Voyagers to the East, Part XX

For the previous entry in this series, click here.

The Inuit (once commonly referred to as Eskimos) were among the last Native Americans to settle in North America, and among the first to encounter Europeans. Arctic hunters of the Dorset and Thule cultures arrived in Alaska by 1000 BC, and migrated thence into northern Canada, reaching Greenland by 1100 AD. There the Inuit encountered the first European settlers in the New World: Norse colonists from Iceland, who had begun colonizing Greenland in 986 AD. The subsequent relationship between Norse and Inuit was not a friendly one. The two peoples did trade with one another - Norse artifacts have been found at Inuit sites off Ellesmere Island - but also fought with one another and competed for resources. The Norse eventually lost this contest: the Little Ice Age cut them off from Iceland and Europe, and as the climate cooled the Inuit proved better able to exploit the island's animal resources. Sometime before 1480, the last Norsemen in Greenland died out. (Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1800 [Cambridge, 1986], 45-54; Eric Wahlgren, The Vikings and America [London, 1986], 16-27).

European contact with the Inuit resumed about 50 years later, but Euro-Inuit relations didn't grow any friendlier. This may have had something to do with Europeans' desire to bring Eskimo captives back to Europe as trophies. In 1536, Englishmen tried to kidnap a party of Native American - probably Inuit - hunters off the Labrador coast. In 1567, French mariners brought an Inuit woman and her daughter to the Netherlands, while Martin Frobisher took another four Inuit captives to England in 1576-77. In 1586 English explorer John Davis captured two Inuit and Inuk men in Greenland, but they probably died before Davis returned to Europe.

Early in the next century, King Christian IV of Denmark commissioned an exploratory voyage to Greenland to determine the fate of the Norse settlements there and revive the Norse-Danish claim to the island. In 1605 three Danish ships under the command of Scottish mariner John Cunningham sailed for Greenland. The vessels successfully crossed the Atlantic, and one, the Loven, traded with the Inuit on Greenland's southwest coast before seizing two men and their kayaks. The Inuit captives violently resisted their imprisonment at first but eventually accepted their fate; perhaps they hoped to make a later escape. In Copenhagen the prisoners were paraded before the King and Queen and participated in a kayak race against a 16-oared Danish vessel. (The race ended in a tie.) Their subsequent fate is unknown.

Cunningham's other two vessels, the Trost and Katten, proceeded up the Greenland coast, skirmished with 30 Eskimos, and captured 3, whom the mariners also displayed in Denmark (after the Inuit prisoners made a failed escape attempt). These captives also participated in kayaking displays - the Spanish ambassador to the Danish court gave them a large cash award for their virtuosity - and purchased much "fashionable clothing" for themselves, including swords and plumed hats. (Some Danish observers referred to the re-costumed Inuit as the "Greenland grandees.") A subsequent Danish expedition tried to take all three captives back to Greenland, but at least two died en route.

The Danes believed that Cunningham's Inuit captives were descendants of the lost Norse colony on Greenland, and they continued their efforts to bring Eskimos - their own purported ethnic relatives - to Europe. There were six Danish and Dutch voyages to Greenland between 1607 and 1654, which brought thirty more Inuit back to Denmark and the Netherlands. Some of the travelers may have been children brought to Denmark for education, as authorized by Christian IV in the 1636 charter of the Danish Greenland Company. The most famous of these captives were an Inuit man, two women, and a girl whom David Daniel captured near Godthaab in 1654. Daniel brought the Greenlanders to Bergen, where they were painted by Salomon van Haven, becoming the first Inuit so represented. (Wendell Oswalt, Eskimos and Explorers [2nd. edition, Lincoln, 1999], 41-43.) The painting can be viewed below:

(The caption on the sign reads "In their small leather ships the Greenlanders sail hither and thither on the ocean; from animals and birds they get their clothes. The cold land of Midnight. Bergen, September 28th, 1654." [Oswalt, 75-76.] Original image from http://achac.com/zoos-humains/erste-kontakte-erste-exponate-von-1492-bis-ins-18-jahrhundert/)

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So What?

When asked what makes the study of history a "discipline," academic historians usually respond (after finishing their drinks) that their books and articles don't just describe a particular event or time period - they also attempt to determine the enduring significance of that event or period. Bernard Bailyn, who dominated the Harvard History Department for nearly forty years, had a more succinct way of making this point: in his graduate seminars, he would frequently begin his criticism of a paper or article by asking "So what?"

Recently, a student asked Professor Timothy Burke (of Swarthmore) if historians have a stock answer to that question. The short answer to the student's question is "No," which generates much consternation in graduate seminars and considerable angst in late-career professionals. Burke very usefully sat down and thought up a longer answer to the question, a list of answers in fact, which he recently posted here.

Some of these items appear unhelpful on first glance; for instance, number 2 ("the past is not prologue") and number 10 ("the past is unknowable") suggest that history has nothing to teach the present. Actually, though, one of the most important historical monographs of the twentieth century, C. Vann Woodward's Strange Career of Jim Crow, falls squarely into category 2. By demonstrating that racial segregation was not an old practice in America, but the product of (then) fairly recent laws, Woodward could argue that American racial attitudes were not deeply rooted but were created by political and legal decisions that could be reversed. Woodward's argument was debatable, but it proved highly persuasive: the NAACP entered an early version of the book as evidence in the case of Brown vs. Board of Education (1954), and Martin Luther King, Jr. called the book "the historical bible" of the civil rights movement." Would that we could all write something as useful.

Professor Enron

Here's an update to a story I posted nearly two years ago: the University of Missouri has finally filled its Kenneth L. Lay chair in economics. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education (May 2, 2008, p. A25), the university awarded the professorship to Joseph Haslag, "a specialist in monetary policy who has taught at Missouri since 2000." The dean of arts and sciences at Missouri says that the delay in filling the chair was occasioned not by the poor reputation of its endower, but by one of the vicissitudes of the academic labor market: four other professors who were offered the position used the offer to "leverage...raises at their home institutions," and then turned down the Missouri job. The article also noted that there are two other Kenneth Lay endowed chairs in economics at the University of Houston, one currently filled and the other soon to be. One can only hope that the professors who hold these chairs aren't hired as specialists in energy policy or corporate ethics.

Your Apocalypse Updated

Alert reader Elena O'Malley writes that Sean Malloy has taken down the Robert Capp photos I discussed in my post of May 10. Apparently, at least a couple of the photos were not of Hiroshima after all; instead, they display the aftermath of the Kanto Earthquake of 1923. One of the most devastating natural disasters of the twentieth century, the Great Kanto Earthquake leveled the cities of Tokyo and Yokohama and killed somewhere between 105,000 and 140,000 people (depending on how one counts the nearly 40,000 people reported as "missing").

I regret that Prof. Malloy and I (among others) were taken in by false evidence, though Malloy deserves credit for correcting the error so quickly. Meanwhile, we might observe that the Kanto Earthquake produced greater property damage, and possibly more human casualties, than the American nuclear attack on Hiroshima 22 years later - proof, if proof were needed, that Nature is still an effective competitor with humanity in the fields of death, destruction, and disaster.

Visualize Your Apocalypse

Earlier this month the Hoover Institution Archives released ten previously obscure photographs of the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing of 6 August 1945. Most of the publicly available images of post-blast Hiroshima are either antiseptic pictures of the ruins or photos of the burns suffered by survivors, which, while impressive (or gruesome), don't convey the full extent of the carnage. The new photos, which were found in a cave outside the city by American GI Robert Capp, remedy this omission - to say the least. The pictures are very graphic and not for the easily depressed or faint of heart, but if (like me) you have a morbid fascination with nuclear war they can be seen here.

If you prefer a more esthetically pleasing nuclear holocaust, these photos of the French Licorne H-bomb test of 3 July 1970 might appeal. This was one of the largest French atmospheric nuclear tests, and an observer commented at the time that it was "stupendously beautiful." Which is, I guess, what the French look for in a hydrogen bomb.

And if you prefer to look on the lighter side of nuclear war, you could do worse than check out the (slightly dated) Flash animation The End of the World. You'll need a Flash player for the video, and a tolerance for four-letter words. (Though, if you don't mind the idea of nuclear annihilation, a little profanity probably won't bother you too much either.)

Happy New Year

Today is May Day, and (as all fans of the movie Airplane! know) it is also the Russian New Year. In honor of the occasion, I've posted a photograph of the Siberian city of Tobol'sk, taken in 1912 by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. This is not a tinted black-and-white print, but an actual color photograph, though it was created through a cumbersome process. Prokudin-Gorskii used a special camera which took three photos of the same image - one through a red filter, one through a blue filter, and one through a green filter. He then loaded his glass-plate negatives into a projector which superimposed the three images on one another to create a final color picture. The photo above can be found, along with many other color photographs of late Imperial Russia, in the collection "The Empire that Was Russia" on the Library of Congress website. The site also includes a short essay on Prokudin-Gorskii and on the digital process whereby the Library re-assembled his photos.

Seven Annoying Things about the John Adams Miniseries

Last Sunday I watched all seven episodes of HBO's John Adams series, and was pleasantly surprised by the show's quality. I found the program well-produced, attentive to historical detail, and graced by some very fine performances (notably Paul Giamatti's and Tom Wilkinson's). In all, it was a good evening's entertainment. However, as a historian of early America, I am honor-bound to point out some the series' factual and interpretive flaws, not so much to warn viewers away from it as to explain why I probably won't use John Adams much in my classes, and as part of a cautionary tale warning my readers not to undertake graduate education, lest they lose their ability to enjoy well-made television programs.

Herewith, then, are the things I most disliked about the miniseries:

1) In Episodes 1 and 2, colonial resistance leaders repeatedly say that they object to the policies of "the Crown." Actually, until 1776 the American rebels considered themselves loyal subjects of the King, and insisted that they merely opposed the wicked policies of the British Parliament – forgetting that, by the 18th century, the King was subordinate to the Parliament.

2) At the beginning of Episode 2, a rider tells Adams that "the British" have attacked Concord. Since most white American colonists still considered themselves British in 1775, this would have confused Adams. Paul Revere and other rebel messengers instead called their military adversaries "regulars," "redcoats," and related epithets (e.g. "bloody backs") – that is, they referred to them by their profession, not their nationality.

3) The series portrays George Washington as a genial, even-tempered man, concerned about the well-being of his soldiers during the war, and unable to resist Alexander Hamilton's personality during his presidency. In reality, Washington was cold and aloof in social settings, famous for his volcanic temper, and reckless in battle. Moreover, while Washington frequently took Hamilton's advice during his two terms as president, his final policy decisions were usually his own.

4) Two minor quibbles about the 1790s: Hamilton didn't propose that the federal government create a national debt in 1790, because that debt (to the tune of $54 million) already existed. He instead proposed that the government make the national debt permanent and interest-bearing. Also, Adams didn't cast the tie-breaking vote in favor of Jay's Treaty. No vice president can, or ever will, do this, because treaties require approval of two-thirds of the Senate.

5) The series ascribed President Adams's electoral loss in 1800 to his unpopular decision to negotiate a new peace treaty with France, which supposedly split the Federalist Party. Actually, Adams lost because the Republicans made political hay out of the Alien and Sedition Acts and the new taxes the Federalists levied to finance their projected war with France. President Adams approved of and signed all of these measures.

6) Episode 7 implies that the post-retirement correspondence between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson didn't begin until after Abigail's death in 1818. Actually, Abigail Adams was the person who arranged for the two men to resume their correspondence, which would have been difficult if she were dead. Adams and Jefferson subsequently exchanged dozens of detailed, erudite letters over a fourteen-year period.

7) Finally, everyone's accent is crap. Paul Giamatti manages a good eastern New England accent, but practically every other actor or actress either pretends he/she is on Masterpiece Theater, or doesn't bother. It's a jarring omission in an otherwise well-directed and detail-oriented series.

We Come in Peace, with Snack Chips for All

The domain of human commerce is about to grow dramatically. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that a group of British astronomers plans to transmit a Doritos (TM) commercial - yes, you read that correctly - to the star system 47 Ursae Majoris. The broadcast, according to the article, will "mark the first interplanetary solicitation of the hitherto untapped alien food market." (Aisha Labi, "The Universal Snack," Chronicle of Higher Ed. [March 28, 2008], p. A6.)



47 Ursae Majoris is a G0-1 class star in the constellation Ursa Major, about 46 light-years from Earth. It has at least two Jupiter-sized planets. Researchers at U.T. Arlington believe the star could potentially have one or more rocky planets within its habitable zone (the range of orbits within which liquid water can exist, assuming the theoretical water-bearing planet also has some kind of atmosphere). There's a good article on the star and its known planets here. If there are potential customers in the UMa 47 system, we might expect their earliest snack orders in 2100 AD.

This Interstellar Doritos Initiative reminds me of an economics paper presented at an Ig Nobel Prize ceremony in the 1990s. The paper's author observed that the total value of our planet's imports exceeded the total value of its exports, and argued that this was decisive proof that humans were involved in interstellar trade. "Space aliens," he concluded, "are stealing American jobs."

(The photo above is of a radar dish at the European Incoherent Scatter Scientific Association station in Norway, which will transmit the UMa 47 Doritos solicitation on June 12th.)

From Yenisei to Arizona

The March 4th issue of the Anchorage Daily News reported on a fascinating paper by linguist Edward Vajda, who, after ten years of research, has found a solid link between an obscure Siberian language and the large Athabascan (or Na'Dene) language group of western North America. After interviewing many of the surviving speakers of Ket, the language of a native Siberian nation from the Yenisei River valley, Vajda found "several dozen cognates" in the vocabularies of Ket and the Athabaskan languages, and identified consistent morphological rules governing the transformation of Ket words into Athabascan. His findings help to reinforce the Beringian hypothesis of Native American origins - the theory that the ancestors of Native Americans migrated from eastern Siberia during the Pleistocene epoch. If he is correct - and his peers in the field seem to think he is - Vajda has also discovered one of the most widespread human language groups. Pre-historic Ket and Athabascan speakers can be found in Siberia, in the Alaskan panhandle, in western Canada, in California, and in present-day Arizona and New Mexico, where the Athabaskan-speaking Navajos settled around 1400 AD. And they accomplished this expansion without draft animals, wheels, or sailing ships.

Voyagers to the East, Part XIX

For the previous entry in this series, click here.

Native American travel to Europe, voluntary or otherwise, was relatively light during the second half of the sixteenth century, and it remained so into the early 1600s. Most of the Indians who journeyed across the Atlantic during the first two decades of the seventeenth century were brought by Europeans as curiosities, translators, diplomats, or some combination thereof. Most, therefore, traveled singly or in small groups - much smaller than the groups of caciques and slaves brought home by Spanish and Portuguese adventurers in the previous century.

The Indians who traveled to England during the first five years of the new century were cases in point. There were only two documented groups of Native American visitors to England during this period, and each consisted of fewer than half a dozen people - and each traveled involuntarily. In 1603, Walter Raleigh sent a ship to Virginia to determine the fate of the Roanoke colony, which had disappeared (actually, relocated to the Chesapeake Bay) in 1590. The mariners, led by Captain Samuel Mace, did not find the colony, but they did kidnap two Rappahannock men on the Virginia coast, whom the Englishmen brought back to London. The two abductees probably lodged with Sir Robert Cecil at his home on the Strand, and were apparently asked by Sir Walter Cope to put on a public display of canoeing in the Thames (Sept. 1603), which drew a large crowd. Their sojourn probably did not end happily, however, for London was stricken with the Plague that year, and there is no record of these Indians having survived it. (Alden Vaughan, "Sir Walter Ralegh's Indian Interpreters," William and Mary Quarterly 59 [April 2002], 357-358.)

The fate of the other party of Indians brought to England during the opening years of the Stuart era was slightly happier, but their experiences were more harrowing. In 1605, two of Raleigh's business associates sent another expedition to the coast of Maine to search for likely sites for a trading post or colony. The expeditionaries, headed by Captain George Weymouth, landed at Pemaquid that summer and captured five Abenaki men, including a local chief. Weymouth sent these captives - Maniddo, Assacomoit, Skicowaros, Amoret, and Tahanedo (or Dehaneda) - back to England as trophies, along with two canoes and several bows and arrows. The captives received fair treatment from Sir John Popham and Sir Ferdinando Gorges, the two gentlemen who had organized the expedition, and provided them with information on the rivers and Indian communities of Maine, along with a short glossary of the Abenaki language. After spending a year in England, Tahanedo returned to Maine with Popham and Gorges, and helped them establish a short-lived settlement on the Sagadahock River.

Maniddo and Assacomoit also sailed for home in 1606, but their ship, the Richard, was intercepted by a Spanish fleet off the coast of Florida. The two Indians and the English crew were taken back to Spain, where Spanish officials jailed all of them. Gorges eventually ransomed Assacomoit and brought him back to England; in 1614 Assacomoit and two other Indians, probably Skicowaros and Amoret, finally returned to Maine. Maniddo's fate, however, remains unknown; there's a good chance he died in prison in Seville. (Harold Prins, "To the Land of the Mistigoches," American Indian Culture and Research Journal 17 [1993]: 185-186; Alden Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters: American Indians in Britain, 1500-1776 [Cambridge, 2006], 57-58, 60-63.)

For the next entry in this series, click here.

Of Cellphones and Coffeehouses

The "creative destruction of capitalism," as Joseph Schumpeter famously described the effects of this flawed but powerful economic system, has noteworthy corollaries. One of these concerns a nation's technological development: the ongoing obsolescence of old machinery and the rapid emergence of newer, cheaper replacement technologies means that poor countries often find it easier to go high-tech than to adopt older devices and techniques. In sub-Saharan Africa, this corollary is demonstrated by the widespread demand for cellular telephones in nations which never had more than rudimentary land-lines, and by the ability of telecom companies to meet that demand. Since Africans are finding it easier and cheaper to erect cellphone towers than to string telephone wires, in the field of telecommunications they are jumping directly from the nineteenth to the 21st centuries.

Sub-Saharan Africa is still poor, however, and most cellphone customers there buy prepaid minutes rather than long-term contracts. The downside of this is that phone companies are unwilling to provide African customers with cheap or free cellphones, which they reserve as incentives for contract customers. Thus, there is a large market in Africa for used cellphones, and in today's global economy, people meet that demand in ingenious ways. Consider the following excerpt from a recent article by Jon Mooallem (citing Chinese scholar Jack Qin):

"In Kowloon, Hong Kong, Pakistanis and other immigrants...import phones from Europe by the shipping container. In the past, Nigerians and other African exporters swept in to buy tens of thousands of phones at a time, particularly so-called '14-day phones,' those that have been returned under warranty and used little. But recently...the markets for these phones have become saturated in African cities. So the Nigerians, needing to take their business to poorer African villages, have been leaving Hong Kong for Chinese cities like Guangzhou, where they can purchase cheaper, more heavily used phones...Many Nigerians have learned Mandarin in order to do business in Guangzhou...and the city now has an African-style coffee-shop." (Mooallem, "The Afterlife of Cellphones," New York Times Magazine, 13 January 2008, p. 41.)

So exporters are shipping European cellphones to southern China, where Pakistani immigrants purvey them to Mandarin-speaking African entrepreneurs for eventual resale in rural Nigeria. And there's an African coffeehouse in Guangzhou. Every day, our world is becoming more and more like a Neal Stephenson novel.

Voyagers to the East, Part XVIII

For the previous entry in this series, click here.

My next sixteenth-century digression takes us to Nova Scotia, where, in the 1560s or '70s, French sailors met a Micmac chief named Messamoet, and agreed to take him back to France. The chief spent an unspecified period, perhaps as long as several years, with Msr. de Grandmont, Governor of the City of Bayonne, and learned the French language and some of their customs. Upon his return to Canada Messamoet used his experience and training to become a fur trader and an interpreter for French explorers. He helped Samuel de Champlain map the coast of Maine in 1604, and helped Jean de Biencourt establish Port Royal, the first French settlement in Acadia, two years later.

Harold Prins believes Messamoet may have commanded a crew of Micmacs who acquired a Basque fishing vessel early in the seventeenth century, and who used it to fish and trade up and down the coast from Newfoundland to Maine. English mariners encountered this vessel in 1602 and said that its captain wore a serge waistcoat, European-style breeches, shoes, stockings, and a banded hat, and knew a fair amount of "Christian words."

However successful he might have become as a trader and translator, Messamoet's close contact with Europeans ultimately undid him. In 1610 he accepted baptism from Jesuit missionaries, and shortly thereafter died of an unspecified European illness, which he probably caught from those same missionaries or other Frenchmen at Port Royal. It's surprising, though, that Messamoet still lacked immunity to Old World diseases following several months' or years' residence in France. Perhaps simple age was also to blame: assuming Messamoet was in his twenties when he first traveled to France, and that he did so no later than 1580, he would have been in his late fifties or sixties by the time he died. (Harold Prins, "To the Land of the Mistigoches," 188; see also Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes [1625; reprint, Glasgow, 1906], 18:265)

For the next entry in this series, click here.

Voyagers to the East, Part XVII

For the previous entry in this series, click here.

The last few posts in this series were an extended digression on Brazilian visitors to Europe, voluntary and otherwise, between 1503 and 1616. I would like to make two more digressions into the sixteenth century, describing three different groups of Native American travelers to Europe, before resuming my chronological narrative where I left it, at the turn of the seventeenth century.

The first digression takes place seven years after the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan fell to Spanish adventurers under Hernan Cortes. In 1528, Cortes made a triumphant visit to Spain, where he was presented to Emperor Charles V at his court in Toledo. Accompanying Cortes were many trophies of his conquest: tropical birds and animals, samples of amber and oil, and at least twelve Mexican Indians, most of whom appear to have come to Toledo voluntarily. The delegation included five Indian acrobats who, according to Bernal Diaz, "seem[ed] to fly in the air while dancing;" four Indian jugglers who could juggle sticks with their feet; three hunchbacked dwarves; two or three caciques, or local Aztec chiefs; and one of the sons of Montezuma, the slain Aztec monarch. The scholar Harold Prins believes that Montezuma's son and the caciques, all of whom probably came to Toledo to increase their domestic political prestige, may well have been able to return home from Spain. The jugglers and other entertainers, however, went to Italy to entertain Pope Clement VII, who apparently persuaded them to remain as permanent members of his court. (Harold Prins, "To the Land of the Mistigoches: American Indians Traveling to Europe in the Age of Exploration," American Indian Culture and Research Journal 17 [1993]:175-195, esp. 189; see also Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America [1984; reprint, New York: HarperCollins, 1997], 129-130.)

In the same year of 1528, another delegation of Indians arrived in Toledo, led by another would-be conquistador, Francisco Pizarro. The three visitors were native Peruvians from the coastal community of Tumbez, whom Pizarro had met while exploring the region the previous year, and whom he brought to Spain for training as translators. We rarely learn of the fate of Indian translators in Europe, but not so in this case. One of the Tumbez travelers, a boy who received the Spanish name Felipillo, later returned with Pizarro to Peru, where he helped poison relations between the conquistador and the Inca monarch Atahualpa by maliciously mis-translating the emperor's speeches. (William Prescott, The Conquest of Peru, Vol. 1, pp. 292-3, 301-314.)

In some ways, then, these two groups of Indian travelers to Spain in 1528 are mirror images of one another: one party symbolized the successful conquest of a Native American empire, while the other played a critical role in starting the conquest of another.

For the next entry in this series, click here.

Joke(s) of the Day

Time Magazine's 2007 Person of the Year issue may have dismayed advocates of a democratic Russia, but its profile of Vladimir Putin was well balanced - and it demonstrated that whatever changes have occurred in the past eight years, Russians retain their taste for political black humor. Here is a joke about Putin and one of his predecessors from Time's December 31st cover story:

"Stalin's ghost appears to Putin in a dream, and Putin asks for his help running the country. Stalin says, 'Round up and shoot all the democrats, and then paint the inside of the Kremlin blue.' 'Why blue?' Putin asks. 'Ha!' says Stalin. 'I knew you wouldn't ask me about the first part.'" (p. 50)

And here is another joke about Putin and his presumed successor as president, Dmitry Medvedev, whom most Russians assume will serve as Putin's lackey after his predecessor becomes prime minister:

"Putin goes to a restaurant with Medvedev and orders steak. The waiter asks, 'And what about the vegetable?' Putin answers, 'The vegetable will have steak too.'" (p. 55)

Hedgehogs, Board Games, and Debt

A few items too short to justify a full-length post, but interesting in their own right:

* This article is proof, if proof were needed, that the English are far more sentimental about animals than Americans could ever hope to be. "Tiggywinkles Wildlife Hospital," indeed! On the other hand, if you ever need a leg cast for a baby hedgehog, you know where to go.

* There are more strange stories associated with World War Two than we will ever know, but this plan to help POWs escape from captivity, by way of Marvin Gardens, is one of the more ingenious Allied ideas I've come across. (Afterthought: isn't "Marxist-themed Monopoly game" an oxymoron?)

* And, finally, as we head through the holiday shopping season, some historical perspective for those who believe consumer debt is a recent problem in America: in the second edition of The Affluent Society, economist John Kenneth Galbraith noted that American consumer debts in the thrifty 'fifties rose by 55 percent (1952-56), and grew another 133 percent - from $42.5 billion to $99.1 billion - between 1956 and 1967. "Our march to higher living standards," Galbraith concluded, "will be paced, as a matter of necessity, by an ever deeper plunge into debt." (Affluent Society, Second Edition [New York, 1969], 158.)

Oklahoma, y'all

Earlier this month I went to Richmond for the Annual Meeting of the Southern Historical Association, one of two professional conferences I attend every year*. The Southern is more frequently a venue for good-natured carousing than academic discourse, but I did manage to attend several panels and listen to a few conference papers. Of these, the most interesting concerned the efforts of Oklahoma, which was admitted to the Union 100 years ago this month, to identify itself as a Southern state during the first quarter-century of statehood. In his paper "Becoming West," David Chang observed that Oklahoma's Democratic political leaders initially took great pains to express solidarity with the South - by passing Jim Crow laws, organizing a large chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, and inviting race-baiting Senator "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman to the state to speak. Eastern Oklahoma's economy, based (until the 1930s) on cotton and tenant farming, was Southern in character, as were its Native American peoples, mainly displaced southeastern Indians of the "Five Civilized Tribes." The state did not begin to adopt a Western identity until the 1930s, when oil and cattle replaced cotton as its principal products, and when Oklahoma's civic leaders began to hold rodeos and built the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa. While Chang didn't say as much in his paper, the shift may also have been due to a change in popular culture: while the early twentieth century was the golden age of Southern nostalgic literature, the 1920s and '30s saw the popularization of the Western film, which glamorized that region and made its identity a more attractive one for Oklahomans to adopt.


* Update, 17 June 2018: In general, I no longer attend the Southern annually, having replaced it with the Ethnohistory Society meeting in the fall.

Achtung! Waschbaeren!

Previously on this blog, I have referred to Alfred Crosby's concept of the Columbian Exchange - the exchange of plants, animals, microorganisms, and humans between the Old World and the New that accompanied and followed Columbus's voyages. As Crosby observed, the transfer of species was almost entirely one-way: Eurasia and Africa contributed far more people, pathogens, and animals to the Americas than the reverse. The only American species to flourish in the Old World were domestic crop plants - maize, potatoes, and cassava in particular - one disease organism, treponema (which causes syphilis), and a few small animals, such as gray squirrels.

To the last group, we may now add one of the most distinctive small American mammals, the raccoon. Introduced to Germany during World War Two, procyon lotor is now flourishing in that nation's woods and cities. This article, while a bit old, tells the story - and features the best headline I've seen since I started this weblog. This article, from May 2007, observes that many Germans have adopted raccoons, or "wash-bears," as pets (one 80-year-old woman had 50 of them in her home), and that they have now spread into France and Belgium and as far east as Chechnya. It now seems only a matter of time before the Nazi raccoon invasion of Britain begins.

October 4, 1957

"One day in 1957 everybody in the United States was minding his or her own business when suddenly the Russians launched a grapefruit-sized object called Sputnik (literally, ‘Little Sput’) into Earth orbit, from which it began transmitting back the following potentially vital intelligence information (and we quote): ‘Beep.’ This came as a severe shock to Americans, because at that point the best our space scientists had been able to come up with was a walnut-sized object that went: ‘Moo.’”

(Dave Barry Slept Here, pp. 139-140 [1989 edition].)

Ostalgie

The June 15th issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education included an article on an odd phenomenon known as "Ostalgie" - nostalgia for the symbols and commodities of the defunct Eastern Bloc. In Eastern Europe, Ostalgie generally manifests itself as a demand for replicas of the old, badly-made consumer goods of the Communist era, like Trabant cars in the former East Germany, Tisza sneakers in Hungary, and Kofola Cola in the former Czechoslovakia. It can also take the form of nostalgia for the rhetoric and professed ideals of the old regime, as in Wolfgang Becker's 2003 movie Goodbye Lenin! Eastern European Ostalgie is most likely the product of middle-aged Hungarians' and Germans' nostalgia for the kitsch of their youth - similar to the wave of '70s nostalgia that washed through American movies and TV shows in the 1990s. It may also be an expression of residual nationalism in countries that are otherwise integrating themselves as quickly as possible into the European Union.

I suspect that few Eastern Europeans pine for a return to the actual conditions of Communist rule - secret police, travel restrictions, and food shortages. We were recently reminded of those conditions by an unusual story out of Poland: the emergence of Jan Grzebski, a former railway worker, from a 19-year-long coma on June 2nd, 2007. Grzebski's last memories were of the final year of Communist rule in Poland, and he was anything but nostalgic: "When I went into a coma," he told a Polish TV station, "there was only tea and vinegar in the shops, meat was rationed and huge petrol queues were everywhere." Economic conditions had, he said, improved drastically in the intervening two decades - though, like most 65-year-olds, he found at least one thing to complain about in the new Poland (namely, people who complained about how rotten life was).

Ostalgie has taken a somewhat darker form in the former Soviet Union, where many Russians now remember the Soviet era as one of order and strength, and the 1990s as a "time of troubles" filled with strife, poverty, and national humiliation. The Putin regime is encouraging this revisionist view in the new history standards it recently issued to Russian high school teachers, reported in the New York Times last August. The new standards are particularly kind to Joseph Stalin, whom they compare to Peter the Great and Chancellor Bismarck. Under his rule, "victory in one of the greatest wars was won, industrialization of the economy and cultural revolution were carried out successfully...The U.S.S.R. joined the leading countries in the field of science; unemployment was practically defeated." (Andrew Kramer, "Yes, a Lot of People Died, but..." New York Times, 12 Aug. 2007) Sure, there was a certain amount of suffering, but it was in a good cause. Even Stalin's purges had a good effect: the creation of "a new class of managers capable of solving the task of modernization in conditions of shortage...loyal to the supreme power and immaculate from the point of view of executive discipline."

A corollary to this longing for the Days of Uncle Joe is the belief that the Soviet Union fell not because of its own internal weaknesses, but because it was "stabbed in the back" by internal enemies - more specifically, meddling liberal reformers like Mikhail Gorbachev. Yegor Gaidar, the former economic minister of Russia under Boris Yeltsin (1991-94), observed in a paper given to the American Enterprise Institute last November that "at least 80 percent of Russians" now believe that "the Soviet Union was a dynamically developing world superpower until usurpers initiated disastrous reforms." To this Weimarian view of the fall of Communist Russia, Gaidar opposes his own thesis, which he calls "Grain and Oil." Essentially, Stalin's decision to collectivize agriculture in the late 1920s led to a severe shortfall of grain in the U.S.S.R. by the early 1960s. Soviet Russia could only feed its people by importing grain, and the only Russian commodities anyone would buy in exchange were oil and natural gas. High oil prices in the 1970s allowed the Soviet government to continue feeding its populace, but when Saudi Arabia dropped the floor out of the oil market in 1985, the Politburo could only continue to buy grain by borrowing money from the West. By 1989, private banks were no longer willing to loan money to the Soviets, and Western governments agreed to do so only on condition that the Red Army withdrew from Eastern Europe. Which it did. Sic transit the Russian Communist Empire.

Gaidar’s paper deserves to be read in full: it is elegant, well-illustrated with charts and historical evidence, and even witty. (He summarizes the intellectual quality of Brezhnev-era Soviet leadership with this quote from Politburo minutes: "Mr. Zasiadko has stopped binge drinking. Resolution: nominate Mr. Zasiadko as a minister to Ukraine.") He does tend to gloss over the other weaknesses of the Soviet economy, such as the total stagnation of its industrial sector - by the 1980s, Soviet citizens viewed consumer goods like the Trabants mentioned above as evidence of Eastern Europe's wealth and sophistication. An American historian might also note that the Reagan administration took an active role in undermining the Soviet oil and gas export industry in the 1980s, first by allowing Soviet spies to steal bugged computer software for their gas pipelines that later caused immense explosions, then by pressuring Saudi Arabia to drop oil prices in the mid-'80s. But his essential point, taken in conjunction with Mr. Grzebski's recollections, is sound: repressive governments can only survive as long as there is food in the shops. If there is no bread, all the military glory and shoddy sneakers in the world won't be enough to save your regime. Trite, perhaps, but easy enough for autocrats to forget.

Now Silent, Upon a Peak in Darien

On May 1st I reported on the 300th anniversary of the Act of Union, whereby Scotland formally surrendered its independence to England and became part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain. I implied that English anti-Catholicism and English bribes had much to do with the end of Scotland's sovereignty. However, in a new article in the Guardian, Rory Carroll attributes the end of Scottish independence to the kingdom's disastrous attempt to colonize Panama in the late 1690s. The now-obscure Scottish colony of New Caledonia cost Scotland hundreds of lives and one-fifth of its national wealth, and its collapse both bankrupted and demoralized the Scottish government. According to archaeologist Mark Horton, however, the failure of New Caledonia was not due to Scottish incompetence - the site was well-chosen and the death rate no higher than in 17th-century Virginia - but rather to Spanish military opposition and English indifference. The story reminds us, at any rate, that the margin of survival in Europe's 17th-century colonies was quite thin, and the consequences of failed colonies could be quite severe for the mother country.