drew inspiration from her memories of him, a fact that echoed in her speeches and activities; since her return to Durham eight years earlier, she had become closer than ever to the man she affectionately dubbed “an old-timey doc” (Cheng E12). In 2005, shortly after the dedication of the new nursing building, Watts joined the North Carolina chapter of the Center for Child and Family Health as an Executive Director of Advancement (NAAHHS). Using her connections at Duke, Welch helped to forge valuable partnerships between Duke, NCCU, and UNC, including the sharing of North Carolina Mutual company archives (Jackson). Increasingly, she turned to the press to advocate for awareness and funds for young victims of mental illness and trauma. She has also worked as an Officer in Duke’s Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

Welch’s evolution from teacher to entrepreneur to administrator paralleled, in many ways, the strides and successes of more and more African American women at the turn of the 21st century. Her personal journey, like others, was inspired by the battles fought and won by her ancestors in the 19th and 20th centuries. Her achievements are significant on a national as well as a personal level. “We all have talents,” mused Welch in a 2009 interview, “and we have to use them for the best” (The History Makers).

Alec Lowman
Charles E. Jordan High School
Durham, North Carolina

Gilder Lehrman Research Project

In an effort to broaden its outreach to American high schools, the Oxford African American Studies Center, in conjunction with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, initiated a research project competition exclusively for high school students in the Fall of 2010. Participating students researched and wrote biographies on prominent African Americans, with the top articles being selected for publication in the online African American National Biography. Working with their teachers, the students were expected to follow the same guidelines used by professional writers for the site, utilizing primary sources and scholarly publications to highlight the contributions of important African Americans in their respective communities. The winners and honorable mentions are listed below (those not selected for publication received feedback on their papers from our team of scholars). All five will be published on AASC in the coming year.

Special thanks to those schools that participated, and congratulations to the winners. It is our hope that more schools will initiate similar research projects. For more information, we invite you to write to the editors.

Winners

“Brown, Kate.” By Brian Tong and Theodore Lin of McLean High School, McLean, VA.

Kate Brown (1840-1883), a retiring room attendant, became a victim of discrimination when she was forcibly removed from a whites-only train car. Later, with the support of sympathizers in the US Senate, Brown sued for damages, and won her claim before the Supreme Court in Railroad Company v. Brown (1873). See the full text here.

“Welch, Eileen Watts.” By Alec Lowman of Jordan High School, Durham, NC.

The daughter of the first surgeon in the state of North Carolina, Eileen Watts Welch (b. 1946) has used her influence as a respected entrepreneur to raise funds in support of education for medical professionals in the region. See the full text here.

Honorable Mentions

“Glover, Nathaniel.” By Kelsey Schurer and Marina Reasoner of Douglas Anderson High School, Jacksonville, FL.

Coming of age during the difficult days of the Civil Rights Era, Nathaniel Glover (b. 1943) of Jacksonville became the first elected black sheriff in the state of Florida since Reconstruction, and later became the President of Edward Waters College.

“Odrick, Alfred.” Leandi Venter, Hannah Heile and Micaela Ginnerty. McLean High School, McLean, VA.

Alfred Odrick (1812–1894), a former slave, helped establish the first African American school in Virginia, which allowed for the formation of a thriving African American community bearing his name.

“Pearson, William Gaston.” By Connor Killian of Jordan High School, Durham, NC.

A former slave, William Gaston Pearson (1858–1947) helped to found the Royal Knights of King David, a progressive reform group that focused on helping southern African Americans advance socially and economically.

By Chris Williams

 
Friedrich Engels once dismissed the Welsh, amongst others, as a ‘non-historic’ people, destined to be absorbed into the grander story of the English nation-state. Much of the subsequent history of Wales has proven him wrong, at least on that point, but carving out a distinct niche for the written history has always been a challenge.

Welsh historians have traditionally hovered between either going their own way (we’ve had a respectable journal—The Welsh History Review—for more than half a century, and a monograph series—Studies in Welsh History—for over thirty years) and running the risk of ghettoization, or trying to gain an audience for their work in British or European contexts and occasionally being patronized as ‘parochial’.

Historical biography has presented similar difficulties. To many Welsh scholars the original, Victorian edition of the Dictionary of National Biography reeked of the English establishment, and given that most were either socialists or Welsh nationalists (or both) this was not something to be welcomed.

The rival Bywgraffiadur Cymreig/Dictionary of Welsh Biography (first published in 1953) was a never fully satisfactory alternative—only once being brought up to date (from 1940 to 1970, in 2001). Its great strengths were its entries on male preachers and littérateurs. Women, trade unionists, even businessmen, were few and far between. Aneurin Bevan is alleged to have stated that ‘biography is fiction’ and, allegedly or not, many agreed with him.

More recently, however, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography  has been offering biographers manqués opportunities to refine their craft, and has aimed to broaden the remit of the old DNB, not least through embracing the explosion of interest in social and gender history.

The latest Oxford DNB update looks to Wales with the addition of new entries on 45 men and women who’ve shaped modern Welsh history, and who join more than 3200 others already in the dictionary with a close association with Wales. As an advisory editor for this update I was excited to help frame the selection of these 45 individuals and fascinated to discuss, with ODNB staff and my fellow adviser Professor Gareth Williams (no relation—there are a lot of us Williamses) who should (or should not) go in to the new edition. It was a horizon-expanding experience—I guess a good dozen of those who have been included were people I was but dimly aware of, if at all.

I wrote two entries myself, on the cartoonist J. M. Staniforth (1863-1921) and on the military hero, landowner, and politician Godfrey Charles Morgan, Viscount Tredegar (1831-1913). In the process I discovered a connection between the two—Staniforth had illustrated a volume on The Wit and Wisdom of Lord Tredegar (the Encyclopedia of Wales suggests, rather unfairly, that this proved Tredegar ‘was not over-endowed with either’).

But much of my role consisted of reading and reviewing the entries supplied by others. In doing that it became evident that the picture of Welsh society being prosopographically generated was much more varied than the conventional stereotypes of politicians, Nonconformists, and rugby heroes.

Politicians there are, of course, but the archetypal career trajectory of Ness Edwards (1897-1968: miner, trade union leader, Labour MP, and minister under Clement Attlee) can be counterbalanced by that of Rose Davies (1882-1958), teacher and first woman member (and later chairman) of Glamorgan County Council, mother to five and a pioneer in areas of maternity, birth control, and education.

No rugby players feature in this new update, though we did include the famous sports writer J. B. G. Thomas (1917-97) who reported on the game. He is complemented by two very different Welsh sporting heroes: Arthur Linton (1868-96) and Jimmy Michael (1875-1904; pictured above)—two Aberaman boys from neighbouring streets who became world-class cyclists in the 1890s, both of whom died in their late twenties amidst rumours of performance-enhancing drugs.

The representation of Wales’s musical heritage is a similar mix of the standard and the unorthodox. Dan Davies (1859-1930) acquired a military aura as the ‘Wellington of choral singing’ for his leadership of champion choirs in Merthyr and Dowlais. A very different performer was Donald Peers (1909-73), whose ‘In a Shady Nook by a Babbling Brook’ brought him fame in the 1940s (and is today on YouTube).

But if I wished to pick just one subject whose life reminds us of the essential difference of the past, and of how we, as professional historians, too easily simplify and package our history for ease of understanding and consumption, then it would be ‘Owen Rhoscomyl’ (1863-1919).

Born as Robert Scowfield Mills in Lancashire, his connection with Wales was the romantic tales he was told as a child by his maternal grandmother who hailed from Flintshire. After early years as a cowboy and prospector in the USA he enjoyed a sojourn in the ranks of the Royal Dragoons before settling in Conwy in the 1890s.

Mills adopted Wales, travelling to fight in South Africa in 1899 under the Cymricized alias Arthur Owen Vaughan. He won a Distinguished Conduct Medal (DCM) and married a Boer woman whose relatives were fighting the British, before returning to Wales to write history and act as impresario of the National Pageant of Wales in 1909.

The First World War saw him serve with the Northumberland Fusiliers and be awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO). He died in London in 1919 but was buried in Rhyl, a virtual pauper. The story of this fascinating life, which usurps normal expectations of national allegiance and Welsh national characteristics, is told by Professor John S. Ellis of the University of Michigan (Flint). Biography can sometimes be better than fiction.

Chris Williams is Professor of Welsh History at Swansea University, and is one of the advisory editors who worked on this ODNB update. The latest update to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography adds over 100 new biographies between the 11th and 20th centuries, including notable figures in modern Welsh history.

Image credit: Rhondda Cynon Taf Libraries photographic archives

All 125 episodes are now available for download in a free archive that can be browsed by ‘claim to fame’, places of association, or by face (or portrait). Here you’ll the stories of some familiar names (from Jimi Hendrix and George Best to Pocahontas and Paul Robeson), as well as some less familiar figures, including the captain of the Titanic, the creator of the coffee house, and the bringer of garden gnomes to England. Covering 2000 years, the podcast can open your ears to lives in science, literature, politics, sport, exploration, music, war and crime.

You can listen to our special George Orwell podcast below.
[See post to listen to audio]

‘Bismark primed happy Germans to worship Hitler’

By George Walden

Everything about Otto von Bismarck was off the scale: his rages, his disloyalty, his mendacity, his gargantuan appetite and his colossal chamber pots. So, too, was the political genius of the greatest, if least lovable, statesman 19th-century Europe had to offer.

In “Bismarck,” historian Jonathan Steinberg guides us through the towering life of the man who unified Germany around his native Prussia and, Steinberg argues, helped lay down its domineering, militaristic traditions. The author augments the power of the book by keeping his opinions to a necessary minimum throughout.

A great hater, Bismarck’s first antipathy was directed at his mother: “Hard and cold,” he called her. His father — a weak, ineffectual Junker, if you can imagine such a thing — merely embarrassed his brilliant son, whose bullish character first surfaced in drinking and dueling.

In parliament, Bismarck proved a wild reactionary and savage debater who did his bit to stoke the anti-Semitism so characteristic of his class and country: He would feel deeply dishonored, he once declared, “to have before me, as a representative of the King’s Sacred Majesty, a Jew whom I would have to obey.”

Yet not even his phobia about Jews interfered with his hard-faced pragmatism. The father of Realpolitik in foreign affairs, Bismarck was content to work with talented Jewish folk — notably his personal banker — when it suited him. The diehard reactionary was also happy to champion a united German parliament as a weapon against recalcitrant German princelings, who understandably feared Prussian dominance.

Ferocious Will
High intelligence and a ferocious will made Bismarck indispensable as chancellor to William I of Prussia. His hold over the king divided the royal household — the queen and the crown princess detested him — yet nothing could prevent the arch-schemer from getting his way at court.

“There is a long way between my skin and my heart,” he once wrote, describing his political staying power with commendable insight and considerable understatement.

The remark came a few years before his most infamous assertion to parliament: “The great questions of the day will not be settled by speeches or majority decisions,” he declared, “but by blood and iron.”

And so they were. For the spike-helmeted chancellor, statesmanship meant a brutal power play during the height of his career, between 1866 and 1871.

Unity Through War
The final forging of German unity was achieved on the battlefield — first by a war Bismarck imposed on Austria over an otherwise obscure issue concerning the principality of Schleswig-Holstein on the Danish frontier, then by a bloody and protracted fight picked with Napoleon III of France, the Franco- Prussian War that gave rise to the Paris Commune.

“Bismarck has made us great and powerful but he has robbed us of our friends, the sympathies of the world, and — our conscience,” Crown Prince Frederick lamented.

Steinberg, a professor of modern European history at the University of Pennsylvania, does his best to show that there was another side to the country, and to Bismarck. Under his chancellorship, Germany became the best educated, most technologically advanced and most productive country in the world, he says. And for all of Bismarck’s fear of socialism (or because of it) German workers enjoyed the earliest social- security system.

Bully and Hypochondriac
As for Bismarck himself, he was a man of contradictions, Steinberg insists. The giant and bully was a lifelong hypochondriac. The habitual liar and schemer could display personal charm and had a fine prose style. And though he amassed a fortune, he lived simply and never cared much for the elegancies of life: His wife, it was remarked, looked like a cook but didn’t know how to give a dinner.

Yet these attempts to polish the Iron Chancellor’s image are halfhearted. It’s not just history that views him as a demonic figure; German contemporaries saw him that way, too. Steinberg describes how the country became fatally conditioned to the chancellor’s dictatorial style, and how Germany went to its doom in World War I under the rigidities he had imposed.

After another go at European domination under Adolf Hitler, Bismarck’s beloved Prussia was to gain the distinction of being the only state in history to be abolished by decree.

“The Prussian State, which from early days has been a bearer of militarism and reaction in Germany, has ceased to exist,” the Allied occupation authorities declared in a law signed in February 1947.

Imagine Bismarck’s reaction to that.

George Walden, a former U.K. diplomat and member of Parliament, is a critic for Muse, the arts and leisure section of Bloomberg News, where this article and audio component originally appeared.

Jonathan Steinberg is the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of Modern European History at the University of Pennsylvania, and Emeritus Fellow, Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He is the author of Bismarck: A Life, the first major biography of Bismarck for thirty years. Read his article, “Is biography proper history?” and watch his video our YouTube channel.

By Simon Blackburn

 
David Hume was born three hundred years ago, on 26^th April 1711.  He lived most of his life in Edinburgh, with only a few improbable interludes: one as tutor to a lunatic, one assisting in a comic-operatic military adventure, and one somewhat more successfully as Embassy Secretary, being a lion in the literary salons of Paris. Apart from these his life was devoted to philosophy, history, literature, and conversation. He is the greatest, and the best-loved, of British philosophers, as well as the emblem and presiding genius of the great flowering of arts and letters that took place in the Edinburgh of the eighteenth century—the Scottish Enlightenment. As with all philosophers, his reputation has gone through peaks and troughs, but today it probably stands higher than it ever has.

This may be surprising. Movements in twentieth-century philosophy were not, on the whole, kind to Hume. Analytical philosophy, initiated by Moore and Russell, took logic to be its scalpel and the careful dissection of language to be its principal task, yet Hume was neither a logician nor primarily interested in language. His empiricism, indeed, had echoes in the later work of the logical positivists. But he was widely regarded as having driven empiricism into a sceptical grave. Russell, for example, could assert in his History of Western Philosophy, that Hume ‘developed to its logical conclusion the empirical philosophy of Locke and Berkeley, and by making it self-consistent, made it incredible’, and this was a widely-held view. On the Continent it has usually been assumed that Hume was simply a curtain-raiser to Kant, who allegedly instructed us how to avoid his sorry descent into scepticism, on the grounds that any world in which we could find ourselves must have a nice regular structure, discernible by the light of reason alone.

There is unquestionably a skeptical side to Hume’s philosophy. But there is another side as well, that is responsible for its current standing. Hume is indeed sceptical about the power of reason to determine what we believe. But he is not sceptical, for example, about whether the sun will rise tomorrow. He just has the calm understanding that our confidence in uniformities in nature, such as this one, is not the result of logic or of any exercise of pure rationality. It is just the way our minds happen to work—as indeed, do those of other animals.

Similarly when it comes to understanding the springs of action, Hume again dethrones reason, arguing that nothing that reason could discover would motivate us without engaging an inclination or ‘passion’. He entirely overturns the Platonic model of the soul in which reason is the charioteer, controlling and steering the unruly horses of desire. ‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them’. We can correct mistakes about the world in which we act, and choose more efficient means to gain our ends. We may even be able to persuade ourselves and each other to alter our courses, for better or worse. But we can only do this by mobilizing other considerations we care about. These concerns, or in other words the directions of our desires, are themselves a bare gift of nature, again. Hume excelled in adding detail to this: his account of the evolution of what he called the ‘artificial’ virtues—respect for such things as reciprocity, institutions of justice, social conventions, law or government—is the grandfather of all later decision-theoretic and game-theoretic approaches to the evolution of cooperation. But it took over two centuries before this would be recognized. Only recently has Hume’s naturalism become the gold standard for everyone at the cutting edge of contemporary investigation, whether in philosophy, psychology, evolutionary psychology, anthropology, or neurophysiology.

A purely natural or observational approach to human nature may seem to exclude any critical interest in distinguishing good movements of the mind from bad ones. Hume is apparently in no position to separate rational sheep from irrational goats, since reason has so little to say about anything. Yet he retained plenty of critical edge. The famous essay ‘On Miracles’, for instance, is a classic demolition of the idea that human testimonies ever make it likely that people have walked on the water or risen from the dead, and a pioneering account of the cognitive dysfunctions underlying our willingness to believe in such things. ‘Examine the religious principles that have, in fact, prevailed in the world. You will scarcely be persuaded that they are anything but sick mens’ dreams.’

Naturally this attitude did not endear him to religious hardliners, and in the 1750s he was in danger of being excommunicated at the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland (‘they intend to give me over to Satan, which they think they have the power of doing’). Bigots like Samuel Johnson and gossips like Boswell found it hard to believe that an infidel could be as good a man as Hume was known to be, nor at the end of his life that he could face death with such calm.

Adam Smith said of Hume that ‘Upon the whole I have always considered him, both in his life-time and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will admit.’ And if, as Aristotle thought, our well-being can be affected by events after our death, his legions of later admirers must continue to contribute mightily to it.

Simon Blackburn is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. Previously he was Edna J. Koury Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and from 1969 to 1990 he was a Fellow and Tutor at Pembroke College, Oxford. He has authored many books, including the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, but his most recent is Practical Tortoise Raising and Other Philosophical Essays.

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By Mark C. Carnes

General Editor, ANB

The 150th anniversary of the Civil War will be commemorated in the usual ways. But a truly unique approach is provided by the online—and thus searchable—version of the American National Biography, a 27-million word collection of biographical essays on some 18,731 deceased Americans who played a significant role in the nation’s past.

Readers can of course acquire an understanding of the major figures, perhaps beginning with James M. McPherson’s long essays on Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant and Russell F. Weigley’s on Robert E. Lee. But there are many hundreds of essays on figures associated with all aspects of the war.

Those interested in a particular battle, for instance, can use the ANB online. A full-text search of articles for “Gettysburg” yields 253 separate biographical essays, the great majority on soldiers who fought there.

But this search also unearths many new gems of information, such as the fact that William Corby, a Roman Catholic priest assigned to New York’s Irish Brigade, stood upon a boulder, raised his right hand, and offered a general absolution for the combatants just before the armies converged.

Women, too, surface in this search. Eliza Farnham, the author of Life in Prairie Land (1846) and a crusader for prison reform and women’s causes, tended the wounded at Gettysburg, where she contracted tuberculosis; she died the next year at age 49. Eliza Turner, an early feminist, abolitionist, and poet, also cared for the wounded at Gettysburg. She later wrote an important woman suffrage tract. Elizabeth Keckley, a former slave who became the dressmaker, dresser, and confidante of Mary Lincoln, attended the Gettysburg commemoration with the first lady.

Scholars—and history buffs—can look at the Civil War from another fresh perspective through ANB searches by geographical location. For example a full-text search for “Frankfort, Kentucky,” limited to subjects between 1800 and 1840, generates nearly three dozen responses. Among the many interesting essays are those on the following:

Leonidas Polk, a graduate of West Point who became an Episcopal bishop and the owner of a Louisiana sugar plantation. At the outset of the Civil War he volunteered to command Confederate forces and Jefferson Davis named him major general for the upper Mississippi region. In September 1862, during an offensive to seize Kentucky, Polk disobeyed an order to attack, forcing Braxton Bragg to abandon Frankfort.

John Marshall Harlan, who raised and commanded the Tenth Kentucky Volunteers. His efforts helped keep Kentucky in the Union, winning for him the support of national Republicans; in 1877 President Rutherford B. Hayes nominated Harlan to the Supreme Court.

Luke Pryor Blackburn, a physician who became governor of Kentucky. He had served as the public health officer for Natchez, Mississippi, during the yellow fever epidemics of 1848 and 1854. During the Civil War the Confederacy sent Blackburn to Canada to collect arms and hospital supplies to be shipped through the Union blockade. In Canada Blackburn devised a scheme to spread yellow fever through Northern cities. To that end he traveled to Bermuda during the epidemic of 1864, collected the bedding of dying fever victims, and shipped it in trunks to cities in the North. (The plan failed: Blackburn did not understand that mosquitoes were the agent of transmission of yellow fever.) Charged with conspiracy to commit murder, Blackburn was acquitted by a Canadian court. He returned to the United States, settled in Kentucky, won a measure of fame for aiding yellow fever victims during outbreaks in the 1870s, and was elected governor of Kentucky in 1878.

This is just a sampling of the innumerable ways in which the American National Biography can provide rich new insights into a war that continues to command our attention.

- Start your search

- You can also jump start your research into the civil war by looking at our Civil War research topic. This small, highly selective set of articles is recommended by Oxford editors to help students get started doing research in this massive, 19,000-biography collection and The Oxford Companion to United States History encyclopedia content that supports it. Browse the list or start with an overview article and follow the links.

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Leading oral historian Alessandro Portelli is Professor of American Literature at the University of Rome-La Sapienza. In 1973 he recorded the first of over 150 interviews with the men and women of Harlan County, which are now available in the volume, They Say in Harlan County: An Oral History.

To accompany this podcast, we also present the following excerpt from the book, as it appeared in the Dec 2010 issue of Harper’s Magazine.

THE BATTLE OF CRUMMIES CREEK
From interviews included in They Say in Harlan County: An Oral History, by Alessandro Portelli, published last month by Oxford University Press. On April 15, 1941, during a national coal miners’ strike, four striking miners entered the company store at the Crummies Creek Coal Co., in Harlan County, Kentucky, and were killed by a mine employee with a machine gun. Locals have long claimed, though it has never been confirmed, that an ensuing gunfight resulted in additional deaths on both sides.

Granny Hager: Crummies Creek. Now, there was killing there and I can’t tell you just how many were killed. You see, I used to have all of that down, but it got washed away so many times, and burned out. I don’t know all that did happen, but they really had a battle up there. I think there was five killed. They wanted the scabs to go on to work, and they wanted to run the union men away, you see. And that is what started the battle. Now that was the roughest place we had in Harlan County.

Plennie Hall: The day before the battle, I went into the office and I told Mr. Johnson, “Mr.Johnson,” I says, “won’t you sign the union? It would be good for everybody, to be satisfied with everything.” And he said, “Hell no”; he wouldn’t under no circumstances. And the next day, the union come up there to stop them from working.

Becky Simpson: Six years old. Me and my mother always walked from Cranks Creek to Crummies to the commissary with my dad’s paycheck. They had a bunch of pickets up at the commissary. This big bald-headed guy, they called him Big Jim Black Hair, he was a big-league ballplayer, he told my mother, “What’re you doing here with this child today? Get what little you’re going to and get this child back out, there’s gon’ be trouble today.” As we was leaving the commissary, they was rolling up these big machine guns, that they could open up the double doors and shoot out. So me and Mommy is walking back up the mountain, we heared the shooting start. And they just mowed the men down.

Ben Campagnari: Now, we were running, and we had a pegleg man. You wouldn’t believe it. Going down that railroad track, and he’s hitting about four ties at a time; and he outrun half of the people that had good legs, and we was all a-running because they was cutting down with the machine gun, or trying to. And I said: “If I ever go on a picket line again, I’ll go with protection.” We died
just like ducks.

Hazel Leonard: And that night, the thugs that lived, they carried all their dead men out of there and hauled them to the top of Crummies mountain, and burned them up. There was a place there, that they called the Halfway House, it was just a dive, you know, just for men to drink and hang out at. And they sold booze and everything, you know what I mean. So they hauled all these people out there, that had got killed that night—the thugs. They hauled them up that mountain to that place and then they burned it. They burned them up.

Plennie Hall: Three weeks later I was over there getting a payday, and there was a drainpipe runs down there, and somebody that crawled in that drainpipe and died, the dogs
pulled out some of his bones. There never was no more said about it. I wondered about who that could have been, or where they were from.

Today on OUPblog we’re celebrating the 100th International Women’s Day with posts about inspirational women. Here, OUPblog Contributing Editor Kirsty Doole writes about why she’s chosen 19th century writer Mona Caird and brings us an excerpt from Caird’s Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry.

These days, not many people outside of academia seem to know who Mona Caird was. I certainly didn’t until I was studying for my Masters degree and decided to write on the New Woman writers of the late 19th century. Through that I came to read her novel, The Daughters of Danaus (1894), which is the story of Hadria, a girl from the Scottish Borders who wants to be a composer. However, the pressure to fulfil the traditional roles of wife and mother is insurmountable and her musical ambitions are ultimately sacrificed to her family obligations. The book is rightly regarded as something of a feminist classic, and it has become one of my very favourite books.

Caird is most often remembered as the woman who wrote an essay in 1888 for the Westminster Review on marriage and the many injustices that she believed it forced onto women. The Daily Telegraph, in response, asked readers to write in with their answers to the question ‘Is Marriage a Failure?’, which prompted something in the region of 27,000 responses from readers (male and female). She went on to write more essays on marriage, as well as on anti-vivisectionism and animal rights. Both her feminism and her animal rights position made her very controversial in her day, and it’s for her bravery and outspoken ways that I admire her.

As far as I can tell, there are only two of her novels still in print (The Daughters of Danaus and The Wing of Azrael), which is a shame as I really think she deserves to be better-known. So, in the spirit of International Women’s Day (which didn’t exist in Caird’s lifetime, but of which she would surely have approved) here’s an excerpt from her entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. You can read the full entry here.

* * * * *

Caird [née Alison], (Alice) Mona (1854–1932), writer, was born on 24 May 1854 at 34 Pier Street, Ryde, Isle of Wight, to John Alison, an inventor from Midlothian, and Matilda Ann Jane, née Hector. As a child she wrote plays and stories. It seems that she spent part of her childhood in Australia and she uses this experience in her first novel, Aunt Hetty, published anonymously in 1877. On 19 December 1877 she married James Alexander Caird (d. 1921), son of Sir James Caird, at Christ Church, Paddington, London. The couple resided at Leyland, Arkwright Road, Hampstead, London, for the remainder of their forty-four-year marriage. Their only child, Alison James Caird, was born at Leyland on 22 March 1884.

At the beginning of her writing career, Caird briefly used the pseudonym G. Noel Hatton, but of the five novels she published between 1883 and 1915, The Wing of Azrael (1889), A Romance of the Moors (1891), and The Daughters of Danaus (1894; repr. 1989), published under her own name, have received the most attention from literary critics…

…Her general ideas are focused on equality for women in marriage and for equal partnerships in the home which will ‘bring us to the end of the patriarchal system’ which she described as repressive both for men, who were trained to see only ‘the woman’s-sphere and woman’s-responsibility condition of things’, and for women, whose ‘best qualities … will disappear’ if they keep within such a system. Her essays are frequently derisive and she employs irony to make her points about the repressive order of society which cannot separate wives from other types of property. As a progressive thinker, Caird sought legal reforms in childcare and divorce which would improve women’s social positions by removing the stigmas of irresponsibility and ignorance. Her views have been the subject of late twentieth-century feminist literary criticism concentrated on how she approached the issue of social change in her fiction and her essays. Her efforts earned her the label of ‘feminist’ in her lifetime and she has been described by John Sutherland as ‘one of the most aggressive of the New Woman novelists’. She was also active in the temperance movement, and was an outspoken antivivisectionist, publishing two works on the subject in 1894 and 1896.

Today on OUPblog we’re celebrating the 100th International Women’s Day with posts about inspirational women. In this post, Patricia Fara, author of Science: A Four Thousand Year History, writes about the 18th century mathematician and physicist Émilie du Châtelet.

Émilie du Châtelet, wrote Voltaire, ‘was a great man whose only fault was being a woman.’ Du Châtelet has paid the penalty for being a woman twice over. During her life, she was denied the educational opportunities and freedom that she craved. ‘Judge me for my own merits,’ she protested: ‘do not look upon me as a mere appendage to this great general or that renowned scholar’ – but since her death, she has been demoted to subsidiary status as Voltaire’s mistress and Isaac Newton’s translator.

Too often moulded into hackneyed stereotypes – the learned eccentric, the flamboyant lover, the devoted mother – du Châtelet deserves more realistic appraisals as a talented yet fallible woman trapped between overt discrimination and inner doubts about her worth. ‘I am in my own right a whole person,’ she insisted. I hope she would appreciate how I see her …

Émilie du Châtelet (1706-49) was tall and beautiful. Many intellectual women would object to an account starting with their looks, but du Châtelet took great care with her appearance. She spent a fortune on clothes and jewellery, acquiring the money from her husband, a succession of lovers, and her own skills at the gambling table (being mathematically gifted can bring unexpected rewards.) She brought the same intensity to her scientific work, plunging her hands in ice-cold water to keep herself awake as she wrote through the night. This whole-hearted enthusiasm for every activity she undertook explains why I admire her so much. The major goal of life, she believed, was to be happy – and for her that meant indulging but also balancing her passions for food, sex and learning.

Born into a wealthy family, du Châtelet benefited from an enlightened father who left her free to browse in his library and hired tutors to give her lessons more appropriate for boys than for marriageable girls. By the time she was twelve, du Châtelet could speak six languages, but it was not until her late twenties that she started to immerse herself in mathematics and Newtonian philosophy. By then, she was married to an elderly army officer, had two surviving children, and was developing intimate friendships with several clever young men who helped her acquire the education she was not allowed to gain at university.

When Voltaire’s radical politics provoked a warrant for his arrest, she concealed him in her husband’s run-down estate at Cirey and returned to Paris to restore his reputation. Over the next year, she oscillated between rural seclusion with Voltaire and partying in Paris, but after some prompting, she eventually made her choice and stuck to it. For fifteen years, they lived together at Cirey, happily embroiled in a private world of intense intellectual endeavour laced with romance, living in separate apartments linked by a secret passage and visited from time to time by her accommodating husband.

For decades, French scholars had been reluctant to abandon the ideas of their own national hero, René Descartes, and instead adopt those of his English rival, Newton. They are said to have been converted by a small book that appeared in 1738: Elements of Newtonian Philosophy. The only name on the title-page is Voltaire’s, but it is clear that this was a collaborative venture in which du Châtelet played a major role: as Voltaire told a friend, ‘Minerva [goddess of wisdom] dictated, and I wrote.’

During the next few years, while Voltaire dedicated himself to the plays and essays that made him famous, du Châtelet carried out scientific experiments and continued publishing in her own right. Like many multi-tasking women, she turned to translation, intellectual work that tolerates frequent interruptions and is vital for spreading scientific innovations. She may have studied intermittently, but she was definitely thorough. To meet her high standards, translating entailed not only converting the words into another language, but also interpreting and criticising the author’s original text. When du Châtelet set about producing a French version of Newton’s Principia, his great book on gravity and mechanics, she went back to his original Latin, explained the complex mathematics and added substantial commentaries.

As the months went by, an unexpected event forced her to work still harder – she discovered she was pregnant. Plagued by gloomy premonitions, she intensified her schedule, putting in eighteen hours a day to finish in time. Although she completed her translation with a couple of weeks to spare, her predictions proved correct, and she died a few days after giving birth. Voltaire was desolate – and du Châtelet’s manuscript mysteriously disappeared.

Ten years later, with perfect timing, du Châtelet’s Principes was published to coincide with the reappearance of Edmond Halley’s comet, which arrived on cue in the heavens as if to confirm that Newton’s calculations were right and Descartes’s were wrong. Du Châtelet was celebrated as France’s ‘illustrious female scholar’ – as indeed she was. But she also ran her husband’s legal affairs, catered for Voltaire’s emotional and editorial foibles, and obtained a military commission for her son. Crucially for me, pleasure did not get forgotten: she engaged in amateur theatricals, hosted lavish dinner parties, danced and gambled – and decorated her dog’s basket in blue and yellow to coordinate with the colour scheme of her bedroom.

Patricia Fara is a historian of science at Cambridge University. Her books include Science: A Four Thousand Year History, Pandora’s Breeches: Women, Power and Science in the Enlightenment and Scientists Anonymous: Great Stories of Women in Science.

By Michelle Rafferty

When did the commander-in-chief become a sex icon? That was the question I decided to pursue this Presidents’ Day. And of course the more people I spoke with, the more complex the question became. By the end of the investigation I learned some Americans continue to preserve a “pure” image of presidents past, while many find their sex lives highly relevant to our political history. Check out the slideshow below to see exactly what Oxford’s presidential experts had to say!

(To see a full image, click on the center of each slide.)

By Jonathan Steinberg

When I began my career in academic life as an historian, the answer was a loud No. Biography fell into the category of ‘unserious’ stuff, written by amateurs. Not any more. Big biographies of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Churchill, Lyndon Johnson and many others pour from the pens of the most distinguished academic historians. My Bismarck: A Life, which appears in February in the UK and April in the USA, will, I hope, find readers both in the professional historical profession and among the public. What has changed? Why has biography become respectable as a form of research?

In the 1960s when I started, the prevailing paradigm came from social sciences. History had to build sociological modes like the totalitarianism model. It had to measure, count and verify. It had to study structures and functions of  the social order, drawn from Marxist analysis or Weberian sociology.  Anything else seemed dangerously uncertain, ill-defined and, worse, ‘subjective’.

The collapse of the Soviet Union brought down the whole edifice of social science. Nobody in the spectrum of social studies had a clue that the Soviet Union and its vast empire could vaporize in two years as if it had been a mirage; anything with ‘social’ in its terminologies lost purchase along with socialism. The gap left in the set of tools available to historians has not yet been filled. But there were lives out there to study. Even I, educated in Parsonian structural-functional analysis and a dedicated social scientific historian, had noticed an absurd contrast between my models and a twentieth century reality dominated by huge charismatic individuals: Lloyd George, Clemenceau, Woodrow Wilson, Lenin, Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt, Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, Mao, Castro, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

Biography established itself, I think, because the social science models left out the power of human personality. Serious historians of National Socialism realized that they had to solve the Hitler problem. The great Hitler biographer, Ian Kershaw, begins his massive 2 volume biography with a section called ‘Reflecting on Hitler’ with these words:

‘The legacy of Hitler belongs to all of us. Part of that legacy is the continuing duty to seek understanding of how Hitler was possible. ..the character of his power – the power of the  Führer . . . a social construct, a creation of social expectations and motivations vested in Hitler by his followers.’ (pp. xiv and xxvi)

Kershaw makes a fundamental and liberating distinction between the life of the man Hitler and the interaction of that life with the category of rule associated with the term Führer or leader, a political, objective reality, which we can study as we can the growth of modern industry or the changes in population.

In writing my book, I worked on the same principle. For the last four decades, since I first lectured on Bismarck as a very junior research fellow at Cambridge, his achievement puzzled me. How had he done it?  Bismarck achieved his feats because his powerful personality disarmed and commanded his supporters and his opponents alike for nearly four decades, but  every individual, no matter how great, works within real parameters. Changes in the international balance of power, over which he had no control made his success possible. The institutional structure of the Kingdom of Prussia after the Revolution of 1848 gave him levers of power. The Prussian army over which Bismarck as a civilian could by definition have no say, made his victories possible.  He needed a general to be Minister of War, who knew he was a genius and found one in Albrecht von Roon (1803-1879). Finally he had to manipulate the old King William I (1797-1888) and that King had to live a long time which he did. The relationship between Bismarck and the old King needs a biographer, not a social scientist, to explain. I see it as a drama between father and son and between the adopted son and a Queen who hated him as he hated her. In that triangle Bismarck unfolded his genius and in the struggle against his enemies, often female, he became physically and psychologically ill.

Biography can be proper history if it asks the kind of questions which an academic historian can define and offers evidence to support the answer. I hope I have managed to achieve that.

Jonathan Steinberg is the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of Modern European History at the University of Pennsylvania, and Emeritus Fellow, Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He is the author of Bismarck: A Life, the first major biography of Bismarck for thirty years. You can watch him talk about the book on our YouTube channel.

By Gil Troy

As we mark the centennial (Feb. 6th, 2011) of Ronald Reagan’s birth, the tug of war over his legacy continues. Reagan’s popular image – and popularity — have fluctuated as wildly as the stock market. One way to make sense of this is to think of Ronald Reagan as having nine public lives.

Central to the Reagan legend is this conservative Republican president’s origins as a Hollywood Democrat. Ronald Reagan was a New Deal Democrat who by the 1950s felt that the Democratic Party had lost its way. He always insisted: “Maybe my party changed. I didn’t.” And yes, Reagan was an actor. Actually, he never understood how anyone could be in politics without first having been in showbiz.

By 1966, when he ran successfully to become California’s governor, Reagan’s transformation was complete. During his two terms as governor, and during his triumphal 1980 run for the presidency, Reagan was known as a Conservative Ideologue, beloved by the right, disdained by the left. Although he won in an ABC election, with most Americans choosing Anybody But Carter, Reagan claimed he received a mandate for change.

Reagan started strong in his third incarnation, as the Reagan Revolutionary. He promised to cut the budget, reduce taxes, trim the bureaucracy, revive America, face down the Soviets. During his first seven and a half months in office, Reagan secured the largest budget cut in history – some $35 billion in domestic spending from Jimmy Carter’s request – and reduced the personal income tax rate by almost one quarter. Initially, Democrats were flummoxed. But by the summer of 1981, with Americans experiencing the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression, Democrats attacked what they now called the “Reagan Recession.” Getting traction on the “Fairness Issue,” critics attacked the President as Mr. Magoo, a bumbling anti-Communist cowboy, a reverse Robin Hood and warmonger. They said he cut taxes for the rich and burdened the poor while risking nuclear war by calling the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire.” They mocked his gaffes, from blaming trees for causing air pollution to counting ketchup as a vegetable (which actually emanated from the Department of Agriculture not him). After Democrats surged in the 1982 Congressional midterm elections, pundits started eulogizing Reagan’s failed presidency.

Fortunately for Reagan, the economy revived before he had to face the electorate for re-election. With inflation tamed, jobs being created, American pride returned. Reagan reigned as a Popular Patriot. He blessed the prosperity as “Morning in America.” He pushed for a peaceful ending to the Cold War by going to Berlin to say to his Soviet counterpart, “Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall.” He repeatedly spurred Americans to build their county as “a shining city upon the hill.”

Yet by the time Reagan retired in January, 1989, even many Republicans were losing enthusiasm for him. By promising a “kinder, gentler” nation, Vice President George H.W. Bush became president implicitly casting Reagan as the Unkind, Ungentle President. The disrespect for Reagan in the Bush White House as lazy, ignorant, detached, became so overt that former President Richard Nixon fired off a note to Bush’s Chief of Staff John Sununu urging discretion. Bush then called Reagan to apologize.

When Bill Clinton ran for President in 1992, he joined the pile-on, targeting Reaganite “greed” and accusing Reagan of neglecting middle class Americans.

As Reagan faded into the haze of Alzheimer’s, and as the Reagan-Bush-Clinton economic boom continued, Reagan’s stock rose. Americans remembered him fondly as the Prince of Peace and Prosperity, a genial, witty, optimist who restored American pride and patriotism.

After 2000, many Democrats who hated George W. Bush forgot how much they had detested Reagan. Suddenly, to many, Reagan became the Palatable Republican, the UnBush, proof they did not hate all Republicans, only the current Republican incumbent.

When Barack Obama ran for President in 2008, he called Reagan a Transformational Leader. This approach allowed Obama to hail Reagan as an icon, acknowledge his continuing popularity, while repudiating Reaganism.

Whenever politicians speak about Reagan’s legacy, they treat it as a clear, static object. In fact, his legacy, like all presidential legacies, is open to debate, just as his popularity will continue waxing and waning. Remembering their 40th President, Americans usually invoke one of Ronald Reagan’s nine lives – as the Hollywood Democrat, the Conservative Ideologue, the Reagan Revolutionary, Mr. Magoo, the Popular Patriot, the Unkind Ungentle President, the Prince of Peace and Prosperity, the Palatable Republican, or the Transformational Leader. Together, these labels paint a portrait of Ronald Reagan’s extraordinary life, reminding us that we live in a Reaganized America, still debating “Big Government” and cutting taxes on his terms, still living under his shadow. Ultimately, then, for better or worse, Ronald Reagan was the greatest president since Franklin Roosevelt, meaning the most significant president since the New Deal.

Gil Troy is Professor of History at McGill University and a Visiting Fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington DC. His latest books are The Reagan Revolution: A Very Short Introduction and (as co-editor) Living in the Eighties.

This Sunday, February 6, 2011, will mark the 100th birthday of the late U.S President, Ronald W. Reagan. In addition to serving as the 40th President of the United States (1981-89), Reagan also served as the 33rd Governor of California (1967-75). He enjoyed a successful career as an actor before coming into office, served in the U. S military during the Second World War, and survived an assassination attempt in March 1981.  In honor of his life, we offer the following excerpt from Michael Schaller’s book, Ronald Reagan.

During his eight years as president, and especially after, supporters praised Reagan as a transformative leader who, like Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt, used his power to alter fundamentally the nation’s direction. Even many Americans who disliked Reagan’s policies agreed that he might well be the most influential president since Roosevelt, turning the nation away from many of the “big government” programs initiated during the New Deal. Reagan received widespread praise for restoring national pride and an unembarrassed muscular patriotism that had lapsed after the debacles of the Vietnam War, the Watergate Scandals, and the economic reversals of the 1970s.

Democratic Party leaders acknowledged Reagan’s political skill but disparaged his ideas and programs. Clark Clifford, an influential power broker since 1948, called Reagan an “amiable dunce.” Democratic Speaker of the House Thomas “Tip” O’Neill put it more gently. Questioning Reagan’s understanding of his own administration’s policies, O’Neill described him as better suited to be a ceremonial “king” than a president.

Biographer Gary Wills explained Reagan’s self-assurance and determination in another way. Wills described Reagan as the real-life embodiment of the nearsighted Mr. Magoo. Like the cheerful cartoon character whose myopia prevented him from seeing anything either unpleasant or that did not conform to his mental map, Reagan simply plowed forward, oblivious to external realities.

Satirist Phil Hartman, part of the Saturday Night Live television ensemble, captured Reagan’s several sides in a 1987 skit. Hartman impersonated a silver-tongued but airheaded president sleepwalking through “photo ops” such as honoring Girl Scout cookie captain of the year. But when the photographers leave, Reagan morphs into a hard-charging executive, telling aides exactly how to supply weapons secretly to anticommunist guerrillas, performing complex currency calculations in his head, and even taking a call apparently from Saddam Hussein in Baghdad (conducted in Arabic) that results, Reagan boasts, in a “lucrative deal with the Iraqis.”

Yet these varied portrayals failed to account for the fact that throughout his career as an actor, governor, and president, most Americans felt comfortable with Reagan. They saw him not as a fool or an extremist but as something of an everyman who shared many of their hopes and fears. Critics who ridiculed his ignorance of complex policy issues misunderstood the source of his appeal, according to journalist Bill Moyers. “We didn’t elect this guy because he knows how many barrels of oil are in Alaska,” Moyers remarked in 1981. “We elected him because we want to feel good.”

Reagan’s presidency coincided with major changes in the economy, the erosion of support for liberalism and big government, and a crisis inside the Soviet Union that led to its demise. He shifted the language and content of American politics in a markedly conservative direction (such as replacing the term citizen with taxpayer and making taxes and regulations sound like dirty words). He also brought many religious, intellectual, social, and economic conservatives into the nation’s political mainstream.

Historians remain divided about how successful Reagan’s programs were in fostering domestic recovery or changing the trajectory of the Cold War. Did tax cuts and deregulation actually restore economic growth? If so, were there hidden costs? Did a president who preached frugality but incurred massive indebtedness symbolize hope or hypocrisy? Were the benefits of covert intervention in Afghanistan worth the price of fostering a powerful anti-Western Islamist movement? Did Reagan’s strident anticommunism and the surge in defense spending change Soviet behavior or merely coincide with events over which he had little control? How did Reagan affect the nation’s long-term political culture?

Reagan spent thirty years in show business before entering politics. Responding to those who dismissed him as “just” as actor, Reagan told a journalist near the end of his presidency, “there have been times in this office when I’ve wondered how you could do the job if you hadn’t been an actor.” He recognized that in an age of instant visual communication, the ceremonial presidency had as much significance as the substance of policy making. Time magazine made this point when it described the ceremony on July 4, 1986 during which he unveiled a refurbished Statue of Liberty in New York harbor. Here was a 75-year-old man “hitting home runs…with triumphant…ease that is astonishing and even mysterious.” This president, in Time’s words, was a “magician who carries a bright, ideal America like a holograph in his mind and projects its image in the air.” Reagan laughed off those who labeled him the “Great Communicator,” but in his last formal address as president in January 1989 insisted that he had “communicated great things…the rediscovery of our values and common sense.” In rallying the American people to “change a nation…instead we changed a world.”

Michael Schaller is the Regents Professor of History at the University of Arizona. He has published numerous books about 20th-century American political history and foreign policy, the most recent of which is Ronald Reagan.

By Frank Close

Ray Davis was the first person to look into the heart of a star. He did so by capturing neutrinos, ghostly particles that are produced in the centre of the Sun and stream out across space. As you read this, billions of them are hurtling through your eyeballs at almost the speed of light, unseen.

Neutrinos are as near to nothing as anything we know, and so elusive that they are almost invisible. When Davis began looking for solar neutrinos in 1960, many thought that he was attempting the impossible. It nearly turned out to be: 40 years would pass before he was proved right, leading to his Nobel Prize for physics in 2002, aged 87.

In June 2006, I was invited by The Guardian newspaper to write his obituary. An obituary necessarily focuses on the one person, but the saga of the solar neutrinos touched the lives of several others, scientists who devoted their entire careers chasing the elusive quarry, only to miss out on the Nobel Prize by virtue of irony, chance, or, tragically, by having already died.

Of them all, the most tragic perhaps is the genius Bruno Pontecorvo.

Pontecorvo was a remarkable scientist and a communist, working at Harwell after the war. When his Harwell colleague Klaus Fuchs was exposed as an atom spy in 1950, Pontecorvo immediately fled to the USSR. This single act probably killed his chances of Nobel Prizes.

In the following years, Pontecorvo developed a number of ideas that could have won him one or more Nobels. But his papers were published in Russian, and were unknown in the West until their English translations appeared up to two years later. By this time others in the USA had come up with the same ideas, later winning the Nobel Prize themselves.

Amongst his ideas, one involved an experiment which Soviet facilities could not perform. But most ironic were Pontecorvo’s insights about neutrinos.

Ray Davis had detected solar neutrinos – but not enough of them. For years, many of us involved in this area of research thought Davis’ experiment must have been at fault. But Pontecorvo had another theory which indicated that like chameleons, neutrinos changed their form en route across space from the Sun to Earth. And he was right. It took many years to prove it, but by 2000 the whole saga was completed. Davis duly won his Nobel Prize, but so many years had elapsed that Pontecorvo by then was dead.

So although my piece for The Guardian began as the life story of Ray Davis, Pontecorvo was there behind the scenes to such an extent that it became his story also. It is also the story of John Bahcall, Davis’ lifelong collaborator, who, to the surprise of many, was not included in the Nobel award.

The lives of these three great scientists were testimony to what science is all about: as Edison put it, genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.

A final sobering thought to put our human endeavors in context: those neutrinos that passed through you when you started reading this article are by now well on their way to Mars.

Frank Close OBE is Professor of Physics at Oxford Univeristy and a Fellow of Exeter College.  He is formerly Head of the Theoretical Physics Division at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, and Head of Communications and Public Education at CERN. He has written several books including The Void, Antimatter, Particle Physics: A Very Short Introduction, and his most recent book, Neutrino. Frank Close’s obituary of Ray Davis won the UK Science Writer’s Prize for the ‘Best Science Writing in a Non-Scientific Context’. You can read more on OUPblog by Frank Close here, here, here, and here. This article is cross-posted with permission from the Oxford University Press/BBC Focus Magazine microsite.

By Peter Stoneley

The last couple of years have been an up-and-down period for the reputation of Mark Twain (1835-1910). It started well with a special issue of Time Magazine in 2008 which reminded readers of Twain’s goodness, and of the fact that the “buddy story of Huck and Jim was not only a model of American adventure and literature but also of deep friendship and loyalty.” This was followed in 2010 by many celebrations to mark the centenary of his death, including a volume in the prestigious Library of America series. Headlining Twain as the most “beloved” and “cherished” author from “around the world,” the Library of America volume was an anthology of “Great Writers on His Life and Work.”

But there has been another Twain waiting for his turn in the public eye. Laura Skandera-Trombley brought this Twain into view with her book of 2010 on “the hidden story of his final years”, revealing just how vain, bad-tempered and vengeful he could be. Far from the world of children and their buddies, a key fact about the revealed Twain was that his secretary had presented him with a sex toy. Then earlier this month the University of California Press published the first volume of their three-volume edition of Twain’s autobiography. This made headlines on both sides of the Atlantic. The autobiography had supposedly gone unpublished because it was so full of harsh truths about Twain’s contemporaries, his nation, and life generally that he himself had ordered that it not be published until 100 years after his death. Here Twain is in full spate, calling his secretary a “salacious slut,” settling many scores with business-partners who he thought had fleeced him, and referring to United States soldiers involved in imperial wars as “uniformed assassins.”

How can we go on seeing Twain as “the quintessential American” once we know that he had echoed Johnson’s comment that “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel”? How can we see him as about “deep friendship and loyalty” when he conceived intense enmities for so many of his closest associates? It turns out that the Twain we had known was, as the New York Times put it, a “scrubbed and sanitized version,” and here in the autobiography was the truth. Similarly the Daily Telegraph assured its readers that the autobiography was “likely to shatter the myth that America’s great writer and humorist was a cheerful old man.”

We might seek to temper the coverage of the publication of the autobiography, as the outstanding editors responsible for the California volume have themselves done. Although it is a great event in Twain scholarship to have a full and reliable edition, substantial parts of the autobiography had been published before, including most of the truly interesting parts. The parts dealing with the “salacious” secretary were not part of the autobiography, but are to be published as an appendix to the California edition, and the material had been discussed in some detail in earlier scholarship. And the sex toy? As an editor at the Mark Twain Project, Benjamin Griffin, has pointed out on the University of California Press website, this was a “massager” that was marketed to men and women as treatment for “rheumatism, headaches, neuralgia, and other ailments,” and Twain recommended the device to friends with seemingly no awareness that it might also serve as “a masturbation aid for women.”

Now, with the 175th anniversary of Twain’s birth on 30th November 2010, I have no further revelations to add. Nor do I wish to try to adjudicate between the “good Twain” and the “bad Twain.” What strikes me is how these fluctuations and polarizations in the image of Twain in the past year or so are but one more renewal of an often-repeated pattern. To disagree with Skandera-Trombley, very little about Twain’s life has been “hidden” at all, and the idea that he has for the past hundred years been seen as a man who was “undeterred by life’s sorrows and challenges” is questionable. After his death, his surviving daughter and his literary executor tried to promote a safe Twain, while others pushed for a fuller and more honest sense of the man. In this seemingly endless push and pull, the “good Twain” has been exploded repeatedly, though perhaps most notably by Bernard DeVoto with Mark Twain in Eruption in 1940, and by Hamlin Hill with Mark Twain: God’s Fool in 1972.

The point might be that the “bad Twain” has to be continually rediscovered because there is a continued investment in the “good Twain.” For as long as there are such intense desires to make a champion out of him, there will be the finding out once more that his feet were made of clay. And this is to leave to one side the attempt to make the idea of America cohere with one identity that is “quintessentially American.”

Peter Stoneley is a Professor in the Department of English and American Literature at the University of Reading. He is the editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.