Robert Tattersall is an internationally recognized authority on diabetes.  He received specialist training at King’s College Hospital, London and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.  He moved to Nottingham in 1975 where he became Professor of Clinical Diabetes.  His most recent book, Diabetes: The Biography, is part of the series Biographies of Disease which we will be looking at in the upcoming weeks.  Each volume in the series tells the story of a disease in its historical and cultural context – the varying attitudes of society to its sufferers, the growing understanding of its causes, and the changing approaches to its treatment.  In the excerpt below we learn about the discovery of insulin- a moment that changed the lives of diabetics forever.

After war service in Europe, Frederick Grant Banting (1891-1941) failed to get a surgical job at the prestigious Toronto Hospital for Sick Children and so set up as a doctor in London, Ontario. This was not a success, and to make ends meet he got a part-time job at the University of Toronto. In October 1920 he had to lecture the students on carbohydrate metabolism, about which he knew little. While preparing, he read an article about a man in whom a stone had blocked the pancreatic duct leading to atrophy of the digestive-enzyme-producing part of the gland but leaving the islets intact. This was hardly new, since it had been known for thirty years that this was what happened when the duct was tied in animals, but in his notebook Banting wrote:

Diabetus [sic]
Ligate pancreatic ducts of dog. Keeping dogs alive until ancini degenerate leaving Isletes.
Try to isolate the internal secretion of these to relieve glycosurea [sic]

Against the background of the fruitless attempts described in the previous chapter, it is not surprising that Macleod did not take Banting seriously. Macleod wrote: ‘I found that Dr Banting had only a superficial textbook knowledge of the work that had been done and no familiarity with the methods by which such a problem could be investigated in the laboratory.’ Quite apart from Banting’s ignorance, Macleod had lost interest in diabetes and was researching acid-base balance. Banting later said that during the first interview Macleod was so disinterested that he started reading letters on his desk. Nevertheless, he offered Banting a disused lab and two students, Charles Best (1899-1978) and Clark Noble (1900-78), who were to do alternate months. They tossed a coin to decide who should to the first month. Best ‘won’, but was so involved at the end of the first month that Noble agreed that he should continue.

Banting need an assistant, because he did not know how to measure blood sugar, and Macleod had wisely insisted on this as the end point of their experiments. During his research on the blood sugar of the turtle, Best had learned the new Lewis-Benedict method, which needed as little as 0.2 ml blood, whereas other methods needed 25 ml. Another stumbling block was that Banting had never done a pancreatectomy, an operation that at the time was used only in animal research. Macleod assisted at the first operation, but Banting and Best then worked alone, writing from time to time to Macleod, who replied with advice. In August 1921they depancreatized two dogs and treated one with pancreatic extract leaving the other as a control. The untreated dog died in four days which the treated one remained well. Macleod was encouraged by their results but felt that the falls in blood sugar might be due to dilution or even normal fluctuations. He suggested further experiments, to which Banting objected violently and accused Macleod of trying to steal their thunder. Nevertheless, the experiments were done. When Macleod returned in October, he had a stormy interview with Banting, who threatened to go elsewhere if better facilities were not provided. At a departmental meeting on 14 November 1921 Banting and Best gave a preliminary presentation of their work. One important suggestion at this meeting was that the best of showing that the extract worked would be if regular injections could prolong the life of diabetic dogs.

This was a logistic problem, because the duct-ligation method needed many dogs and a wait of seven weeks while the exocrine tissue degenerated. Banting’s solution was to use foetal calf pancreas, which Best got from the local abattoir. The rationale, as Sobolev had suggested twenty years before, was that it contained a high proportion of islets in relation to exocrine tissue. An important breakthrough came in December, when Banting decided to use alcohol in making extract (an idea Macleod had suggested some months before). It worked well and led them to wonder whether they could get a similar result with the more easily available adult beef pancreas. That they did must have been a surprise, because the original rationale for duct ligation was that the internal secretion would be destroyed by pancreatic enzymes. In fact, although Macleod and others believed this, it had been known since 1875 that fresh pancreas did not break down proteins. The intact gland contains an inactive precursor trypsinogen, which is converted into the protein-dissolving enzyme trypsin only by contact with duodenal juice. Around this time Banting and Best were joined by a biochemist, Bert Collip (1892-1965)-more accurately, he was foisted on them by Macleod, who regarded him as a proper scientist. Collip had come on a Rockefeller fellowship and was studying the effect of pH on blood sugar. Later he was asked to help with the purification of insulin and made rapid progress, although afterwards he downplayed his role, suggesting that any biochemist could have done the same.

Some time in December 1921 Collip began making extracts from whole pancreas and, at Macleods suggestion, tested them on rabbits. The extracts reduced the rabbit’s blood sugar, and how far it fell was a useful and cheap way of telling how potent the extract was.

The first use of insulin (an extract made by Charles Best) on a human being was on 11 January 1922. The pancreatic extracts were relatively impure, and the house physician at Toronto General Hospital described what he injected into the buttocks of 14-year-old Leonard Thompson as ‘15 cc of thick brown muck’. Thompson has been on the Allen diet since 1919 and weighed only 65 lb (29.5 kg). After the injection, his blood sugar fell from 440 to 320 mg/dl (24.4 to 18.3 mmol/l), but no clinical benefit was seen. The experiment was resumed on 23 January, when he was given Collip’s extract, and now his blood sugar fell during one day from 520 mg/dl (29 mmol/l) to 120 mg/dl (6.7 mmol/l). He continued treatment for ten days with marked clinical improvement and complete elimination of glucose and ketones from his urine. Subsequently he lived a relatively normal life, although reliant on insulin injections, before dying of pneumonia in 1935.

The first clinical results were published in the March 1922 Canadian Medical Association Journal, where the authors reported that they had treated seven cases…

Paolo Mazzarello graduated from medical school with honors from the University of Pavia, Italy, and earned a PhD in neurological sciences from the University of Milan.  He has since been a researcher for the National Research Council at the Institute of Molecular Genetics in Pavia, Italy and is currently Professor of History of Medicine at the University of Pavia, Italy.  His most recent book, Golgi: A Biography of the Founder of Modern Neuroscience, looks at an extraordinary intellectual who explored three major fields of biology and medicine, namely neuroscience, emerging cell biology, and the new science of medical microbiology.   In the excerpt below we learn a little bit about Golgi’s key discovery, the black reaction.

One winter day at the end of 1872, or the beginning of 1873, a scientist sat down to work at his microscope in the unlikely setting of an asylum for lunatics in northern Italy, after focusing back and forth for a while…

What a fantastic sight! On a yellow, completely transparent background, there appear sparsely scattered black fibers, smooth and small or thick and prickly, as well as black, triangular, star- or rod-shaped bodies!  Just like fine India ink drawings on transparent Japanese paper.  The scientist gazes upon it in astonishment.  He is more accustomed to the chaotic images produced by carminic acid and hematoxylin, which yield one dubious interpretation after another.  Here, on the other hand, everything is absolutely clear, without any possibility of confusion.  There is nothing more to interpret; one need only observe and note these cells, with their different, ramified extensions, like plants in the morning frost, covering an astonishingly large space in wavy lines; thse smooth and uniform extensions which, springing from the cell, cover great distances, before suddenly splitting up into a bunch of innumerable fibers…The delighted and astonished gaze cannot tear itself away from this fantastic sight.  Methodic wishful thinking has become reality.  Metal impregnation has produced a magnificent and unexpected slide.

This is how the renowned Spanish histologist Santiago Ramón y Cajal imagined the scene that, on that day, must have presented itself to the eyes of Camillo Golgi, the young chief physician of the Pie Case degli Incurabili (Charitable Home for Incurables) of Abbiategrasso.  This was the moment of the discovery of the “reazione nera” (black reaction), a revolutionary method for studying the structure of the nervous system.  This discovery contributed, more than thirty years later, to the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Medicine to Golgi.

For every student of medicine or biology, the name Golgi is synonymous with one of the basic structures in the cell: the Golgi Apparatus or Golgi Complex.  But this is only one of the many discoveries and achievements, particularly in the neurosciences, for which Golgi’s name deserves to be known by a much wider public than just devotees of biomedical sciences.  Unfortunately, his scientific fame lags far behind the historical significance of his discoveries.  The historical-critical literature on Golgi is scanty and the appraisal of his scientific work has been negatively affected by his rejection of the theory of the neuron and by the erroneous idea that his discovery of the black reaction was the result of pure chance.

The theory of the neuron, which was definitively confirmed only after the advent of the electron microscope, is an important example of a revolutionary conceptual transformation in biology. Using the terminology of Thomas S. Kuhn, without necessarily adopting his ideas on the evolution of scientific thought, the theory of the neuron represents a fundamental “paradigm” of the neurosciences in the same sense that atomic-molecular interpretation of matter or the theory of the discrete transmission of hereditary characteristics constitute fundamental paradigms of chemistry and genetics, respectively.  This concept of the neuron (and particularly that of synapses), by virtue of its being the elemental unit of modulation and transmission of information, has also assumed a preeminent role in many disciplines associated with the neurosciences such as informatics and artificial intelligence.  The multidisciplinary significance of the theory of the neuron does not simply represent an automatic extension to the nervous system of the principles of cellular theory, just as quantum mechanics is not simply a consequences of applying classical mechanics to subatomic structures.  Given the biophysical characteristics of neurons, the laws of their reciprocal communication, the complexity of their connections, and the extraordinary nature of the activities to which they give rise, it is evident how this theory constitutes the basis of a new segment of the scientific research that integrates “polyphonically” contributions from physics, electrochemistry, informatics, and clinical medicine, and in addition classical physiology and anatomy-histology.  From this perspective, the theory must be considered one of the great intellectual conquests of the nineteenth century.

To the end of his life Gogli remained a fiery opponent of this theory, despite having contributed materially its formulation, as he recognized explicitly in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.  The technical histological revolution that he developed, the black reaction (known also as Golgi’s Method or chrome-silver reaction), which allowed the detailed investigation of the morphology of neurons and the basic architecture of cerebral tissue, was in fact the fundamental prerequisite that made possible the “paradigmatic” generalization of the theory of the neuron.

Often in the history of biology (and even more so in scientific discoveries generally), the introduction of a new technique revolutionizes a whole area of research, radically transforming preexisting disciplines and creating others from scratch.  One is reminded of the effect that monoclonal antibodies had on immunology and other branches of biology, or of the impact that the technology of recombinant DNA had on genetics.  The black reaction represented, for the histology  of the nervous system, a breakthrough of comparable importance, permitting the development of neuroanatomy as an autonomous discipline, and thus contributing to the birth of modern neuroscience.  Only after the introduction of Golgi’s Method, and the extraordinary structural descriptions of the nervous tissues obtained with it, did morphological investigations begin to be connected to physiological and functional investigations…

Jennifer Burns is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Virginia.  Her new biography, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, follows Rand through her meteoric rise from struggling Hollywood screenwriter to best-selling novelist.   Burns highlights two facets of Rand’s work that make her a perennial draw for those on the right: her promotion of capitalism, and her defense of limited government.  In honor of Jennifer Burns’s The Daily Show appearance (be sure to tune in 11 tonight!) we have posted an excerpt below.

“I am coming back to life,” Rand announced as the Nathaniel Branden Institute entered its second year of existence.  Watching Nathan’s lectures fill, Rand began to believe she might yet make an impact on the culture.  Roused from her despair, she began once more to write.  In 1961 she published her first work of nonfiction, For the New Intellectual, and in 1962 launched her own monthly periodical, The Objectivist Newsletter. Over the course of the decade she reprinted articles from the newsletter and speeches she had given in two more books, The Virtue of Selfishness and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.  Although she occasionally talked of a fourth novel, Rand had abandoned fiction for good.  Instead she reinvented herself as a public intellectual. Gone were the allegorical stores, the dramatic heroes and heroines, the thinly coded references to real politicians, intellectuals, and events.  In The Objectivist Newsletter Rand named names and pointed fingers, injecting herself directly into the hottest political issues of the day.  Through her speeches and articles she elaborated on the ethical, political, and artistic sides of Objectivism.

Rand’s ideas were particularly attractive to a new generation of campus conservatives, who saw rebellion against a stifling liberal consensus as a basic part of their identity.  Unlike older conservatives, many right-leaning college students were untroubled by her atheism, or even attracted to it.  As Rand’s followers drew together in campus conservative groups, Ayn Rand clubs, and NBI classes, her ideas became a distinct stream of conservative youth culture.  Through her essays on government, politics, and capitalism Rand herself encouraged the politicization of her work.  In 1963 she even endorsed a new Republican on the scene, Barry Goldwater, a move that situated her as the leader of a growing political and intellectual movement.

At first look Objectivism may appear a freakish outgrowth of the turbulent 1960s, but it had significant parallels in American history.  Nearly a century before, similar reading clubs and political activism had sprung up around Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, a book uncannily similar to Atlas Shrugged, if diametrically opposite politically…

Rand made her network television debut in 1960, appearing on Mike Wallace’s celebrated interview show.  Her dark eyes flashing, she refused to be intimidated by the liberal Wallace and expertly parried his every question and critique.  Her performance caught the eye of Senator Barry Goldwater, who wrote Rand a letter thanking her for defending his “conservative position.”  Rand had not mentioned the senator by name, but he immediately recognized the similarity between their views.  Goldwater told Rand, “I have enjoyed very few books in my life as much as I have yours, Atlas Shrugged.”  He enclosed an autographed copy of his new book, the best-selling Conscience of a Conservative.  Shortly thereafter the two met briefly in New York.  Rand followed up this encounter with a lengthy letter urging Goldwater to support capitalism through reason alone.  Although she considered him the most promising politician in the country, Rand was distressed by Goldwater’s frequent allusions to religions.  The Conscience of a Conservative had been written primarily by L. Brent Bozell, William F. Buckley’s brother-in-law, and accordingly reflected the fusionist consensus of National Review.

In her letter to Goldwater Rand hammered on the need to separate religion and politics, a theme that would animate her for decades.  She singled out National Review for special criticism because it was a supposedly secular magazine that surreptitiously tried “to tie Conservatism to religion, and thus to take over the American Conservatives.”  If such an effort succeeded, Rand asked, what would become of religious minorities or people like herself who held no religion?  Goldwater’s response, which reiterated his Christian religious beliefs, was brief yet polite.  Rand had a powerful admirer, but not a convert.

As her depression lifted, Rand began to explore different ways she might exercise cultural influence.  She was newly interested in politics because of her esteem for Goldwater and her dislike of the dashing presidential contender, Jack Kennedy, to her a glamour candidate who offered no serious ideas.  She made her first venture back into political commentary with a scathing attack on Kennedy, “JFK: High Class Beatnik,” a short article published in the libertarian journal Human Events.  In the summer of 1960 she even dispatched Nathan to investigate the possibility of her founding her own political party. It was unclear if Rand saw herself as a potential candidate or simply a gatekeeper for others.  Nathan sounded out a few of Goldwater’s political advisors, who told him that Rand’s atheism severely limited her prospects.  Abandoning that idea, Rand returned once again to intellectual pursuits.  She sent her attack on JFK to the head of the Republican National Committee to be used as needed in Republican publications.

Shaking off her lethargy, Rand now began paying attention to the new following she had gained through Atlas Shrugged.  The book was an instant best-seller despite the largely negative reviews it received.  As with The Fountainhead enormous quantities of enthusiastic fan mail poured in.  Although Rand could not respond personally to ever letter, she was interested in her readers, particularly those who wrote especially perceptive or ignorant letters.  Nathan often interposed himself between Rand and the most objectionable writers, but in the early 1960s it was entirely possible to send her a letter and receive a personal response.  Sometimes she even engaged in a lengthy correspondence with fans she had not met, although her more usual response was to refer the writer to work she had already published.

The Nathaniel Branden Institute both capitalized on and fostered Rand’s appeal.  Nathan used the addresses from her fan mail to build NBI’s mailing list and advertise new courses.  As the lectures expanded into new cities, he took out newspaper advertisements describing Objectivism as the philosophy of Ayn Rand.  In 1962 he and Barbara published a hagiographic biography, Who is Ayn Rand?, which included an essay by Nathan on the fundamentals of her philosophy.  Slowly public perception of Rand began to shift, establishing her as a philosopher, not just a novelist.  The NBI ads and lectures made Objectivism into a movement, a larger trend with Rand at the forefront.

Robert Cohen teaches social studies and history at New York University and chairs the department of Teaching and Learning in NYU’s Steinhardt School of Education.  His new book, Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s, is the first biography of Savio, the brilliant leader of the Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement, who helped carry the students to victory in their struggle against the university.  In the excerpt below we are introduced to Savio.

Few protest leaders have burst upon the American political scene more dramatically than did Mario Savio in fall 1964 when he was a twenty-one-year-old Berkeley student.  The University of California (UC) had become the scene of nonviolent political warfare, with the administration enforcing and students defying a campus ban on political advocacy that closed down the free speech area at UC’s busy southern entrance.  Coming at a time when student civil rights activism was surging, the ban seemed an attack on the civil rights movement and a gross violation of the right to free speech, igniting protests in mid- and late September.  This conflict escalated just before noon on October 1 as police drove a squad car to UC Berkeley’s central thoroughfare, Sproul Plaza, to arrest civil rights organizer Jack Weinberg because he, like many free speech activists, was defying the ban by staffing a political advocacy table on the plaza.  Before the police could arrest, someone shouted, “Sit down!”  Within moments a crowd of students surrounded the car in a nonviolent blockade that would last thirty-two hours.  Shortly after the blockade began, Mario Savio, a leader of the civil rights group University Friends of SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee), removing his shoes so as not to damage the police car, climbed on top of it and into national headlines, using its roof as a podium to explain the protest and demand freedom of speech.  From those first moments atop that car Savio emerged as the Berkeley rebellion’s key spokesperson, symbolizing all that was daring, militant, and new about the Free Speech Movement (FSM).

…Savio was among the first media starts of America’s New Left – the 1960s student movement “committed to redressing social and political inequalities of power,” challenging cold war nationalism, and renewing “the atrophied institutions of American democracy” by creating “new institutions of popular participation to replace existing bureaucratic structures.” In 1964, when Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) had yet to attract the media coverage it would receive as the key New Left organization of the mid- and late 1960s, Savio was making headlines leading the largest, most disruptive campus rebellion in American history.  He helped to define a new role for American college students, that of a dynamic youth leader igniting mass student protest.

Savio’s fame was closely linked to his oratory.  Back in 1964 the press – with its cold warrior disdain for radicalism – hardly knew how to react to his militant yet popular oratory because it seemed so out of place on U.S. campuses, which had almost never witnessed mass protest…  Time magazine thus looked outside the States for comparisons, evoking Fidel Castro and attributing to Savio “an almost Latin American eloquence…a sense of demagoguery and a flair for martyrdom.”  Yet not even Time’s antiradical editors could miss the fact that Savio had prevailed over a university administration undermined by its “habit of vacillating between concessions and crackdowns.”  The Bay Area press uncomfortably conceded his eloquence, hinting that its appeal was based on emotion rather than reason.  “He harangues in rapid fire staccato,” explained one San Francisco reporter, “shrill at times, emotionally charged always.  He’s a slender 6 foot 1, sloping at the shoulders, clad usually in baggy slacks and a heavy jacket, bushy hair…unkempt, his blue eyes sparkling and intense.”

Friends and foes alike recognized that Savio on the stump “cut an extraordinary figure,” whose words and delivery made a lasting impression.  Berkeley history professor Reginald Zelnik termed Savio “the most original public speaker I would ever hear.” Zelnik saw in him in the reflectiveness of a genuine intellectual, the questioning spirit of the most iconoclast undergraduate, and an intense desire to inspire thought and dialogue.  Berkeley immunology professor Leon Wofsy reflected, “He wasn’t doing it for show.  He wasn’t doing it to provoke.”  When Savio argued on behalf of the FSM, as Wofsy put it, “he was speaking from his heart and from his head.  There was certain quality there.  Not just his rhetoric, but there was a quality of sincerity and thoughtfulness that just lifted him above the others.”

It is Savio’s speeches, not those of professors or campus officials, that have found their way into the histories of the 1960s.  This was in part because during the FSM, as historian Henry May noted, students were the actors, making history through their protests, while faculty and administrators were merely reactors, trying to come to grips with this unprecedented outburst of activism and civil disobedience.  But it more than simply Savio’s insurgent status that made his words memorable.  After all, many Berkeley protesters spoke up, but none of their words have proven so enduring, and none of these speakers could match Savio’s passionate yet logical, accessible, democratic, and at times poetic oratory…

…Savio did not have to be speaking from atop a police car for his words to be remembered.  His most famous speech occurred two months after the police car blockade as he urged students outside Sproul Hall to join the FSM’s culminating sit-in on December 2, 1964.  He demanded that college youth heed their consciences and embrace activism.  “There’s a time, ” Savio exhorted his classmates,

when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part.  You can’t even passively take part.  And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop.  And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free the machine will be prevented from working at all!

This dramatic call to resist unjust authority embodied the youthful idealism and iconoclasm of the insurgent sixties.  Well into our own century it continues to appear in feature films, documentaries, protest songs, and television shows that explore that decade and other times of revolt against oppression.  The speech helped convince some thousand students to occupy Sproul Hall, paving the way for a mass sit-in, which for its time was the greatest act of mass civil disobedience…on an American campus.

From a young age, Justice Albie Sachs played a prominent part in the struggle for justice in South Africa. As a result he was detained in solitary confinement, was subject to sleep deprivation, and eventually blown up by a car bomb that cost him an arm and the sight in one eye. Later, he returned to play an important part in drawing up South Africa’s post-apartheid Constitution, and served as a member of the Constitutional Court for fifteen years. As his time on the Court comes to an end, he has put together a book called The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law, which combines personal reflections with extracts from some of his key judgements. In the excerpt below, Sachs talks about his early life and the ways in which the dual strands of his life – ‘as lawyer and as outlaw’ – were eventually drawn together.

Life prepared me in a most bizarre way for becoming a judge. If judicial office had been my goal I was doing everything right… eight years of study and three degrees including a doctorate in law, a decade of busy practice as an advocate at the Cape Town Bar, and, later, earnestly teaching law in three continents and publishing several books, some scholarly, others autobiographical. Yet as far as the actual impact of the law on my life was concerned, everything was wrong: as a student my home was raided before dawn by the police and I was subjected to what was called a ‘banning order’ that restricted my movements and activities; while at the Bar I was twice placed in solitary confinement by the security police, first for 168 days and later for 3 months, during which I suffered torture by sleep deprivation; when I completed my doctorate I was living as a stateless person in exile in England; and some years later while doing legal research in Mozambique I was blown up by a bomb placed in my car by my country’s security agents, losing an arm and the sight of an eye.

The fact is that for much of my life I lived simultaneously as lawyer and as outlaw. Anyone who has been in clandestinity will know how split the psyche becomes when you work through the law in the public sphere, and against the law in the underground. Yet the causes were easy to understand and the resolution as obvious to predict—only when we ended apartheid and realigned the law with justice, could I become whole again. Less dangerous but more disturbing was a deeper disquiet at the centre of my legal soul, one that was aggravated by the grotesqueries of apartheid, but that had a more profound and more problematic genesis.

I first became aware of it when I was a student at the University of Cape Town. The sun streamed into our lecture rooms as I listened dutifully to professors speaking on what I have since heard described as the beautiful abstraction of norms. To pass exams I would repeat elegant textbook phrases about the rule of law, basic rights and the independence of the judiciary. Then at night, in a shack lit by flickering candles, I would conduct study classes and see the expressive eyes and mouths of desperately poor people incandescent with determination to give all their energies, even their lives, for justice and freedom. I would be deeply animated by a vitality and laughter that seemed vastly more meaningful for the achievement of justice than any of the erudite but passionless phrases of my law school. Two worlds in the same city, yet totally apart, joined by pain rather than by hope, and I did not live completely in either. For more than thirty years of my life as a lawyer I battled with this divided self. Unexpectedly, it was the bomb that blasted the schism away. The bomb literally hurled me out of my legal routine, and freed me to recreate my life from the beginning. I learnt to walk, to stand, to run… and to prepare for the writing of South Africa’s new Constitution. Suddenly, joyously and voluptuously, the grand abstract phrases of the legal text books united with and embraced the palpable passion for justice of the disenfranchised. And far from the law constituting a barricade of injustice that had to be stormed and torn down for freedom to be achieved, it became a primary instrument for accomplishing peaceful revolution. In the months and years of constitution-making that followed, the formerly contradictory influences of my life were able to synergise. If the process of making of a new basic law helped my country to heal itself, it also resolved my own deep internal contradiction.

And so it came to pass that if some people are born to be judges and some achieve judicial office, I was one of those that had judicial office happily thrust upon him. And what extraordinarily rich and intellectually exciting years have passed since the day fourteen years ago when newly-elected President Nelson Mandela appointed me and ten colleagues as members of South Africa’s first Constitutional Court.

I never took my being a judge as something natural, preordained, and unproblematic. The intensely contradictory nature of my earlier relationship to the law would not have allowed this. Furthermore, being involved in socio-legal studies in my years of exile led one to observe and interrogate what I and my colleagues were actually doing. And then I was constantly being pressed by universities and legal groups throughout the world to explain what they saw as the miracle of the establishment of a constitutional democracy in a country destined for a racial bloodbath. If you want to give credit to the miraculous without believing in miracles, you are compelled to search with particular diligence for rational explanations. How did the transition take place, and what role was I now playing as a judge?

I found myself giving presentations all over the globe on questions that were raising similar controversies in the most varied jurisdictions. The lectures, repeated over the years in places as far apart as New York, London, Delhi, Cambridge and Chicago, were collected for a possible book of essays. The bundle lacked connecting texture, so to add some starch I began to mix in extracts from judgments that had been delivered in my Court, some by myself, some by colleagues. At the very least this would show an interesting contrast between the more accessible and personalized cadences of a lecture, and the oracular and disinterested voice of a judgment. I noticed, however, that the compare-and-contrast effect of conjoining narrative text with judgment excerpts was beginning to provide my imagination with something more exciting—glimpses of a fascinating and not very obvious chemistry between my non-judicial life experiences and my decision-making as a judge. And in this way a totally new book began to construct itself within the innards of the manuscript.

In the post below, Gordon Thompson Professor of Music at Skidmore College, remembers Bobby Graham who passed away on Monday.

Forty-five years ago in September 1964, the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” stormed to the top of British charts and would soon accomplish the same on Billboard’s American rankings. The raucous guitar and explosive drums declared a new era of pop and an aggressive voice for rock. Indeed, in that juxtaposition of angry instruments and whining voice can be heard the beginnings of punk. With this recording and many others, Bobby Graham offers the example of a musician many have heard, but too few have heard of.

The leader of the Kinks, Ray Davies remembers in his autobiography how he suddenly understood what rock drumming was all about when they hired Bobby Graham. He and producer Shel Talmy arranged to record “You Really Got Me” at a midnight session in London’s IBC Studios with session musicians Graham and Arthur Greenslade (piano). They had made several attempts, but tonight when Graham played, he brought all the power and the authority to the session it had lacked. The drummer abandoned “the complicated introduction he had planned and just thumped one beat on the snare drum with as much power as he could muster, as if to say, ‘OK, wimp, take that!’ For the next three minutes he was one of us” (150). Graham would continue providing the beat for the Kinks until around 1966 when he tried his hand producing records and serving as a music director; but drumming would always be his first love.

Bobby Graham may not have looked like a mod, but his drumming graced many of mid-sixties British hits, including those by the Dave Clark Five (especially those disks featuring horn sections such as “You Got What It Takes”) and Them (“Gloria” and “Baby, Please Don’t Go”). His association with the Dave Clark Five proved particularly problematic given that the bandleader WAS the drummer; moreover, Clark routinely declared that no other drummer played in the studio. However, a close listen to early recordings such as “Do You Love Me,” “Glad All Over” and “Bits and Pieces” reveals double-tracked drumming, suggesting that the drummer/producer had assistance from another musician. Graham maintained to the end that he was that drummer (a claim supported by unofficial correspondence) and who could doubt Clark’s good judgment at hiring the best. Indeed, many a British drummer cringed when they saw Graham at a session, knowing they had just been demoted to playing tambourine.

Graham had played on earlier hits by Johnny Leyton (“Johnny Remember Me”) and Joe Brown and the Bruvvers (“Picture of You”), but with the explosion of pop groups in 1963, Graham’s proven abilities in the studio made him the choice of producers looking to make quick hits. Younger musicians might break into a sweat when the red light burned in the studio indicating that the tape was running; but musicians like Graham buckled down and did what they knew best: play near flawlessly.

Bobby passed away in London on Monday 14 September 2009 with loved ones by his side. He leaves behind a treasure trove of great music. In my last communication with him, he lamented that he could no longer gig, not that he did not crave to be on the stage again, having a bash while the world danced to his drumming.

Benjamin Moser is the New Books columnist for Harper’s and regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and Conde Nast Traveler. His new book, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, looks at one of the most popular but least understood of Latin American writers and demonstrates how Lispector’s art was directly connected to her turbulent life. In the clip below, shot in OUP’s office, Moser talks about which of Lispector’s works he would like to translate.

On this day in history, August 19, 1959, Blind Willie McTell passed away.  To honor this great musician we have excerpted his biography from Oxford Music Online’s Encyclopedia of Popular Music.  When you are done reading the post check out some of his music here.

McTell, Blind Willie

b. 5 May 1901, McDuffie County, Georgia, USA, d. 19 August 1959, Almon, Georgia, USA.

Blind from birth, McTell began to learn guitar in his early years, under the influence of relatives and neighbours in Statesboro, Georgia, where he grew up. In his late teens, he attended a school for the blind. By 1927, when he made his first records, he was already a very accomplished guitarist, with a warm and beautiful vocal style, and his early sessions produced classics such as ‘Statesboro Blues’, ‘Mama Tain’t Long Fo Day’ and ‘Georgia Rag’. During the 20s and 30s, he travelled extensively from a base in Atlanta, making his living from music and recording, on a regular basis, for three different record companies, sometimes using pseudonyms which included Blind Sammie and Georgia Bill. Most of his records feature a 12-string guitar, popular among Atlanta musicians, but particularly useful to McTell for the extra volume it provided for singing on the streets. Few, if any, blues guitarists could equal his mastery of the 12-string. He exploited its resonance and percussive qualities on his dance tunes, yet managed a remarkable delicacy of touch on his slow blues. In 1934, he married, and the following year recorded some duets with his wife, Kate, covering sacred as well as secular material.

In 1940, John Lomax recorded McTell for the Folk Song Archive of the Library of Congress, and the sessions, which have since been issued in full, feature him discussing his life and his music, as well as playing a variety of material. These offer an invaluable insight into the art of one of the true blues greats. In the 40s, he moved more in the direction of religious music, and when he recorded again in 1949 and 1950, a significant proportion of his songs were spiritual. Only a few tracks from these sessions were issued at the time, but most have appeared in later years. They reveal McTell to be as commanding as ever, and indeed, some of the recordings rank among his best work. In 1956, he recorded for the last time at a session arranged by a record shop manager, unissued until the 60s. Soon after this, he turned away from the blues to perform exclusively religious material. His importance was eloquently summed up by Bob Dylan in his strikingly moving elegy, ‘Blind Willie McTell’.

Elliott J. Gorn is author of Dillinger’s Wild Ride: The Year that Made America’s Public Enemy Number One, is Professor of History and American Studies at Brown University.  John Dillinger, celebrity outlaw extraordinaire has been the subject of many films.  In the article below Gorn explores Dillinger’s film history, including the newly released Public Enemies.   Be sure to check out Gorn’s other OUPblog articles here.

In his new film Public Enemies director Michael Mann has Johnny Depp, who plays John Dillinger, smile as he watches Clark Gable go to the electric chair at the end of Manhattan Melodrama. Depp then walks out of Chicago’s Biograph Theater to his death at the hands of federal agents, just as Dillinger did seventy five years ago today. Art recreates life recreating art.

Dillinger was always big box office. After he died, film more than any other medium kept his memory alive.  Dillinger would have loved it.  He went to movies as often as he dared while he was on the lam.  Toward the end, he even thought about making his own film.  Since then, documentaries, made-for-TV pictures, and several movies have featured the Hoosier outlaw.

At first, though, Dillinger couldn’t catch a break.  The Hays Commission, established in the early 30s to police the film industry, stood guard at theater doors, protecting Americans’ morals.  They called out Dillinger by name: His story was too violent, too sexual, too demoralizing.

Still, it was hard to keep the Dillinger story out of the movies. Max Nosseck’s 1945 Dillinger, was a low-budget picture, starring the relatively unknown Lawrence Tierney.  The Hays Commission looked the other way on this one, even though the movie did very well at the box office, because Tierney depicted Dillinger as so ruthless, so craven that there was no chance anyone might identify with him.

Dillinger confirmed the “official” version of the story that J. Edgar Hoover, the Justice Department, and most newspapers had promulgated for a decade.

Director John Milius’s 1973 Dillinger was neither glamorous nor technically polished.  Rather, it had slightly shabby look, matching the era it depicted.  Melvin Purvis, the man who brought the bandit down—played by a big, rough-looking Ben Johnson—narrates the story.  At first, he seems to be the film’s moral center, but before it is over, the feds look more like executioners than law-enforcement officials, and Dillinger (played by Warren Oates with a wonderful combination of self-doubt and bravado) is the one who upholds older American ideals of honor, loyalty, and rural virtue.

Michael Mann’s Public Enemies, released earlier this month, makes Dillinger and Purvis men of action, pure and simple.  We get little sense of their motivations, no character development.  Like an old English ballad the film doesn’t so much tell a story as refer to a known story.  Public Enemies is a great action film, beautifully shot.  But it refuses to take sides, explain what is at stake, or tell us why Dillinger or Purvis are the way they are.  They are simply two men locked in mortal combat.

Mann conceived, wrote and filmed Public Enemies before last fall’s economic meltdown. Financial excess and corporate greed were more on his mind then breadlines and homelessness, which is probably why Public Enemies feels more like a gangster picture than an outlaw film.  The suits, cars, cityscapes, nightclubs, and rich interiors are all gangster movie conventions.  And gangster films are less about renegades pitting their bodies against the system than about outsiders trying to get in.  Like other gangster films, Public Enemies is a parable of corruption, where violence—whether from J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, Frank Nitti’s mob, or the Dillinger gang—are the way of the world.  This is allegory—Dillinger, the outsider, the little guy from the provinces—crushed between government and big business.

Which movie gets it right?  The question is a little beside the point.  The Dillinger story has always been about his public persona, and popular media like the movies shaped his legend.  More important than Dillinger’s deeds is how we remember him.

Certainly the 1945 film is the least accurate historically, but Tierney’s ruthlessness echoed J. Edgar Hoover’s conclusion about John Dillinger: “he was just a yellow rat that the country may consider itself fortunate to be rid of.”  Warren Oates’s Dillinger best captured how the outlaw was understood in the 30s.   By keeping the Great Depression in view, the 1973 film gets at the very thing that made Dillinger a hero to so many Americans, his willingness take bold action in fearful times.

Public Enemies certainly recreates the look and feel of 30s America.  But in telling such an unsentimental tale of hunter and hunted, Mann misses something essential.  Americans identified with John Dillinger not just because he was good at crime, but because, in the context of the 30s, being an outlaw was an act of rebellion.  Dillinger’s story was actually very sentimental, highly romantic.  It assumed that bold individual action still mattered.  His brief life on the open road became a fantasy of freedom amidst uncertainty and want.

John Dillinger will never go away.  A generation from now, as the hundredth anniversary of his death approaches, there will be more movies about him. Their creators will try to tell the “real” story, but the real story will reflect the temper of their times.

Noralee Frankel is the Assistant Director, Women, Minorities, and Teaching at the American Historical Association.  Her new book, Stripping Gypsy: The Life of Gypsy Rose Lee, is the biography of a woman who was constantly torn about her choices as a beautiful and intelligent woman immersed in the burlesque world.  In the original post below Frankel looks at Gypsy’s patriotism.

Gypsy’s greatest triumph as an entertainer was not her performance at Minsky’s, at the World’s Fair, or even on Broadway; but her tours of military bases beginning during World War II. In December 1943, she hitched up her trailer to her car and drove from New York to places like Fort Bragg, North Carolina, haggling with gas rationers along the way.

Gypsy encouraged soldiers’ participation in her act, even though their contribution brought more rehearsals and a less polished show. One Friday night, Gypsy performed for Army Air Force pilots in training at Gunther Field, Alabama. Her number “Gimme a Little Kiss” depended on at least three volunteers. Another number, “I Don’t Get It,” included Gypsy and the Gunther Field Rockettes. With Gypsy supplying the costumes, soldiers dressed as strippers. The program indicated that Gypsy’s performance with the enlisted men was the first time the post had staged their own show. At Bergstrom Field in Austin, Texas, the male chorus line wore costumes with heart motifs and GI mops for wigs. Gypsy donated one of her outfits to a soldier who impersonated her amazingly well in a show entitled “This Is the Army.”

Gypsy also liked to parody gender roles in these skits and acted as the sexual predator against a poor, helpless enlisted man. In the scene, Gypsy took a soldier out on a date and then she would try to convince the soldier to let her come into his home. The soldier demurred, remarking on the lateness of the hour. When Gypsy tried to kiss him, he exclaimed, “Certainly not! I’m not that kind of boy!” He insisted, “I’d hate myself in the morning.” Gypsy responded that she loved him “like a sister.” The soldier retorted, “My sister never looked at me like that.” A military police officer misreading the situation once assumed the soldier had been bothering Gypsy. He ordered the soldier to move along.

In 1951, Gypsy wanted to perform for troops stationed in Germany while she was touring Europe, but the army refused, probably because she was blacklisted from TV and radio for her political views a year earlier. By the mid-1960’s, Gypsy was back in good graces and off she went to entertain soldiers, as she had 25 years earlier, only this time in Vietnam.

In her fifties, she no longer performed, but still thought of herself as a “sexy grandmother.”