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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.


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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.

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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.

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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.


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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