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