July 4, 2018 History The Philosopher of the Firework By Skye C. Cleary and John Kaag He was looking for a chemical mixture—a potion or tonic perhaps—that would give him eternal youth. Instead, when it caught fire, the ninth-century Chinese alchemist discovered gunpowder. From there, our global obsession with fireworks was sparked. From then on, fireworks were used in celebrations to bring happiness and luck, and also to ward off evil spirits. Almost a thousand years later, upon signing the Declaration of Independence, John Adams wrote to his wife that the day “ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.” The first anniversary of Independence Day, in 1777, was indeed full of pomp and parade and illuminations. The fireworks were slightly more subdued than the ones that are used today, since colored fireworks, mixed with strontium or barium, would only be discovered in Italy fifty years later. For the first American Independence Day, orange would have to do. Fireworks, hypnotic and sublime, are used to celebrate national independence around the globe, as signs of sovereignty or political autonomy. They are the window dressing of the modern state. The exploding rainbows are a tribute to the bloody wars that made the celebration possible. They are a reminder that—under that same sky and upon that same land to which the ashes float—we are kinfolk. Read More
May 1, 2018 History May ’68: A Great Lyrical Community By Mitch Abidor Fifty years later, we look back at the student-led protests that shook Paris in May 1968 and have occupied the French political imagination ever since. May 1968, Paris. Photo: Bruno Barbey. The events of May 1968 in France emerged seemingly out of nowhere, yet they brought the country to a halt. High schools and universities in all corners of the country were occupied by students, and millions of workers went on strike. Although some have maintained that the uprising was actually an outgrowth of the strike movements that had swept the country in the previous year, May ’68 was not the result of worker discontent: they only joined the fray ten days after the students set it off. The movement emerged from the students. Its premonitory signs appeared at the new University of Nanterre in late 1967 and early 1968 with protests over the right for boys to visit girls’ dorms and vice versa and in defense of the students who were threatened with expulsion for their participation in an anti–Vietnam War demonstration. What would become known as the May events began when students gathered at the Sorbonne in Paris and threw stones at police occupying the courtyard. Why, in the midst of the trente glorieuses, the thirty glorious years of postwar prosperity, did France suddenly find itself in a revolutionary crisis? The issues that directly set off the uprising hardly seem to be enough to detonate a revolution. In my book May Made Me, an oral history of the events, I interviewed those involved in the moment in an attempt to understand. Jean-Michel Rabaté, now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania but then a student in Bordeaux preparing his entrance to the École Normale Supérieure, offered his explanation for May. “De Gaulle lied. He lied to everyone … There were so many lies, so many lies about our heroic past. France needed more truth, and that was the effect of May ’68: May ’68 allowed for greater truth.” For Jean-Michel, the goals of the movement were difficult to inscribe on a banner: “May was, We’re going to be more true, and that was the case. We came closer to the truth.” Read More
May 1, 2018 History May ’68: What Legacy? By Agnès Poirier Fifty years later, the time has come to take a measured look at the student-led protests that shook Paris in May 1968 and have occupied the French political imagination ever since. Student riots in Paris, May 1968. Of the hundreds of books and essays published about the events of May 1968 in Paris, one of my favorite remains the philosopher Raymond Aron’s La révolution introuvable, written as the events unraveled in July 1968. In this book, whose title translates to The Nowhere-to-Be-Found Revolution, the events are described as a tragicomedy in which “a verbal delirium with no casualties” placed bourgeois students with a “utopian negation of reality” and workers with authentic and legitimate demands on France’s center stage. Raymond Aron was critical of the student protest; however, he was also critical of the centralized Gaullist government, which had failed to anticipate the aspirations of a whole society. A fellow graduate of Jean-Paul Sartre at Ecole normale supérieure in the late twenties, Raymond Aron joined General de Gaulle in London as early as June 1940 and enrolled in the Free French forces. Aron and Sartre were often caught on opposite sides of arguments. Sartre was the committed, politically engaged intellectual of the Left, while Aron was the philosopher of the Right who preferred to observe events at a distance. Though Aron had more accurately predicted the course of Eastern Europe in the fifties through the eighties, it was nonetheless fashionable among French intellectuals to say, “Better be wrong with Sartre than right with Aron.” Sartre was more exciting company. He was a magnet for generations of thinkers, he had the sparkle of the perpetually angry man, while Aron had the calm of a pessimistic humanist. Today, however, it is clear that Raymond Aron’s quiet yet acute dissection of les evénements of May ’68 offers the best entry point into a critique of ’68’s legacy. Many argue, like Aron, that May ’68 and its heritage are still nowhere to be found, impossible to define even fifty years later. Read More
January 9, 2018 History The Impossibility of Knowing Mark Twain By Gary Scharnhorst Lamano Studios Over a century and a half ago, a columnist for the San Francisco Daily Dramatic Chronicle predicted that Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain, was “bound to have a biographer one of these days—may it be a hundred years hence!” Albert Bigelow Paine’s official biography of the author was published less than fifty years later. It is an indispensable source for the legend of Saint Mark. Paine portrayed his subject as “the zealous champion of justice and liberty” who was “never less than fearless and sincere. Invariably he was for the oppressed. He had a natural instinct for the right, but, right or wrong, he was for the underdog.” As recently as 2002, Robert E. Weir echoed the dubious claim: Sam “was an indefatigable foe of anything that stood in the way of human progress and individual potential,” as if to suggest that the world would be a better place if only everyone emulated him. Sam Clemens’s most honest comments about his life, or so he asserted, appear in his autobiography, most of which appeared posthumously. “A book that is not to be published for a century gives the writer a freedom which he could secure in no other way,” he explained in 1899. “In these conditions you can draw a man without prejudice exactly as you knew him and yet have no fear of hurting his feelings or those of his sons or grandsons.” “I speak from the grave rather than with my living tongue, for a good reason,” he declared. “I can speak thence freely.” In a March 1904 letter to his friend W. D. Howells, Sam described his autobiography as the truest of all books; for while it inevitably consists mainly in extinctions of the truth, shirkings of the truth, partial revealments of the truth, with hardly an instance of plain straight truth, the remorseless truth is there, between the lines, where the author-cat is raking dust upon it which hides from the disinterested spectator neither it nor its smell … the result being that the reader knows the author in spite of his wily diligences. Howells replied skeptically, “Even you won’t tell the black heart’s-truth. The man who could do it would be famed to the last day.” Read More
November 3, 2017 History From Throwing Sticks at Roosters to Dwarf Tossing By James McWilliams On the human desire to hurl (and hurl things at) animals, and other humans. In the fourth volume of Brett’s Miscellany, published in Dublin in 1757, readers could find an entry on a custom called “throwing at cocks.” This was an activity where a rooster was tied to a post while the participants, as if playing darts, threw small weighted and sharpened sticks (called coksteles) at the poor bird until it expired. The article explored the sport’s origin: “When the Danes were masters of England, and used the inhabitants very cruelly,” it began, “the people of a certain great city formed a conspiracy to murder their masters in one night.” The English artfully devised “a stratagem,” but “when they were putting it in execution, the unusual crowing and fluttering of the cocks about the place discovered their design.” The Danes, tipped off by the commotion, “doubled their cruelty” and made the Englishmen suffer as never before. “Upon this,” the entry concluded, “the English made custom of knocking the cocks on the head, on Shrove-Tuesday, the day on which it happened.” Very soon “this barbarous act became at last a natural and common diversion, and has continued every since.” Thus the innate human urge to throw things at things entered the early modern era. William Hogarth depicted cock throwing in The Four Stages of Cruelty, Children Torturing Animals (1751). Throwing at cocks continued well into the late eighteenth century. Although the custom, according to Remarks on the character and customs of the English and French (1726), exemplified a “diversion of the meanest of the populace,” throwing at cocks was soon normalized. It ranked up there with “playing at foot ball,” “bowls,” and “prize fighting.” A Complete History of the English Stage (1800) referred to it as an “annual sport.” In 1747, a volume called The History and Present State of the British Isles lumped throwing at cocks with “wrestling,” “footraces,” and “nine pins” as “the sports of the common people.” A regular activity, in other words. In time, the moralists cracked down on such hoi-polloi barbarity. Anyone who knows anything about throwing at cocks probably does because of Hogarth’s etching, First Stage of Cruelty, which demonstrates—while censuring—the incivility of this particular blood sport. John Brand, in his 1777 Observations on Popular Antiquities, notes that, “to the credit of our northern manners, the barbarous sport of throwing at cocks on Shrove Tuesdays is worn out in this country.” A London minister who published a lengthy sermon on the topic urged “the suppression of the throwing at cocks in the town or city” because it was an activity that all too easily exemplified how “the lower orders of people among us are eminently reproachable.” By 1793, the Country Spectator advised that throwing at cocks should be met with the “pain of your heavy displeasure.” Read More
October 31, 2017 History Ghost Club: Yeats’s and Dickens’s Secret Society of Spirits By Peter Hoskin Still from Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse (1922). When it comes to ghosts, belief and outright disbelief are not the only options—or at least they weren’t in nineteenth-century Britain. The Victorians didn’t stick to simple arguments about the existence of ghosts; they also argued about how, when, and why they might exist. Spiritualists attacked spiritualists over whether the supernatural should be classed as natural. Scientists discussed whether psychological or physiological factors were at play. Inventors, politicians, journalists, and madmen joined in, too. Indeed, it was such a popular, multidisciplinary pursuit that its practitioners needed new places to meet, outside of their existing societies, and various organizations were established to debate the boundaries of the immaterial. One of these exploratory committees was the Ghost Club. It was founded in 1862 and lasted about a decade, although its history stretches back to a group of Cambridge academics in the 1850s, and it stretches forward, through several resurrections, to now. The earliest days of the club are not well recorded, but we do know that it was small, populated by male intellectuals, and it concentrated on investigating supposed supernatural encounters, with the intention of exposing frauds. Charles Dickens is said to have been a founding member; the first in a procession of writers—including William Butler Yeats and Siegfried Sassoon—who joined its ranks. Read More