Maggie's Farm

We have mourned, on these pages, the destruction of the great American downtowns during the 60s and 70s in the name of progress. And we have praised the liveable, human-scale cities which, for whatever reason, managed to escape the wrecking ball. Why does Savannah, GA always come to mind? Georgia on my mind, I guess.

In 1950, Louisville was the 12th largest city in the US, and a thriving place. But the downtown lacked parking lots, so lots of buildings "had to" come down.

Photo below: the 1920 Rialto Theater during the 1969 demolition, replaced by a parking lot. I'd be willing to bet they wish they had the Rialto now. An essay, Louisville after the Bombings, here. Our Dylanologist says the same essay could have been written about Nashville.

Western soldiers like to collect souvenirs of war. As quoted in a scholarly essay by Michael Stevenson :

'Many soldiers in the 24th Division's tank companies and Scout platoons began to collect battlefield souvenirs - especially Soviet AK-47 assault rifles carried by the military. … In one instance, an elaborate Iraqi Defense Ministry compound was broken into by the 2-4 Cavalry, and, under the eyes of its commander … soldiers loaded glassware, trays, sterling silver, gun collections, oversized rugs, and a huge photograph of Saddam Hussein onto tanks and armored cars to take back to America. … The items were to be used … for a Cavalry Ball, to be held after the war…'. In the case of this war, a 'war-souvenir officer' was even appointed to gather war trophies - flags, enemy tanks and artillery pieces, two camels, etc - for display at the Fort Stewart Museum, back in Georgia.

Stevenson's essay takes a look at how widespread this was during the 19th Century wars in Africa. Why did people go to the trouble of collecting this stuff, what meaning did it have for the collectors, and what meaning does it have for later owners?

The whole essay is linked above. Photo: Zulu shield and spear.

“...a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization.” The FDR audio here.

D-Day was an excellent trick.

Niall Ferguson discusses Nassim Taleb's new book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, in The Telegraph.

The piece echoes some of the themes in Dr. Bliss' Virginia Tech and the Fantasy of Safety.

Quote from Ferguson:

... it is Taleb's assault on traditional historiography that is most relevant here. Since Thucydides, it is true, historians have encouraged us to explain low-probability calamities (like wars) after the fact. Such story-telling helps us to make sense of a random disaster. It also enables us to apportion blame. Generations of historians have toiled in this way to explain the origins of great calamities like, say, the First World War, constructing elegant narrative chains of causes and effects, heaping opprobrium on this or that statesman.

There is something deeply suspect about this procedure, however. It results in what Taleb calls the "retrospective distortion". For these causal chains were quite invisible to contemporaries, to whom the outbreak of war came as a bolt from the blue. The point is that there were umpteen Balkans crises before 1914 that didn't lead to Armageddon. Like Cho Seung-Hui , the Sarajevo assassin Gavrilo Princip was a Black Swan - only vastly bigger.

The same flaw is obvious in the stories currently being told about the Virginia Tech massacre. If we can see the causes of Cho's rampage now, why was it not anticipated at the time? Negligence is not the only possibility. The reality is that for every Cho who runs amok, there are hundreds of thousands of depressive, misanthropic students who don't.

and

...as President Bush has learned, you don't get rewarded for trying to stop bad things from happening, precisely because if you're successful they don't happen. On his watch, after all, there hasn't been another 9/11 (a classic Black Swan event). And Saddam Hussein will never invade Kuwait again. But is anybody out there grateful? Not even Bush himself can be certain that his strategy of pre-emption deserves the credit for non-events.

Read the whole thing.

A wonderful review of some very funky 19th C. American architectural styles, at Sippican Cottage. Scroll down. Or look at the log cabins too. Good fun.

Keep 'em comin', Mr. S. Cottage: it's a free eddication for me. But what would you call that French Quarter architecture we posted below? "Caribbean Whorehouse"?

April 18, 1775. The Battle of Lexington and Concord.

Jules Crittenden linked to the English documents regarding that battle.

We owe everything, historically, culturally, and spiritually, to those reckless farmers who were not willing to take any crap from their well-intentioned but ultimately feckless government.

Rick Moran remembers Paul Revere and his midnight ride.

Charles Babbage (1791-1871) not only designed and built the earliest calculating machines - with printers, too - but also designed programmable computers which used punch cards.

One of his machines was built in 1990 according to his plans, and was able to perform calculations to 32 decimal points.

Mr. Babbage detested street musicians, according to Done with Mirrors, who seems to enjoy them.

From a piece by Fred Sanders on George Washington Carver:

Carver developed a homespun religious philosophy and told little stories that catch the imagination. One story has him crying out to God, “Oh, Mr. Creator, why did You make the universe?” to which God replied, “You want to know too much for that little mind of yours. Ask me something more your size.” So he tried “Dear Mr. Creator, tell me what man was made for.” Still too big. Finally: “Mr. Creator, why did You make the peanut?”

"Thats better!" the Lord said, and He gave me a handful of peanuts and went with me back to the laboratory and, together, we got down to work.

It might be homespun but it works for me.

From the always-interesting Edward Luttwak in Harper's. It begins:

Modern armed forces continue to be structured for large-scale war, but advanced societies whose small families lack expendable children have a very low tolerance for casualties. Even supposedly warlike Americans gravely count casualties in Iraq that in three years have yet to reach 3,000—fewer than were lost in many a single day of battle in past wars. Fortunately, this refusal to spill the blood needed to fuel battles diminishes the likelihood that advanced societies will deliberately set out to fight one another (pas des enfants, pas des Suisses, pas de guerre) unless they are somehow able to convince themselves that a war could be entirely or very largely aerial and naval. Such wars, however, are difficult to imagine, except when islands are involved, as in a China-Taiwan war, which is very improbable for its own reasons. Air and naval forces can certainly be employed advantageously against any less advanced enemy incautious enough to rely on a conventional defense, conducted by regular forces, but in that context as well there must be severe doubts about the continued usefulness of the ground forces of advanced countries that are intolerant of casualties. It is easy enough to blockade the enemy, to successfully bomb all the right nodal points and shut down electrical, transportation, and communications networks. Air strikes can disable runways and destroy both sheltered and unsheltered aircraft, ballistic missiles, and nuclear installations. Air power can also sink warships, or rout any mechanized forces deployed in the open, as the United States did with Iraq in 1991 and partly in 2003, and as it could do with Iran. No real role would remain for ground forces except to dislodge the enemy from any territory he had occupied, or to occupy his own territory. That, however, is bound to cost casualties that might not be tolerated; it is also bound to provoke an insurgency.

Insurgencies understand this very well. A thoughtful piece. Read the whole thing. As we always say at Maggie's Farm, "Hope is not a plan." Neither is hopelessness, of course.

The Free and Independent Republic of West Florida. Its complex history here.

Update, by Rick. Sounds like a mechanical astronomical calculator. Clever Greeks.

The Antikythera Project website is here (photo from that site).

The Vikings are returning in their ships to Ireland, reports Blue Crab. Very cool, but it's not really a very difficult passage, in good weather.

The Norsemen terrorized the British Isles during the dark ages, raping, burning, killing and pillaging...all the fun stuff Vikings liked to do, but also settling and colonizing, to some extent, until the French-speaking Norsemen of Normandy finally took the whole place over in 1066, more or less.

Monks huddled on top of inaccessible places like Skellig Michael to elude them, and dedicated their lives to prayer and the copying of the ancient classical writings.

We first learned about Skellig Michael on the old PBS Civilization series by Lord Kenneth Clark (that was good TV - every kid should see it). And then more in Thomas Cahill's wonderful How the Irish Saved Civilization. I like all of Cahill's stuff, especially Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus.

I have been to Skellig Michael. Took the little fishing boat out there and climbed those endless narrow stone-cut, railing-less, acrophobia-inducing steps almost to the top, where their stone huts still sit in the wind and clouds. Would not recommend going to Ireland without going down there.

Image: A view from Skellig Michael.

The most interesting book I've read this year - George Marsden's recent biography of Jonathan Edwards. I am about halfway through it, but find it difficult to put down. (It won the Bancroft Prize.)

Marsden weaves late colonial history, theology, Edward's complex life (his struggles with faith, struggles with temptation, struggles with character flaws, his depressions, his never-resting intelligence), and the daily life of the times into a darn good tale. And Marsden does know his theology.

Connecticut's Edwards (1703-1758) is one of the most compelling and important figures in American history - probably more important than the Founding Fathers: he helped lay the cultural foundation on which the national institutions were constructed. I see him as the evolutionary link between the Puritan Pilgrims and the world of the Founders. His view of the world was far better known in the colonies in 1776 than were the works of John Locke - or of anyone else: sermons were best-sellers in those days. Isolated: not really.

Did Edwards read Locke? You bet. Locke was his great inspiration (except for scripture), at Yale (then a divinity school). Newton and Rousseau too: these New Englanders were plugged into the latest European thinking.

His life and preaching remain a part of America's national DNA. As theologian, theological logician, preacher, and the preeminant evangelist of the Great Awakening, he has been and remains the dominant figure in the history of American religious life - and a major international figure, too, because of his role in the worldwide movement that puritan Reform (Calvinism) represented.

So he is well worth reading about.

From the Booklist review:

In the first full critical biography of Edwards in 60 years, a distinguished Notre Dame scholar humanizes America's greatest colonial clergyman, a man highly esteemed in his own time but since singled out for decades of abuse by Puritan-bashers. To be sure, Edwards' brimstone pulpit rhetoric (most famously deployed in his 1741 sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God") offends modern sensibilities. But Marsden--drawing heavily on recent scholarship--restores Edwards to an eighteenth-century New England where most shared his doctrines, though few could rival him in the power with which he preached them. Exceptional insight shines through a felicitous style as Marsden recounts how Edwards acquired that power, the intellectual rigor of his Yale studies gradually lending force to his intense spiritual vision. His rare gifts enabled Edwards to kindle the Great Awakening, emblazoning his name on the pages of American history.

A quote from Marsden's excellent Introduction:

Historians of the United States have been prone to give much more attention to Benjamin Franklin than to Edwards as a progenitor of modern America. That is understandable because Franklin seems so congenially to represent tendencies that triumph in mainstream American life and politics. Yet a good case can be made that stories of America are deficient if they do not at least temper emphasis on the Franklins of the heritage with a serious reckoning with its Edwardses. Most strikingly, the modern narratives fail to account for why levels of religious practice came to be so much higher in the United States than in other modernized nations. They also do little to explain why evangelical Christianity  flourished in America and why its revivalist style became one of America's leading exports.