Bench Grass is a blog about the history of technology by the former student of a student of Lynn White. The main focus is a month-by-month retrospective series, covering the technology news, broadly construed, of seventy years ago, framed by fictional narrators. The author is Erik Lund, an "independent scholar" in Vancouver, British Columbia. Last post will be 24 July 2039.
In a perfect world this would be a substantive post, as I left on my summer bike trip last Wednesday and arrived home yesterday. On the other hand, I'm owned one short, breezy, on-the-road post. Owed, man.
Anyway, my Dad died the winter before last of the slow and fading road to the west that my uncle is now following, removing the need to ride the Crowsnest to Grand Forks for my annual visit. I also accomplished my goal of riding (part) of the Okanagan last year, and was free to return to Highway 5A, "The Old Princeton-Kamloops Highway," which I last rode, in part, as a youth so many years ago, full of all the silly follies of youth that seem so absurd when you are possessed of the follies of old age.
Detail of 1779 chorographical map of New York (including chorographical details of adjacent parts of New Jersey but evidently not those of Pennsylvania) showing the "Minisink Valley." https://minisinkvalleygenealogy.blogspot.com/p/blog-page_10.html
So Braddock's Expedition is a bit confusing because American historians all talk about his two regiments, and military historians of the Nineteenth Century know that's about ten thousand men, which is a huge force by the standards of Eighteenth Century colonial warfare, and meanwhile military historians of the Eighteenth Century are, like, "what's a regiment?" It's not inaccurate, in that regiments did exist in the Eighteenth Century as political, financial and administrative elements, and the particular two battalions of the Irish Establishment that came out with Braddock belonged to single battalion regiments. American military historians are probably informed by reading about the Civil War, where, as was often the case in that era, it was found necessary to insert an additional tier in the command structure of the Age of Reason. That is, in 1755 there were so many companies per battalion, so many battalions per brigade, so many brigades per [insert tedious historiographical discussion here] division. In 1860, armies with lots of conscripts found that this wasn't enough supervision and turned the regiment into an organisational level between battalion and brigade. Conscripts, and their ROTC officers, just need more attention from more headquarters because they can't be trusted to know what they're doing on their own.
The aftermath of Braddock's Defeat is also confusing, because, we are told, a wave of Indian attacks caused settlers to abandon frontier settlements and flee eastward, with a strong subtext of a racial war against the Westward Drive, Frontier Spirit, and Manifest Destiny. And we are not told wrong, except that, with the exception of three extraordinary attacks, the trouble took place in what was then Pennsylvania's Northumberland County, now Monroe and Pike counties, or, in Eighteenth Century usage, the "Minisink Valley," which is not a valley at all, but the region north of the Delaware Water Gap cupped by the Poconos Mountains that was shared between Pennsylvania, New York, and West Jersey, as it still was. The attacks were absolutely Indian attacks, made specifically by the followers of Teedyuscung, probably a grandson of Tamanend and, if my tinfoil hat isn't fitting too tight, William Penn, with an internally Pennsylvanian objective, which was why the raiders spared New York and New Jersey, and why the raids were probably actually a pogrom, which is why almost all the attacks killed the patriarchs of the settlements raided, and probably why there's a slightly panicked subtext to Ben Franklin's reports about the refugees gathering in New Jersey. Because if they weren't leading members of these families, they were probably mostly enslaved. This was a Pennsylvanian civil war. The racial component isn't "Scotch-Irish" versus Indians, but rather a peasant's revolt.
No wonder, then, that the Pennsylvanian Assembly settled quickly in the 1758 Treaty of Easton. But before that could happen, and just to drag this preamble around to relevance, Henri Bouquet, the Swiss Protestant (that is, Francophone) favourite of the Duke of Cumberland, had arrived in Philadelphia and there formed, not to get all genealogical, one of the ancestral units of the King's Royal Rifle Corps, most easily searched, I suspect, as the 60th (American) Rifles. Per the source most recently consulted --probably Wikipedia, but I forget-- this was formed from immigrant German workingmen. Wikipedia does not note that in 1756 the Germans who were immigrating to Philadelphia were mostly coming from German Flats, far up the Mohawk, where a German-speaking community had been growing by ethnogenesis from 1719. With regards to the demographic raw material, this can only have been the free Blacks who could not exist as such in the Eighteenth Century American cosmic order. This probably explains why Bouquet didn't need to subject his riflemen to some specialised training regime to turn them into another of the mid-Eighteenth Century's many ethnically-recruited special forces.Which is usually a bit of an anachronism in that the European units that trace their tradition to the Eighteenth Century special forces have all been long since de-specialed, pipe bands apart.
The American ranger tradition is an exception, and one that, I suggest, is rooted in race, not the primeval (hah!) forest of the American frontier.
At least if your musical tastes are as lowbrow as mine (it's a brain chemistry thing, I swear!), the "suggested next video" that appear in the personal playlist feature was an exercise in self-abnegation. I would play the Silencer' version of "Wild Mountain Thyme," which does speak to me, and after a few choices out of my frequently-viewed list, there's Ella Roberts' "Loch Lomond." The self disgust came from thinking, "OMG, the AI thinks I like this shite!" The despair it provoked about the way the world was going came from the fact that the AI couldn't learn, no matter how many times I stopped and refreshed at the first note of Ella Roberts' overblown Gaelic kitsch, it just could not learn. Nowadays it gives me this, which is still not the version of "Northwest Passage" I ever search for, but is at least in the first place not bad, and in the second, one that leans into the moment. (Future readers: You may not believe that Donald Trump managed to shine up Canadian nationalism, but trust me. It happened.)
Maryland has an NHS designation for "Historic Inns on the National Road." This is the Tomlinson Inn at Grantsville. Built around 1818. James K. Polk slept here! By Generic1139 - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/ w/index.php?curid=21602442
All that being said, "Loch Lomond" is so popular for good reasons. "You'll take the high road/I'll take the low road" is a lyric meditation on mortality. The whole thing is genuinely affecting. It's sad that it has to be yoked to young love, Culloden, the Rising of '45, the Highland Clearances, but now in the fashion of the Internet I will turn it on its head and talk about high roads, low roads, the '45, and the National Road that the Federalists built from Cumberland, Maryland, over the Cumberland Narrows to Redstone Creek and on to Vandalia, Illinois via Wheeling, West Virginia, in way of having an argument about whether the Constitution allows the Federal government to fund "internal improvements," as opposed to lying down on the (privately built, toll-gated) freeway to die.
Field-Marshal Viscount Montgomery of Alamein visits Vancouver Technical High School in 1954 because one of his nephews went there and the Field-Marshal was actually a fairly normal person with a life and stuff like that.
Major General Wilfred George Fryer, RE (1900--1993)
There's some fairly weird shit going on about Monty that doesn't speak well of WWII nerds, and one of the heights of this weirdness is the claim that he "held back" Eighth Army after Alamein because he knew that if Commonwealth forces cornered Rommel's Afrika Korps (what, there were Italians there, too? Get out of town!), the Germans would turn around and go all "Nazi supermen are our superiors" on their pasty Limey (now with bonus Antipodean content) asses. If you've a mind to refute that "thesis" with facts, you will explore the fighting after Alamein, and in particular the attempt to encircle the retreating Axis forces via an inland hook around the town of Sirte. To do that you will have to resort to the official histories, if not the archives, as no-one but an official historian could possibly care about the New Zealand Division's travails in the crusty saline bogs south of Sirte that very nearly exposed the isolated force to the Axis counterattack that didn't happen and which would have led to someone actually knowing that Eighth Army was fighting in December of 1942. If you go to Wikipedia you will learn that no less a figure than Milton has something to say about "a boggy Sirte, neither sea/Nor good dry land." And if you go to Civil Engineers in War, the special series of The Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, you will get, via W. F. Fryer's "The Military Water Problem in the Western Egyptian Desert, 1940--43," a deep hydrological explanation of the roadbuilding problems discussed at some length by the official history, and otherwise apparently of interest only to the local historians of Sirte, and certainly not to the grand theorists of Classical Antiquity, which is why this post comes to tophets via a weird digression through Wilfrid Fryer's discussion of the problem of watering the Western Desert Force.
The Continental versions of Penguin Classics are allowed to have naughty covers. Ooh la la! I like the single name author credit. This is a classic, not smut!
So, anyway, it looks as though the problems at the UBC Libraries automated retrieval hub are now confined to email alerts, and I probably had my recalls waiting for me for a week the last two times I tried to get at Aviation Week, Flight, and The Engineer. I suspect this because this time around I also recalled Fortune, The Economist, and Newsweek from the PARC offsite storage facility, and got an alert for The Economist only. The upshot is that I have now all of same and might blame the need to process Aviation Week and The Engineer for being late with postblogging this week, whereas in fact it was the 31 January number of Newsweek that bogged me down yesterday. We get to hear about fallout next week!
The saving grace here is that I would be remiss in not covering something of a blockbuster development in the history of the Iron Age Mediterranean, notwithstanding that I heard about it on a political blog, and they heard about it from The Economist. (Otherwise I could talk about Forbes' Road and the Duke of Cumberland.)
Huelva from orbit, and a satellite map of Ahousaht from Google. The conjoint estuaries of the Odiel and Tinto have been progressively silting in, while in the post-glacial period Ahousat is located at the conjunction of two drowned valleys, or fjords. I do not see archaeologists going as far out on a limb as to tell us the situation of ancient Onoba ("Fortress of Baal"), but depending on the extent of the silting it might have been an estuarine island. Ahousat isn't technically an estuarine island, but there is significant outflow from the two fjords, both of which have productive watersheds in spite of their small size, due to the heavy precipitation of the region.
We do not normally think of any place on the northwest coast as flat and fertile, but Ahousaht (technically Marktosis Indian Reservation 15) is almost as close to an exception as it gets:
The Ahousaht band is actually a confederation of eight tribal entities and has 25 smaller reserves attached, all seasonal fishing and resource extraction sites.
So, and as will come as no surprise, I've had the experience of a short work week pulled out from under my feet at something like the last minute. It was perhaps not impossible for me to write Postblogging Technology, August 1954, I: I Know Eyewash When I See It, and I'm honestly not sure who besides me to blame for my taking a day off on the 11th and yesterday, but I'll settle for Larian Studios, for making Baldur's Gate III so seductive. That, of course, means that instead of something long, with a lot to chew over, you're getting a bit of a dive into semi-random thoughts I had this week.
In this case, and as a development of "smokeless powder is just another textiles industry development, therefore the modern rifle, and modern war, comes out of industrial cotton," I am wondering about how normal early telegraphy was. (Is the rifle, or telegraphy, more important to the transformation of war before 1914?) So
let's forget about all that "information industry" stuff, and look at the telegraph as it came in, and try to understand why people might take the first steps to improve on semaphore and heliographs and pony expresses, and see where we are.
I am just back from a cycling vacation in which I finally rode the Okanagan Rail Trail from Kelowna to Vernon. This turns out to be a trick, because between the exquisitely appointed section in Kelowna and the somewhat rougher but eminently ridable section between Lake Country and Vernon that passes through my childhood summer camping grounds, there is an "unimproved" section that was very rough riding, and quasi-trespassing, as the landholder objects to the transformation of the CN rail right of what through their property into a recreational/highway bypass rail trail.
It turns out that that the landowner is the Westbank First Nation; the parcel is remediated wetland, and I imagine was classified as reserve land because of seasonal bird hunting, which was ruined by the CN's railbed. The contrast between the all-but unpopulated Okanagan-owned parcel and the stretch approaching Oyama just north of it, in which one lakefront property after another evidently had its own private access across the tracks (at least my family settled for a culvert underpass, never used for its intended purpose of watering livestock) is striking. The Salishan-speaking Okanagans left a clear imprint on the geography that their descendants still occupy, but that doesn't make them any less of a marginalised group. You can draw all the property lines on a map that you want; if you don't have the social power to make them work, they are just lines.
First, a housekeeping note: There was a hitch in my techblogging process at terms' end in April, resulting in my having to return all my materials and recall them, which I have done this week. Or, rather, two hitches, as my summer holidays and stat days were all heaped up and pushed to the end of August, leaving me off from the 14th to the 31st, or possibly the 2nd of September, although I am not counting on having the first Sunday of September off work. I currently intend to get caught up on the postblogging from the 14th to the 21st and then leave for my summer road trip, unless the province is on fire by then.
Meanwhile, the icy hand of mortality, in the form of knee pain that started on my trip to Kamloops and which was exacerbated by having to run around the store for days on end covering for other peoples' vacations has reminded me that I Would Run Away to the Air, Plantation of the Atlantic, and Sacred Spring aren't writing themselves. Of the three I have no manuscript material for Sacred Spring apart from blog posts, and while I am hardly satisfied by the first two projects, Plantation is steadily progressing in my off-blog writing time and I have decades of investment in I Would Run Away, so Sacred Spring deserves a bit more attention here.
Like many other cities of Classical Greece, Argos was a synoecism of nearby towns, overshadowed by the older sites of Mycenae and Tiryns. The construction of a temple of Hera on a massive artificial terrace, deliberately built in the "Cyclopean" style of the Before Times, and convenient to the earlier cities, amidst a group of "Mycenaean" monumental graves, may be seen as a way of appropriating the prestige of the earlier foundations. I talked about it very briefly as an example of a sanctuary of a city (polis) goddess that wasn't Athena. What did not appear last time was a gruesome story out of Herodotus, which I embed in about as much of the Father of Lies as the reader is likely to tolerate since the whole thing is so evocative:
This is the Athenian story of the matter; but the Aeginetans say that the Athenians came not in one ship only; "for," they say, "even if we had had no ships of our own, we could right easily have defended ourselves against one ship, or a few more; but the truth is that they descended upon our coasts with many ships, and we yielded to them and made no fight of it at sea." But they can never show with exact plainness whether it was because they confessed themselves to be the weaker at sea‑fighting that they yielded, or because they purposed to do somewhat such as in the event they did. The Athenians then (say the Aeginetans), when no man came out to fight with them, disembarked from their ships and set about dealing with the images; and not being able to drag them from the bases they did there and then fasten them about with cords and drag them, till as they were dragged both the images together (and this I myself do not believe, yet others may) fell with the selfsame motion on their knees, and have remained so from that day. Thus, then, did the Athenians; but as for themselves, the Aeginetans say that they learnt that the Athenians p97 were about to make war upon them, and therefore they assured themselves of help from the Argives. So when the Athenians disembarked on the land of Aegina, the Argives came to aid the Aeginetans, crossing over from Epidaurus to the island privily, and then falling upon the Athenians unawares and cutting them off from their ships; and it was at this moment that the thunderstorm came upon them, and the earthquake withal.
87 This, then, is the story told by the Argives and Aeginetans, and the Athenians too acknowledge that it was only one man of them who came safe back to Attica; but the Argives say that it was they, and the Athenians say that it was divine power, that destroyed the Attic army when this one man was saved alive; albeit even this one (say the Athenians) was not saved alive but perished as here related. It would seem that he made his way to Athens and told of the mishap; and when this was known (it is said) to the wives of the men who had gone to attack Aegina, they were very wroth that he alone should be safe out of all, and they gathered round him and stabbed him with the brooch-pins of their garments, each asking him "where her man was."
88Rawlinson p294Thus was this man done to death; and this deed of their women seemed to the Athenians to be yet more dreadful than their misfortune. They could find, it is said, no other way to punish the women; but they changed their dress to the Ionian fashion; for till then the Athenian women had worn Dorian dress, very like to the Corinthian; it was changed, therefore, to the linen tunic, that so they might have no brooch-pins to use. But if the truth be told, this dress is not in its origin p99 Ionian, but Carian; for in Hellas itself all the women's dress in ancient times was the same as that which we now call Dorian. As for the Argives and Aeginetans, this was the reason of their even making a law for each of their nations that their brooch pins should be made half as long again as the measure then customary, and that brooch-pins in especial should be dedicated by their women in the temple of those goddesses; and that neither aught else Attic should be brought to the temple, nor earthenware, but that it be the law to drink there from vessels of the country.
89H & WSo then the women of Argolis and Aegina ever since that day wore brooch-pins longer than before, by reason of the feud with the Athenians, and so they did even to my time; and the enmity of the Athenians against the Aeginetans began as I have told. And now at the Thebans' call the Aeginetans came readily to the aid of the Boeotians, remembering the business of the images. The Aeginetans laying waste the seaboard of Attica, the Athenians were setting out to march against them; but there came to them an oracle from Delphi bidding them to hold their hands for thirty years after the wrong-doing of the Aeginetans, and in the thirty-first to mark out a precinct for Aeacus and begin the war with Aegina; thus should their purpose prosper; but if they sent an army against their enemies forthwith, they should indeed subdue them at the last, but in the meanwhile many should be their sufferings and many too their doings. When the Athenians heard this reported to them, they marked out for Aeacus that precinct which is p101 now set in their market-place; but they could not stomach the message that they must hold their hand for thirty years, after the foul blow dealt them by the Aeginetans.
I swear Herodotus privately identified as Carian. Anyway, we hear about Athens' long and strange conflict with Aegina, about the obsession with symbolic acts of war like the seizure of images leading to real human tragedies; another intimation that the Athenian identification with Ionia was deliberate self-fashioning; and some mythical references.
John Byrne, "Goblin Queen" (From a story by Chris Claremont)
Good news! My employer has been persuaded that "But I don't wanna!" is not an adequate argument against the labour code requirement that I get an extra day off to celebrate the birthday of our undying Queen-Empress.That's next week; this week I celebrated it with lots of overtime instead, so I am going to pluck another low-hanging fruit before engaging with postblogging next week.
So the story here is that the Indo-European languages emerge into the light with The Proclamation of Anittas, a unique document on Old Hittite extant in an early as well as late-Kingdom copies, anchoring the use of the Hittite tongue to a c. 1600BC central Anatolian context. And I am engaged here in the fun and low-stakes enterprise of arguing that this is not only the oldest Indo-European, but the source of the language family. Today we're going to go a bit further and single out an individual: Puduhepa, the Queen of the Night.
This one originally qualified as a response to something I read online: not here, of course: Over at Quora, where the best of the resident historical geneticists, Ygor Coelho, accepts the final collapse of the "Yamnaya expansion" thesis as far as it concerns ancient Anatolia --and then reconstructs it.
It could also qualify as a book review, in that I took the decision to spend a lazy Saturday working this material over as an invitation to read Eric Cline's After 1177: The Survival of Civilisations. Also, Narendra Modi is going to win re-election in India on his "Sure would be a shame if an ethnic cleansing were to just happen around here" platform, and if I can't do anything about that, at least I can direct some impotent aggression towards his Hindutva loons.
So, first, Professor Cline. I read 1177 BC: The Year Civilisation Collapsed as a somewhat less than passionately felt book, and that is even more true of Survival. That's not to say that it is a bad read, much less bad scholarship. I see omissions and neglect in the literature, But Cline has a professional expertise in the field so that is much more likely to be my misperception than reality, except insofar as I was hyperfocussed on his treatment of the brilliant Saro Wallace, and found his use of her work shallow. To be fair, Travellers in Timecame out too late to be considered; but Cline's whole monograph is permeated with the idea of a "successful collapse," and Wallace offers a mechanism for it that would explain what Cline finds so mysterious about the Phoenician anti-collapse and which might have come into his treatment of Israel if he had taken Finkelstein more to heart. (A redistribution of everyday economic activity across elevations enriches the "Phoenician" city states and makes the Kingdom of Judah possible).
Oh, well, maybe I'm just white knighting it But, you know, Cline only catches fire when it ambles off the reservation to talk about climate change. I'm totally on board with worrying abot climate change, but the presumed "mega-drought" plays an important, if not quite starring role in Collapsed, and is central to Survival, is rooted in archaeobotanical studies, and drawing universal conclusions from localised archaeobotanical sites is a fraught activity, as witness repeated revisions of claims about forest cover changes based on revised understandings of the environmental history of specific sites. I get that Cline would like to use the enormous amount of money he has made for his publisher and turn into public intellectual clout in the service of something more important, but there are fine young scholars out there failing to get tenure-track jobs, and I'd like Cline to back off them if he can.
Back to Ygor, who, as an Internet warrior still has his bones to make, and can get down into it. Ancient Anatolians do not have Steppe ancestry, and that's that. The Indo-European language family was not spread into Anatolia by a wave of demic advance. "Migration." So then he fixed it by finding a mutual ancestral group in the southern Caucasus in the right timeframe for Proto-Indo-European (4000BC, according to him.
No disrespect to Ygor, but this is crazy. It's like, "I read some historical linguistics stuff on the Internet, and now I'm going to do a genetic study of the recovered DNA of more than 200 Neolithic individuals and unleash enough statistical analysis software on them to take a Lunar lander to the Sea of Tranquility and back."
See? This is why linguistics is secretly the hardest historical science. We all take it for granted that we're not going to understand what the historical linguists are talking about, so we just nod along. It's like the Grand Unified Theory. Or it would be if we were using the contradictions between General Relativity and quantum mechanics to justify some light genocide.
Did anyone else reading this frequent Young and Bloor in the early Nineties? Remember the giant poster of Pamela Anderson as Barbed Wire? There's something about comic book movies about girl characters where a dyke director (I assume) gets hold of the property and makes a movie with an aesthetic that says, "Hey, straight guys, we're just not going to apologise for not being for you," and then the straight guys don't go to see it and everybody looks at the box office and is, like, "What happened?' I mean, I don't want to be the culture warrior here. I liked Birds of Prey well enough. But "we're going to shoot Ella Jay Bosco like she's chunky (she's not!) because you should be ashamed of your male gaze" is quite a message to swallow to enjoy me some movie. While I am determined to validate the artistic choice, I am wondering how you get to spend eight figures on a movie when your head is that far up your ass. It's not like you got the MoD (MoS) to pay for it!
By MigMigXII - Animated from CAD drawing, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24337752
Speaking of which, this cool animation adorns the Wikipedia article about the Napier Deltic, an 18-cylinder opposed-piston diesel engine consisting of six layers of cylinders arranged in a stack of equilateral triangles. Beginning as Napier's visionary submission to an Admiralty requirement for a diesel engine suitable for Coastal Forces, as of January of 1954 it has been at sea in a proving boat for almost two years, and is about to go into service on 18 "Dark" class 50t patrol boat, as noted in The Engineer for 5 January 1954, which covers the current state of the Royal Navy (which absolutely needs 60 cruisers and its battleships, but which can afford to cut the size of its new aircraft carriers from the excessive 37,000t displacement of Eagle and Ark Royal.) The article also notes that the Deltic has "been covered fully in these pages." But in the first half of whatever month the article ran in, damn it! Apart from the "Darks," Deltics went into a number of subsequent large coastal classes and several classes of British railways locomotives, Especially the Class 55, which made an indelible impression on the trainspotting public running 100mph services and hitting 125mph descending Stoke Bank with its distinctive noise. (Did I mention that this high speed, high power diesel was noisy? And smoky? I know. Next thing I'll be saying that it rattled!) Boring and conventional engines rule the diesel engine world today since given the costs involved in high speed rail infrastructure they might as well be electrified. The Deltic isn't precisely forgotten, but it is a curiosity of a bygone age, and not the only one in this post.
Two things, first, a very late change of schedule; second, a scary moment at the Silver Kettle Lodge as my 92-year-old father seemed to be failing after his vaccination. These mean that I do not have Sunday to work on my postblogging, although I am covering a mid-shift on time change day, and do have some extra writing time. And I am reminded that we do not live forever and I should get my intellectual life in order.
So here's a summary of work to date on Sacred Spring: The Early Iron Age Revival of the State and a brief outline.
Well, I might well be on strike next week, and I certainly have split single days off this week. And that can only mean one thing. A Technological Appendix with absolutely no reference to modern day events. Instead, I'll talk about a long deadlock in the French National Assembly requiring multiple votes for multiple candidates to select a new premier, and a devastating military setback for colonialism. People, it's the Fifties! It was a different time.
GM's lease at Willow Run, signed in August of 1953, and the fall of the French fortress of Dien Bien Phu in the Sip Song Chau Tai, on 7 May 1954 stand as two signal failures of high modernism.
They are also drawn together as threads in the June 1953 news, while I am writing less than a month ahead of the 70th anniversary of the creation of the fort at Dien Bien Phu, threaded through by a technological story, if not a very exciting one, that of the Fairchild C-119, and the month-long series of votes in the French National Assembly that was required to finally find a premier who could command the confidence of the house.
The first candidate for the premiership was, pictured, Pierre Mendes-France, who gave The Economistthe vapours, as reported in the issue for 6 June, with his neutralism (he was cool to the European Army), his socialism, and his openness to an outcome in Southeast Asia that didn't involve the final crushing of Communism. The final, and successful one, was Joseph Laniel. I've joked several times in alt text that the Assembly was choosing the man to throw under the bus of Dien Bien Phu, a hair-brained strategic scheme that is already cooking, inspired by dubious success of a small airlift of troops into Vientiane, in which C-119s played a non-trivial role. Mendes-France will negotiate France's disengagement from Indo China in the course of 1954, when the Assembly grudgingly accepted that he had been right all along, and liberated Tunisia in the bargain before the diehards expelled him in order to make the Algerian situation as difficult as possible.
There's not necessarily anything funny-ha-ha about this. The Fourth Republic did fall, and not long after the deadlock of 1953. It's the only modern democratic state to do so in the post-WWII international order, and evidence that it can happen. On the other hand, in retrospect it seems like it mostly came about because of obdurate resistance to social democracy, and, anyway, the Fifth Republic might not be perfect, but it is better than the Fourth, and one has to wonder if some of the other modern democratic states of the post-WWII international order could do with a one-and-done revolution and a new constitution. Maybe if they're having difficulty selecting a head of government, that's a sign? Of course, it's hard to think of a perfect modern parallel, given that we're well past the days of colonialism.
Dien Bien Phu also has a more unusual hook on my imagination, because I cannot escape memories of Tactics of Mistake, an entry in Gordon Dickson's Childe cycle. Tactics is a late novel, but strikes me as marinated in the contemporary reaction to Dien Bien Phu, which might be because it is a fix-up, like Soldier, Ask Not, but of unpublished stories from Dickson's first decade as a professional science fiction writer. Or he just read Bernard Falls. If the first theory is true, though, we can thank Nguyen Van Giap for the boomlet in military/mercenary/war-world science fiction that continues to this day.
It's been more than two years since I've done a "Gathering the Bones" post, and I can report some progress. I've finished reading Fenimore Cooper's Wyandotte: Or, the Hutted Knoll. It's a really good book, Fenimore Cooper continues to be a fascinating person, and the novel is a lot like Wept of Wish-ton-Wish in that it uses distance from the Leatherstocking Cycle to comment on some of the same themes as Deerslayer while being a bit more willing to admit the crime. (The Wyandotte Patent is assigned to the infant product of a private marriage and baptism and so remains the property of a British general while avoiding confiscation during the Revolution by appearing to belong to a local Dutch New York Patriot family.) On the other hand, the question of mixed marriages is handled even more obliquely than in previous novels, much less being explicitly admitted, as in Wish. The heroine, Maud Meredith (Willoughby) is born to her mother in a British army frontier post in 1758, and so her mother is neither British nor a member of American society, in that she is neither home in the United Kingdom nor in Albany. On the other hand, she has money. So Maud Yeardley comes out of some kind of irregular circumstances that I'm not going to probe any further here, although obviously she is much better born than Judith Hutter of Deerslayer, and what about all that deerslaying?
So, three things: i) There is no way that I am not posting this ad, especially the week I read Edith Outland on "the Effingham libels." Man, did Horace Greeley know how to stick in the knife! ii) I'm off on a bonus week of vacation to see my Mom, so I'm looking for a blog post that requires more wandering-around-the-Intenet-at-the-kitchen-table than blasting away at the keyboard whilst surrounded by ancient tomes. iii) Lameen has confirmed that "there was no North African Bronze Age" is something people say.
I have academic confirmation of the commonplace that makes it a bit less bizarre, but there is a deeper problem in that there seems to be a lack of communication between research silos. Something isn' t right in the prehistory of the Maghreb.
Queen Dido of Carthage has come up in this blog in two very different contexts. First, "an urn said to contain the ashes of Dido" appears in the main room of Temple Hall in the hamlet of Templeton on the shores of Glimmerglass, in James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers: Or, the Source of the Susquehanna. It is part of a set of enigmatic images in a place where we would expect to see ancestral portraits, and is such a ludicrously obvious CLUE that we really ought to be taking it as a hint that this is a puzzle we're being invited to unravel. In this case, not to drag it out at any length, Dido committed suicide on her own funeral pyre in the Temple of Venus at the summit of the Byrsa citadel of Carthage. This is more than enough references to "Temples" (there are more!) to read the clue as saying that one of the author's grandfathers is not who the genealogists say he was (Richard Fenimore), but rather Benjamin Franklin's illegitimate son, William Temple Franklin. Whether this is true is another matter.
Dido (click this link for the ear worm song) has also come up in her own right as the mythical Queen of Tyre who fled the oppression of her brother, Pygmalion, and founded the city of Carthage on the Tunisian shore of North Africa in either shortly after the fall of Troy, or, more plausibly, 814BC. This discussion is going to develop the claim that she staged her voyage of colonisation from Cyprus, from which her alternative name, "Elissa" is derived from the name of the Great Goddess of Cyprus, per Marie-Pierre Noel's theory, giving me an excuse to embed a performance that isn't "White Flag" or Purcell's "Dido's Lament:"
This post is brought to you, indirectly, by the Academia.edu algorithm's helpful habit of recommending that I read articles that I'm obviously interested in because I have already read them. There are not, as it happens, any useful articles on the founding of Carthage at the site, as near as I can tell, but a search turned up the fact that when I tried to find some I found instead that Saro Wallace published a new monograph in 2029, Travelling Through Time: Imagining Movement in the Ancient Aegean World (Amazon link).
This is absolutely my jam. I'm not going to precisely review it here because anything I say would just shed an uncomfortable light on my totally-not-creepy Saro Wallace bedroom shrine. What I am going to do is work a discussion of it into the Academia algorithm-inspired brief survey of recent work on the foundation of Carthage, with maybe some brief asides about Fenimore Cooper's explanation of the foundation of America as a creole aristocracy that forgot itself.
How about that sport history? Guys, and I do mean "guys," some of us, maybe most of us, are here for the cultural history, for which purposes we're more interested in dates than the areas of early polo grounds.
Anyway, it turns out that Major General Joseph Ford Sherer (1829--1901) is the "father of modern polo," which I will take as proxy for a stronger claim about how polo as a social phenomena of the high Victorian period. There's a website associated with the Polo Hall of Fame, but I decline to explore it further, even though, I notice, it has a brief and actually pretty relevant discussion of the history of polo ponies;. My excuse is that equestrian history is even more inaccessible than sport history. In truth, I want to gesture at the evolution of the wealthy British male consumer's "need for speed" through various horse breeds strictly as a prologue to machines, and facts would just get in my way.
It turns out, and here I am just showing my lack of culture, and specifically the fact that I didn't read or have Wind in the Willows read to me, that Mr. Toad follows exactly this path. Beginning with a horse caravan (a Victorian fad I completely missed above), he moves on to his notorious automobile-born adventures. Finally, the questionable "Scouring of the Shire" conclusion in which the "Wild Wood" hoi polloi are expelled from the family seat. A perfectly understandable plot point in a child's novel, it becomes questionable when seen as a political allegory, and it might reflect the kind of anxieties which Joseph Chamberlain set out to embody.
Kenneth Grahame would have written a much more useful book for my purposes had Mr. Toad escalated from row boat to yacht and through a bicycle to an aeroplane, but that's a bit much to ask of a book published in 1908. Plenty of people have carried Toad's adventures on into the air, and the Amazon entry opposite even credits Kenneth Grahame as author, but that seems to be some kind of automation error.
![[link to original Greek text]](https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/Images/Utility/Flags/medium/Greece.gif){kind=small}
