One or Two Bright Spots

Some good news, courtesy of Fix the News (formerly Futurecrunch). Heaven knows we could all use some:

Researchers discovered that the drug Lenacapavir eliminates HIV infection completely.

Global tuberculosis deaths fell to their lowest level in history. 

In South Asia infant mortality fell 75% between 1990 and 2022. 

200 million more children have acquired access to clean water and sanitation at school since 2015. As of 2024, about 500 million children worldwide have free or nearly-free school lunch. 

In Brazil, the deforestation of the Amazon has fallen by 50% since 2022. 

In the United States, the removal of four dams from the Klamath River has been completed ahead of schedule. No word on whether the new administration plans to put them all back.

Power companies, corporations, local governments, and individuals installed 660 GW of new solar power generation this year.

Thailand and Greece (inter alia) legalized same-sex marriage.

NASA launched the Europa Clipper mission, which should please fans of 2010: Odyssey Two.

Everything else is pretty terrible, but that’s not exactly new.

Your Trash, Our Treasure: The Salzburg Refugees

 

The princely state of Salzburg, in present-day Austria, had in the early-modern era a Catholic majority and a small but visible Protestant minority. The Protestants’ visibility was not so much social as topographical: most lived in independent farmsteads on the heights above Salzburg town, leaving on occasion to work for wages in neighboring states (where pastors had introduced many of their ancestors to Lutheranism). Salzburg’s ecclesiastical rulers tolerated this heretical population throughout the 1600s, but in the second quarter of the eighteenth century Prince-Archbishop Leopold von Firmian identified them as a stain on his principality. After a failed attempt to convert the mountain-dwellers to the One True Faith, in 1731 Leopold invoked the doctrine cuius regio, eius religio and expelled his Protestant subjects. He relented only to the extent of allowing the expellees a little extra time to sell their lands and property before deportation. In the spring and summer of 1732, thirty thousand men, women, and children went into permanent exile from their homeland.

 

Konstantin Cretius, The Salzburgers Received,1860

The other princes of the Holy Roman Empire did nothing to stop Leopold, for in challenging him they might undermine their own prerogatives. Moreover, some of these potentates wanted the subjects the prince-archbishop was discarding. One third of the expellees settled in Holland or Hanover, or in the new colony chartered by and named for the Elector of Hanover (in his capacity as King of Great Britain), Georgia. Most of the Salzburg Protestants, however, sought refuge in the far east of Germany, near the Prussian city of Konigsburg. King Frederick William, pleased to enlarge his kingdom’s future base of taxpayers and army recruits, offered the refugees land, travel funds, and a temporary tax abasement, and twenty thousand of them accepted his offer. To their new homeland they followed a clockwise route around the mountains: west to Ulm, north to central Germany, then east to Prussia. King Fred-Bill personally greeted the first emigrant party outside of Berlin, and joined them in prayer and song. He doubtless saw the arrival of so many new subjects as providential, while understanding that the migration was entirely the work of men - in particular of two men, a religious bigot and the constructive opportunist the king so frequently saw in his mirror.

 

Sources: Mack Walker, The Salzburg Transaction: Expulson and Redemption in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Cornell UP, 1992); Julie Sweet, Negotiating for Georgia (U. Georgia, 2005), 106-107.

Another Candle

Some years ago I began a series of posts on charitable organizations I supported and whose signal I wanted to boost. I suppose I preferred cursing the darkness, since I only managed to light two candles (so to speak) before discontinuing the series. I think it is past time to renew that effort. Our social fabric will always need mending, and of late that fabric has seemed more frayed than usual - but perhaps also more reparable.

I’ve long been annoyed by institutions’ emptying issuance of tribal land acknowledgments, an act which seems to me like a social prayer without works. (Cf “thoughts and prayers” to victims of gun violence.) I think if one is going to admit to living on another person’s property, one should at least make an effort to pay rent. Some institutions do so; most, I think, don’t bother. 

As an individual I find that my resources are too straitened to make more than nominal compensation to Indigenous Americans; as a student of Native American history, I find it important at least to make the attempt. 

Like Scott Berg, I have made the American Indian College Fund my de facto landlord. The AICF is a thirty-five-year-old, Native-run charity that grants scholarships to about 4,000 Indigenous American students pursuing associates, bachelors, or postgraduate degrees. It also provides financial aid and training to personnel and programs at the United States’ thirty five Tribal Colleges and Universities. (All of these, by the way, are grievously underfunded. The United States government is the biggest deadbeat tenant.) The latter help develop programs in education, computer science, and language revitalization. About 70 percent of the Fund’s revenue goes to scholarship recipients, making it a reasonably efficient eleemosynary agency. Even so, the AICF can only provide aid to ten percent of applicants, so the need for its services and for donors is considerable.

In Brief: The Prettier Learning

Kalipedia, he prophesied, would soon be generally adopted and all the graces of life, genuinely good music, agreeable literature, light philosophy, instructive pictures, plastercast reproductions of the classical statues such as Venus and Apollo, artistic coloured photographs of prize babies, all these little attentions would enable ladies who were in a particular condition to pass the intervening months in a most enjoyable manner.

Thus one of the characters in Ulysses, apropos of the needs and wants of pregnant women, about which too many men have uninformed opinions. Joyce was likely referring to “Callipaedia, Or the Art of Getting Pretty Children” (1719), a translation of Claude Quillet’s versical marriage manual. The word “callipedia” itself refers to “beautiful learning,” which Joyce rendered as “kalipedia,” (good learning). 

Apparently Playmobil has this market to itself.

For all of J.J.’s snarkiness, I find this curriculum appealing, particularly as I advance in years. I am likelier to enjoy my leisure hours, such as they are, if I can fill them with old popular music, “agreeable” books, and pictures of…well, cute animals rather than prize-winning babies, but the aesthetic is much the same. Plaster cast statues of Greek gods I’ll need to leave out, as my wife and I have too much bric-a-brac as is; regrettably, Funko Pop has not, as yet, devised smaller substitutes.

Colder Connections

 

As he plied his loathsome trade in the summer of 1751, the slave-ship captain Henry Ellis paused to engage in a little scientific exploration. En route to Jamaica, in the vicinity of latitude 25 North, Ellis lowered into the ocean a sealed bucket with controllable valves, able to take and hold samples of seawater from multiple depths. To the probe’s designer Ellis reported his success in taking samples from exceptional depths, up to a mile below the surface. His findings surprised him: from a surface temperature of about 25 Celsius, the seawater rapidly chilled with increasing depth, falling to a low of 5-10 C, then rising again below 1300 meters to a maximum of 12 degrees Celsius. The deep, cold water also proved more salty than expected. A practical man - slavers weren’t idealists - Captain Ellis used the chilled water samples to refrigerate his supply of wine.

 

Slaver Ellis wasn’t conducting oceanographic investigations for a laugh. He considered himself a natural philosopher, having served as de facto science officer on an expedition to the Northwest Passage in 1746-47. After his return Ellis published a book on the voyage, describing the explorers’ reconnaissance of Greenland, trade with the Inuit, and eventual failure to find an ice-free channel beyond Hudson Bay. The voyage and book ingratiated Ellis with a number of scientifically-inclined noblemen, who doubtless helped him raise the capital for his trade in human beings. One high-born friend, Lord Halifax, later appointed Ellis royal governor of Georgia, a colony that had recently legalized slavery. Ellis helped negotiate a stable peace settlement with the neighboring Muskogee Creeks, doubtless thinking himself a humanitarian for doing so. (See Julie Sweet, Negotiating For Georgia (2005), 188 on his governorship.) Illness drove the governor from Savannah after a year, but Ellis eventually returned to American office in Halifax, as lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia.

Detail from Ellis’s 1746-47 voyage

 

The results of Captain E’s deep-sea experiment remained little-known until the 1790s, when Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, theorized that the mass of cold, salty water Ellis discovered was a current of cold seawater, analogous to the Gulf Stream nearer the surface. In the twentieth century, oceanographers concluded that both warm and cold Atlantic currents comprised a great conveyor-belt extending from the Antarctic to the Arctic, powered by heat and the transfer of salts - the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). In our own time, climate scientists have expressed concern that the accelerated melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps, the flow of low-salinity water into the polar zones of the AMOC, and the disruption of thermohaline circulation will shut down the whole circuit. Since the warming Gulf Stream is part of the AMOC, this will spell pretty bad news for Europe. For parts of North America, too: the Gulf Stream deflects a substantial volume of seawater from the East Coast, and its dissipation will cause the relative sea level to rise, contributing to the inundation of low-lying communities.

 

Careful readers will note that the Atlantic Overturning currents also tie together many of Henry Ellis’s ports of call and places of residence: Greenland, whose melting ice caps now threaten to shut down the Gulf Stream, and the coastal cities of Savannah and Halifax, which are likely to experience considerable flooding if the Atlantic basin sloshes slightly westward. Ellis himself lacked the notional birds-eye view needed to make these connections, or to observe that he had helped make the Atlantic both a web of human-made connections and an avenue of human misery. If he’d made these observations, though, I doubt that they would have changed his behavior. One didn’t rise to high rank in the British Empire on the strength of humane sentiments.