Category: History

Regarding this morning’s post, What Bill Clinton Hath Wrought?, a reader writes:

In all fairness to Clinton and Gore, Gore wasn’t the first presidential candidate to put self-interest before the good of the nation. Aaron Burr had that dubious distinction in the presidential election of 1800. But it is notable that it was exactly two hundred years before another man decided to plunge the country into a constitutional crisis rather than graciously concede defeat for the greater good of his country.

Small correction: Burr was the candidate for vice president, not president; so I guess it is fair to say that Gore was the first legitimate presidential candidate to plunge the country into constitutional crisis. Although, come to think of it, wasn’t there some controversy surrounding Hayes’ election in the nineteenth century? Maybe every hundred years, give or take, we’re simply burdened with public figures who cannot put the good of their country before the temptations of power.

She also provides two very helpful links:

ONE TO A DISCUSSION OF THE ELECTION OF 1800

AND ONE TO A DISCUSSION OF RUTHERFORD B. HAYES

Read ’em! They’re good!

I should perhaps explain the nature of the thesis I was proposing, though. It wasn’t that Al Gore was the first presidential candidate to plunge the nation into a constitutional crisis or that Bill Clinton was the first such candidate to put self-interest ahead of the good of the nation.

Unfortunately, American history is tumultuous enough and populated with enough rogues that neither of these men were first of their kinds.

Previous presidential (and, as the reader points out, even vice-presidential) candidates, including some very famous ones, have put naked ambition and self-interest ahead of the country, both in ways that led to previous constitutional crises and other grave disasters for the country.

My thesis is therefore rather more restricted. It is that, (1) after a period in which several presidents and presidential candidates displayed the statesmanship to put the good of the party and the country ahead of personal ambition, we now have entered a period in which once again the nation is being harmed by naked ambition and self-interest being put ahead of the common good, and (2) Bill Clinton may have played a key role in the historical genesis of this era.

In other words, we’ve regressed.

Big surprise.

After all, they had a cat goddess (Bast) and all.

I think I also read somewhere that the built the world’s biggest tombs or something like that.

GET THE STORY.

To most folks, rice is something that you eat in Asian restaurants.

To me, rice is something that I’m not allowed to eat on my diet. But it’s also something else.

Being from Texas, Rice to me is also a university located in Houston (one of my four hometowns). I’d known about Rice for years, but what I hadn’t know was how it got started.

It’s AMAZING.

I doubt that any other university in the world has been founded in quite this way.

Read The Frightful Tale Of The Founding Of Rice University!

(They should make a movie about this or something.)

Wikipedia is such a great resource. I’m consistently impressed with how well the open-source encyclopedia is written and how accurate its content is. It’s not perfect, but it’s still truly impressive.

Each day they have a featured article. I’m not quite sure how they pick ’em, but if you want an interesting education, check out the featured article. (Maybe they can get an RSS feed for those. I’ll see about suggesting that to them.)

Yesterday’s featured article was on Fr. Damien.

For those who may not know, he went to Hawaii as a missionary. This was when Hawaii was an independent kingdom, before it was conquered and annexed as a U.S. territory. Upon arriving in the kingdom, Fr. Damian became concerned about the leper colony on the island of Molokai. He sought and obtained permission to go to Molokai and serve as priest for the lepers. He did menial work–caring for the living, caring for the dying, building homes, building coffins, digging graves–and his presence revolutionized the community. In the end, he contracted leprosy and died among the lepers he served.

Though the man is yet only a beatus, in truth he was a saint. (Also a pipe smoker, though the article doesn’t mention that.)

I hope his canonization will be soon.

. . . something you’ll never guess.

According to this early Greek poet, girls didn’t just want to have fun.

Proof this is what he said (see line 370).

A German scientist named Dr. Rainer Kuehne believes satellite images have located the fabled sunken city of Atlantis–ironically, above ground in Spain.

An American researcher named Robert Sarmast believes maps of underwater geography have revealed the location of Atlantis–underwater off the coast of Cyprus.

Meanwhile, representatives of Stargate Command downplayed rumors that another American scientist–Dr. Daniel Jackson–had found an ancient, extraterrestrial tablet that located the lost city of Atlantis–in the distant Pegasus Galaxy.

At the moment I’m listening to an audio course on Roman history (which I will review soon), and as I go through it, it’s bringing to mind all kind of incidents I remember that involve Roman history. One of them occurred just last year.

I was in an art museum with a family of friends, and we were looking at a room of sixteenth to eighteenth century paintings, most of which dealt with biblical or mythological themes. I was studying a picture at my eye-level (Daniel in the Lion’s Den or something like that), when the tiny voice of the family’s youngest daughter rose to my ears.

“Where are they taking those women . . . ?” she asked.

I bent to look at the painting at her eye level and saw that it was a painting of men hefting women on their shoulders and carrying them off (much like the one I’ve reproduced here, which is of the same event).

I looked at the card next to it to see what it was titled. “THE RAPE OF THE SABINES,” the card said.

My mind reeled for a second as to what to tell the child.

“To have fun,” I said.

“Oh,” she replied, contentendly.

Actually, as the Roman history course I’m listening to now points out, the “rape” of the Sabines wasn’t really a rape. It was actually “kidnapping with intent to marry,” but it still left me wondering what kind of weirdo would hang a painting of the event at the eye-level of a six year old child. That’s one of those practical organizational rules like “Don’t put the horses at the front of the parade.”

(FYI, if you’re not a student of Roman history, you may have heard of the abduction of the Sabine women from the goofy musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, where it is recounted in the goofy song “Oh Those Sobbin’, Sobbin’ Women.” Sobbin’ = Sabine. Get it?)

At the moment I’m listening to an audio course on Roman history (which I will review soon), and as I go through it, it’s bringing to mind all kind of incidents I remember that involve Roman history. One of them occurred just last year.

I was in an art museum with a family of friends, and we were looking at a room of sixteenth to eighteenth century paintings, most of which dealt with biblical or mythological themes. I was studying a picture at my eye-level (Daniel in the Lion’s Den or something like that), when the tiny voice of the family’s youngest daughter rose to my ears.

“Where are they taking those women . . . ?” she asked.

I bent to look at the painting at her eye level and saw that it was a painting of men hefting women on their shoulders and carrying them off (much like the one I’ve reproduced here, which is of the same event).

I looked at the card next to it to see what it was titled. “THE RAPE OF THE SABINES,” the card said.

My mind reeled for a second as to what to tell the child.

“To have fun,” I said.

“Oh,” she replied, contentendly.

Actually, as the Roman history course I’m listening to now points out, the “rape” of the Sabines wasn’t really a rape. It was actually “kidnapping with intent to marry,” but it still left me wondering what kind of weirdo would hang a painting of the event at the eye-level of a six year old child. That’s one of those practical organizational rules like “Don’t put the horses at the front of the parade.”

(FYI, if you’re not a student of Roman history, you may have heard of the abduction of the Sabine women from the goofy musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, where it is recounted in the goofy song “Oh Those Sobbin’, Sobbin’ Women.” Sobbin’ = Sabine. Get it?)

One of the cool parts of The Return of the King is when Gandalf and Pippin light the beacons of Minas Tirith. Cool visuals. Majestic music. Neat suff!

Thing is, a bunch of folks probably thought “What a cool idea Tolkien (or maybe Jackson) had here.” But the idea wasn’t original.

Beacons (fires set on hilltops or other high places as a means of communication) were used in antiquity. The Greeks and Romans had beacons linked in relay that were used to rapidly transmit information across long distances. Homer mentions them in The Illiad (which is what that Troy movie is loosely based on). They served as a low-tech form of Internet, though with severe limitations about what kind of information could be sent.

To get around the problem of only being able to send a limited number of messages, the ancients would also use flags, smoke signals, and other means that could transmit a more data-rich message.

As cool as the beacons of Minas Tirith sequence is in The Return of the King, I do have one criticism of it: Peter Jackson shows the beacons taking way too much time. The sequence shows them being lit for part of a day, all of a night, and part of another day in order to get the “Help!” message from Gondor to Rohan, which the film tells us are only a few days’ ride apart. That’s too much time.

The Roman beacon system was much faster, speed being the whole point of the beacon network. As soon as the guys at one beacon see another catch fire, they start lighting their own, and so the message is communicated from beacon station to beacon station much faster than a horse could carry a rider. A basic message could be sent across Europe by the real-world system in less time than it took the message to travel in the film.

If you’re any kind of a history buff–or if you’ve watched Carl Sagan’s Cosmos–you know about the famed Library of Alexandria, the most famous center of learning in the ancient world.

The site of the library has been lost for going on two millennia, but–turns out–it’s been found!

At least so says Dr. Zahi Hawass, curator of the Giza Plateau in Egypt, and a team of archaeologists from Poland.

Dr. Hawass is kind of a character. I’ve been following his career for a number of years, and the man seems to consider himself a kind of modern, Egyptian Indiana Jones. His antics when giving interviews can be a real hoot, but he’s not a flake when it comes to archaeology.

In fact, it is his job to reign in the nuttiness of a lot of what passes as Egyptology in certain circles. You know, they people they patterened the early, goofus version of Dr. Daniel Jackson off of. (*Cough*Robert Bauval . . . *Cough*Graham Hancock . . . ).

In other words: If Hawass says they’ve found the Library of Alexandria, they probably have.

Wicked awesome!

Hopefully, they’ll be able to find out the answers to some of the mysteries connected with the library, like how it was finally destroyed. There is considerable confusion on this point. The story linked above notes that it may have been destroyed by Julius Caesar, that’s far from certain, and there is evidence that the library survived after Caesar’s time (though it may have been rebuilt after he burned Alexandria)–see the wikipedia link, above.

What would be even cooler would be if they found a few of the works the library had in its possession but which have been lost to subsequent history.

I’d just hate to be the person who has to pay the library fine on those!