God Speed the Plough: Swords Into Ploughshares

Because Superman is based on Moses, and Thor is based on, well, Thor. 

At his Temple of A Million Years at Medinet Habu, Ramesses III (r. 1186--1155 BC) celebrates his victory over an enemy who comes from the midst of the sea. No further details are necessary here, since this isn't a discussion of the Late Bronze Age Collapse. What matters here is that some of them appear to be wearing horned helmets.

This isn't a post about Vikings, either. It isn't even about Gaston Maspero, the Paris-born son of Jews of Italian origin, who, after a youth spend assisting a wealthy dilettante seeking the Aryan roots of Peruvian Indian languages, went on to be the long-lasting Director of Antiquities in Egypt and the author of multi-volume histories of the ancient Near East, as well as of an 1881 article that popularised the idea that there existed such a thing as the "Sea Peoples." It's not even about the regional conflicts in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century France about which Maspero was so clearly actually writing. ("Vikings" are "Normans," and there's a big to-do about there being Normans in northern France and not southern France, which shows that the south's relative economic backwardness isn't about policy favouring the north, but rather about race.)

It's about ploughs.

They  had image scraping in 1947, too! I'm sure that this is the Country Life in question. The image comes from F. G. Payne's 1947 article in The Archaeological Journal, "The Plough in Ancient Britain," which is widely available on the Interwebs as a pdf, not that has helped in the slightest.

Technical Appendix: Apollonian Days

I was going to go with "Apollonian Days of Future Past," but too wordy. I'm still going to keep the image of Old Wolverine getting barbecued, even though I'd need to write an essay in this block to explain why. Source

I'm referring to the Armstrong Whitworth Apollo. Two weeks ago, I thought, "Well, before I make a joke about the way that its original name (the Avon) poaches the Rolls Royce "River" theme, I should find out when the Avon [1947/8, as it happens] appeared --and, for that matter, when the themed naming schemes of postwar British engines were finalised." It turns out that naming a plane "the Avon" was perfectly fine in 1947; and, in any event, the plane's name was changed to the "Apollo" well before Armstrong Whitworth slunk away in shame from the "turboprop feeder airliner" market in 1951, leaving this mess on Farnborough airfield for someone else to clean up.

By RuthAS - Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34744239

Before I disappear up my own ass, here's my argument and conclusions:

Given that the United Kingdom had bombed out the only viable competition [which is a story about the American engineering industry that hasn't been well told], there was room for its aviation industry to take advantage of first mover advantage and get an effective monopoly on each of the three main types of commercial gas-turbine engines: the turbojet, turboprop, and turbofan. When I started bouncing around after the full story of the Armstrong Whitworth Apollo, I thought I knew the results of this fleeting advantage. It was thrown away in the case of the turbojet,  seized with impressive sales results in the case of the turboprop, and irrelevant in the case of the turbofan, which came after the British lead had evaporated.

This goes to show how little I know about the subject. In my defence, this is a "technical appendix," that is, a hypothesis about an aspect of the history of technology that surprised me as much as I hoped it will you, and which we should keep an eye on as the postblogging series continues.

The inquiry turned up a planned military transport version of the Vickers Valiant, and a proposed commercial variant. The variant, the Vickers VC7, would have been powered by the first viable turbofan engine, the Rolls-Royce Conway. This would have made it the first turbofan commercial airliner by at least a year or two, but it was cancelled in 1955. Questions were asked in Parliament, and the received opinion discovers a "political decision" entangled in the earlier developments. Maybe it's the last moment when the British aviation industry could have been saved. Maybe not.

What can be said is that this brings the British aviation industry's grade down from a gentleman's D (pity marks for the Comet), to a clear fail. It's to be sent down to find a job in the City, where it can laugh at those poor, mucky manufacturers up at least through to Brexit.

So: Is there a profound lesson here about technology policy? Brendan Flynn thinks so. Arguing with someone named "Professor Geels," who has a sociology-of-science explanation about research sites and networks, Flynn proposes that the missing ingredient is state funding. Can Rachel Summers send Kitty Pryde's mind back to the 1980s to put everything right with the one crucial bit of information that a bit more Keynsianism is needed?

 Is this an accurate picture? At this point, who knows?  I'll state it affirmatively, but with mental reservations. I'm really just laying out a programme of research.

A Very Brief and Non-Technical Appendix About Then and Now

Something I read this afternoon, slightly edited..

"Economists are very worried about the decline in labor’s share of U.S. national income... https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-04-24/cracking-the-mystery-of-labor-s-falling-share-of-gdp...For decades, macroeconomic models assumed that labor and capital took home roughly constant portions of output—labor got just a bit less than two-thirds of the pie, capital slightly more than one-third. Nowadays it’s more like 60-40. Economists are therefore scrambling to explain the change. There are, by my count, now four main potential explanations for the mysterious slide in labor's share. These are: 1) China, 2) robots, 3) monopolies and 4) landlords..."
There is, in my view, a fifth—and a much more likely—possibility: the low-pressure economy.

"Rob said...I don't really understand this explanation.There certainly seems to be a secular trend as well as a cyclical effect. Brad's explanation for the secular trend is what? That we've actually been in recession since 2000? That we need inflationary booms to "reset" labour's share? That labour's share is related to inflation in a non-expectations-adjusted way?"

And something that seems relevant.

Postblogging Technology, March 1947, II: The Only Bad Publicity

R_.C_.,

Oriental Club,

London, England.

Dear Father:

I  expected to find you haunting the Reform Club with your cousin. Or perhaps the Royal Air Force Club; but I should have known. Have you kept a membership these long years? Uncle George is always grumbling about keeping up his club fees. Or are you the guest of someone even more adventurous than yourself?

I'm sorry. I'm sure there'll be a story when you get back. I'd tell you of exciting developments here in Santa Clara, but there are none! I'm flat on my back, your youngest is a fortress of solitude far away in Massachusetts as he writes final exams --as is "Miss V. C," who is keeping close to her digs at Stanford, except when she is up to San Francisco to borrow a telephone. (I wonder who she is calling that she needs to use the Chow's line? And, yes, I know what you will say, but you are wrong.)

Fanny is helping Teddy Tso study, I suspect --depending on how you define studying, of course. Vickie, I am persuaded, is improving slowly under professional care, and James is fluttering about trying to make sure that I stay in bed. Bill and David have been up to talk about something about air traffic control that they are feeling out with the Air Force. While it has little money to send their way, it has plenty of inspiration. One of the problems with ground control of aircraft is that you have all of this radio information streaming in, and operators can only look at so much at one time. If only there were a way to store it all, a very youthful Colonel says to them. "Well, actually," they say. . .

We'll see what comes of that. In the mean time, best of luck in England, and I hope that I see you before. . . 

"GRACE."

PS: Only please, for my sake, come back by liner, and persuade your cousin to do the same!

Further to the Last: New Light, Not Necessarily On The Converting Sacrament

Lameen and Graydon have been bugging me for years to subject my crackpot hypothesis to DNA testing. It may seem like I've been ignoring them, but, in reality, I've been creating elaborate counterarguments in my head, which I would have talked about already were it not for Windows doing a forever update while I lounged around in pyjamas on my Surface. (It's a day off, first of seven. What can I say? Pizza later.)

In retrospect, my time might have been better spent watching the latest episode of Agents of Shield than spinning my theories in my head. Say what you want about Hydra, but they're damn good DNA testers. 

Test this. (The model isn't credited, except presumably on an expired American Apparel page, but the cropped top is Raglan Jaquard.)

Eric Durand, J. Michael Macpherson, David Reich and Joanna L. Mountain are also good genetic testers. But, first, let's look at something cool.

The last column is because this is about a Skeptical Inquirer article about ancient Canaanites being maybe the ancestors of modern native North Americans. Oh, those wacky Mormons. 

The X2a bands show that there's room for future discoveries. We wouldn't even know that there was an X sub-haplogroup present in aboriginal American populations from the Mound City samples alone. That said, we have a pretty solid overall profile of the mitochondrial DNA picture of pre-contact Eastern Woodland Indian populations, thanks to the Hopewell horizon's enthusiastic bone-gathering. This is important, because genetic genealogists trace regional ancestry through three major inputs: autosomal DNA, present in X chromosomes; Y DNA, which is passed purely through the father's line; and mitochondrial DNA, the most recent and most exciting discovery, and present only in the ovum, and thus passed exclusively matrilinearlly.  Of these, autosomal DNA loses Native American flavour after six generations, while Y DNA mutates so slowly that half of Native Y DNA is shared with common ancestors who spread into northern Asia and Europe two Ice Ages back. So if you are looking for Native ancestors in commercial DNA testing, as many people at my stage of life are, it's pretty much mitochondrial DNA you need to look at, and, subject to new research, if you have a Cherokee great-grandmother, you can only prove it genetically by testing with X2a, D, C, B or A haplogroups.  

That being said, I'm a complete amateur at everything but history of science (humblebrag appeal to authority!), so let's look at the testing.

"We find that many self-reported European Americans, predominantly those living west of the Mississippi River, carry Native American ancestry (Figure 3B). We estimate that European Americans who carry at least 2% Native American ancestry are found most frequently in Louisiana, North Dakota, and other states in the West. Using a less stringent threshold of 1%, our estimates suggest that as many as 8% of individuals from Louisiana and upward of 3% of individuals from some states in the West and Southwest carry Native American ancestry. . ."

For African Americans,

[T]he frequency of European American individuals who carry African ancestry varies strongly by state and region of the US (Figure 3A). We estimate that a substantial fraction, at least 1.4%, of self-reported European Americans in the US carry at least 2% African ancestry. Using a less conservative threshold, approximately 3.5% of European Americans have 1% or more African ancestry (Figure S8). Individuals with African ancestry are found at much higher frequencies in states in the South than in other parts of the US: about 5% of self-reported European Americans living in South Carolina and Louisiana have at least 2% African ancestry. Lowering the threshold to at least 1% African ancestry (potentially arising from one African genealogical ancestor within the last 11 generations), European Americans with African ancestry comprise as much as 12% of European Americans from Louisiana and South Carolina and about 1 in 10 individuals in other parts of the South (Figure S8).

Most individuals who have less than 28% African ancestry identify as European American, rather than as African American (Figures 4 and 5A ). Logistic regression of self-identified European Americans and African Americans reveals that the proportion of African ancestry predicts self-reported ancestry significantly, with a coefficient of 20.1 (95% CI: 18.0–22.2) (Table S6 and Figure S9).

The hotlinks don't go to the images, but they do tell you where to find the figures in the article, so I'm keeping them.

And the ancestral connections are sex-biased:

Fitting a model of European and Native American admixture followed later by African admixture, we find the best fit with initial Native American and European admixture about 12 generations ago and subsequent African gene flow about 4 generations ago.
Non-European ancestry in European Americans follows a sex bias in admixture contributions from males and females, as seen in African Americans and Latinos. The ratio between X chromosome and genome-wide Native American ancestry estimates in European Americans shows greater Native American female and higher European male ancestry contributions (Tables 1 and S4). Though we do not observe evidence of a sex bias in African ancestry contributions in European Americans overall, analysis of only those individuals with at least 1% African ancestry reveals 15% higher African ancestry on the X chromosome relative to genome-wide estimates (p value 0.013). This increase suggests female-African and male-European sex bias in European Americans that follows the same direction as in African Americans and Latinos, with greater male European and female African and Native American contributions.

And, of course

We find very low levels of African and Native American ancestry in Europeans with four grandparents born in Europe. We estimate that only 0.98% of Europeans carry African ancestry and 0.26% of Europeans carry Native American ancestry. These levels are substantially lower than the 3.5% and 2.7% of European Americans who carry African and Native American ancestry, respectively.

Finally,

Our results provide empirical support that, over recent centuries, many individuals with partial African and Native American ancestry have “passed” into the white community,79, 80 with multiple lines of evidence establishing African and Native American ancestry in self-reported European Americans (see Subjects and Methods). Though the majority of European Americans in our study did not carry Native American or African ancestry, even a small proportion of this large population that carry non-European ancestry translates into millions of European Americans who carry African and Native American ancestry. Our results suggest that the early US history, beginning in the 17th century (around 12 generations ago), might have been a time of many population interactions resulting in admixture.

So there you go. I'm not completely crazy.  

Gathering the Bones, 19: Sinners In the Hands Of An Angry He Who Wears Human Heads as Earrings

*

It's properly time to for me to be reviewing technology news from March of 1947, but I have some time off this week, and my last post leaves me dissatisfied. I mean, who cares that Veronica is dark and brunette, or that George Washington was a redhead?* She's rich! He's a President! Rich and famous people get away with stuff like being racially fluid. The real question is what this means to a poor redhead like Archie Andrews, who has to worry that other people might get to choose his racial identity for him. (1,2, 3). 

If America was, in its origins, and is, still, a mixed race society that pretends that there is a firm, clear, and unambiguous colour line that just happens to coincide with class, then its central social question isn't goings on in the Lodge lodge. It is, rather, who polices the colour line? Lower class Americans do not have social power. That's kind of the point of being poor. In Latin America, the poor really are victims of a moving race/colour lline. Why on the right bank of the Rio Grande? How do they own their own history in the North? 

The answer is "Religion."  Next week, Postblogging Technology, March 1947, II.

No, wait, video time! 

(The Be Good Tanyas. )

More specifically, I mean, religious continuity between Eastern Woodland religious practice and the America of small sect Christianity. That's where this spooky, powerful song comes in. It is weighed down by history. Seemingly, a  longer and heavier history than America has had time to accumulate. Even America's historical crimes aren't this old! 

The Shenandoah is the most southerly reach of a series of "carrying-place" linked, approximately north-south rivers above the Fall Line, extending from the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Basin via Oswego River, the Mohawk, the Susquehanna, the Potomac, and, finally, the Shenandoah. Iroquian-speaking communities extend along the route, from the Neutral Nations in the far north to the Cherokee in the furthest southern reaches of the Shenandoah Valley.

America is older than it says. Not convinced? Here's Alison Krause taking us down to the river to pray.

The datestone says 1752, but Pittsburgh's Old Stone Tavern just must have been built in 1782, because, after all, 1752 was before Braddock's defeat, and Pittsburgh didn't exist yet. Well, there was a town, but it was an Indian town, and Indians didn't make bricks. I mean, they made pots, but that was, you know, long ago. Now they live in wigwams. No, I'm not racist, you're racist. By Lee Paxton - self-madeTransferred from en.wikipedia, GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16994850

Gathering the Bones, 18: Hew Down the Bridge!

Then none was for a party—
Then all were for the state;
Then the great man helped the poor,
And the poor man loved the great;
Then lands were fairly portioned!
Then spoils were fairly sold:
The Romans were like brothers
In the brave days of old.

Then none was for a party—

  Then all were for the state;

Then the great man helped the poor,

  And the poor man loved the great;

Then lands were fairly portioned!

  Then spoils were fairly sold:

The Romans were like brothers

  In the brave days of old.

The week, and the circumstances, militate for a shorter post. but instead of writing a technological appendix about Fortune's hot take about the bright future of coal, relevant as it is, I find that I have a burr under my saddle. Yes, it is about the last of the race of Uncas the Mohican again. Race matters, after all.

Just to review here, this is about Gathering the Bones. Buried ossuaries are very common in Eastern Woodlands cultural horizons. At least, that is how we have interpreted the remains of buried structures filled with bones, set on fire, and then buried under earthen mounds. European ossuaries, which are sacred spaces filled with bones, next to overcrowded graveyards, have an obvious function which is much less obvious in a Hopewell horizono context --the last thing they were short of, was burial grounds! (Although ground that could be dug with stone tools might have been harder to come by.). In his ground-breaking,perplexing  reinterpretation of the Hopewell horizon, Martin Byers presents an alternative interpretation: bones, the immanent remnants of dead humans, were deemed to have some kind of transcendent power, and various sodalities competed to gather those bones and exercise power over them. Some details of this struck me as similar to the horrifying ritual execution of Jamestown Governor John Ratcliffe in 1607, at the end of which, Powhattan incorporated the man's flensed bones in an ossuary. This adds a bit of the sinister, and of social domination to the process. Gathering the bones is all about seizing power in current social life by appropriating the past: privatising history, if you will. In a long-ago post, I even suggested a specific (and debatable) example, the national monument to the dead of the massacre of the Christian Munsee Indians at Gnaddenhutten, in eastern Ohio. (The specific example is important because this is where James Fenimore Cooper's Chingachgook had "his people" "cut off." (Cooper can never say what he means, so it is not obvious that he intends to be ambiguous in not specifying which of Chingachgook's relatives were killed, but the "cut off" isn't ambiguous in early Nineteenth Century usage, even if the metaphor demands attention.) Speaking of ambiguous, the linked post contains more explicit examples of formerly public cemeteries which have since been "privatised," so that you know that I'm not just straining and making stuff up.

Thus, "Gathering the bones:" American history is constantly under threat of privatisation, as means of both constructing and rendering mysterious the American social hierarchy. In this way, a landed aristocracy can exist in what is constantly described as an egalitarian, freeholder republic obscure. Thrown in something about a guy with adamantium-laced bones with a secret identity, who lives on the Hudson Valley estate of a rich guy with a Dutch name, and there's even a tie-in to the thumbnail image!

So why am I returning to this topic? Because of  an extraordinary article in The New Republic this week, Ganesh Sitaraman announced that the United States is in a constitutional crisis, and that it is due to the fact that the constitution fails to make provision for economic inequality, and that this is because, "in the brave days of old," there was no inequality. America differed from Europe in having no hereditary, landed aristocracy. Various assertions about the fundamental equality of settler farmers and free land in the west follow, like some 1950s paen to the Frontier thesis. (Note: The Homestead Act was only passed in 1862. A deep knowledge of American history might even reveal some more profound significance to the year.)

Last week, we were in 1947, and, just to remind everyone, next year's elections are rushing on, as they always are. The Democratic nominee will be the President, because he owns this mess. Seeking to salvage things, and lacking a Vice-President as a successor, he has thrown over a party boss as Secretary of State, with a Virginia tidewater aristocrat, One of his potential opponents is an Ohio-important member of a collateral lineage of another Virginia tidewater clan. This is not a state without a hereditary aristocracy! (And remember that there is a lot we do not know about the origins of this group, due to the not-at-all-accidental burning of Jamestown courthouse in Bacon's Rebellion.) 
But, you say, Virginia is a state, not a country, and the Republican candidate in 1948 will be Thomas Dewey, who, per his biography, paid his way through the first year of college with a summer job, and is rich because he was such an awesome trial lawyer.

Well, yes, but this is Dapplemere, near Pawley, New York,