Francis Galton

I had never heard of this man before this week, and now I have heard of him twice: on Tuesday at the Ink edition of University College London's amazing Bright Club courtesy of Natasha McEnroe, curator of the Galton Collection, and then on Wednesday at a British Computer Society event on biometrics. For he was the first person to make a scientific study of fingerprints, and give the discipline of fingerprinting the authority it needed before it could be used in criminal cases.
A cousin of Charles Darwin, he was interested in how Darwin's principles of selection could be applied to humans, and coined the word eugenics for the idea. For the better end of breeding, he looked no further than his own family: here's how he mapped out the brilliance of his nearest and dearest:

The first "brilliant" on row 3 is Charles Darwin: the second is Galton himself.
Galton took his principles of eugenics on tour, creating the Beauty Map of Britain. This involved his loitering in various cities, recording his ratings of the women who passed by. To spare embarrasment, he did this by pricking holes in a piece of paper in his pocket: at the top for "worst", in the middle for "so-so", and at the bottom for "best" London ranked highest; Aberdeen lowest.

The lengths to which Galton would go to save the blushes of the women he wished to calibrate in the cause of science are also shown in this excerpt from his The Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa (1853):

The object of my admiration stood under a tree, and was turning herself about to all points of the compass, as ladies who wish to be admired usually do. Of a sudden my eye fell upon my sextant; the bright thought struck me, and I took a series of observations upon her figure in every direction, up and down, crossways, diagonally, and so forth, and I registered them carefully upon an outline drawing for fear of any mistake; this being done, I boldly pulled out my measuring tape, and measured the distance from where I was to the place she stood, and having thus obtained both base and angles, I worked out the results by trigonometry and logarithms.

History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

Pivot Charts: Charles and Diana announce engagement, 24th February 1981

An occasional series on how the world's major events have not affected its pop music charts.

Week ending	#1 Artist	#1 Song
24/02/81	Joe Dolce	Shaddap You Face
03/03/81	Joe Dolce	Shaddap You Face

History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

Monk wars

Clonmacnoise

Thanks to BBC radio series A short history of Ireland (in 240 episodes) I now know that in 760,  the abbot of the monastery at Clonmacnoise led his monks against those at Birr, and 200 died in the ensuing battle. They were at it again in 764. More here.

History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

Digging for gold

 Samuel Pepys has been making some interesting posts lately on his twitter account. In October 1667 Pepys was coming back to London from Brampton with his life savings. Following Michiel de Ruyter's devastating raid on the English navy in Chatham dock in June of that year, Pepys felt London might be next. Being a high-up naval man himself, might have had more knowledge of the situation than many.

So it was he sent his wife up to Brampton in Cambridgeshire, where his uncle Robert lived, and there she buried their stock of gold coins in his garden. This was a bit of a theme in the Pepys family: Samuel had buried a particularly expensive cheese in the garden of his London house to protect it from the Great Fire of the previous year. In October of 1667, once the Treaty of Breda looked like it had put an end to the Anglo-Dutch War, the Pepys family returned to Brampton to retrieve it. It wasn't an unmitigated success, for the bags had rotted, and their attempt to root out the individual pieces left them 30 short. They worked by candlelight and in hushed tones in case the neighbours worked out what was going on, Pepys exasperated to find out they had buried the gold only 6 inches under the ground and in full view of the neighbours.

On the carriage trip back to London, the still-jumpy Pepys was afraid that the bottom of the baggage compartment might give way with the weight of the coins, so he had it transferred to the hand luggage. As far as we know, the missing 30 pieces of gold are still somewhere in Brampton. Happy hunting!

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Anne of Cleves

Happy birthday (for yesterday) Anne of Cleves. That's the one whom Henry VIII is supposed to have called a "fat Flanders mare" when they first met, and although as far as we can tell that phrase wasn't recorded until over 200 years after the event, it is fair to say that they did not click as a couple. Nevertheless it remains one of Henry VIII's least unhappy marriages. Brought together for political reasons that were already disappearing before the best man's speech, the couple held off from consummating the marriage (once bitten twice shy, in his case) and it was easily annulled a few months later. By that stage, Henry had his eye on Catherine Howard.

Catherine turned out to be a blessing in disguise. In exchange for a quick and amicable separation, Henry granted Anne £3000 per year for life, and she remained in England a very wealthy and exceptionally independent woman.
History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

My Coney Island Baby

Delighted to learn that the funfair on Coney Island housed a baby incubator display. Dr Martin Couney's "Incubator Baby Exhibits" were a regular feature at the World's Fairs, as well as at their permanent site on Coney Island. In part this is because it was one of the most electrically endowed sites in the USA; but is is also because ticket sales funded his pioneering treatment of premature babies, and Coney Island guaranteed a high freak-show-friendly footfall. In August 1904 half a million people turned out to see the world's tiniest baby fight for its one-pound-six-ounce life (it succeeded, and according to the New York Times of September 4th, met the smallest woman in the world).

History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

Killer Cucumbers

I take as my text this page of free-for-all footnotes to Pepys' Diary, on the subject of cucumbers, as it serves as a pretty good selective social history of the vegetable. I was led there from a line in a song in Gay's Beggar's Opera:

As men should serve a cowcumber, she flings herself away

Serve, of course, mainly as in "treat", not as in "arrange nicely on a plate". Cowcumber was the prevailing spelling and pronunciatiom. One of those Pepys footnotes quotes "It is said that the antique name of cowcumber arose because the fruit was thought fit only for cows". Said by whom we don't know. It's not the full-on etymology, which in either its cow- or cu- form comes straight from the Latin cucumis, but could at a pinch explain a cheeky variation.

Certainly the cucumber was not in much favour in the days of Pepys or Gay. It shows up in Pepys' diary in a health scare: on September 22nd 1663, Pepys hears of the second man allegedly dead from eating that particular green peril within the space of days.
On the subject of flinging cucumbers away, the footnote to that line in the Beggar's Opera in my (D. W Lindsay) edition has "Eighteenth-century physicians were said to recommend that a cucumber should be carefully sliced and dressed, then thrown away", which although a lovely image raises more questions than is answers and is ultimately unsatisfactory. I am rather more inclined to think of the excerpt from John Evelyn quoted on that Pepys footnote page: "it not being long, since Cucumber, however dress’d, was thought fit to be thrown away, being accounted little better than Poyson." That's from a 1699 book all about salad, so ought to know. It was published chronologically slap-bang in between Pepys and Gay: so either Gay was behind the times, or else Evelyn's attempts to rehabilitate the cucumber had proved fruitless. The image I'm left with is one of an unwanted garnish of cucumber, probably pickled, ejected from one's food, a tradition which continues for the reviled Big Mac gherkin to this day.

Image by Michael Sporn.

History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

Burning Down the White House

1812 was an exciting year. Not just for Napoleon's trip to Moscow and back, with those scenes in War and Peace and the Tchaikovsky overture with the cannons, but for parallel goings-on across the pond in the War of 1812, when the United States declared war on the British Empire, for reasons including trade restrictions.

The trade restrictions had come about like this. Napoleon, beaten militarily by British forces but still strong in Europe, forbade traders from France and her allies from trading with Britain. Britain responded in similar terms, preventing French traders from trading with Britain's colonies. Britain, with its superior navy, did a much better job of enforcing its side of the argument than France could.

Thus the United States took matters into its own hands. A medium-complexity war ensued and on this day in 1814, the British army got into Washington and burned down the White House and the Treasury. Nowadays th War of 1812 is most often recalled when people are arguing whether the USA has ever lost a war or not. It is difficult to talk about winners and losers in the War of 1812 because it concluded in an even-handed peace with no land changing ownership.

That's as far as the major powers are concerned. Amongst the less enfranchised, some slaves did relatively well, with several thousand escaping to freedom. Native Americans did very badly, losing their last chance of autonomy.

History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

Cordoba Initiative

Reactions and overreactions to the plan to build a mosque (or not a mosque) at Ground Zero (or not at ground zero). Indeed it is not going to be at Ground Zero (i.e. on the site of the World Trade Center): it is going to be near ground zero, and replacing a building that was damaged in the 9/11 attack, but not actually replacing the World Trade Center so not strictly speaking at Ground Zero. A technical win for the liberals there.

And indeed it is not going to be a mosque - it is planned to be "a world-class facility which will house a mosque". So it will have a mosque but not be one. Whether this "have" is one of aggregation (like a horse has 4 legs) or one of composition (like a square has 4 sides) is a moot point to leave for another day. But the point is that the building will have strong elements of mosquiness, and even if it didn't it would have strong elements of Islam, and anybody who thought it valid to be offended by a mosque on the site would I suspect still think it valid to be offended by an Islamic organisation on the site. We will probably have to score that one to the conservatives.

The other question is how prominent it will be. The picture shown here is from Wikipedia and the only one I could find (in the half hour allotted for my blog posts). The official websites for the Cordoba Initiative and Park 51 don't use it, so I shouldn't rely on it. Anyway it has no domes, minarets or giant crescents, but nor is it shrinking hand-wringingly into the background.

 Now, this is a history blog, and what interests me most is the name. Not the name of the building (Park 51) but the name of the project to build it (Cordoba House) which was also at one point the intended name for the building. I think that is true at the time of writing but it is all very confusing and it may not be true next month. According to the Cordoba Initiative, "The name Cordoba was chosen carefully to reflect a period of time during which Islam played a monumental role in the enrichment of human civilization and knowledge". Much of the promotional information about this decision stresses the peaceful coexistence of Muslim, Christian and Jewish citizens, just as the Koran requires, in 8th-11th century Cordoba (in Andalucia). Of course, as is to be expected from a 360 year period of history, there were wrinkles in the general theme of tolerance: as the 48 Martyrs of Cordoba were keen to testify at the time. However the main element of controversy is that this peaceful coexistence was under an Islamic caliphate that was established by the decidedly non-peaceful conquest of Cordoba in 711. For a centre dedicated to exploring questions of the price of peaceful coexistence it is an excellent choice of name.

History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

Guantanamera

Up till recently I'd thought of Guantanamera as a cheesy folky pop song. Only when hearing a poet (who served Saddam Hussein as a human shield in the first Gulf War and goes by the name of "The Singing Marxist") sing and simultaneously translate it a capella in a room above a pub in St Giles' did I start to appreciate its powerful message. That also explained why Vanessa Redgrave chose it to sing as part of her Vietnam war protest. The verses, translated:

I am an honest man from where the palm tree grows
and before I die I want to throw my poetry from my soul.

My poetry is clear green and burning red;
my poetry is a wounded stag seeking shelter on the mountain.

I want to throw my lot in with the poor people of the world.
The mountain stream pleases me more than the sea.

Those aren't the original verses. The original verses, along with the tune, were written probably by a Cuban songwriter in the late 1920s, and were about meeting a girl from Guantanamo - hence title and chorus, which have survived unmolested. The other word in the chorus, Guajira, means "peasant girl", but to add to the confusion, Guajira is also a type of Cuban folk song and that is how people unaware of the song's previous incarnation have sometimes translated it.

The verses we have now were plucked selectively from the first few pages of Versos Sencillos by Cuban revolutionary writer/philosopher José Martí, who had died in the Cuban War of Independence shortly after writing his literary will (see verses 1 and 3).


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The Poplar Tree Incident

Or the Axe Murder Incident  if you don't mind knowing in advance how it ended. Out of all the various August 18th anniversaries, today I'm noting this skirmish on the Military Demarcation Line between North and South Korea in 1976.

An unruly poplar tree was obscuring the view from a United Nations Command observation post. A US-led South Korean gardening expedition was sent out to trim a few branches. A party of North Korean guards interrupted them, saying that the tree had been planted personally by the Great Leader Kim Il Sung and should not be touched. The UNC party carried on with their pruning, and were attacked by the North Korean guards. In the ensuing fight some axes were dropped by the UNC party, and these were used to kill the two American officers who led the expedition. The rest escaped back over the Bridge of No Return.

The UN, with swift (and Swiftian) resolve, in response mounted "Operation Paul Bunyan", Paul Bunyan being a North American folk legend: a giant lumberjack. Some of the childhood myths surrounding Paul Bunyan might have resonated with the Great Leader's fans across the border: as a baby it took three storks to bring him to his parents instead of the usual one; and when he first learned to clap he did it with such force that the shockwaves broke all the windows in the house. Operation Paul Bunyan used an overwhelming force of over 800 men, with assorted automatic weapons, vehicles and air support, to chop the tree down once and for all.

History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

Peterloo Hunt Breakfast

There's been a rally in Manchester today to mark the "Peterloo" massacre of August 16th 1819.  An order by magistrates to disperse a crowd of demonstrators in St Peter's Field was interpreted as a cavalry charge which killed 15 and injured hundreds. The crowd had turned out to hear the revolutionary campaigner Henry Hunt, who was jailed for his part in the meeting, and whose policy of mass nonviolent agitation was not entirely unlike Mahatma Gandhi's satyagraha.

Where Hunt's approach differed from Gandhi's was his use of merchandise. He took to advertising the radical cause on promotional jars of shoe polish, bearing the snappy slogan "Equal Laws, Equal Rights, Annual Parliaments, Universal Suffrage, and the Ballot." He also developed a tie-in soft drink: his Breakfast Powder was billed as "most salubrious and nourishing Beverage that can be substituted for the use of Tea and Coffee, which are always exciting, and frequently the most irritating to the Stomach and Bowels." Practical revolution in the style of Amelia Bloomer (see earlier post).

Breakfast Powder was made from roasted corn, and given that he was campaigning for the repeal of laws that had made corn too expensive for the poor, he wouldn't be the last politician to position his finances with a view to future legislation.


History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

Grand Frère

French protorevolutionary Jean-Jacques Rousseau shot from obscurity to fame and fortune (well, patronage at least) after he entered an essay competition advertised in literary magazine "Le Mercure de France". The competition was organised by the Academy of Dijon, and the question set was "Has the restoration of the sciences and arts tended to purify or corrupt morals?" On the advice of future encyclopedist Diderot, he argued devil's advocate for "corrupt", and won.

If pre-revolutionary France had got its celebrities via the modern Reality TV route, the revolution might never have happened. Alternatively, if it had still happened, its leaders would have been very well prepared for the Reign of Terror.

History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

I go, I go. Look how I go! Swifter than arrow from the Tartar's bow!

Went for a run over Primrose Hill earlier this evening, and followed a well-worn path through a little bit of scrubland down the other side. It was such a well-worn path that I assumed it led back to the road, but it didn't. Somewhat off-puttingly, it ended in a dingy corner and a large bush.
Of course it made me think of the love scene with Titania and Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream. In particular, this image:

Sleep thou, and I will wind thee in my arms,
Fairies, be gone, and be all ways away.
So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle
Gently entwist

You see, honeysuckle grows clockwise, whereas woodbine (i.e. bindweed) grows anti-clockwise. Impressive stuff (though Flanders and Swann do make a meal of it).
A Midsummer Night's Dream is dated around 1596 - and it was on this day of August 11th in 1596 that Shakespeare's only son, Hamnet, died, aged 11. More fanciful readers might identify this as the start of a transitional period in Shakespeare's career, seeing him start treating more serious themes such as age and responsibility, through The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It and the second history tetralogy.

The picture is Joy Coghill as Puck in Midsummer Night‘s Dream (1961). Photo by Franz Linder.

History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

Bad results for Republicans

On this 9th August, two anniversaries of regime change. Firstly the resignation in 1974 of US President Richard Nixon, following the Watergate scandal. His vice president Gerald Ford replaced him, thus becoming the only US president never to have been elected president or vice-president. He had been appointed vice-president the previous year, when Nixon's first vice-president, Spiro Agnew, resigned amidst criminal charges of corruption.

Although the US republicans recovered from that low point, the Roman republican cause never recovered after the its defeat at the battle of Pharsalus on August 9th, 48 BC. Republican forces under Pompey were beaten back when they tried to attack the legions that Julius Caesar controlled as governer of Gaul; and ultimately, Caesar was able effectively to convert Rome into an empire (though he got assassinated before he had a chance to become its first emperor).


History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

Hiroshima day

Hiroshima day.

History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

Animal missiles

At a delightful Camden Fringe show last night, Helen Keen's It Is Rocket Science, I learned all about Project X-Ray. Work on Project X-Ray began the month after the attack on Pearl Harbour, and was to involve dropping a large number of chilled and hibernating bats, each carrying a miniature incendiary device, over Japanese towns. The bats would thaw out and wake up - hopefully before they hit the ground - and spend the timers' alloted half-hour infiltrating the local bat community amongst the rafters of the town before bursting into flames. The plan was ultimately dropped in favour of the atomic bomb.

Another aborted animal explosive project was the pigeon-guided torpedo. The explosive and propulsive aspects of the torpedo (aka "The egg that moves itself and burns") had long been addressed by Middle Eastern scholars in the 13th century, but guidance was another matter. A 1950s US plan to solve this involved a pigeon, which had been trained to peck at the centre of a piece of paper in the shape of an enemy battleship. When placed in the nose of a torpedo, with a clear view of a real enemy ship through a sheet of electrically conductive glass (rather like an iPhone screen), the pigeon's pecks could be used to control the torpedo's rudder. Like the bat bomb, the pigeon guided torpedo was shelved when superior technology came along - electronics in this case.


Of course the history of animals in warfare is roughly as old as warfare itself. It has included Cyrus's camels, which caused enemy horses to panic when they got a scent of them at the Battle of Thymbra in 547 BC, as recorded by Xenophon; Hannibal's elephants; and the donkey-cart rocket launchers used recently in Iraq and Afghanistan.


History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

A holiday from history

After all this history, a word on some people who just don't bother with it. The culture of the Pirahã tribe in the Amazon rainforest is so unconcerned with the past or future that for a long time their language was believed not to have tenses. There is some debate on which of these phenomena - that they don't have any history, or that they don't talk about it - is the cause and which is the effect. Cause and effect is also something they have difficulty expressing, because their language doesn't really have subordinate clauses.
Another thing they don't have is words for left and right: your left hand is your upriver hand or your downriver hand, depending on which way you are facing.

The best non-academic read about the Pirahã, (short of an actual book, obviously) is probably this New Yorker essay.


History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

Pivot Charts: Pearl Harbour, 7th December 1941

An occasional series on how major world events have not affected the US Billboard Chart.

Week ending	#1 Artist	#1 Song
06/12/41	Glenn Miller	Chattanooga Choo Choo
13/12/41	Glenn Miller	Chattanooga Choo Choo

History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

The Third Wave

A low-profile German film called "The Wave" was on television the other day. It's based on the "Third Wave" experiment, carried out as part of a politics class at a high school in Palo Alto, California, in 1967. The teacher Ron Jones started with a class of students (picture them sitting cross-legged on tattered grass in their sheepskin coats and calico dresses) incredulous of how so many people supported the Fascist and Nazi movements of 1930s Europe, and decided to play a trick on them that would give them a taste of Fascism.

He started by introducing a bits of stage business to his lessons - desks in straight rows; Wagner on the record player, a special salute.  He also introduced a few mottos: Strength Through Discipline; then Strength Through Community; finally Strength Through Action. Most (not all) of the students really got into it. Other students from other classes also got interested, and Jones had to think of a way of "initiating" them into the movement. A few students tittle-tattled on their less dedicated colleagues. After 4 days Jones stopped the experiment out of fear that the movement had got too strong, no doubt wagging his finger and saying "now do you understand?" as the scales fell from his students eyes.


Of course, he had not introduced them to anything like Fascism. He had avoided any political position. He had just given them a glimpse of a bit of discipline and community spirit, both of which were anathema to the prevailing ideology of individual expression that held sway in the field of education in late-60s California, and liable to be mistaken for Fascism amongst the less rigorous left wing thinkers. It could just as well have been an introduction to Communism, the Navy, or supporting West Ham. (As Slavoj Zizek has said on the matter: "Strength through discipline; strength through community; strength through action: where's the problem?)

I shouldn't be too harsh on Ron Jones. He was a high school teacher, not a psychologist, and he did make a point, although it wasn't exactly the one he wanted to make. I don't know how much he would have known about the more famous and more disturbing Milgram experiment (aka the Yale Experiment) which began in 1961 and fills in the gap between Jones' ersatz community movement and an acquiescence in atrocities.

Milgram's experiment was set up to explore a related question: whether people who participated in the Holocaust had necessarily shared its aims. Milgram's volunteers were asked to help a scientist (in fact an actor) by delivering what they thought were increasingly painful, and ultimately fatal electric shocks, to a test subject (another actor). They all protested strongly; but all except one went ahead with the maximum voltage. The experiment ultimately showed that people will do anything if a man in a white coat with a clipboard tells them it's for the best.


History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

Air travel

Today I salute the town of Croydon, Surrey, for its pioneering role in transport. For it was on this day in 1803 that the Surrey Iron Railway opened, linking it up with Mitcham and Wandsworth. It has been called the first public railway. It was public in the sense that it was open to anybody, as long as they had a train to put on it; and, this being a few years before the age of steam, a horse to pull it. Bits of it survive today as part of Croydon's latest groundbreaking transport initiative, the much loved Croydon Tramlink which brought trams to the London area for the first time in 50 years.

A more ambitious though ultimately unsuccessful rail project connected Croydon with London Bridge in the 1840s. This "atmospheric railway" used pneumatic propulsion. A piston would be propelled along a cast iron vacuum pipe (pictured) running between the rails. The pipe had a leather valve so that a connecting rod could fix the piston to the train.  It would have had the advantage of keeping the engines, and all their smoke, well away from the train in separate "pumping stations". It only lasted a few months, due partly to problems with the leather valves, especially at points.

The town's next transport innovation was to host the first airport in the world to have air traffic control, introduced in 1921 when Croydon was London's main airport, and it was the height of fashion for silent film stars and glamourous flappers to be photographed cavorting down Purley Way.


History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

Crisis? What crisis?

In 1839, when the man in the street was busy joining the Chartist movement and founding the Anti-Corn Law League, the young Queen Victoria was busy involving herself in a typically Victorian bedroom scandal. Prime Minister Lord Melbourne of the Whig party (the party of the landowning ascendancy) wanted to resign, and recommended that Victoria should appoint Robert Peel of the up & coming, urban, reforming Tory party to succeed him. Victoria made Peel the offer, but he would only accept if Victoria made some changes to the personnel of her bedchamber. Many of her ladies-in-waiting were the wives of Whig politicians, and Peel thought that with their influence on the Queen behind closed doors, a Tory prime minister wouldn't last very long. He didn't have a majority in the Commons: besides which, he must have had a sense of inverted deja-vu.

For Peel had been Prime Minister once already. In 1834, Lord Melbourne had succeeded Earl Grey as PM, with a large Commons majority for the Whigs. Those were troubled times, and even though Melbourne wasn't a natural reformer, he felt pressured into adopting a reform agenda to avoid a revolution. King William IV however thought he was going too far, and replaced Melbourne with Peel. Peel failed to gain a majority in the 1835 election, so within a year Melbourne was back in again. In fact that turned out to be the last time an English sovereign would sack a Prime Minister: but of course only 5 years later, Peel wasn't to know that. If he was going to take the job on again, things would have to be different.

Unfortunately for him, the 19-year-old Victoria was barely 2 years into her reign and also needed to make a show of strength. She refused to make any changes to her boudoir line-up. Peel turned the job down and Melbourne agreed to stay on. Fortunately for Peel, he didn't have to wait very long to get the job on acceptable terms. By the time he won a comfortable majority in the 1841 election, Victoria had married her Prince Albert, and with a strong man on hand could be trusted not to have her head turned by her attendants' Whig wiles.




History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

The Monkey Trial

Today's the anniversary of the Scopes Trial verdict. In 1925 it became illegal in the state of Tennessee to teach evolution, and within the year John Scopes, a sports coach subbing for a biology teacher at the time, was successfully prosecuted. Although also  known as the Monkey Trial, no monkeys were directly involved in the trial: they were outside on the courtroom lawn performing for the amassed global media circus. The trial was reinvented for the McCarthyite era in the play Inherit the Wind.

History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

Bloomers

1848 - a revolutionary year. So revolutionary that the Wikipedia article "Revolutions of 1848" starts with a small list of the major European countries that did not have a national revolution, before discussing the majority that did. In February of that year, Karl Marx had set the tone with his Manifesto of the Communist Party.

On July 19th 1848, the village of Seneca Falls NY began a two day convention on women's rights that would get its name on the revolutionary map. As well as making a particularly rousing declaration, it made a significant stride into practical revolution when local resident Amelia Bloomer introduced her eponymous underwear. Although premiered in 1848, they did not get a significant public outing until the summer of 1851 (Crystal Palace wasn't the only Great Exhibition of that year).

For the first time, women could do a bit of basic athletics without showing any more leg than Victorian morality prescribed. Combined with bicycles a few decades later, they gave women an unprecedented freedom of mobility (the bicycle has its own starring role in the revolutionary movement, which I might look into one day). Patriarchy did not take kindly to bloomers: they were vilified in the press, and the New York Times describes with relish the arrest of two "disorderly bloomers" (the word denoting the wearer - compare "hoodies") for the shocking act "of unblushingly stopping gentlemen, with their wives".



History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

Happy birthday parking meter!

Happy 75th birthday to the parking meter, first installed on this day in 1935 in Oklahoma City. However the parking meter's annus mirabilis did not come until 1967. For this is the year in which the Beatles recorded their celebration of the parking meter, Lovely Rita, featuring John, Paul and George on the comb-and-toilet-paper. It is also the year in which New York city hired its first male member of its "meter maid" crew. And in 1967's Cool Hand Luke, we first meet Paul Newman's egg-loving character sawing the heads off a host of parking meters. They'd have you believe '67 was the Summer of Love, but really it was all about those meters.

History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

Chatsworth loft sale

The Duke of Devonshire is clearing out Chatsworth (that is to say the stately home, not the fictional Manchester council estate) with the help of Sothebys. (Pictured: the stables.) As you'd expect, they are an interesting family - possibly even more interesting than the Gallaghers. Cavendish by name, they might have got their startup money from some opportunism during the Dissolution of the Monasteries before achieving their Earldom under James I. The 4th Duke was briefly Prime Minister - this was during a particularly rough patch towards the start of the 7 Years War. His predecessor the Duke of Newcastle had stood down in 1756 amidst heavy criticism, but would be back 6 months later. His son was the Duke in The Duchess.
The 8th Duke was a leading Liberal politician who three times turned down offers from Queen Victoria to become Prime Minister. The present Dowager Duchess, possibly the least extreme of the ever-fascinating Mitford sisters, is offering her record player at the forthcoming sale. Bidders are expected to include some who might have got their startup money from some opportunism during the dissolution of Soviet industry.

History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

History.ppt

As an alternative to history in a spreadsheet, here are some bits of history in a diagram. They include impressive depictions of those two notorious puzzlers, the Wars of the Roses and Wall Street scandals.

History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

Arians and Axumites

Today the General Synod of the Church of England begins debates on not whether, but how, to start appointing  women bishops. The more option is to allow women simply to be bishops. The other option is to allow them technically to be bishops, but supervised by roving male superbishops to look after priests in the diocese who don't want to be looked after by female bishops. These superbishops would be able to dispense on-the-spot masculinity wherever the female bishop is inadequate (some of those croziers are awfully heavy after all). It has made me wish for the days of the First Council of Nicaea, when theological debate was about proper things - specifically on whether (with Arius) the Son was created by a superior pre-existing Father, or whether (with Athanasius) both are eternal and omnipotent.
Constantine called the Council of Nicaea because the Arian controversy was threatening to tear apart the religion that he had used to unite the Roman Empire, and he succeeded in establishing a creed that would get people quite literally singing from the same hymn sheet.
However I didn't realise until today that the 325, the year of the Council of Nicaea, was also the year in which the Aksumite Empire became officially Christian. (325 is around when its King Ezana was converted to Christianity by Frumentius, and Aksum became officially Christian by its own account. An alternative date of 328, when Frumentius had been given the all-clear by Patriarch Athanasius and returned to Aksum as its first bishop, is when Aksum became officially Christian from Orthodoxy's point of view).

Either way, surely that is the religious equivalent of watching a colleague's relief at adopting Windows 7 after years of struggling with Vista before you buy a computer yourself. Or something like that.


History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

Michiel de Ruyter

For reasons that will take quite long to climb clear of their wrong beginnings (and may never) I have been writing fictionally elsewhere about the famously all-thumbs executioner Jack Ketch, as seen through the eyes of Samuel Pepys. Pepys being a naval man and all, in order to fake some plausible authenticity I have been doing some background reading into the Anglo-Dutch wars: especially the Medway raid. That is when Admiral Michiel de Ruyter, a (old) Zealander, led the Dutch fleet right up to Chatham docks, towed away the British flagship, and burned at least a dozen other ships. Although his website is jolly diplomatic about it, there's a strong case that if they'd been contemporaries, he'd have knocked our Nelson into his famous cocked hat. He certainly served for longer and notched up a greater number of significant battles. De Ruyter also had the bright idea of coating the deck of his ship with butter and getting his men to fight in their stockinged feet for grip, so that any enemy sailors who attempted to board in their leather boots would slip over. Apparently his surviving relatives are allowed to have a peep in his tomb, but the combined effects of time and the Battle of Augusta (pictured) have left him not a pretty sight so the rest of us should not be jealous.

Congratulations to the Netherlands also on their more peaceable victory against Uruguay yesterday evening.

History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

Little-known Jacobite fact

James II of England spent most of his French exile sunbathing in Aviator sunglasses and a baseball cap.

(The portrait is by Nicolas de Largillière. Really I have no idea why he looks like that.)

History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

For want of a shield

Still haven't fully made up my mind about the Acharnians dating question. There's a bit of internal evidence that is intriguing me, but unhelpfully it's the kind of evidence that could support either case depending on how you react to it.
One of Aristophanes' stock jokes was about the Athenian general Cleonymus. Cleonymus committed the classic faux pas of throwing away his shield in (probably) the retreat at the battle of Delium in 424 BC, in order to make a quick getaway. There are jokes about Cleonymus as a boaster and a coward in every single one of Aristophanes' six surviving plays up until 414. He lays off him after that, for whatever reason - maybe he had made up with cleonymus over a couple of kylixes, or maybe it just wasn't funny after 10 years.

The Cleonymus joke in the Acharnians is pretty oblique. The characters are talking about a banquet in which a bird is served up "three times the size of Cleonymus. They called it the Boaster" - with a possible pun on phenax (boaster)/phoenix. It's possible to take this as evidence that Cleonymus, though already known as something of a braggart, can't have parted company with his shield at the time the play was written, or else Aristophanes would surely have made a more specific joke. But it's also possible to take it as the kind of subtle reference that a comedian might choose when referring to a very recent military defeat. He was after all playing to an Athenian crowd and trying to win a prize.

The relentless mockery of poor old Cleonymus can seem like a bit much, especially if you're reading the plays in chronological order, and it's easy to wonder why Aristophanes saw fit to keep the joke going for so long. I think it's being used as a deterrent. If you live in a small town at the head of an empire and reliant on its army, the last thing you want is people thinking it's anything other than irreparably shameful to throw away your shield and run away from a battle. Athens had no professional army and relied on its citizens to fight. Aristophanes might well have been at Delium too: many of his audience certainly had. He's more interested in upholding a moral imperative than in tickling your funny-bone.

If you want to find a similar warning in modern day Britain - that the loss of a shield will be the loss of an important plank of society - we have the message round the edge of a pound coin. If it's an English one, you'll see "DECUS ET TUTAMEN", which means "a decoration and a safeguard" - the point being that the decoration doesn't just make the coin look nice. It lets you know immediately if someone's been clipping little bits off the edge of the coin, thus devaluing it. This has admittedly been less of a problem since we started making pound coins out of a cheap copper/zinc alloy instead of gold. The Latin is from Virgil's Aeneid : one of the prizes in Anchises' funeral games is a fancy breastplate described thus. The inscription on Scottish pound coins, "NEMO ME IMPUNE LACESSIT", "nobody disturbs me and gets away with it", or as I prefer, "come and have a go if you think you're hard enough", makes the same point: the original refers to a thistle.

History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

A bigger boat

A "true story" from 1799, though I can't find it mentioned earlier than this Times article in 1835. Lieutenant Whylie of the "Sparrow" suspects a supposedly neutral ship, the "Nancy" of smuggling but his case doesn't look very strong and the "Nancy"'s captain brings a counter-claim. While waiting for the case to come up, Whylie visits a colleague, Commander Fitton of the "Ferret". Unexpectedly, Fitton is able to contribute vital evidence, having found the "Nancy"' s incriminating papers in the stomach of a shark that he had caught that morning. Another version of events is here.

History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

World population history stats

Added sporadic world population history figures, using data from Population Reference Bureau. I'll leave off interpolating as it would require more numerous and complex assumptions than I can justify.

The picture, by the way, shows Eaton's Santa Claus Parade, Toronto, 1926.

History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

Three timers

Have been charting the exploits of the resilient Athenian tyrant Peisistratus.

Three times he got Athens to suspend its famous democracy. The first time was in 560, when several factions had been vying for control of Athens. Peisistratus turned up in the market place, claimed he'd been victimised by his opponents, and was granted a bodyguard which he used to establish his HQ on the Acropolis (pre-Parthenon of course) and gain absolute power. Then around 555 a rival coalition managed to kick him out, but its head man, Megacles, couldn't maintain support and invited Peisistratus back to marry his daughter. When Peisistratus did return, he brought with him a young lady dressed as Athene, and everybody believed he had the goddess' support and let him begin a second period of power. This ended when Megacles accused Peisistratus of failing in his marital duties towards his daughter (he'd had no children by her, though he may have done with other women) and raised enough support to eject him again. This time he had to raise military support in Thebes and Naxos and defeat the Athenian army in open battle to regain power, which he held from around 535 until his death in 528/7.

It serves to remind you that Athenian politics (Roman politics too) was often more like The Godfather than The West Wing. It also got me thinking about other political three-timers. Like:

Dick Whittington
Famously thrice Mayor of London - the first two times run into each other, but the first term was appointed by Richard II and the second was elected. He gained the first term by buying the cash-strapped city's freedom out of his own pocket.

Peter Mandelson
Resigned from the cabinet firstly over a mortgage, secondly over a passport. Gordon Brown brought him back for a third stint by giving him a seat in the House of Lords. Although sitting in the Lords, the government took the usual step of also allowing him to speak in the Commons, to answer questions on his department. Last time that sort of thing happened we had a civil war. Fortunately this time, only a general election was required.

Winston Churchill
Only Prime Minister twice of course, but before the wilderness years of 1945-50 he'd already experienced another fallow period. Following his role in the Gallipoli landings of 1915 his glittering career took a deep dive, even including a spell in the Liberal party.

St John Chrysostom
Popular bishop of Constantinople, exiled in 403 (following a politically motivated trial that had only been made possible after John had dissed the empress's fashion sense) he was soon brought back only to be re-exiled by another synod in 404. Brought back in triumph in 438, though by this time he'd been dead for 31 years (yes, cheating a bit there).

W E Gladsone
An honourable mention, for he was Prime Minister 4 times. Twice alternating with Disraeli from 1868-1885; once briefly in 1886, only to see his party split over Ireland and have to hand over power to the Tories; finally, in his eighties, at the head of a minority government relying on Irish Nationalists.

History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

Two vales and an ave

Farewell Sebastian Horsley, who held out in Soho for the bohemian dream with the isolated determination of a Japanese WWII soldier holed up in late 60s Borneo. Most famous for having had himself crucified in the Philippines to inspire some paintings, and falling off the cross. He is survived by a one-man play based on his life at the Soho Theatre, a short kerb-crawl from his Meard Street flat.

His grandfather Alec, the founder of the Horsley fortune, was much more interesting. A Hull-based Quaker who started up a condensed milk factory that is now Northern Foods PLC, he turned his hand to prison reform and social causes. He was a founder member of CND and played tennis for Nigeria. If he was right and his grandson was wrong about the afterlife, there'll be some stern words at the pearly gates right now.

Also a shock to have lost the man behind Frank Sidebottom. He'll be missed by anyone who stopped in the North West over the past two and a half decades. Yes he will. He really really will.

History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

Poetic Offa Licence

(the titletaken perversely but irresistibly from Poetic Off Licence, a collection by Hovis Presley)

So congratulations to Geoffrey Hill for getting the Oxford Professor of Poetry job, ahead of my friend Michael Horovitz. Hill is the certainly the better poet, though Michael would have been the better professor. Hill is famously obscure in his references: but within the Oxbridge poetry establishment, where L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E still has a lot of sway, he is comparatively straightforward in his surface meaning. I am rather tempted by Peter Porter's dictum: "All poetry is LANGUAGE poetry: but not all LANGUAGE poetry is poetry".

If you fancy catching up with Hill, get yourself a copy of his "New & Collected Poems 1952-1992". This isn't straightforward: my copy is ex-library from a US naval college. But if you can, head for Mercian Hymns, his most accessible entire collection. It's about Offa of Mercia (of Dyke fame), the first man to call himself (on charters around 774) "King of the Angles". But here Offa is a modern dark age monarch who gets phone calls and plays with model aeroplanes, as elements of him are drawn from Hill's own Midlands childhood.

If you persist with Hill, you will find yourself in the company of Osip Mandelstam, Charles Peguy and Asmodeus: what's not to like?

History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

Mildew

My bathroom ceiling has got a touch of the mildew, so naturally I'll be turning to the Book of Leviticus. A small number of Christians and a large number of atheists would have you believe the Book of Leviticus is about homosexuality, but really it is hardly concerned with that at all, and mainly concerned with the proper treatment of mildew. Mildew was a serious business. The Hebrew original uses the word tzaraas, whose semantic field includes leprosy, amongst other types of infectious disfigurement. English translations (at least up to and including KJV) carried on talking about leprosy in buildings, leather and linen until they realised their syllogistic slip and brought in "mildew". That's far too nice a word for it. OED's first citation is the Old English mele-deawe: mele as in honey, deawe as in dew.

But this has got me to think about how to deal with biblical events in the history spreadsheet. Once the Israelites have established themselves in Israel, many of the historical events like changes of ruler and battles can be tallied against the records of the Assyria, Egypt and the like, although they sometimes veer out of line by a king or two. I don't see much of a problem putting things in the Middle East geographical column when they can be plausibly dated, especially as they are often more geopolitical than they are religious. There's a similar situation for the Gospels with respect to the Roman world.

As for events that are somewhat less historically convincing (Daniel in the lion's den? Elisha and the two bears?), I'd like to include them somewhere: for colour, and so that they bear comparison with what ever else was going on in the world when they are supposed to have happened. But it will be under a "religion" column, and people can be free to pick and choose which bits of that column they want to believe, or just use the "hide column" function.

History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

Acharnians

The first production date of Aristophanes' Acharnians was about to go in the spreadsheet, but I can't decide whether it was 426 or 425. I think the dispute is just over the date of the Lenaean festival in that year (December 426 or January 425), rather than which Lenaea it was, so it might not matter much. Anyway, I decided to reread the play instead. If you've got a spare hour, you can read the play and enough of introductions and footnotes to flesh it out.

It's Aristophanes at his earliest and roughest, but it's as self-aware as Tristram Shandy and bashes at the fourth wall like Brecht. Produced 6 years into the Peloponnesian War, its Rizla-thin plot follows a disaffected charcoal-burner named Dicaeopolis as he fails to persuade Athens to sue for peace with Sparta, so makes his own private peace treaty instead. We see the austerity of a fragile Athenian democracy trying to hang onto its freedoms. In the people of Megara we get a glimpse of deprived and depraved life in a battered, paranoid frontier town. It would be funnier if it wasn't happening right now in southern Kyrgyzstan, but of course it's not supposed to be.

History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

The Atlantic via Belgrave Square

During my saunter across town yesterday I had to stop and wait while a group of teenage tourists took a photograph. Not at all unusual in London, except that the thing being photographed was an unremarkable sketch on the tiled wall of Hyde Park Corner underpass, depicting Wellington's peninsular campaign. They proudly told me they were Portuguese and had come to visit their "Old Friend" England (Portugal being England's oldest ally, since 1373, as I happily told them but they already knew). It is always a pleasure to have my faith in the next generation restored.

I was on my way to Belgrave Square, where coincidentally the Portuguese embassy is located, as well as a newish statue of their countryman Ferdinand Magellan, and of another transatlantic voyager, Christopher Columbus. Belgrave Square is obviously trying to compensate for its role in a less successful transatlantic crossing, because it was at number 24 that Bruce Ismay, chairman of the White Star line, dropped by for dinner with Lord Pirrie, chairman of shipbuilders Harland and Wolff, one evening in 1907 and commissioned the Titanic.

History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

The Corn Law Rhymer

After hearing some 1980s style open mic ranty poetry earlier this week, and then spreadsheeting a few early c19th Prime Ministers, I wondered whether the reform movement of that time had its own People's Poet. Indeed it did and his name was Ebenezer Elliott. It's actually his real name, although enough time has passed for a modern day open-mic poet to adopt it again.

History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

World population

I've added a new column for estimated world population figures, and filled it in from 1950 to 2009 using United States Census Bureau data. I'll top it up with estimates for earlier years when I've decided whose data to use.

It turns out that something I knew about world population - that most of the humans who have ever lived are alive today, or to put it another way, that more people haven't died than have - is not true. It's not even close to true. It isn't even close to believable once you've thought about it for any length of time. An estimate of the number of people who have ever lived by the Population Reference Bureau in 2002 plumped for 106 billion, so the percentage of those who are lucky enough to be still with us is about 6%.
That also happens to be the percentage of people alive today who are on Facebook. That means only 0.36% of people who have ever lived are on Facebook, so I think I can hold out for a while longer.

History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

Out of sorts

Logging the first production dates of the Oresteia and a couple of Aristophanes plays yesterday, the spreadsheet looked alarmingly out of order. George I was following on from Elizabeth II. Turns out it had been somehow reorganized in alphabetical order of English monarchs.

Now I would usually champion any historiographical model that gets us away from the "Whig view", the temptation to read history as a progressive narrative from the didn't-know-any-better past to the morally superior present, but that was a bit extreme for me.

Whig history: the highlights.

It wasn't easy to reorder, because Google Spreadsheet's reorder button isn't enough of a mind-reader to put BC dates in descending order at the top, then AD in ascending order underneath.

So I've replaced the BC years with -ve numbers. It looks a bit odd, but it does have the advantage of sidestepping the "AD/BC" v "CE/BCE" debate. (For the record, AD/BC is obviously preferable.)


History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

Pivot Charts: 11th September 2001

An occasional series on how major world events have not affected the UK Singles Charts.

Week ending	#1 Artist	#1 Song
08/09/01	Blue	Too Close
15/09/01	Bob the Builder	Mambo No. 5
22/09/01	DJ Otzi	Hey Baby (Uhh, Ahh)

History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet

Restorations

Tomorrow we celebrate the 350th re-birthday of the English monarchy: Charles II restored to the throne by a nation which, after 11 years of puritan protectorate, was definitely in the mood to give Christmas Pudding another try. It's called Oak Apple Day, and apparently it's customary to whip children with a bunch of nettles if you catch them not wearing an oak leaf, or (if you're Royal) to inspect a Chelsea Pensioner. Here's Rufus Sewell, as Charles II, demonstrating the classic nettle-thrashing stance:


Also up for a biggie this year is Sri Potuluri Virabrahmendra Swamy, born in 1610, one of several mystics known as "The Nostradamus of India" (and I think they even mean that as a compliment). He was once given a job as a cow-herder, but was found skiving in a cave writing on leaves instead, having drawn a big circle around the cows and told them to stay within it. And, as you can read in his blog from beyond the grave, he knew how to handle a heckler sceptical about his own restorative powers.

Aloysius versus Winnie

Recording that A. A. Milne published "Winnie the Pooh" in the year of the General Strike (1926) has made me think of a couple of books that make use of a similar contrast between Eden-like tranquility, and large-scale strife. One is Brideshead Revisited (1945), in which Charles and some chums embark on a spot of blacklegging:

We were joined by a Belgian Futurist, who lived under the, I think, assumed name of Jean de Brissac la Motte, and claimed the right to bear arms in any battle anywhere against the lower classes.

The other is The Vermilion Box (1916), by E. V. Lucas. Lucas introduced Milne to the illustrator Ernest Shepard, who gave us the famous image of Winnie the Pooh that not even Disney dared to mess with much. Otherwise, Lucas was a veritable Vernon Coleman of his day, knocking out around 3 books per year on every subject under the sun (Swollen Headed William, If Dogs Could Write and The Hausfrau Rampant to name but 3). I read The Vermilion Box earlier this year for the simple reason that it contains the first known use in print of the phrase "Donkey's Years" (though it's actually "Donkey's Ears" there).

It's in the form of a collection of letters sent within several families who have members serving in the war, and I didn't actually realise it was fiction until 4 or 5 letters in. It's of little literary merit, and though it tries to embrace all walks of life it only succeeds from lower-middle class to upper-middle class. But it's interesting in being pitched knowingly, inoffensively and saleably in between the two views of WWI that we get today: the jingoism and the horror.

Although Disney were obliged to follow Shepard, I think I prefer the Soviet Russian bootleg, Vinni Puh.

Fox and the Rockinghamites

Have just added entries for UK Prime Ministers 1782-4. It's almost as if they didn't care about how easy the situation would be to summarise in 3 spreadsheet cells.

If that's how coalition governments work out, Parliament could be in for an interesting few years. Fortunately I don't think the Queen will get the chance to scupper a nationalisation bill and dismiss the government in a huff, like her great uncle George did in the good old days. So spare a thought for the 2nd Earl of Shelburne:

The whole thing has made him go quite pale.

So where is it?

Oh, where is it?
It is here.

History of the world

World history has never fitted in my head very well. I usually think of it as a travelling promotional roadshow, always happening somewhere, visiting some places more often than others, but never in more than one place at a time.

Let us consider the years up to and of World War I. In the early 1910s, History mainly happened to the Suffragettes in West London, before decamping to central Europe in time for the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. It spent the next few years in France and Belgium, with a citybreak in Dublin for Easter 1916 and a few months in Russia the following year, returning to London in 1918. There the Suffragettes, who had been patiently waiting for another go at History all this time, were rewarded by the 1918 Reform Act.

To widen my view of the world, I started this spreadsheet where events can nestle side by side, sometimes making excuses for each other (the first ever nuclear reactor and Mother Courage both created in 1941), sometimes shaking their heads in dismay (Byron enters the House of Lords as Napoleon enters Moscow), sometimes blissfully ignoring each other (the 1914 deaths of the aforementioned Archduke in Sarajevo, and Martha the last ever Passenger Pigeon in Cincinatti Zoo).