Chiefs at Verde Reservation, Arizona. Source: NYPL Labs Stereogranimator.

During the 1800s, white settlers moved west by the tens of thousands, and the US cavalry went with them, battling Indian tribes along the way. One by one, tribes were forced to relinquish their homelands (on which they had lived for centuries) and relocate to reservations, often hundreds of miles away. By the late 1800s, some three hundred reservations had been created.

The purpose of the reservation system was, for the most part, to remove land from the Indians and to separate the Indians from the settlers. Reservations were usually created on lands not (yet) coveted by non-Indians. By the late 1800s, however, settlers were nearly everywhere, and Congress needed to develop a new strategy to prevent further bloodshed.

The government decided that instead of separating Indians from white society, Indians should be assimilated into white society. Assimilation of the Indians and the destruction of their reservations became the new federal goal.

Two very different social forces helped shaped this new policy: greed and humanitarianism. Many whites wanted Indian land and knew that they would have an easier time obtaining it if Indian tribes disappeared. This greed prompted Congress to pass the Dawes Act, also known as the General Allotment Act, in February 1887. The Dawes Act was also favored by many non-Indian social reformers who were aware that Indians were suffering unmercifully under the government’s existing reservation policies, and they sincerely believed that the best way to help Indians overcome their plight and their poverty was by encouraging assimilation. Although their motives differed, both groups pressured Congress to pass the Dawes Act. The objectives of the Act, as the US Supreme Court has noted, “were simple and clear cut: to extinguish tribal sovereignty, erase reservation boundaries, and force the assimilation of Indians into the society at large.” Indian tribes had no say in the matter and were not even consulted.

Most Indian tribes had no concept of private land ownership. Rather, land was communally owned and everyone worked together to gather what they could from the land and shared its bounty. In order to compel assimilation of the Indians, a scheme was developed that would undermine Indian life and culture at its core: individual Indians would be forced to own land for private use. Indians would be converted into capitalists.

To accomplish the new policy of assimilation, the Dawes Act authorized the President of the United States to divide communally-held tribal lands into separate parcels (“allotments”). Each tribal member was to be assigned an allotment and, after a twenty-five-year “trust” period, would be issued a deed to it, allowing the owner to sell it. Once the allotments were issued, the remaining tribal land (the “surplus” land) would be sold to non-Indian farmers and ranchers. Congress hoped that by allowing non-Indians to live on Indian reservations, the goals of the settlers and those of the humanitarian social reformers could both be satisfied: land would become available for non-Indian settlement within Indian reservations, and Indian poverty would be eliminated once Indians accepted the Anglo-American concept of private ownership and saw and emulated the farming and ranching habits of their new neighbors. “Within a generation or two, it was thought, the tribes would dissolve, their reservations would disappear, and individual Indians would be absorbed into the larger community of white settlers.”

The first goal — opening large portions of Indian reservations to white settlement — was a huge success. During the next fifty years, nearly two-thirds of the 150 million acres of land that Indian tribes owned in 1887 was sold to non-Indians. The second goal, however, was a dismal failure. Rather than assist Indians improve their lives and overcome poverty, the General Allotment Act made their condition worse. For one thing, many allotments were unsuitable for small-scale agriculture, and even those that were suitable required money for the purchase of equipment, cattle, or seeds that few Indians had. Moreover, many Indians didn’t want to become farmers and ranchers, and viewed such a lifestyle as distasteful. It simply was naïve and unrealistic — if not callous and racist — to think that Indian life would be improved by a method that forcibly confiscated tribal land and allowed outsiders to live on Indian reservations.

Congress passed a law in 1934 that ended the allotment process, and no further parcels of land were allotted to Indians. But the damage had been done. Indeed, today, more non-Indians live on some Indian reservations than Indians, and Indian life has been changed dramatically. The 125th anniversary of the Dawes Act is not, for Indians, a cause for celebration.

Stephen Pevar is the author of The Rights of Indians and Tribes. A graduate of Princeton University (1968) and the University of Virginia School of Law (1971), he was a Legal Aid lawyer on the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation from 1971 through 1974. Since 1976, Pevar has been on the national legal staff of the ACLU. He has litigated a number of cases in the field of Indian rights and has lectured extensively on the subject.

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February 8, 1904

Japanese Attack Port Arthur, Starting Russo-Japanese War

On February 8, 1904, just before midnight, Japanese destroyers entered the harbor of Port Arthur (now Lü-shun, China). Soon after, they unleashed torpedoes against Russian ships in a surprise attack that began the Russo-Japanese War.

The conflict grew over competition between Russia and Japan for territory in both Korea and Manchuria, in northern China. Japan had won Port Arthur, at the tip of the Liaotung Peninsula, from China in an 1894–1895 war. Russia joined with other European powers to force it to relinquish the port, however — and then three years later had compelled China to grant the city to it. These actions rankled Japan, as did Russia’s refusal to honor a promise to withdraw troops from Manchuria. Japan decided to go to war.

The attack on Port Arthur resumed in the late morning of February 9, when bigger Japanese ships began shelling the Russian fleet and nearby forts. The Russians put up more resistance than expected, however, and the Japanese ships withdrew.

The attack on Port Arthur was inconclusive, but the rest of the war went largely Japan’s way. The Japanese enjoyed several victories in 1904, seizing Korea in March, and defeating Russian forces twice in Manchuria during the summer. More success followed in 1905, with the surrender of Port Arthur in January, a victory over a large Russian army in Manchuria in March, and a decisive naval battle at Tsushima Strait in May that destroyed the Russian fleet. Russia’s government, facing unrest at home, was forced to seek peace.

The Russo-Japanese War marked the first victory of a non-European nation against a European one in modern times. It also contributed to unrest in Russia that would lead, more than a decade later, to the Russian Revolution.

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February 6, 1935

Turkey Holds First Election That Allows Women to Vote

On February 6, 1935, the women of Turkey were allowed to vote in national elections for the first time. Women were even allowed to stand for office — and eighteen female candidates were elected to Turkey’s parliament.

The radical reform was part of Kemal Mustafa Ataturk’s effort to secularize and modernize Turkish society. Ataturk, a military officer, led a movement that took control of Turkey in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after its defeat in World War I. Ataturk was committed to westernizing Turkish society, as evidenced by his adoption of German business laws, Italian criminal laws, and Swiss civil laws. One of the hallmarks of his effort was to recognize the rights of women. They were allowed to vote and run for local office in 1930. A law from December of 1934 expanded these rights to include national parliamentary elections.

That as many as eighteen women were elected to the parliament in the first election is a bit deceptive. In the early republic, when Ataturk ran a one-party state, his party picked all candidates. A small percentage of seats were set aside for women, so naturally those female candidates won. When multi-party elections began in the 1940s, the share of women in the legislature fell, and the 4% share of parliamentary seats gained in 1935 was not reached again until 1999. In the parliament of 2011, women hold about 9% of the seats. Nevertheless, Turkish women gained the right to vote a decade or more before women in such Western European countries as France, Italy, and Belgium — a mark of Ataturk’s far-reaching social changes.

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On this day in 1922, James Joyce’s Ulysses was first published in its entirety, although the publication history of the book is nearly as complex as the novel itself. Initially serialised in The Little Review from 1918, publication of Nausicaä episode led to a prosecution for obscenity and no English-speaking country dared to publish more, and risk further prosecution. However, shortly after arriving in Paris in July 1920, Joyce met Sylvia Beach, proprietor of the Shakespeare and Company bookshop and friend to modern writers. On hearing of the collapse of Joyce’s hopes of US or English publication, Sylvia Beach offered to publish the book under the auspices of Shakespeare and Company, to have it printed in Dijon by Maurice Darantiere, and to finance it by advance subscription. Joyce agreed at once. Here, we’ve picked one of our favourite extracts from the Oxford World’s Classics edition (pp.226-227).

Mr Bloom turned over idly pages of The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, then of Aristotle’s Masterpiece. Crooked botched print. Plates : infants cuddled in a ball in bloodred wombs like livers of slaughtered cows. Lots of them like that at this moment all over the world. All butting with their skulls to get out of it. Child born every minute somewhere.  Mrs Purefoy.

He laid both books aside and glanced at the third : Tales of the Ghetto by Leopold von Sacher Masoch.

–  That I had, he said, pushing it by.

The shopman let two volumes fall on the counter.

–  Them are two good ones, he said.

Onions of his breath came across the counter out of his ruined mouth. He bent to make a bundle of other books, hugged them against his unbuttoned waistcoat and bore them off behind the dingy curtain.

On O’Connell bridge many persons observed the grave deportment and gay apparel of Mr Denis J. Maginni, professor of dancing &c.

Mr Bloom, alone, looked at the titles. Fair Tyrants by James Lovebirch. Know the kind that is. Had it? Yes.

He opened it. Thought so.

A woman’s voice behind the dingy curtain. Listen : The man.

No: she wouldn’t like that much. Got her it once.

He read the other title : Sweets of Sin. More in her line. Let us see.

He read where his finger opened.

— All the dollarbills her husband gave her were spent in the stores on wondrous gowns and costliest fillies. For him ! For Raoul !

Yes. This. Here. Try.

–  Her mouth glued on his in a voluptuous kiss while his hands felt for the opulent curves inside her deshabillé.

Yes. Take this. The end.

—  You are late, he spoke hoarsely, eying her with a suspicious glare.

The beautiful woman threw off her sabletrimmed wrap, displaying her queenly shoulders and heaving embonpoint. An imperceptible smile played round her perfect lips as she turned to him calmly.

Mr Bloom read again : The beautiful woman.

Warmth showered gently over him, cowing his flesh. Flesh yielded amid rumpled clothes. Whites of eyes swooning up. His nostrils arched themselves for prey. Melting breast ointments (for him ! For Raoul !) Armpits’ oniony sweat. Fishgluey slime (her heaving embonpoint !). Feel ! Press ! Crished ! Sulphur dung of lions !

Young ! Young !

An elderly female, no more young, left the building of the courts of chancery, king’s bench, exchequer and common pleas having heard in the lord chancellor’s court the case in lunacy of Potterton, in the admiralty division the summons, exparte motion, of the owners of the Lady Cairns versus the owners of the barque Mona, in the court of appeal reservation of judgment in the case of Harvey versus the Ocean Accident and Guarantee Corporation.

Phlegmy coughs shook the air of the bookshop, bulging out the dingy curtains. The shopman’s uncombed grey head came out and his unshaven reddened face, coughing. He raked his throat rudely, spat phlegm on the floor. He put his boot on what he had spat, wiping his sole along it and bent, showing a rawskinned crown, scantily haired.

Mr Bloom beheld it.

Mastering his troubled breath, he said :

–  I’ll take this one.

The shopman lifted eyes bleared with old rheum.

—  Sweets of Sin, he said, tapping on it. That’s a good one.

This excerpt is taken from Ulysses: The 1922 text by James Joyce. It is edited with an introduction by Jeri Johnson, Senior Tutor at Exeter College, Oxford and appears in the Oxford World’s Classics series.

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February 2, 1536

Buenos Aires First Founded

On February 2, 1536, Spanish explorer Pedro de Mendoza founded the city he named Nuestra Señora Santa María del Buen Aire—Buenos Aires, Argentina. The new town was meant to spearhead the Spanish effort to colonize the interior of South America. It came less than two years after conquistadors had returned to Spain from Peru with treasures seized from the Inca empire.

Spain’s Charles I was spurred by the vast Inca wealth to seek further riches in South America. He also wanted to block any effort by Portugal to expand its foothold in Brazil. Accordingly, he commissioned Mendoza to mount an expedition to explore and settle the Río de la Plata, a vast estuary in southern South America that had been sighted back in 1516.

Mendoza set out in August 1535 in command of 800 to 1700 men (accounts vary) in around a dozen ships. The expedition — the largest sent from Spain to the Americas to date — was ill fated, however. A fierce storm blew the ships off course, and after regrouping Mendoza decided that one of his lieutenants was a rebel and had him executed. Troubles continued after the founding of Buenos Aires. At first the Spaniards received gifts of food from the indigenous locals but soon after fighting broke out between the two groups. That conflict cut off the chief source of food, and the Spaniards began to starve. Mendoza sent a lieutenant upriver in search of a friendlier site. He founded Asunción, now the capital of Paraguay.

Mendoza himself headed back to Spain in 1537. He was seriously ill — perhaps from syphilis — and died on the return trip. His settlement continued to struggle, and in 1541 the remaining colonists abandoned it, heading for Asunción. Not until 1580, when Juan de Garay returned to the scene, was a permanent Spanish presence established at Buenos Aires.

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February 1, 2009

Iceland’s Sigurðardóttir Becomes the First Openly Gay World Leader

On February 1, 2009, Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir made double history: she became the first woman to serve as Iceland’s prime minister and she became the first openly gay person to become leader of any nation.

Sigurðardóttir’s rise to the premiership resulted from several factors. She had a long career in politics and was the longest-serving member of the Iceland’s parliament, the Althing, having first been elected in 1978. She also had experience in government positions, serving four times as Minister of Social Affairs, overseeing Iceland’s social welfare programs. Sigurðardóttir was a member of Iceland’s middle class, working as both a flight attendant and an office worker before entering politics. Her understanding of the basic concerns of ordinary people appealed to many Icelanders.

The other factor contributing to her achievement was Iceland’s economic mess. The island nation’s banking industry collapsed in 2008 and 2009. That crisis brought down the conservative government of Prime Minister Geir H. Haarde and caused Icelanders to favor the leftist views of the socialist Sigurðardóttir.

Two years after taking office, her government seems to have stabilized Iceland’s economy. Inflation had been surging above 18 percent a year at the end of 2008, just before she took office. By 2011, it had fallen under 4 percent. The growth rate of the nation’s gross domestic product, which had been negative in 2009 and 2010, in the wake of the economic collapse, was expected to reach 2.5 percent in 2011. The banking sector has been overhauled.

Success was not complete, however. Icelandic voters rejected a government-backed plan to reimburse British and Dutch depositors in Icelandic banks for lost deposits. Voters also seem not to favor Sigurðardóttir’s desire to enter the European Union.

Sigurðardóttir did enjoy a great personal moment from her premiership. When Iceland’s new law that allowed gay marriage took effect in June 2010, she married her longtime partner Jónína Leósdóttir, a writer.

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Has the Washington foreign policy establishment disavowed democracy in the Middle East? According to Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald the answer is a resounding yes. Greenwald, a lawyer by training and blogger/author by trade, has long been a trenchant critic of various “establishments.” In addition to “America’s national security priesthood,” he has often skewered the mainstream media for various transgressions such as giving the George W. Bush administration a pass on the invasion of Iraq and more recently for giving Luke Russert and Chelsea Clinton high-profile jobs. Greenwald’s work on post-9/11 domestic policies, especially the way the Bush administration and a complicit Congress compromised civil liberties through dubious laws like the USA Patriot Act is among the best there is out there. Yet on those occasions when he has wandered into foreign policy, Greenwald’s commentary is considerably less original.

In his January 2 column, Greenwald went after CSIS’s Jon Alterman for an oped he published in the December 31 New York Times. Alterman had been an election observer in Egypt during the second round of polls. In about 80 words he relayed what he saw, including large numbers of voters turning out for either the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party or the al-Nour Party, which is affiliated with one strand of the Egyptian Salafist movement. Alterman, who spent three years living in Egypt in the 1990s, suggests that the best outcome in terms of American interests would be “a balance” between the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and Egypt’s new politicians. The implication being, I think, that the military would retain control over important foreign policy issues like the bilateral relationships with the United States and Israel while ceding executive authority in other areas to elected civilians.

Being well…I guess… part of the foreign policy establishment by dint of my employment, it is hard to understand how Greenwald extrapolates from Alterman’s oped that Washington foreign policy establishment has collectively decided that democracy in the Middle East is bad for the United States. A few observations before I move on: 1) people outside of Washington often make claims about Washington that they would never make about anywhere else. Greenwald is a smart guy. He surely knows that the so-called foreign policy elite is a diverse group. Indeed, there are many varieties of species in this zoo, 2) I don’t know whom Greenwald has been reading, but I count exactly two people who have warned that democratic development in the Middle East is bad for U.S. interests—Les Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and Greg Gause, professor of political science at the University of Vermont. Greenwald suggests his two primary bugaboos: Israelis and neocons. He is surely correct about the Israelis who prefer to make deals with regional authoritarians whom they hope can keep a lid on public sentiment, but he has got the neocons wrong. (By the way, in order to make his claim that “many neocons” oppose democracy in the Arab world, Greenwald cites a February 2, 2011 piece—nine days before Hosni Mubarak fell—in The Forward that only references David Wurmser and Malcolm Hoenlein , hardly a representative sampling.) Take the Egypt Working Group, a bipartisan group that which includes leading neocon personalities like my colleague, Elliott Abrams, and the Brookings Institutions’ Robert Kagan. Neither the Group nor Abrams nor Kagan have wavered in their support for democratic change in Egypt.

The jaundiced views of folks like Gelb and Gause does not make either of them democracy haters, though. It seems to me that they are onto something that few people took into consideration during the heady days of last winter, myself included. It has been an article of faith among many observers that more democratic countries in the Middle East will ultimately be better allies of the United States. Maybe. This is actually more of a hunch based on what people hope will happen in the long run than a reasoned analysis based on either historical precedent or the political dynamics of region. The emergence of a new kind of politics in the Arab world in which public opinion matters in new and important ways, revolutionary narratives about what has ailed countries the past and the best solutions for the future, as well as politicians seeking to establish their nationalist bona fides strongly suggests that in the short run (might I remind that the long run is made up of lots of short runs) Washington is going to have a tough time in the Middle East.

Greenwald seems to think that Washington has a special allergy to the accumulation of Islamist political power conveniently forgetting the Islamists who run Turkey or the Wahhabist worldview that undergirds Saudi Arabia or the fact that policymakers saw the writing on the wall relatively quickly after Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak fell and dropped official prohibitions on interaction with the Muslim Brotherhood. Still, the changes that are coming in the Middle East are not a function of Islamism per se, but rather politics. It would be rather un-pragmatic politically of the vaunted pragmatists of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood to renounce its long-held position that the United States has played a malevolent role in Egypt and the Arab world more generally. The Brothers are not alone, however. Everyone in Egypt has sought to leverage the moment of national empowerment and dignity that the January 25th uprising represents to their political benefit and the strategic relationship between Mubarak’s Egypt and Washington is a juicy target.

Given U.S. interests—the free flow of oil from the Middle East, helping to ensure Israeli security, and preventing any other power from dominating the region—and the changes presently underway in the Arab world, foreign policy analysts would be remiss not to point out that there are potential downsides to democratic development in the region. Countries like Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and others helped create a regional order that made it relatively easier and less expensive to pursue its interests in the Middle East. That era has come to an end and it is likely to be costly to the U.S. The good news for Greenwald and everyone else is that there is nothing Washington can do about it. There will be no Operation Egyptian Freedom. American foreign policy, in order to be successful, is going to have to take stock of the changes in the region and adjust. There is every indication that the national security priesthood actually understands this and is now groping to develop a new approach to the region, though much of U.S. policy will depend on political outcomes in the Middle East and not what is written in the oped pages or said at Washington, DC foreign policy roundtables.

This article appears courtesy of CFR.

Steven A. Cook is the Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. A leading expert on Arab and Turkish politics, he is author of The Struggle for Egypt: From Nasser to Tahrir Square.

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January 30, 1948

Mahatma Gandhi is Assassinated

The 78-year-old man was walking to a prayer meeting with the support of two grandnieces. A man stepped out of the crowd and greeted him. The old man returned the salutation when, suddenly, the other man pulled out a pistol and shot three times. Half an hour later, Mohandas Gandhi—the leading figure of India’s independentce movement and the leading exponent of nonviolent resistance—was dead.

Born in India, Mohandas Gandhi was trained as a lawyer and first began a movement for social change in South Africa, where he had lived and worked for a time. That campaign aimed at overturning laws that limited the rights of Indians living in South Africa. The effort, based on his belief in nonviolent resistance, won some concessions from the government in 1913.

He launched his first civil disobedience movement in India in 1919, protesting a British law that required military service of all Indian men. For most of the next three decades, Gandhi was the spiritual and political leader of India, pushing for reform, boycotting British goods, protesting violence between Hindus and Muslims, and eventually pressuring Britain to grant Indian independence.

That campaign finally succeeded in 1947, though Gandhi’s hope for a united India was dashed when Britain, bowing to pressure from the Muslim League, split the area into two states—the chiefly Hindu India and the mainly Muslim Pakistan.

Religious violence followed, as members of the two faiths attacked and killed each other. Gandhi pleaded for an end to the violence and for the Hindu majority to grant tolerance to Muslims. That plea led his assassin, a Hindu fanatic, to kill the Mahatma, or “Great Soul.” A reporter who had been Gandhi’s friend wrote, “Just an old man in a loincloth in distant India: yet when he died, humanity wept.”

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Interviewee: Steven A. Cook, Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies, Council on Foreign Relations
Interviewer: Bernard Gwertzman, Consulting Editor, CFR.org

With the anniversary of the Egyptian Revolution [January 25] only a couple of weeks away, do Egyptians think they are better off now than they were when Mubarak was in charge? What about U.S. officials, are they happier or more worried?

For the most part, Egyptians are happy to see the end of the Mubarak era, which was not an era of prosperity. It was not an era in which they could participate. It was an era of corruption and authoritarian politics. There remain supporters of the old regime, although they are a relatively small minority. The big question is what does the so-called silent majority–that the Egyptian Armed Forces consistently looks to–want? It’s unclear without major nationwide polling, but you do get a sense that what these people want is change. They came out in large numbers to vote in the now-concluded parliamentary elections. They want change. They want prosperity. They do not want the authoritarianism of the previous regime, but beyond that, it’s entirely unclear what Egyptians want. And I think that that is the challenge going forward.

There is supposed to be a hundred-person constitutional assembly created to write a new Egyptian constitution, which is to be followed by a presidential election. Is that going to be easy?

The challenge in the constitution-writing period is divining a vision for Egypt that the vast majority of Egyptians agree upon. And I think that that’s been and remains a problem.

Is Washington content to watch this uncertainty unfold?

The challenge in the constitution-writing period is divining a vision for Egypt that the vast majority of Egyptians agree upon.

U.S. policymakers find themselves in an unknown environment. Egyptian politics have been quite scrambled. The party of the Muslim Brotherhood–the Freedom and Justice Party–is slated to win somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 percent of the seats in the new People’s Assembly, followed by the Salafist al-Nour Party, with some 25 percent. Neither of these groups has historically held worldviews that conform to American interests in the region. So there’s going to be a divergence between Egypt and the United States over time. And that’s due not only to Islamist politics. People associate Egypt’s strategic relationship with the United States with Hosni Mubarak, even though it began before him, and people don’t believe that it served Egypt very well. As a result, I think there are going to be changes, and I think that that is certainly cause for concern. American policy makers are aware of the changes in Egypt, and they’re struggling to find a policy that adjusts to this new era.

The parliament that’s now been elected, as you point out, is predominantly led by the Muslim Brotherhood and the more conservative Salafists, but there’s no single individual who stands out for president. The people who are running for the presidency are more or less people we knew from the Mubarak days. Does it alarm you at all that there is no clear leader?

It is evident that Egypt, which through the years has had very strong leaders [Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat, and Hosni Mubarak], now seems to be lacking someone who can give the revolution some sort of leadership and coherence. People are vying for the leadership role, but the uncertainty at the top ultimately may be a good thing over the long run. Egypt has suffered from executives with too much power. I would bet that if this constitution is written in a relatively free and unfettered environment, that the tendency will be to reduce the powers of the executive.

There are some newcomers to the field of would-be presidential candidates, but the ones that are known more broadly are people that are not surprises. It remains to be seen how they will fare. Mohamed El Baradei [former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency] had a hard time gaining traction among the broader public. The supporters of Amr Moussa [former head of the Arab League] insist that he has the broad, public support that would be required to carry him to the presidency. Nobody really knows. Does Abdel Moneim Fotouh, a former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, who is a charismatic figure, tip the scales as the new leader? There are a number of other potential presidential candidates: Ahmed Shafiq–whom Mubarak appointed as prime minister during the uprising and remained for a short period afterwards, resigning in March–is seen as someone [who] might command significant numbers of Egyptian votes.

When will the presidential election take place, after the constitution is written?

That’s the way it’s supposed to happen, but we’re in a compressed timeline now because the military, as a result of public pressure, has indicated that it will hand power over at the end of June or beginning of July of this year, rather than in 2013 as originally planned. The constitution’s supposed to be written in six months. So the question is: Can the constitution be written, a presidential election held, and the military [hand over power by] June-July? That does not seem to be feasible. So there’s going to have to be a reshuffling of the timeline.

What about the constitutional assembly?

There’s already some dispute over where these hundred people will come from and who will choose them. There was some thought that it would come from the parliament, then it was argued it would come from a combination of people from the parliament and outside the parliament. It is uncertain whether the parliament will choose the outsiders, or [whether the] military [will] do so. Or will the parliament and military both do the choosing?

There’s the potential for a significant struggle between a newly elected parliament that can legitimately claim a popular mandate and a military that retains executive authority and would like to continue to be the ultimate authority and source of power in the political system. That is setting things up for what is likely to be a clash between the parliament and the military.

The Brotherhood and the military are not beyond making short-term tactical deals with each other to advance each other’s interests at particular moments, but ultimately they are competitors.

The military will continue to be watchful and want to oversee things, but it needs to make a deal with someone about its economic interests, about its post-transition role. If that deal is made, perhaps there won’t be a decisive showdown with the parliament.

What happened to the liberal young people, the people who were in Tahrir Square back in January 2011 who inspired the revolution? Have they been pushed to the sidelines with the rise of the Islamists and the Salafists?

Yes and no. There’s a difference between the revolutionary groups and the political parties. The revolutionary groups have had quite obviously a hard time gaining traction. In some ways, they’ve turned themselves into a permanent revolution against the military, which they see as an extension of the Mubarak era. But that kind of permanent protest seems to have had diminishing returns. They don’t have the kind of momentum that they had coming out of the uprising. That’s not to say that they haven’t been able to make their voices heard and their weight felt. You had big protests in late November; you had this terrible kind of battle between revolutionary groups and the military police in downtown Cairo in mid-December.

[Revolutionary groups] were not very interested in party politics and as a result didn’t organize in parties. In the elections, secular, liberal parties haven’t done very well. Many liberal, social democratic parties recently set up are redundant. They have very similar programs, but they’re divided along leadership and personalities. There’s one bloc of political parties–the Free Egyptians, the Egyptian Social Democratic Party, and the Tagammu party–that ended up in the 15 percent range. They’ll have a voice in the parliament along with a smattering of independents, but by and large the elections have favored the Brotherhood, which had an eighty-year head start, had the benefits of having for a long time a mechanism of political mobilization through the provision of social services–and has a vision of Egyptian society that resonates with people.

Steven A. Cook is the Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. A leading expert on Arab and Turkish politics, he is author of The Struggle for Egypt: From Nasser to Tahrir Square.

This article appears courtesy of CFR.

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January 26, 1500

Pinzón Becomes First European to Land in Brazil

On January 26, 1500, Spanish sailor Vincente Yáñez Pinzón spotted land. He named the cape the Cabo de Santa María de la Consolación. The site was near modern-day Recife, Brazil, making Pinzón the first European to explore Brazil.

Pinzón was an accomplished navigator who had taken part in the famous 1492 voyage of Christopher Columbus. Pinzón commanded the Niña while his brother Martín commanded the Pinta (a third brother, Francisco, was Martín’s chief officer on that ship). It was not until 1499, however, that Pinzón set out on a new expedition.

In November of that year, he sailed from Palos, Spain, reaching the South American coast by the next January. He spent several months exploring the coast, reaching as far north as the mouth of the Amazon River. Pinzón noticed that the color of the water had changed and, after sampling that differently color water, found it to be freshwater, and not saltwater. He named the body the Mar Dulce, or Sweetwater Sea, and using the strength of the outflowing current, he sailed for the West Indies before returning to Spain.

Records and maps from the Age of Exploration are not always clear or without controversy. Pinzón’s sighting of Brazil is subject to these uncertainties. Some historians think that he landed in Venezuela, not Brazil, and encountered the Orinoco River, not the Amazon. They believe that Portuguese explorer Pedro Álvares Cabral—who certainly reached Brazil in April of 1500—was the first European to land there. At any rate, Portugal, not Spain, gained possession of Brazil and made it the cornerstone of its American empire.

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January 25, 1971

Idi Amin Takes Power in Uganda

Source: Library of Congress

Obote had led Uganda’s independence movement in 1962 and had served as its first prime minster. In 1966, though, he deposed Uganda’s king and had a new constitution written that created a republic with himself as president. Amin was an ally whom Obote named as head of the army and air force at that time.

Amin decided to move against Obote when he was under investigation for his leadership of a gang of thugs. His brutality emerged quickly. Prominent Ugandans — including the police official who had been investigating him — were killed, some by armed toughs and others in mysterious circumstances. Several thousand soldiers were killed on Amin’s orders, decimating the armed forces but putting it firmly under his control.

Amin formed four different security organizations, which he used to carry out his harsh rule. Estimates suggest that as many as 300,000 people were killed in his violent rule.

Amin’s leadership was also marked by actions based on fleeting moods. Late in 1972, he ordered all Asians expelled from Uganda. The departure of some 35,000 people, many of whom owned businesses, crippled Uganda’s economy. A Muslim, Amin was extreme in his condemnation of Israel and once praised Adolf Hitler’s execution of millions of Jews.

Fear drove several different assassination attempts between his coup and 1979. That year, Amin sent troops into neighboring Tanzania to harass some villagers. In response Tanzania’s leader, Julius Nyerere, ordered a counterattack that was joined by thousands of Ugandans. Within weeks, the rebels had seized power and Amin had fled to Libya. He died in Saudi Arabia in 2003.

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In these videos, John Reader, author of Missing Links: In Search of Human Origins talks about the treasure hunt that is the search for the missing link.

Is it possible to discover the missing link?

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What is it like finding the remains of an ancient pre-humanoid?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Can scientists draw firm conclusions from fossil finds?

Click here to view the embedded video.

John Reader is Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology, University College London. A writer and photographer with more than fifty years of professional experience, his work has included contributions to major international publications, television documentaries and a number of books, including including The Untold History of the Potato, Africa, Pyramids of Life with Harvey Croze, and Rise of Life. His latest book, Missing Links: In Search of Human Origins, published in October 2011. John Reader has previously written about Australopithecus sediba for OUPblog.

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In Heart of Buddha, Heart of China: The Life of Tanxu, a Twentieth Century Monk, James Carter traces the life of Tanxu, an unknown but extraordinary Buddhist monk. Defined by a desire for a desire for an activist Chinese nationalism that maintained the nation’s cultural and social traditions Tanxu’s life story portrays twentieth century China from empire to republic, through war, famine, and revolution.

A century ago, Tanxu used his temples to establish physical links between Buddhism and Chinese nationalism. At the same time, though, he was guided by the belief that the physical world was illusory. The title of his memoir, “Recollections of Shadows and Dust,” uses a common Buddhist phrase meant to convey the impermanence and illusion of the material world, hardly the theological emphasis one might expect from a man who transformed cityscapes with his work in brick and mortar. I tried to understand this apparent paradox as I researched Tanxu’s career, but my connection to him remained impersonal, even distant, and strictly academic.

This all changed with the unexpected series of events that led me to the Bronx. My research turned up a commentary that Tanxu had written on the Heart Sutra (a Buddhist sutra is a sacred text, usually purporting to record the spoken teachings of the historical Buddha). This brief and very popular text includes the famous construction “form is emptiness; emptiness is form.” Tanxu’s commentary was translated into English and widely read by Western Buddhists. One morning from my office in Philadelphia I emailed the Young Men’s Buddhist Association (YMBA), in New York, to request a copy. They were happy to comply, but more interesting was this aside in their response: “By the way…[our] Master Lok To is a dharma heir disciple of Master Tanxu.”
…
Tanxu and Lok To worked together closely during the 1950’s and Lok To came to North America with Tanxu’s encouragement. He settled in the Bronx at the invitation of local Buddhist laity, and established the Buddhist Association of the United States there in 1964. Ten years later, he moved to his current location, on Davidson Avenue and founded the Young Men’s Buddhist Association as a center for his translation work. There he has been for nearly forty years.
…
Sitting with Lok To, Lu Bin (a young nun), and Hoi Sang Yu (a lay Buddhist who would become one of my most important guides through Tanxu’s world), I share my interest in Tanxu, and what I know about him. I’ve been to Harbin, and Yingkou, and Changchun, places they’ve never visited. Had I been to Qingdao, they wanted to know? Not yet. But that was the Master’s most important temple – I had to visit there: they could arrange it. They could coordinate my travels to most of the important stops on Tanxu’s itinerary, including Ningbo, where Tanxu studied to become a monk, and Tiantai Mountain, where his sect of Buddhism was established 1,100 years ago. Lok To was formally the abbot of Chamshan Temple in Hong Kong, where Tanxu’s remains were interred. I was welcome there anytime.
…
The moment was exciting, but also unsettling. I am by training and disposition an academic: keen to observe, less eager to participate. Journalists are warned to report, not to become, the story. Was I not risking just this by accepting invitations to temples and posing before Tanxu’s memorial shrine? And there was the question of faith. I make no claims for or against the beliefs that Tanxu, Lok To, and the other monks shared. Did I belong here?

Five months later, I stand in a mountainside clearing overlooking Clearwater Bay in Hong Kong’s New Territories. A white stupa housing Tanxu’s earthly remains gleams in the tropical sun. It is a beautiful scene of green cliffs plunging into the azure waters of the South China Sea. As I contemplate the view, a monkey emerges from the forest and, with barely a glance my way, walks to the plate of offerings on the altar in front of Tanxu’s stupa. Taking an orange form the plate, it saunters casually back into the forest.
…
My immersion in Tanxu’s world is most complete as I follow the story of his ordination in the city of Ningbo, near Shanghai. Ningbo teems with an easy going affluence. Centuries ago it was one of the largest ports in Asia. Today, less hurried than Shanghai, less uncertain than Hong Kong, and less paranoid than Beijing, it is no longer one of China’s great cities, but seems to have found a comfortable rhythm being past its prime. And, like almost all Chinese coastal cities, Ningbo is in the midst of an explosive construction boom.
…
The day I arrived, the temple appears shabby and dark, but active. A handful of monks move among the pavilions. The temple’s abbot, Master Yixang, less than five feet tall with a long gray beard, greets us. He did not know Tanxu personally, but he is familiar with one of the temple’s most famous students, and he is happy to meet visitors who know about Tanxu, for it is a rare occurrence. He shows me where Tanxu prayed, studied, and slept. In the gathering twilight, the abbot leads us from these faded buildings to his office, where he brings out the architectural drawings for renovations to Guanzong Temple and the Ningbo Buddhist Association: it will be a grand, brightly colored compound with marble floors replacing the worn wood that creaks under my feet as I look over the plans. It will be an impressive complex, but I feel fortunate that I arrived before the renovations and can tread the very same boards Tanxu walked decades before.

As Tanxu studied in this monastery in the 1910s, approaching his fiftieth birthday, he no doubt reflected on all the brutality and deprivation he had observed in his life. The first of Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths declares, “All existence is suffering”: Tanxu had suffered, and had dedicated much of his life to the path that would enable humans to transcend that suffering. My travels with Tanxu had taken me across the world, several times, but the only way to get to the start of the story was to travel back in time. This story begins neither in New York nor Hong Kong nor Ningbo, but in the poverty and political turmoil that was North China in the late nineteenth century.

James Carter is Professor of History at Saint Joseph’s University, in Philadelphia. He has lived and traveled widely in China, is the editor of the journal Twentieth-Century China and the author of several books and articles on modern China, most recently Heart of Buddha, Heart of China: The Life of Tanxu, a Twentieth Century Monk.

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Downton Abbey opens with the telegram announcing that the Earl of Grantham’s heir, James Crawley, and his son Patrick, have perished in the sinking of the Titanic. Since Lady Mary was supposed to marry Patrick, the succession plans go awry, and this sets off a chain of events.

But how likely is it that an English aristocrat would have perished in the disaster? The British Inquiry (1912) found that those saved represented 203 out of 325 passengers in First Class (62.46%); 118 of 285 in Second (41.40%); 178 out of 706 in Third (25.21%); and 212 of 885 members of the crew (23.95%). Overall, 711 passengers and crew were saved of the 2,201 on board (32.30%).

Not surprisingly, with the emphasis on ‘women and children first’, the proportion of women passengers saved in First Class (140 out of 144, or 97.22%) was higher than that for men. But 57 of the 175 men were saved, or 32.57%. In fact if you were a male passenger in Second Class your chances of survival were very slim indeed – only 14 of 168 were saved, or 8.33%. And in Third Class your chances were only slightly better – 75 of the 462 were saved, or 16.23%. It was these figures which reduced the overall odds for men, since for men overall – both passengers and crew – only 338 of a total of 1,667 were saved, or 20.27%.

The opening of Downton Abbey suggests that the Titanic was a potent symbol of luxury and privilege. To be sure, there were English aristocrats in First Class, figures such as Lucy Noel Martha Dyer-Edwards, born Kensington on 25 December 1878, who had married Norman Evelyn Leslie, the 19th Earl of Rothes in April 1900. The Eton-educated Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon, fifth baron, was travelling with his wife Lucy, the well-known fashion designer. He was a talented fencer, and had represented Great Britain at the 1908 Olympics. This was a world where wealth was derived from land, and where deference was the norm. But their fellow travellers in First Class were more likely to be American or Canadian. Among them were the property developer John Jacob Astor; the businessman Benjamin Guggenheim; John Borland Thayer, Second Vice-President of the Pennsylvania Railroad; George Widener, son of P. A. B. Widener, a member of the board of the Fidelity Trust Company of Philadelphia; Charles Hays, General Manager of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway; and Isidor Straus, co-owner of Macy’s Department Store in New York.

Much of the fascination of the Titanic is that the personal narratives of individual passengers and crew provide insights into the worlds they came from. In First Class, we can find businessmen, their families, and the maids and governesses who travelled with them, privileged certainly, but predominantly men whose wealth was based on the new commercial opportunities offered in the United States and elsewhere. In Second Class, there were the teachers, clerks, minor businessmen, clergymen, small time inventors and others who represented the trades and the growing middle class that relied on them. In Third Class, we see the poor and under-privileged, the ironworkers, bricklayers, farmers, labourers, bakers, gardeners, fitters, butchers, carpenters, grocers, butlers, shop assistants, toolmakers, valets, and blacksmiths. Many of them were migrants, not only from Britain, and especially Ireland, but from Belgium, Finland, Sweden, the Lebanon, and a host of other countries, leaving poverty or oppression for a better life in the United States. And among the crew, the Captain, ship’s officers, surgeons, stewards, stewardesses, waiters, engineers, lookouts, firemen, cooks, and plate washers. This then, is the real world of 1912: one of class conflict, religious sectarianism, mistrust and suspicion, leisure for some but grinding poverty for others, racism and prejudice, faith in technology tempered with scepticism, and optimism mixed with anxiety about the future.

In fact, the reality of life on board the Titanic is better captured by the human detail of more anonymous figures – among both passengers and crew. Lawrence Beesley, originally from Wirksworth in Derbyshire, was an English science teacher and widower, travelling to visit his brother in Toronto. Elin Hakkarainen, a domestic servant from Finland, was travelling with her husband Pekka to Monessen, Pennsylvania. Elizabeth Shutes, originally from Newburgh, New York, was only in First Class because she was the governess to her charge Margaret Graham. Hanna Touma was a mother and migrant from Tibnin, a village in the Lebanon; accompanied by her children Maria and Georges, her husband Darwis was already working in the United States, in Dowagiac, Michigan. Harold Bride, born Deptford, London, was the young Assistant Wireless Operator. And Violet Jessop, born in Argentina of Irish parents, was one of the Stewardesses. The Titanic did represent the last night of a small town, a cross section of Edwardian society. But it was a world of migrants as well as millionaires.

Dr. John Welshman is Senior Lecturer, History Department, Lancaster University, UK. He is the author of Titanic: The Last Night of a Small Town.

January 23, 1849

Elizabeth Blackwell Becomes First Woman to Receive a Medical Degree

Source: National Library of Medicine

Blackwell was born to a wealthy and progressive-minded English family that moved to the United States in the 1830s, when she was around ten. She became a teacher, though that profession did not engage her. One day, a dying friend told her that she might have endured her disease better if she had been attended by a female physician. The conversation planted the idea of becoming a doctor in Blackwell’s mind.

She received some rudimentary training in medicine in the home of a local physician and began applying to medical school. Geneva accepted her, in part because the student body — to whom the question of her admission had been put — treated the idea of a female medical student as a joke. Blackwell faced the hostility of some teachers, students, and townspeople, though she eventually disarmed critics with her dedication and seriousness.

Prejudice made it difficult for Blackwell to establish a practice after her graduation. In 1853, she opened a clinic for women in New York City. She was eventually joined by her sister Emily and by Marie E. Zakrzewska, both of whom she had encouraged to earn medical degrees. The clinic grew and in 1857 was renamed the New York Infirmary for Women and Children. Eleven years later, Blackwell opened the Woman’s Medical College associated with the infirmary. In 1869, she returned to England, where she lived and worked for the rest of her life.

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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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The charismatic Elder Price of Broadway’s Book of Mormon musical famously and energetically sings “I Believe!” in a boisterous catechism of odd Mormon beliefs. But Elder Price is only one voice in a chorus broadcasting Mormonism’s strangest doctrines. While the Mormons portrayed in the musical are presented as basically good if generally deluded, many discussions of the Mormon tradition emphasize the utter absurdity of their beliefs. The average reader is left wondering how on earth Mormons could be so credulous. In context, though, these caricatured beliefs make a certain kind of sense.

There are two general points that need to be made before discussing any relevant context for specific beliefs, though. First, Mormon belief is as diverse as that of any other religious tradition. Mormons include dogmatic fundamentalists and believers not unlike mainline Protestants, while large numbers of practicing Mormons hold few-to-none of the beliefs circulating in the media. Second, Mormonism began at the tail end of the early modern era, and we now look back at its history across a cultural chasm. Early Mormons sounded like many of their peers and predecessors in early America. Several traditional Mormon beliefs are fossils of a lost worldview at the same time as Mormons participate in modern American society. Anecdotally, Mormons currently boast the top women’s historian in the nation, a successful financier running for president, and a conspiracy theorist with a chalkboard selling gold on cable television. All are true to their Mormon roots and they signal the diversity of Mormon belief.

With those two caveats in mind, let’s consider two of the more distinctive beliefs attributed to modern Mormonism.

Humans will have their own planets in the afterlife, and God lives on one such planet named Kolob.

In the phrase of the Book of Mormon musical, Mormons “believe that God has a plan for me, and that plan includes me getting my own planet,” and “God lives on a planet called Kolob.” These phrases roughly approximate the beliefs of some, though far from all, Mormons even now. The context for these beliefs requires understanding the role of family and the significance of ancient views of the universe in early Mormonism.

Mormon founder Joseph Smith believed that the work of the universe was the creation of relationships, connections he framed within a notion of the family that encompassed all of humanity, indeed the entire cosmos. Ancient ideas about parallels between the structure of the universe and human existence heavily influenced Smith’s views. Smith and his followers understood celestial bodies as participating in a kind of family relationship parallel to that of humans. Family relationships, especially those between parent and child, were central to the Mormon worldview, and Mormons saw the relationship between God and Jesus as parental (they strongly rejected the traditional Trinitarian view of God dominant within Christianity). Mormons therefore believed that the basic meaning of life was to parent. After Smith’s death, several of his closest followers tried to imagine what it would mean to (a) be like God and Christ, and (b) parent in heaven. They imagined that they would participate in creation the way God and Christ had. It seemed logical that their participation could potentially result in the creation of new planets.

In Smith’s cosmic family of celestial bodies, Kolob (probably a minor variant of kokab, the Hebrew word for star) was understood to be the star closest to the actual location of heaven. Though relatively few Americans would endorse an actual physical heaven now, it wasn’t so uncommon when Mormonism arose and reflects in part the concrete way early Mormons read the Bible. If God truly existed, they thought, wouldn’t it be possible to encounter him in a literal heaven somewhere in the heavens?

Mormons wear magic underwear

Smith told his followers that the way to establish the family relationships that could interconnect all humanity was through special rituals that took place in buildings called temples. The Mormon temple liturgy contains various rites that think through what it means to be human and to create. As part of the temple system, Mormons acquire sacred undergarments, essentially an undershirt and boxer shorts. Mormon “garments” draw on images and themes from the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Bible, and Masonry, much as the temple liturgy does. These garments recall, respectively, the clothing of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, Old Testament priestly robes, Jesus’ burial shroud, and the robes of angels. By wearing this clothing Mormons affirm their commitment to Mormonism, their connections to all humanity and their new life in the death and resurrection of Christ.

Academics also see this clothing as a marker of cultural difference–a way to remind Mormons that they are indeed Mormons, a tool to resist the influence of outsiders. Something as richly symbolic as this garment would almost certainly be seen by some as having special power; various Mormons over the years (including hotel magnate Willard Marriott on “60 Minutes” in 1996) have made impressively literal claims about the power of these garments. Such beliefs are not much different from folk Catholic beliefs about the power of holy water or saintly relics, or modern American beliefs about the power of pomegranate juice, antioxidants, or St. John’s wort.

In historical context, some of the early Mormon beliefs that have persisted into portions of modern Mormonism are primarily concerned with puzzling through the meaning of life, our integration into the universe, the persistence and scope of human relationships. Though at times these beliefs bear a more antique flavor than many contemporary observers would favor, the Mormon tradition vigorously attempts to make sense of the world. In some respects these Mormon beliefs recall, in idiosyncratic specificity, the visceral stirrings of awe that strike many of us at some point when we stare into the night sky and wonder how we could possibly fit into the universe.

Samuel Brown is Assistant Professor of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the University of Utah/Intermountain Medical Center and the author of In Heaven as It Is on Earth: Joseph Smith and the Early Mormon Conquest of Death. He is also the translator of Aleksandr Men’s Son of Man.

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January 19, 1903

Marconi Sends—and Receives—First Two-Way
Transatlantic Wireless Message

As you look for wireless hot-spots to connect to the Internet, thank Guglielmo Marconi. The Italian inventor championed wireless communication at the turn of the twentieth century—and demonstrated it on January 19, 1903, when he sent and received the first transatlantic wireless messages.

Marconi was inspired to investigate wireless communication by Heinrich Hertz’s studies of electrical and magnetic waves. He began experimenting in 1894, when he was twenty years old. His first successful signal traveled only 30 feet, but over time he built more and more powerful transmitters. By 1901, he could send a signal 200 miles.

Marconi dreamed of sending signals across the ocean. To transmit a signal, he built large antennas supported by four 210-foot high wooden towers. He built three of these transmission stations, one each in England, Nova Scotia, and Cape Cod. To send the long-wave radio signals he used, he needed powerful generators that produced 2,200-volts of electricity that a transformer increased to 25,000 volts. The noise of the generators could be heard 4 miles away.

After a successful test in December of 1902, Marconi demonstrated the equipment the next month. A telegraph operative tapped out a Morse Code message from President Theodore Roosevelt to British King Edward VII. “Taking advantage of the wonderful triumph of scientific research and ingenuity,” Roosevelt said, he sent greetings to the king and his people. Soon after, the king returned the president’s good wishes. The wireless age was born.

Wireless communication was quickly adopted by shipping companies. The importance of wireless messages was underscored less than a decade after Marconi’s demonstration. When the Titanic was sinking in 1912, its wireless distress calls reached the Carpathia, which steamed to the scene and rescued more than 700 people.

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Did America really start a “holy war”?

Just like today, a lot of Americans in the early nineteenth century thought God had a plan for the United States; they saw how the U.S. won the Revolution against all odds, and they understood it as the will of God—as providence. And at that time, there were a number of politicians who said, we have a providential destiny to bring our citizens more liberty—to spread our civilization across the continent. That’s what led to a war against Canada and the Native Americans, the War of 1812, which almost destroyed the country

This was a war against one religion in particular, wasn’t it?

There was a holy man of the Shawnee nation, who took the name Tenskwatawa, which roughly means “The Open Door.” After 1804, he carries a message to the Native Americans across the frontier, but especially in the Ohio Valley. And his message is that the Master of Life, the great being who had created the world and made all the peoples of the Americas, had returned to guide his people on a new path towards independence and self-sufficiency.

Why did American leaders fear this religion?

American officials worry about this religion because Tenskwatawa provides an alternative leadership for Native Americans; he refuses to sell land and he refuses to accept the perfidy of the Americans. Tenskwatawa teaches that the Master of Life wanted all Indians to live and worship together; there would no longer be any more individual tribes or clans. This is a divine warrant for a new kind of political organization, and the Shawnee Prophet actually sets up two independent cities to prove his point, first in Ohio and then in Indiana.

In some ways, the Americans helped Tenskwatawa out.

Yes—William Henry Harrison, the governor of Indiana, dismissed Tenskwatawa’s religious power, and sent him a very demeaning letter asking him to perform a miracle. And a few days later, Tenskwatawa made the sun go dark in the afternoon.

Was that really a miracle, or was it just an eclipse?

Well, that’s sort of like asking whether Jesus Christ really rose from the dead—people who don’t believe in the religion are going to find ways to explain it away. But even when people explain it away, it doesn’t stop Christians from believing in it, or from acting on that belief. In the same way, many Native Americans believed Tenskwatawa had caused the sun to go dark, and they followed him because they believed.

What kind of a leader was Tenskwatawa? How successful was he?

He’s quite successful—and he does what almost no other Native American leader at the time does, which is to negotiate with the Americans without signing away land. But it’s also true that Tenskwatawa had plenty of enemies, in part because he actually presided over witchcraft trials.

How was this war also a war about witchcraft?

In 1806, some Delaware Indians came to believe there were sorcerers in their midst, who poisoned people and caused bad luck. They contacted the Shawnee Prophet, a holy man, to tell them where this evil magic had come from. And Tenskwatawa identifies several Delawares as witches, and they are executed.

So Salem in 1692 was not the last witch trial in America?

No. Witch trials are rare, but, a lot of Americans at that time still believe in witchcraft; there are cases in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Maine where mobs lynched women they thought were witches.

Most of us only know William Henry Harrison as the guy who died after only being president for thirty days. Tell us more about him.

This all takes place thirty years before Harrison becomes president; in 1800, he was the governor of Indiana Territory, which he turned into his personal fiefdom. It’s probably the least democratic place in the U.S. He appointed his own Senate; he exploited loopholes to make sure that his friends got elected, and he basically disenfranchised voters he thought were not going to vote for his handpicked candidates. And on top of that, he expands slavery in Indiana. And he’s constantly reminding people that his way of doing things is the providential way; it’s what freedom is and it’s what God wants.

Did Harrison start this war?

I think so. Harrison sees Tenskwatawa as his opposite number; Tenskwatawa is a “savage” and he’s not Christian, so at the time of the witch trials, Harrison starts a drum beat for war. And it takes about five years, because people in Washington do not want a war because they’re not sure they can win. And finally in 1811, Harrison gets permission to strike at Tenskwatawa’s holy city in Indiana. Harrison marches his troops there, and it’s a disaster.

What happened at the Battle of Tippecanoe?

A lot of pain for not much gain. Harrison’s forces get trapped in an early morning skirmish outside the Prophet’s city. There was a prolonged firefight, and Harrison’s troops took the heavier losses, but eventually the Prophet’s soldiers withdrew and abandoned their city. Harrison burns the city to the ground—but he immediately retreats, because he didn’t bring enough troops or materiel to secure the victory. And Tenskwatawa reoccupies the position and rebuilds the town.

Did the Battle of Tippecanoe cause the War of 1812?

In part: Harrison was immediately censured by political enemies in Indiana and in Washington, DC, for starting an unnecessary war. He’s even investigated by Congress—but he saves himself by joining this push for a broader war against all the Northwest Indians and Canada.

How did the war go for Tenskwatawa?

For the first year, incredibly well. He reoccupies his city, and Tecumseh and the Canadian British actually capture all of Michigan. Tenskwatawa and his allies are striking American forts inside U.S. territory. In 1813, Oliver Hazard Perry wins a very close battle on Lake Erie, which means the British navy can’t resupply the Indian and Canadian forces in Michigan, and that ultimately forces a retreat into Canada and then end of the Prophet’s movement. But if Perry had lost, Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh would have kept control of Michigan and central Indiana, and given how badly America handled the rest of war—the British burned Washington, remember—they could possibly have won a formal independence from the U.S.

Most Americans know almost nothing about the War of 1812? Why is that? What should we remember about it?

I think we don’t remember it because we lost. But in some ways, it’s more important to remember because this was a war that politicians claimed was divine and would be easy to win. That’s a cautionary tale. And I think it’s important to remember as an example of the ways in which religious zealotry and political power can interact, on both sides of this conflict, and that’s another cautionary tale.

Adam Jortner teaches history at Auburn University and is the author of The Gods of Prophetstown: The Battle of Tippecanoe and the Holy War for the American Frontier. His essays have appeared in The Journal of the Early Republic and Early American Studies.

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On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, a national holiday in the U.S., we commemorate the birthday of the eponymous leader and activist, and reflect on his significant contributions to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Dr. King’s legacy, while forged in the midst of a tumultuous time in U.S. history, transcends categorical boundaries of race, class, and nationality. Each year on the third Monday of January, we’re reminded of the practice of civil disobedience, of overcoming (and sometimes succumbing to) overwhelming adversities over which we have but marginal control, and of the power that language has to effect change in the world.

Coming to you live from the Soapbox Memorial

The first image that comes to mind when I think of Dr. King is of him standing behind a podium. Behind him sits a statue of Abraham Lincoln. A crowd of thousands listens in earnest as he delivers one of the most memorable, and memorizable, speeches in history. Last October, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial dedication broadcast live from Washington, D.C., and I watched as the ceremony closed out with footage of the famous “I Have A Dream” speech given at the 1963 March On Washington. Thanks to many a U.S. history lesson, cultural osmosis, and the distinctive cadence and prosody of his delivery, I found myself reciting entire segments along with Dr. King on the television, vicariously inhabiting his role as orator for civil rights.

Oratory, the art of public speaking, is a formal practice of eloquent speechmaking that utilizes elements of language to influence an audience. In short, it is rhetoric on a public stage. Dr. King, an impassioned orator, made use of a wealth of rhetorical techniques in order to communicate the messages of equality, justice, and peace during the divisive and violent civil rights era.

Building up to a dream

Rhetorical devices are abundant in the “I Have A Dream” speech. Most noticeable, and frequently used, is anaphora, which our dictionary defines as “the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses”:

Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.

Metaphors are also spread throughout the speech—sometimes in short bursts of “quicksands” and “solid rock”, and at other points extended to create an even fuller image:

In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check…It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”

Allusion helps Dr. King to hone his argument that Americans share a collective national ancestry:

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

Hyperbole is balanced by simplicity and frankness:

I have a dream that every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight…

is preceded by a more moderate, but equally compelling:

I have a dream that one day…right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

Authority, Passion, Rationality

Greek philosopher Aristotle categorized three styles of appeal in persuasion: Ethos, asserting the credibility of the speaker; Pathos, appealing to the emotions of the audience; and Logos, persuasion through reasoning. On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial forty-nine years ago, Dr. King weaved these rhetorical appeals into almost every segment of his “Dream” speech. He was a Baptist minister whose ethos was a claim of faith, both religious and secular. He made pathetic appeals to his audience’s nationalist sense of pride in America in a way that also reminded them of what their nation stood for and the principles it fought for. He knew when to sacrifice this balance and let one persuasive appeal dominate an argument. He was a remarkable orator, and his words helped change the world.

Allison Wright is an Editor for US Dictionaries at Oxford University Press. The first chapter book she can remember reading was a children’s biography of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

January 16, 1979

Iran’s Reza Shah Pahlavi Flees the Country

In the mid-1970s, few rulers seemed more secure than Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the shah of Iran. He had oil wealth, a powerful military, and the friendship of the United States and other western nations. Yet on January 16, 1979, he and his family were forced to flee. What toppled this powerful ruler?

Despite many advantages, the shah had problems too. The growing middle class resented limits on their access to political power. Dissidents feared and hated the SAVAK, the shah’s brutal secret police. Meanwhile, powerful Muslim fundamentalists were angered by the shah’s abandonment of traditional Islamic law and embrace of western culture and ideas.

A religious-inspired rebellion led to the shah’s downfall. The Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a religious leader forced into exile by the shah back in 1964, grew increasingly vigorous in his criticisms of the shah in the 1970s. By 1978, mass protests against the shah were common in Iran. He declared martial law in several cities, but the situation worsened when oil workers went on strike and riots erupted across the country.

Growing desperate, the shah appointed new governments in November of 1978 and again in January of 1979, but he could not regain control of the nation. On January 13, the Ayatollah proclaimed a new revolutionary government, dismissing the shah’s latest government as illegal. The shah’s prime minister suggested that the ruler’s departure was the only chance to regain control.

That glum conclusion prompted the shah’s exit. He and his wife flew to Egypt, and their three children left for the United States. Official word said that the shah was taking a vacation, but he remained in exile until his death the following year. Khomeini, on the other hand, returned to Iran on February 1, declared an Islamic republic, and became the de facto head of the government for the next 10 years.

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January 15, 1559

Elizabeth I Crowned Queen of England

The day was frosty, and some snow lay on the ground. Nevertheless, thousands of Londoners and visitors turned out to see the 25-year-old Elizabeth I’s coronation in Westminster Abbey.

Elizabeth had succeeded to the throne the previous November, when her half-sister Mary I had died. Astrologer John Dee had chosen the date of January 15 for her coronation because it was a propitious day. That date also gave Elizabeth two months to plan her official entry onto the English throne—an entry she intended to make memorable to impress both her people with her readiness to rule and rival nations with English power and wealth.

The day before the coronation, Elizabeth was carried on a sedan through London’s streets to cheering crowds. She accepted interruptions from ordinary folk in the crowd, watched the five pageants staged at various stops along the way, and smiled when one member of the crowd shouted a fond remembrance of her father, Henry VIII.

On coronation day, a Sunday, she walked on a blue carpet from a palace to Westminster Abbey amid the pealing of all the city’s bells. The crowd swarmed onto the rich carpet behind her and tore it to pieces for souvenirs. The ceremony included traditions dating back hundreds of years, but some hints of change, too. Some English sections were added to the Latin ceremony—hers was the last coronation to be carried out in Latin— and Elizabeth held an English Bible, not a Latin one, when she was proclaimed “Defender of the True, Ancient, Catholic Faith.” After the ceremony, the new queen went off with guests to the coronation feast.

The coronation was quite a show and, for once, predictions of grandeur and glory proved true. After years of turmoil, England embarked on a long period of stability and brilliance under Elizabeth, who came to be called Gloriana.

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January 13, 1898

Zola publishes J’Accuse, exposing Dreyfus affair

On January 13, 1898, the French newspaper L’Aurore (The Dawn) published a sensational open letter addressed to French president Félix Faure. The article—titled J’Accuse (I Accuse) was written by famed novelist Emile Zola, and his charges—perjury, conspiracy, and injustice in the court-martial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus—rocked France and gave renewed vigor to the efforts to clear Dreyfus’s name.

Dreyfus had been wrongly convicted in late 1894 of handing military secrets to Germany—but the Jewish officer had been fingered largely on circumstantial evidence and deep-seated anti-Semitism, and his conviction was based largely on a forged document. Stripped of his military rank, Dreyfus became the focus of national outrage.

Then, in late 1896, new and real evidence pointed to the actual culprit, Commandant Ferdinand Esterhazy. The French army ordered a new court-martial but rather than admitting its mistake and convicting the real spy, acquitted Esterhazy of all charges. This verdict, delivered in January 1898, provoked Zola’s letter of outrage.

Zola laid out the facts in the Dreyfus case in meticulous detail, spicing his presentation with ringing words. “My duty,” he declared, “is to speak out, not to become an accomplice in this travesty.” Later in the letter, he proclaimed “Truth is on the march and nothing can stop it.”

As he suspected would happen, Zola was accused of libel. In yet another unfair trial, he was found guilty and sentenced to a year in prison. The novelist fled to England to escape the sentence. But his words had succeeded in swinging public opinion in Dreyfus’s favor. Dreyfus’s conviction was overturned in 1899. He was retried that same year and once again found guilty, though he was pardoned. Not until 1906 was that conviction finally reversed and his innocence unequivocally declared. By that time, Zola had died. He remains honored, though, for his courageous stand for truth and justice.

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It sometimes seems that scarcely a news cycle goes by without some allusion to the various energy industries: the BP oil spill, the debate about offshore drilling, the controversy over the impact of fracking, and our ongoing search for alternative energy are only a few examples. In this excerpt from North American Indians: A Very Short Introduction, Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green discuss the history of exploitation of natural resources on American Indian reservations by power, mining, and oil companies.

After World War II, economic development was at the top of the agendas of virtually every reservation. Unemployment was almost universal, family incomes were virtually nil, and the tribes had no income beyond government appropriations to the BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs). Some reservations did have natural resources. Some tribes own important timber reserves, but mineral resources attracted most postwar attention. Thirty percent of the low-sulfur coal west of the Mississippi is on Indian land, as is 5 to 10 percent of the oil and gas and some 50 to 80 percent of the uranium. Congress enacted legislation in 1918 and again in 1938 to authorize the secretary of the interior to negotiate leases to develop tribal mineral resources. Stipulations in these acts set royalties below those demanded for similar activity on government land and omitted provisions for periodic renegotiation of the contracts.

The Navajo reservation is especially rich in oil, uranium, and coal. Oil exploration began before World War II, and in the 1950s a huge strike generated major interest. The Cold War created a market for uranium, which Navajo mines largely supplied until 1982 when they closed. The most important Navajo resource, however, is coal. Coal underlies much of the Navajo reservation, and Black Mesa, which the Navajos share with the Hopis, is a virtual mountain of coal. As early as 1943 the Navajo tribal council had begun to explore the possibility of developing its coal, but there was no market. The postwar population explosion in southern California, Arizona, and Nevada created an unprecedented demand for electricity that changed everything. Twenty power companies formed a consortium, which drew up plans for a huge power grid anchored by a series of coal fired power plants located adjacent to the Navajo reservation. Black Mesa coal would provide the fuel, and Peabody Coal Company of Denver would mine it.

Mining coal on such a scale is an enormously complicated and expensive business. Both the Indians and the Interior Department lacked the necessary expertise to understand all that was involved. But Peabody and its attorneys knew. Chicanery, fraud, manipulation, and ignorance marked the arrangement. By the end of the 1960s the Navajo and Hopi tribal councils had signed the necessary contracts and the enterprise was under way. The going market price for coal at the time was $4.40 per ton, $1.50 of which was the standard payment to the owner. The contract concluded between Peabody Coal and the Interior Department provided seventeen cents per ton to the tribes with no provision for renegotiation if the price of coal went up. In 1973, during the time of the OPEC oil embargo, the price of coal reached fifteen dollars per ton. The Navajos and Hopis, the owners of the coal, continued to receive seventeen cents.

In 1975 the mineral-rich tribes organized the Council of Energy Resource Tribes (CERT) in hopes of improving their situation relative to the mining companies. CERT hired experts, commissioned surveys, developed a library, and positioned itself to provide the tribes with expert advice on how to gain better control over their resources and prevent the kind of exploitation experiences by the Navajos and Hopis. The Jicarilla Apaches of New Mexico, caught in a similar situation, enacted a severance tax on the oil and gas pumped from their reservation. Amoco challenged the tribe’s right to do so. In 1982 the Supreme Court upheld the authority of the sovereign Jicarilla nation to levy the tax and opened the way for other tribes to follow suit.

The story of Black Mesa is perhaps the most disgraceful, but it is by no means the only example of resource-rich tribes being swindled by the sweetheart deals concluded by power, mining, and oil companies and the Interior Department for rights to Indian-owned minerals. Congress attempted to fix things in 1982 with the Indian Mineral Development Act, which recognized the right of the tribes to develop their own minerals. The exploitation of oil, coal, and other resources can provide jobs and income, but doing so is controversial. Coal strip mines are ugly and cause a great deal of environmental damage. Coal-fired plants emit pollution that fouls the air for hundreds of miles, and they require enormous amounts of water, which in the desert southwest is scarce. But the tribal governments need income and the people need jobs.

All these schemes for breathing new economic life into the reservations share serious disabilities. Contracting and compacting depend on unpredictable government appropriations, and the heavy hand of the BIA is present everywhere. The controlling power in the exploitation of natural resources lies in the Department of the Interior and the mining and energy companies. Tribes receive royalty payments, but the profits generated by the development of tribal resources belong to the corporations and leave the reservations. Neither plan provides the tribes with the investment capital necessary to create meaningful economic autonomy.

Theda Perdue is Atlanta Distinguished Professor of Southern Culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of many books, including Sifters: Native American Women’s Lives and Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835. She is past president of the Southern Association for Women Historians and the American Society for Ethnohistory, and will serve as president of the Southern Historical Association in 2011.

Michael D. Green is Professor Emeritus of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has held fellowships from the Newberry Library and the Rockefeller Foundation and is former chair of the Native American Studies Program at Dartmouth College.

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Fawaz A. Gerges is Professor of Middle Eastern Politics and International Relations at the London School of Economics. He also holds the Emirates Chair of the Contemporary Middle East and is the Director of the Middle East Centre at LSE. His books include The Rise and Fall of Al-Qaeda (2011), Journey of the Jihadist (2007) and The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global (2005).

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