Father Indiana Jones, OSB

Dom Columba Stewart travels to the dangerous parts of the world to photograph and preserve ancient manuscripts.

Remembering Nature's Table

Here's yet another great Smile Politely article, this one by Rob McColley about Nature's Table, the old Urbana, Illinois, jazz hangout that was razed in 1991 by the University of Illinois to make way for a big shiny Chemical and Life Sciences building.

A final B-17 mission

84-year-old Marvin Skubick, a B-17 Flying Fortress pilot in World War II, took his final flight on a B-17 last month. According to wikipedia, "of the 1.5 million tonnes of bombs dropped on Germany by U.S. aircraft, 500,000 were dropped from B-17s."

A bit of Gloucestershire in the South Pacific

Vide:

The entire population of a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean has been found to speak with a West Country accent – because the residents all descend from one man from Gloucestershire.

Lileks on Roosevelt

Lileks nails Roosevelt and his cult of Great Leader worship. That's the evil Roosevelt, of course, not good old Teddy.

Santa Anna's leg

A bit of local history from the Champaign News-Gazette:

The most controversial Central Illinois [museum] item is the leg of a certain Mexican general, the conqueror of the Alamo.

Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna lost his leg in the so-called French Pastry War, fought between France and Mexico in 1838. In 1847, facing the United States at the Battle of Cerro Gordo in Mexico, he lingered over a roast chicken.

Illinoisans charged the camp, ate the general's chicken and carried off his cork leg. They memorialized the victory by naming a Piatt County town after the battle.

The leg has been stored at Camp Lincoln's Illinois State Military Museum in Springfield, but in recent years the Mexican government has requested its return.

More details in an earlier News-Gazette article here.

Noted in passing

James O'Donnell is one of the presenters in the BBC's 4-part series on St Augustine, and here's a website devoted to the life and work of Page Smith, biographer of John Adams and others. His biography of Adams ($8.00 many years ago at the Old Book Barn, where I also picked up the complete works of Edmund Burke, the 1880s Boston edition, for a pittance) is among my current reading, as is Laura Ingalls Wilder's cracking good Little House series - an Epiphany gift from our 9-year-old daughter. It's not just for kids!

Annotated Code of Justinian

Vide, edited by Timothy Kearley of the University of Wyoming's College of Law.

The Civil War in 4 minutes

Via Kenneth Silber:

Empire and underwear

Here's a good article from the Daily Mail on the Vindolanda Tablets, personal letters to and from Roman soldiers stationed on the northern border of ancient Britain.

Jefferson on subsidiarity

Subsidiarity is the principle which states that matters ought to be handled by the smallest (or, the lowest) competent authority.

Here's Jefferson in his autobiography as cited in The Founders' Constitution:

But it is not by the consolidation, or concentration of powers, but by their distribution, that good government is effected. Were not this great country already divided into states, that division must be made, that each might do for itself what concerns itself directly, and what it can so much better do than a distant authority. Every state again is divided into counties, each to take care of what lies within it's local bounds; each county again into townships or wards, to manage minuter details; and every ward into farms, to be governed each by it's individual proprietor. Were we directed from Washington when to sow, & when to reap, we should soon want bread. It is by this partition of cares, descending in gradation from general to particular, that the mass of human affairs may be best managed for the good and prosperity of all.

The sentence "Were we directed from Washington..." is illustrated by the experience of the Pilgrims their first few years here. They set up a farming system such that all food was grown in common on common land. They starved. Then William Bradford, the governor of Plymouth Colony, gave each family their own land to farm, which "made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better content". See the journal of William Bradford, excerpted at The Founders' Constitution.

Anniversaries: ending slavery in America

Good things often happen very slowly: 200 years ago today it became illegal to import slaves into the United States; 145 years ago today, all slaves in Confederate territory were freed.

There are no spaceports in Calcutta

As Kathy Shaidle says, this is just a fine piece of writing.

New Herodotus

You may remember The Landmark Thucydides published in 1996; the same folks have now published The Landmark Herodotus. Here's a review in the NYT.

The Roman Law Library

A huge compendium of original sources and commentary on ancient and medieval Roman law. O for more time.

Catalog of ancient and medieval eclipses

Here's an interesting summary of ancient solar eclipses and contemporary accounts of them. The neat thing about eclipses is that their details can be computed down to the minute even across a few thousand years, giving us prefectly precise dates for some historical events.

Overwrought

This article from Bruce Fein in the Washington Times seems a bit overdone to me. It's the usual "we've done gone to Hell in a handbasket" bit that every generation comes up with as they look back to Washington and Jefferson and then look around at their own era's US Grant or Harry Truman or, God help us, Jimmy Carter.

Sure, things have gone downhill ever since we first headed east from Eden. Every generation looks at their youngsters and foretells disaster; forty years later those youngsters look at theirs and foretell the same. And yet it all works out somehow and we keep stumbling along.

Historians as the custodians of memory

A good article from Jonathan Jarrett at A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe:

...we seem now to be watching the Great War crossing that threshold of about three generations whereafter it will be difficult for people to be attached to its memory any longer. It will join the other stuff that we study in the past, where relevance is not immediately apparent and has to be argued, or else can even, eventually, be disowned because popular attachment is now so weak that just interest is a more powerful justification, which puts you about where I was with the previous post in this series. And it will be our job as historians, is already some of our jobs, to try and bring stuff like that back as far as it can be brought back, and to try and tell what it was and what it was like, with imaginative reconstruction where necessary and steadfast adherence to the evidence where possible and so on.

My new theory of the Civil War

In its legal or constitutional essense it wasn't a war between the states, and it wasn't north versus south. It was the national government versus a breakaway sectional government. I haven't thought this through, of course, because I have code to write and diapers to change and cigarettes to smoke.

Intro to the Constitution

If you've forgotten your basic Constitutional principles, here's an introduction from a reliable source: James McClellan: Liberty, Order, and Justice: An Introduction to the Constitutional Principles of American Government (1989).

That's at the Online Liberty Library at the Liberty Fund; here's an obituary of James McClellan, who died in 2005.

An ugly similarity

I haven't thought this through, but this sort of Confederate apologetics sounds like a petulant spouse trying to justify divorce:

The Gettysburg Address was brilliant oratory, but it was also political subterfuge. As H.L. Mencken pointed out, it was the Southerners who were fighting for the consent of the governed and it was Lincoln's government that opposed them. They no longer consented to being governed by Washington, DC. Lincoln's admonition that government "of the people, by the people, for the people" would perish from the earth if the right of secession were sustained was equally absurd. The United States remained a democracy, and the Confederate States of America would have been a democratic country as well. Lincoln's notion that secession would "destroy" the government of the United States is also bizarre in light of the fact that after secession took place the US government fielded the largest and best-equipped army and navy in the history of the world up to that point for four long years.

From lewrockwell.com via the wikipedia entry for Paleoconservatism. I once leaned toward the 1980s pre-internet sort of paleoconservatism with its then-excellent magazine Chronicles and Pat Buchanan's autobiography. I left them when I discovered they're shot through with Jew-hatred.

Internet challenge

This afternoon I challenged our 10-year-old train expert and master googler Christopher to find (in 2 minutes) a picture taken at the completion of the transcontinental railway at Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869. In 90 seconds he had found an entire website devoted to the area: the Golden Spike National Historical Site (complete with the old photos I was thinking of). Here's a history text written by National Park historians Robert M. Utley and Francis A. Ketterson, Jr.

What's the Latin word for haggis?

A second-century Roman tombstone has been discovered near Carberry in Musselburgh, East Lothian, east of Edinburgh. (Is that the right way to specify a town? Here in the States we'd just give Town Name, State.)

Coverage in The Scotsman here and here; there's a small picture of the tombstone in the BBC report. Here's a website devoted to Romans in Scotland.

The Medieval Bestiary

The Medieval Bestiary: Animals in the Middle Ages - an excellent collection of lore, electronic texts and medieval illustrations.

A dozen late antiquities

From Peter Brown's lecture:

It was soon apparent to me that each country had its own classical tradition, its own late antiquity and, very much, its own conflict of Christianity and paganism. To pick up the unmistakable tone of a laïc Frenchman in the Empire chrétien of André Piganiol, of a conservative Catholic in an Italian journal or of a Lutheran contributor to the Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte was much more than to discover the "bias" of a particular article. It was to add alternative layers to one’s own heart and mind, by seeing one’s own preoccupations with Christianity in the last centuries of the Roman Empire from the standpoint of European cultures very different from one’s own.

On saving space junk

A neat interview with Alice Gorman (aka Dr Space Junk) of Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, about the junk orbiting the earth.

Late Antique man

Here's Peter Brown's recent inaugural address (pdf) at the opening of the Oxford Center for Late Antiquity. A random bibliophilic quote:

Only recently, I experienced a feeling of strangeness as I sat at home, reading Morin's edition of newly discovered sermons of Augustine, printed in the 1930 centenary collection of Miscellanea Agostiniana. There was good reason for this sense of unease. This massive tome with its generous print and wide margins had its allotted place in the Theology section of the Lower Bodleian. To be precise, it was near to the window overlooking the inner courtyard, to the left as you entered from Classics. To think of removing it from that place was as inconceivable as to think of removing a feature from a well-known landscape - like stealing the Rock of Gibraltar or removing the head of Washington from Mount Rushmore. A few hours later, to place pages of this volume across a xerox machine, so as to make copies of Sermon Denis 24 for the use of a seminar, awoke in me an Oedipal thrill which (in the 1950s) would have kept the Freudian analysts of that distant age in business.

The decline and fall of the moustache

A fun article in the Telegraph, via the Irish Elk. An excerpt:

Strict etiquette was enforced regarding the care of the fashionable accessory. In the 1880s, Rudyard Kipling wrote of a woman who complained that being kissed by a man who did not wax his moustache was like eating an egg without salt.

When the First World War began, it was compulsory for all British officers to have a moustache. Poignantly, that edict was revoked in October 1916, because the new recruits were so young that some could not rustle up more than a thin, mousey streak.

New books for my library

My Google Books library, that is.

• Gregory the Great, Rev. J. Barmby, 1892; Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge
• Gregory the Great: His Place in History and Thought, volume 1, Frederick Holmes Dudden, 1905 Longmans, Green
• The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages, 3rd edition, Henry Osborn Taylor, 1911 The Macmillan Company
• A History of Latin Literature, Leonhard Schmitz, 1877, William Collins, Sons, & Company
• The Dark Ages, William Paton Ker, 1904, C. Scribner's sons
• Fifty Spiritual Homilies of St. Macarius the Egyptian, translated by Arthur James Mason, 1921, Macmillan
• Aelfric: A New Study of His Life and Writings By Caroline Louisa White, 1898 Lamson, Wolffe and Company
• The Complete Works of Venerable Bede: In the Original Latin, John Allen Giles, 1843, Whittaker
  • volume 1 (check out the initial capital letters!)
  • volume 2
  • volume 5
  • volume 6
  • volume 7
  • volume 8
  • volume 10
  • volume 11
• The Homilies of the Anglo-Saxon Church (this is a starting-point to track down the many volumes of this series for a future blog post)
• The London Charterhouse: Its Monks and Its Martyrs, with a Short Account of the English Carthusians After the Dissolution, Dom Lawrence Hendriks, 1889, K. Paul, Trench & Co.

Mannahatta Island, 1609

Found in the the New Yorker, a project dedicated to reconstructing the pre-European ecology of Manhattan Island (there are a few very cool reconstructed pastoral scenes at the website):

The aim of the Mannahatta Project is to reconstruct the ecology of Manhattan when Henry Hudson first sailed by in 1609 and compare it to what we know of the island today. The Mannahatta Project will help us to understand, down to the level of one city block, where in Manhattan streams once flowed or where American Chestnuts may have grown, where black bears once marked territories, and where the Lenape fished and hunted. Most history books dispense of the pre-European history of New York in only a few pages. However, with new methods in geographic analysis and the help of a remarkable 18th-century map, we will discover a new aspect of New York culture, the environmental foundation of the city.

Historical anatomy books online

Here, courtesy of the US National Library of Medicine in Bethesda MD. Fascinating stuff! Here's a plate from William Cheselden's 1733 Osteographia, or The anatomy of the bones:

What Every Medievalist Should Know

Here's James Marchand's annotated bibiography of the basic subjects. A great starting point for google searches.

That beautiful sound

It's strange that the instruments of war should be so beautiful. Here's a video of an airshow this year in Blenheim, New Zealand, that featured seven Fokker Dr I triplanes, a Fokker D VII, a SE5a, a Sopwith Camel, and a Nieuport. You can find details of the planes here.

Google Maps & YouTube test

Here's the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery in France; the Meuse-Argonne offensive began today in 1918.

And here's a video of the cemetery and memorial: