A Fascinating Book: Tamed

Alice Roberts. Tamed: From Wikd to Domesticated, the Ten Animals and Plants That Changed Human History.

This is a popular history of the domestication of the animals and plants that to a large extent created our civilization. My wife found it interesting but not as well written as her English Composition teaching standards required. Yes, there are areas where I found the structure less than satisfying but it tells stories so interesting that I can forgive some minor issues.

If I fault this book for anything, it is that for many of these stories, it recounts the early attempts to understand the domestication process, then the later attempts, and now today’s theories.  While that development process has a certain detective story interest to it, it is far less satisfying to me and much wordier than just presenting current theory. 

Since I teach Western Civilization, these domestication events are of great importance. There is a bit of wit and humor scattered through the book, although not as thoroughly entertaining as Mary Roach's similar popular science books.

One surprising deficiency, since the author is a professor is that the lack of either traditional footnotes or endnotes. The bibliography is detailed, but if i am curious about one little detail, I should not need to read through a dozen books and journal articles to find it.

The chapter on humans i thought might examine the futile attempts of eugenics but it is an examination of how for a variety of reasons, humans have changed genetically in ways that have tamed us, making us more able to get along with each other.  Also along discussion of why GMO is the Island of Dr. Moreau disaster that many Greens assume but of course it turns into evil greedy corporations cannot be trusted with this, only the selfless universities and other nonprofits. 

The Butcher's Tale

By Helmut Walser Smith. This is what historians call "post hole history." To say that is a very deep dive is an understatement. The sources are interrogations, court transcripts, and census records associated with Konitz, a small town in what was then German East Prussia. 

The crime was horrendous: an 18-year-old boy was suffocated or strangled and then dismembered expertly and wrapped and tied as though he was coming from a butcher. Bad enough, but rapidly this turned in the popular imagination of the town into a Jewish sacrifice of a Christian for blood to make matzohs. Antisemitic journalists soon arrived to throw liquid oxygen on a gasoline fire. 

This book examines not only the crime itself but how the assumptions of the locals spun this positively medieval blood libel into a widely believed story. While some local prosecutors pursued the blood libel idea, responsible aristocrats and bureaucrats recognized it as an absurd claim and provided troops to protect Konitz's Jewish community when local police were overwhelmed by numbers. Amazingly enough, it did not turn into a pogrom.

He examines in detail the underlying questions of how neighbors turn against neighbors and why the blood libel persisted into remarkably recent times in Europe, in spite of strong papal opposition.  Much of this discussion is not spectacularly interesting to me, but as detective story, it works well. 

Fortunately, Democrats are looking for other ways to demonize the Jews; blood libel is even too much for MSNOW.

A Sense of Loss

One of you is scheduled to come take this 1983 Encyclopedia Britannica away Thursday or Friday. They are, in any rational sense, an obsolete marker of a 20th century literate middle class American family. You wanted a comprehensive overview of human knowledge not just for your own curiosity, but as a starting point for your kids when they started school. While encyclopedia are never a particularly good source for a research paper, like Wikipedia or Grokopedia, they were a starting point for enough knowledge to know what to ask next. 

These were a uniformly bound and in the case of the Britannica beautiful above and beyond their content. They represented an attempt at presenting a consensus of educated academics at a time when that phrase still meant something positive. 

Articles were usually anonymous but you would sometimes get surprised at identified authors for some entries. An article in the 1963 Americana (with which I grew up and which were a companion on many boring weekends when I was 10 or 11) about American English was by H.L. Mencken, about as expert a user of 20th century American English as you could pick. He is remembered today  for the acerbic "Puritanism.—The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." This is not a fair statement of Puritan concerns but it captures well Mencken's wit, and style with a pen.

Another was an article about vigilantism by Glenn S. Dumke, for many years chancellor of the California State University system,  back when that was a sign of education not Marxism or other forms of woke. His article observed what I have since discovered in my deeper reading: In Gold Rush California, vigilantism were an expression of popular justice often no worse than the legally constituted courts.

As the title of this posting implies, there is a sense of loss as these leave. They are the loss of an aspect of 20th century American middle class idealisn that for all its flaws aimed high and achieved much. They also carry a sense of wistful personal loss.  My wife and I bought these around the time our daughter was born in 1983. They were expensive (about $1100, if I recall correctly) but something of a statement that we were going to bring our daughter up in a home that put knowledge and education at the core of her life. We already had a 1963 Americana, but the Britannica was always first in class so why not the best?

Goodbye, dear friend.

Encyclopedia Brittanica (1983l

We bought these just before our daughter was born. They received very little use.  We are beginning to thin down our possessions before moving. I would think a home schooler or someone who wants something for post-EMP education would find this attractive. If you know someone in the Boise area that could these, have them contact me. If you want them out of area they will cost a bit to ship but post office book rate is not too bad. The bookshelf goes with them.

End of _End of a Berlin Diary_

I finished reading Shirer's book. A few observations:

There are places where his comments especially in the Postscript reflect the immediate postwar liberal consensus: Germany is a fundamentally warlike and brutal nation which can never be trusted with industry again. The U.S. should focus on propaganda to defeat the Soviet Union, not military aid to the nations that were fighting Communist insurrectionists. Free enterprise was an outmoded concept; democratic socialism was the only way forward. The Great Depression was still widely blamed on capitalism and it seemed like a plausible suspect at the time. The failure of the New Deal was not sufficiently obvious at that time.

There are many pieces of information that he lists that were new to me: I did not know that General Beck actually had the wheels turning for a military coup d'etat against Hitler that was derailed by Chamberlain's betrayal of Czechoslovakia.

There are facts that I have often seen asserted without any specific documentary evidence. Shirer points to specific documents that demonstrate that the German General Staff recognized that preoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936 if resisted by France would have led to a humiliating defeat for Hitler. Similarly, the General Staff believed that if Britain, France and the Czechs had put up any military resistance to Sudetenland land invasion, Germany would have lost 

Finished Shirer's Berlin Diary

It is a truly astonishing slice of eyewitness history. Like all eyewitnesses, you have to remember that they see only one part of the scene. But what is recorded is still valuable to anyone writing a secondary work on the subject.

One surprise for me is his late 1940 discussion of the T4 program to murder everyone who was in some way not sufficiently advanced to be part of the master race: the developmentally delayed; congenital defects; the incurable. Shirer mentioned that he heard numbers of 100,000 thrown around and thought this was likely too high. History has shown it was too low.

What i found interesting is that families of the dead ran paid death notices that in subtle ways hinted that something was not quite believable about these deaths. There were lots of these death notices in newspapers until the government stopped allowing them.

Shirer also indicates that while most Germans were generally supportive of the war at the start, sentiment was beginning to change by mid-1940. A jok he heard was that a plane crash killed Hitler, Goering, and Goebbels. "Who was saved?" "The German People."

He also recounts the wooden bombs story that i am sure you have heard, but in a different direction. As Shirer was told by a Luftwaffe officer, the Germans had constructed decoy aircraft made of wood. British Intelligence had enough local agents to drop wooden bombs.

This is one of those great stories that I really doubt no matter which air force did it. Why burn fuel and risk planes and air crews to do this? It is still a great story.

Reading William Shirer's Berlin Diary

This is mostly his daily diary from 1934-1941 as he watched firsthand (sometimes as Hitler walked past him in restaurants) the Gleichschaltung in Germany and then the cowardly turning over of Sudetenland Czechoslovakia to Germany. 

I have read much about this over the years. Watching the Biden Administration was uncomfortably similar, although the resistance of some news organizations to the effort is a counterpoint. To be fair, the National Socialist suppression of alternative points of view was imposed with force, in a way that was unneeded with the fascist leanings of most American news organizations. 

One other very important difference was the courage of Elon Musk spending an incomprehensible amount of money to buy Twitter and open it up to alternative points of view. If there had been any similar courage and alternative media in 1933 Germany, think of the lives not lost, the bright and creative outputs not going up chimneys in German extermination camps. Think of Eastern Europe not suffering under decades of Soviet tyranny. 

While I think it important not to suffer from the mindless optimism of Francis Fuyukama's "The End of History," imagine the resources wasted during World War Ii and the Cold War spent on human development.   

Of course, without those wars, we would never have landed on the Moon, put satellites in orbit, invented Teflon, and arguably the U.S. Civil Rights Movement might have been delayed decades. World War 2 also hastened the end of European imperialism. I confess whatever the justice of the resulting devolution of power, it is not clear that this was a win for the hundreds of millions who suffered and still suffer under corrupt and brutal thugs in the Third World.

Shirer's diary has a depressing immediacy as he describes day-to-day at the front events. If you want to write historical fiction for this time, here is where you go for the daily living that will add versimiltude to your book. Where did correspondents eat dinner, what did they do in their office hours, how did Getapo intimidate citizens of neutral nations?

There are events that even having read Shirer's magisterial Rise and Fall of the Third Reich were new to me.  They seem small in the larger scheme of this disaster.  There was an American Jew who was arrested entering Germany with a suitcase of bombs and guns and was beheaded for it. His German lawyer argued unsuccessfully that he may not have known what he had been asked to take to Germany. I confess I would find that implausible. Just an event that was, to my surprise,unknown to me.

Just Finished Reading

The subtitle description of these Victorians as "eccentric" captures it well. Lots of odd characters stumbling to make sense of dinosaur fossils while staying to the general Biblical narrative until Darwin.

To understand Darwin and his loss of faith that led to his publishing Origin of Species (1859) let me recommend Richard Keynes' Annie's Box: Charles Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution (2001   Keynes is a descendant of Darwin and his book starts with discovery of Darwin's writing about his daughter who died young provoking a storm of guilt from marrying his first cousin. (Darwin blamed this semi-incestuous marriage for his daughter's weak health.)

17th Century Inflation

I have just started reading Richard Ollard's This War Without an Enemy: A History of the English Civil Wars.  This book was recommended by my friend Joyce Malcolm, who is an English Civil War specialist.

Early on, he attributes this, at least in part, to a general inflation of prices in the 17th century throughout Europe.  This surprises me not in the least.  The core was the Spanish importation of gold and silver in mind-boggling quantities from the New World, much of it obtained by working Indian slaves to death.

Vault of the Ages

This is a 1952 Poul Anderson post-nuclesr apocalypse novel.  

There are two major categories of such stories: recovery will be painful, but human spirit and knowledge of how to rebuild is widely enough known to do so; a new Dark Age will result from ignorance of survivors. 

Vault of the Ages is sort of in the middle. Five hundred years of Bronze Age culture with some use of salvaged steel and copper from the still feared cities.  But eventually someone not terrified of the taboos of the memories of radiation poisoning gets into a vault of knowledge about science, technology,  and the humanities and restarts.   (Humanities were still of merit in 1952.)

I generally land on the optimistic side.  Almost everyone is know has enough understanding of tools, machine tools, and the guts of industrial civilization that rebuilding would be painful but not hopeless.   We do not need to reinvent machine tools, assembly lines, light bulbs, electronics.  The knowledge is either widely distributed or in books. 

I Finished Reading Dugard's Into Africa

About Stanley and Livingstone.  Anyone that wonders why Equatorial Africa failed to develop need only read the descriptions of the really repulsive diseases and parasites both of them battled while exploring. 

I really enjoyed this book.  So much tangential history that I found fascinating. 

I Like to Think I Am A Bit More Knowledgeable About History Than Most

This book was a Father's Day gift from my son:

I knew about polar explorers such as Peary and Cook (and the dispute as to who reached the North Pole first) and the earlier tragedies associated with trying to find the Northwest Passage.   I had no knowledge that polar explorers had attempted and actually reached the North Pole by hydrogen-filled dirgible.

Like many of these late 19th and early 20th century explorers,  it is amazing that any survived.  These are exciting stories of courageous men attempting the impossible and often succeeding.