The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt

    While I thought The Swerve was going to be all about Poggio Bracciolini, who discovered Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, it is actually much more about De Rerum Natura. Lucretius' book, published in the first century BC, is a scientific/philosophical text derived from the Epicurean field of philosophy. It asserts that everything is made of particles "atoms" from Greek, and that these elementary particles are eternal, infinite in number, but limited in shape and size. These particles move about in an infinite void, in a universe with no creator. But critically, their movements are not predetermined, but swerve. This swerve, or clinamen (or declinatio or inclinatio), is responsible for all life and creation, as the random, unpredictable movements of the atoms creates the capacity for all objects and living things. It is the source of free will as nature experiments with movements, sort of foreshadowing the theory of evolution. Lucretius asserted that the universe was not created for humans and that there was no soul outside of the body that could outlive the body, and no afterlife. He also included some Hobbesian ideas about human origins. Religions, for Lucretius, were cruel delusions, and superstitions at best. Rather than prayer, the better use of a person's time would be to seek pleasure and avoid delusion, as well as to try to learn the truth of the universe.

    What is ironic is that despite these ideas being so heretical to the Catholic Church, they were brought back into the world by Poggio, an apostolic secretary who worked personally for several Popes, discovering a ninth century copy of Lucretius in a monastery, likely in Fulda, Germany. The book gives you a real appreciation for how important book copying was and how difficult it was. Monks had to spend hours every day concentrating on writing on animal skin, vellum, and mistakes were costly. They even had a term, acediosus, which was a sort of illness in monastic communities in which a monk would find it impossible or difficult to read, and would try to distract himself with gossip, feeling that life was better somewhere else. Many students have dealt with this since. They enforced absolute silence, and when scribes wanted to ask for something they needed to use gestures. The scribes used twenty-six tiny pinholes on the ends of each sheet to fix the vellum steady for writing, and used score marks to form straight lines. Apparently Christian monks still copied classical works for centuries, but that copying declined between the sixth and eighth centuries, starting as an active campaign to attack pagan ideas, and then transforming into a true forgetting of those works.

    Reading this book was also significant for me since I think of it primarily as a book given to me by my grandmother many years ago, before she passed away in 2017. I read it way back when, but it was nice to re-read the book, and it brought back memories of her. She was intensely interested in the classics and read in Latin and Greek, and I think I got a lot of my love of history from her. I miss her.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Out of Aeschylus' 80 or 90 plays and Sophocles' 100, only seven of each have survived. Of those of Euripides and Aristophanes, the numbers are 18 out of 92 and 11 out of 43, respectively.
• "At the end of the fifth century CE, an ambitious literary editor known as Stobaeus compiled an anthology of prose and poetry by the ancient world's best authors: out of 1,430 quotations, 1,115 are from works that are now lost."

The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman

     The Guns of August was a fantastic book. Tuchman does an amazing job of laying out the dramatic first month of World War One, starting with the invasion of Belgium and the Battle of the Frontiers and ending with the First Battle of the Marne, leaving the Race to the Sea and the rest of the war in epilogue, as a sort of anticlimax. This is a great book because it seamlessly travels from the generals in their headquarters to the politicians and diplomats in the European capitals, and then to the troops on the ground. There are diversions to the Eastern Front, but this book is mainly about the Western Front. Tuchman is a real master of her craft. My only complaint is that reading the details about all the generals can get a little tedious, but I think that is just because I'm not as interested. That's what Tuchman wanted to write about, and she did so very successfully.

    Early in the book, Tuchman explains in detail the significance of Belgium, which she writes was a creation of England as a neutral and independent country. It was on those plains that became Belgium that Wellington defeated Napoleon, and then England was determined, as the predominant power in the world, to create a neutral zone there that would prevent its use as a launching point for cross-channel invasions. But the original plan was to attach Belgium to the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The Catholic Belgians resisted this in a revolt in 1830, succeeding in becoming independent, recognized as such in Europe in 1839.

    The Germans and the French had sharply contrasting plans, but with one similar goal. Each country wanted to swing hard with their right hook, concentrating forces on a flank. For the French, this was to cross the Rhine at Mainz, northwest of Nancy, on the actual Franco-German border. This was known as Plan 17. The Germans, through the Schlieffen Plan, were determined to violate Belgium's neutrality and take the French at an area on the French left that would be less defended, although a longer route for the Germans. The French plan was very flexible, but maybe not in a good way. It contained no overall objective and no explicit timetables. Its intention was to attack, remain on the attack, and get back on the attack if temporarily pushed back. The German plan was much more rigid. It required hitting France hard and fast to eliminate France as a threat on their Western Front before Russia could mobilize in the east.

    The war was triggered by the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, on June 28, 1914. The Serbian nationalists who killed him wanted Austria out of Serbia. The result was an Austrian occupation of Serbia, and a German pledge on July 5 to give Austria its "faithful support." Austria delivered an ultimatum to Serbia on July 23, and then rejected the Serbian reply on July 26 (even though Serbia met almost all Austrian demands) and declared war on Serbia on July 28. On July 29, Austria began bombarding Belgrade, and the Russians began mobilizing on their Austrian border to defend Serbia on July 30. On July 31, Germany issued an ultimatum to Russia to demobilize within twelve hours. At the same time, Germany made the same ultimatum to France, also demanding surrender of French forts at Toul and Verdun, a ridiculous proposition. Many have criticized this since Germany should have just induced France to remain neutral, but it seems clear that Germany had no trust in France to do that, as France would have much to gain by attacking Germany while its forces were in the east. When Germany went to war with France, Britain joined France as an ally, seeing Germany as the bigger threat. Most thought the war would be quick and decisive, with few, like Lord Kitchener, predicting a multi-year war ("We must be prepared to put armies of millions in the field and maintain them for several years.").

    Admiral Wilhelm Souchon was commanding the German fleet in the Mediterranean at 6pm on August 3 when he learned war was declared. He commanded the Goeben and the Breslau and immediately set sail for the Western Mediterranean to try to escape from the Adriatic Sea. Initially, he sought to intercept three French ships on their way south to Algeria, and continued despite receiving an order from Admiral Tirpitz to turn around and make for Constantinople. He steamed ahead at full speed until he saw the Algerian coast, where he ran up a Russian flag and opened fire. According the Kriegsbrauch, the manual issued by German General Staff, "The putting on of enemy uniforms and the use of enemy or neutral flags or insignia with the aim of deception are declared permissible," even though this was directly contrary to the German-signed Hague convention. After that shelling of at least one French ship and the city of Philippeville, Souchon turned back to Messina in Sicily to coal there from German steamers before setting coarse for Constantinople 1,200 miles away. Below is the route taken.

By MartinD - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3683178

On the morning of August 4, the British ships Indomitable and Indefatigable encountered the Goeben and Breslau heading east back to Messina. But because of the timing of the ultimatums going back and forth, Britain and Germany weren't yet at war. If the British ultimatum was sent to Germany one night before, they would have been at war. But instead, the ships passed within 8,000 yards of each other in silence. See below.

By Bundesarchiv, Bild 134-C2320 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5337867

    Souchon made it to Messina where two messages reached him. One told him to actually not go to Constantinople, due to divided counsel in the Ottoman capital. Passage of the German ships would violate Turkish neutrality. The second informed Souchon that the Austrians could give him no naval help in the Mediterranean, and that Souchon was essentially on his own. Knowing he didn't have the speed to make a run through Gibraltar, and "rebell[ing] against holing himself up in Pola, dependent on the Austrians," Souchon decided to make for Constantinople anyway, with a political instead of a military goal: to bring the Ottomans into the war. The Germans were surrounded on either side of the Strait of Messina, with the stronger British ships protecting the western side, anticipating a breakout in that direction. But after recoaling, the Germans moved east, chased by a smaller ship, the Gloucester, that wouldn't get in range because the Germans would blow it out of the water. Captain Kelly telegraphed Admiral Milne and Troubridge, and the British ships gave chase. Some shots were exchanged, with no damage taken on either side, and the British ships withdrew, expecting the Germans to turn West, which they never did. At that time, a small Italian ship happened to pass by, which happened to have a two-year-old Barbara Tuchman on it, and she and her family witnessed the action.

    Upon reaching Constantinople, the plan transformed into "selling" the ships to the Ottomans, transforming them into the Jawus and the Midilli, flying the Turkish flag. By the end of October, Souchon, still commanding the now-Ottoman ships, entered the Black Sea and shelled Odessa, Sevastopol, and Feodosia, killing civilians and sinking a Russian gunboat, bringing Russia into the war on November 4.

    On land, Germany entered Belgium first, and on August 4, with German columns marching on Liege, the King of Belgium pleaded for help from France, Britain, or anyone. No one was ready to oppose the Germans in Belgium, as the British wanted to be the last ones in (so they wouldn't lose their entire army immediately), and the French were planning to attack in a totally different direction. The Germans were shocked (although they shouldn't have been) that the British chose to side with the French. The Germans conquered the country by August 15. Although the world celebrated Belgium's heroism at delaying the invader, the Germans had already planned some time to be delayed in Belgium, so the delay was only two days, not two weeks as many thought. In Belgium, the Germans had taken severe measures against civilians, taking leaders hostage (and sometimes killing them), burning towns and cities (including a major library), and killing civilians to punish cities for resisting. The German thinker Clausewitz had prescribed terror as the proper method to shorten war, since it would force the population to submit. But the opposite effect occurred, building resentment and resistance against the German occupation.

    Critically, Germany's commander, Moltke, changed the inflexible Schlieffen plan to make it something it was not. The plan called for total commitment on the right side to sweep through Belgium and hit France. But Moltke was tempted by successes on Germany's left, on the actual French border. Initially, the plan was to make a strategic retreat, to capture the French in a sack in the east. But in the face of real war, the Germans advanced in the east too. It turns out that the French were unprepared on all fronts, even the east, where they planned their attack. It couldn't have helped that they wore red trousers, and it couldn't have helped that French Field Regulations calculated that in 20 seconds the infantry could cover 50 meters before the enemy could fire, but that with machine guns it only took the Germans 8 seconds. By August 23, it was clear that the French had broken against the smaller portion of the German forces in the east and the center, not to mention the massive force coming from the north/west. But the one thing that could be said of the French is that they were learning and started a strategic retreat to catch the Germans in a "sack" of their own. This fooled the Germans into a sense of complacency, although some were attuned enough to ask that, if the French were routed, why have we taken no prisoners? But the German advances already decided that the Germans could not be defeated easily. By taking Belgium and northern France, the Germans were in control of the industrial power of both countries, massive coal fields, iron mines, rivers, railroads, and agriculture. This would feed the German war machine for the rest of the war. Luckily for the French, the Germans were forced to send two corps east. The Russians had mobilized far faster than expected in support of their French allies. But they were also defeated far faster than expected at the Battle of Tannenberg. But in this defeat, the Russians bought the French valuable time.

    In those early days of the war, German war aims included control of the European continent, which would require abolition of neutral states at Germany's borders, the end of England's hegemony in world affairs, and the breaking up of Russia. The nations Germany defeated would have to pay massive reparations for direct war costs, veterans funds, public housing, gifts for generals and statesmen, and all of Germany's national debt.  These aims ironically foreshadowed the reparations that would go in the other direction at the end of the war.

    Meanwhile in the North Sea and Baltic, Germany kept its fleet in a defensive posture. The fleet, which had so threatened Britain enough to create permanent enmity between the two countries and drive Britain into France's arms, was now useless in an actual fight. Instead, the Kaiser wanted to keep the fleet for bargaining purposes after the war, plus, it was still weaker than the British fleet it would need to fight to break out of the North Sea. Britain was therefore able to blockade Germany throughout the war, which helped bring America in on the Allies' side, as US trade with the Central Powers diminished from $169 million in 1914 to $1 million in 1916, while trade with the Allies in the same period rose from $824 million to $3 billion. The German fleet was to remain a "fleet-in-being," as the Germans hoped for an early victory on land that never came.

    In the final days of August, Joffre, who had mismanaged the first weeks of the war, became focused on his counter-attack. Tuchman praises him in this period and writes that

What went on behind that opaque exterior he never showed. If he owed his composure to a failure of imagination, that was fortunate for France. Ordinary men, Clausewitz wrote, become depressed by a sense of danger and responsibility; if these conditions are to "lend wings to strengthen the judgment, there must be present unusual greatness of soul." If danger did not strengthen Joffre's judgment in any way, it did call forth a certain strength of character. When ruin was all around him, he maintained an even tenor, a solid control, what Foch, who saw him on August 29, called a "wonderful calm" which held the French Army together in an hour when it most needed the cement of confidence.

On the eve of battle, he heard the news that the Russians had been crushed at Tannenberg, but with the consolation that the two German corps had been diverted to the east (and had been diverted unnecessarily, as they arrived after the battle). And the French, with Paris blacked out and the government fleeing to Bordeaux, caught a lucky break. Instead of going to Paris, the Germans swung east of the city, presenting their flank to the French army garrisoned in the city. The Germans were flanked at the First Battle of the Marne just outside Paris, and were forced to retreat, both sides racing to the sea to try to (unsuccessfully) outflank the other. The Germans had been exhausted from forced marches on the way to Paris, and many were captured sleeping or unable to take another step in the early September heat. The German general Alexander von Kluck gave the reason for the German failure at the Marne:

The reason that transcends all others was the extraordinary and peculiar aptitude of the French soldier to recover quickly. That men will let themselves be killed where they stand, that is a well-known thing and counted on in every plan of battle. But that men who have retreated for ten days, sleeping on the ground and half dead with fatigue, should be able to take up their rifles and attack when the bugle sounds, is a thing upon which we never counted. It was a possibility not studied in our war academy.

Had the Germans not withdrawn two corps to face the Russians, there might not have been a hole in the line to Kluck's left, and there might have been no space to flank on his right.

    All in all, this was a great book and totally a classic of its genre. Very heavy on politicking among the generals, but that's the point.

Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=188665

Miscellaneous Facts:

• A good quote from Tuchman: "nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great general."
• There was a whole issue years before the war in France when it was proposed that France get rid of the red trousers in its uniform, because they were so visible. But conservatives protested it, and succeeded in keeping the "iconic" red trousers, which caused more casualties in the early days of WWI, when it became obvious that a change was needed.
• The French Commander-In-Chief Joffre was driven around in a car by Georges Bouillot, the three time winner of the Grand Prix.
• The Russian state, worried about drunkenness, banned the sale of vodka during the war, which had the negative effect of diminishing state finances, since the Russian government had a monopoly over vodka sales, which made up a third of government income.

The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance by Shaul Magid

     This is an interesting book that deals with Zionism, post-Zionism, counter-Zionism, exile, diaspora, postmodernism, and everything in between. At some points it was very esoteric and sort of beyond my comprehension, but it was still thought provoking when I was able to understand it. It reads like a literature review, since Magid basically structures each chapter as a response to other authors or an analysis/synthesis of other thinkers. 

    Magid identifies a crisis in liberal Zionism in that the desire for Jews to own or control the land of Israel conflicts with the rights of Palestinians to live there, as well as with the desire for a plural democracy. Magid essentially says that Israel should dispose with Zionism and accept victory in the Jews having arrived, and now implement a true democracy, the only legitimate way forward. But I remain unconvinced after reading the book that this idea is any better than Israelis throwing themselves at the mercy of more numerous Palestinians/Arabs who would outvote Jews in elections. And since the two communities have no trust between each other, this doesn't seem like a very functional state.

The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History by Ruth Mostern

    This book by Ruth Mostern was a great study of hydrological history. Mostern's writing is a little dry, but it's a work of scholarship that really taught me a lot about a river I knew nothing about. The Yellow River is China's second-longest river, after the Yangtze (meaning Long River), and is the sixth longest river in the world. It is also the birthplace of Chinese civilization. It feeds a floodplain in northeastern China that is extremely rich agriculturally, but it also causes massive floods that kill and displace millions in the worst events. Here is a map below.

By Shannon1 - Created using Natural Earth and NASA SRTM data, both public domain., CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9617583

    The most interesting thing I've learned is that the Yellow River was not always yellow. It is called the Yellow River because of the color of the river after it picks up sediment in the Loess Plateau (see below).

But originally, sediment didn't run with the river. In fact, the sediment comes from erosion caused by human activities: felling trees, grazing animals, and clearing land for agriculture. All of these activities removed plant life, causing more erosion, which washed sediment into the river until it reached the flat floodplain (see below).

As the water reached the floodplain, it deposited the silt, which would then block its own path, causing the river to wind across the plain, continually changing course, forming oxbow lakes, and gradually rising above the land surrounding it as it travelled on its own silt beds. Being higher than the other land, when the river did spill its banks, the floods were more dramatic, as the river couldn't connect back to its old course, which was higher than the surrounding land due to the silt deposits.

    Until the ninth century CE, relatively few people lived upstream on the Yellow River, and there were a far smaller number of flooding events downstream than would occur later. It was then that the Chinese state sponsored major frontier colonization up into the middle reaches of the river, doubling the rate of erosion (today, the rate of erosion is ten times natural levels). Before that, as recently as 2,500 years ago, historical documents, pollen records, and archaeological sources show large areas of shrubs and grassland, which today cover only 3% of the Plateau. The Loess Plateau receives less than twenty inches of annual rainfall, and 90% of the river's sediment comes from there, as almost all of the Yellow River's middle-course tributaries funnel into the plateau region. The erosion has grown exponentially: between eleven thousand and six thousand years ago, the river deposited about .54 centimeters of sediment annually; between six thousand and three thousand years ago, .75 centimeters; and today it deposits 8.2 centimeters per year, fifty-eight times the rate of the early period. The smaller numbers were already enough for the river to overflow its banks, but during the beginning of greater human intervention 1,000 years ago, the river started to rise by about a meter a century.

    The first major state-sponsored colonization of the frontier began under the bureaucrat Shang Yang during the Qin dynast in the fourth century BCE. First, Qin laborers built a wall, staffed with soldier-farmers to keep out the horse-riding raiders and to demarcate the area of agricultural activity; then, they surveyed and subdivided the kingdom, assigning new land uses, intending to farm in areas where they probably shouldn't have, very similar to the US in the Great Plains in the 19th century. Agriculture intensified south of the wall, and the Qin forbade the older system of migratory, interlocking subsistence farming. The Qin dynasty would end up unifying China as its first modern empire, and the Qin regime sponsored as many as eleven forced migrations to the northwest onto the Loess Plateau.

    Within a few centuries, contemporary scholars and bureaucrats were already noticing that there was an erosion problem. Zhang Rong, commander in chief at the Han imperial court, observed in 4 CE that state sponsored colonization caused erosion and flooding. Unfortunately, changes were not made, and it was probably already too late. A catastrophic flood broke through the levies in 14 CE, and the river was not rerouted until 70CE. Mostern observes that between the census counts of 2 and 140 CE, the total population of the Han empire declined from 58 to 48 million, and there was a massive exodus out of the Yellow River floodplain: in 2 CE, 44 million people lived in north China and 14 million in the south; but in 140, 26 million lived in the north, with 22 million in the south. But even so, this was a more stable system than the shock that would come in the tenth century.

    Flooding got really bad during the very wet 920s, in which heavy rains caused more sediment wash. Every year between 924 and 954 saw at least one flood or breach, and then beginning in 958, there were annual disasters, usually more than one. Only seven years between 958 and 1029 didn't have a massive flood, and in three years, there were double digit numbers of floods. Here is a graph below made by Mostern of the flooding. You can see that things get really bad in the tenth century and then periodically hit bad levels for centuries after.

This period in the tenth century, coinciding with the transition from Tang to Song rule, is considered by historians to be a major watershed in imperial Chinese history, in which there was access to new strains of faster-ripening rice, population doubled (and urbanized), and Chinese civilization became more oriented toward the Yangtze River than the Yellow River. Until the eighth century, less than half of China's population lived south of the Yellow River basin, but by 1550, over two-thirds did. The shift probably came around the tenth century, according to Mostern. She doesn't say it directly, but it would seem to be the implication that poor river management caused catastrophe after catastrophe and drove people away.
    It's crazy to read how many people knew exactly what was going on with flood management and were ignored. Liu Tianhe (1479-1545), a minister who served as a military officer in Shaanxi, wrote A Compendium of Questions About Water (Wenshuiji), and identified that

[Silt] comes down from the gullies that have come to exist in the high-altitude places in the northwest, from whence the water rushes with extreme violence that levees are unable to resist. Second, the silt raises the riverbed higher, so today, if one surveys the middle of the stream as it flows through Kaifeng, [one discovers that] in winter and spring, it has a depth of only a bit more than one zhang, while even in summer and fall it does not exceed more than two zhang. Its bed is high, unlike the abyss of the Changjiang [Yangtze] course ... Fourth, downstream, the land is extremely flat and there are no mountains to control and confine [the river]. Fifth, in all of the former northern and southern courses of the [river] through the central prefectures, the earth is mixed with mud and sand. Sixth, this perfectly causes [riverbank] collapse through susceptibility to breaches.

    It seems like, according to Mostern, the CCP made the most progress at flood control. By the 1950s, they basically understood what was going on, and began to restore forests and grasslands on the Loess Plateau while also building new concrete embankments with steel foundations on the floodplain that were far stronger than anything built before. But problems aren't over. The Yellow River has experienced desiccation (drying up) multiple times since the 1970s, and the rate of desiccation has increased with time. What water remains is polluted with fertilizers, pesticides, and industrial chemicals. This is surely a big issue for the future.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• The Great Bend in the Yellow River, which turns north, then east, and then south before turning east again, is a result of a shift in continental plates long after the Yellow River first formed 56-34 million years ago. It had drained due east until India crashed into Asia five million years ago and caused the "Ordos Block" to fold and uplift into place.
• The Yellow River did not originally take one clear path to the sea, but just sort of petered out on the floodplain. It had to be channelized to actually clearly make it to the sea.
• The major turning points in soil erosion occurred about 7,000 years ago, with the emergence of neolithic agriculture; 300 BCE to 0 CE, as a result of state-directed Iron Age agriculture; between 800 and 1100 CE, the most abrupt change due to population growth, military activity, and timber commodification; and in the 17th and 18th centuries, when people began intensive dryland farming of maize and tubers with a population boom.
• Around the eighth century BCE, pastoralists started riding horses, which introduced the horse population to the landscape, eating up lots of grass and causing more erosion.
• Kublai Khan commissioned the first scientific expedition to the headwaters of the Yellow River in 1279, which resulted in a short book titled Monograph of the River's Origin (Heyuan zhi).

Cien años de soledad por Gabriel García Márquez

    Quería leer algo en español y pensé en este libro por su reconocimiento global y también porque lo había leído en inglés hace muchos años en el colegio. Al terminar, entendí porque se considera una obra maestra de la literatura, pero no conecté con la novela tanto que quería. Me confundía con los nombres y me enredaba con vocabulario nuevo. Pero fue una buena experiencia desafiarme con este meta de leer un libro entero en español. Creo que es el libro más largo que he leído en español, y si no, es uno entre los más largos. La novela trata mucho con el olvido, el egoísmo, la obsesión, y la familia.

1587: A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline by Ray Huang

    This is a book I wanted to read mainly for its title. The idea of the book is that Huang will explore a single year that is not known for being particularly impactful, but actually illustrates and reveals much about the end of the Ming Dynasty, which fell by 1644. Knowing so little about China and the Ming Dynasty, I mainly just learned the wavetops of how the top of the government worked in that period. The big "events" of the year 1587 (the year of the Pig) include the emperor's withdrawal from public ceremonies, the deaths of some major officials and thinkers, and ...

    One thing I learned from this was how weak the role of the emperor could be and how it could differ significantly under different rulers. The Wanli emperor was nine years old when he came to the throne, and as a result was controlled by his advisors as a child, a role he never broke out of. So while other emperors went out hunting and led armies, the Wanli emperor almost never left the Forbidden City. He took like four visits outside the city into Beijing and nearby tombs of ancestors in his entire life. Otherwise, he was surrounded by women and eunuchs mostly in the Forbidden City. Moreover, he was expected to refrain from influencing policy very much at all. His main role was ceremonial and neutral. As a child, he wasn't allowed to develop any talents--despite being a talented young calligrapher, calligraphy was eliminated from Wanli's curriculum once it was determined that he was enjoying it too much, since "harmless hobbies could develop into undesirable distractions that sent rulers to their ruin." The Ming Dynasty differed from other Chinese Dynasties because it required the ruler to rule without a regent, so there was no official person other than the young emperor controlling the state in his childhood. This gave his tutor, Chang Chu-Cheng, a lot of influence. Chang amassed a huge amount of power, but when he died, other bureaucrats turned against his legacy. This led to Wanli going on strike against his ceremonial duties, also vengeful against the courtiers who tried to get him to name his first son heir instead of the third son, whose mother he was in love with. This had practical effects, since his sons would not be educated properly without being named heirs. Without a formal way to resolve the conflict, it simmered for years and years. The Wanli emperor became very cynical about his role as emperor, which kept him as prisoner with the ability to remove or punish bureaucrats, but no ability to affirmatively push policy.

    Huang was interesting in distinguishing Wanli from the Cheng-te emperor, who was far more independent several decades earlier. He had no family ties and didn't care for any of the palace ladies. He was able to basically rule like I would have thought emperors could rule, doing whatever they wanted. He died childless, and his brother, Wanli's grandfather inherited the throne. This was the situation that bureaucrats wanted to avoid.

    Also interesting in 1587 is that a northeastern governor noticed that a tribal leader was building strength and eliminating rivals on the northern frontier. He sent forces out against him, but was defeated. It became a controversy whether or not to eliminate the officials who failed to defeat the tribesmen, and the bureaucrats eventually decided to retain them. This rewarding of failure was surely to the benefit of the Jurchen leader Nurhaci, who would eventually topple the Ming and found the Qing Dynasty. While 1587 was still a long way from the end of Ming, from that point on, Nurhaci had full reign.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• "Geomancy" was a kind of divination that figured out where to build state structures in a quasi-religious way.
• Almost all military officers in the Ming Dynasty inherited their positions from their fathers, with junior officers inheriting ranks exactly as they were, and generals' sons getting ranks only slightly lower.

The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

     I can't exactly remember where I heard of this book. I think it was in something I read by Francis Fukuyama. But whatever I read, it referenced The Leopard's refrain, that "If we want everything to stay as it is, everything has to change." The line is spoken by the young and liberal aristocrat Tancredi in the midst of Risorgimento, the Italian unification. The book deals with this issue, of how the aristocrats dealt with the changing world of the mid to late 19th century, but it has application to all times of great change. The book is especially interesting because the author, writing in the 1950s, was the descendant of the individual characters of the book. Tomasi di Lampedusa was the last of his line of minor Sicilian princes, which ended when Italy abolished titles in 1946. He never published during his lifetime, authoring this one book, which was published posthumously. The book is significant for its depiction of Sicily and for its deep themes of decay and change. It has a nostalgic feel to it, although not necessarily Conservative.

    And politics pass the aristocrats of the story by, more like a force of nature than a force of man. The comparison becomes explicit: "The rains had come, the rains had gone, and the sun was back on its throne like an absolute monarch kept off it for a week by his subjects' barricades, and now reigning once again, choleric but under constitutional restraint." We never get a direct action by any of the characters on the politics of the world. Instead, the world constantly acts on them, remaining passive. 

    Sicily itself also features as a character in the book. Tomasi di Lampedusa describes summers of obliterating heat, glassy seas pounded by the sun, and people baking in their clothes. Little towns disappear into folds in the land, and the whole earth is the yellowed color of dead grass, with trees few and far between. And there is a slowness, very stereotypical of southern Italy, and really pretty offensive. 

"In Sicily it doesn't matter whether things are done well or done badly; the sin which we Sicilians never forgive is simply that of 'doing at all. We are old, Chevalley, very old. For more than twenty-five centuries we've been bearing the weight of a superb and heterogenous civilization, all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that we could call our own. We're as white as you are, Chevalley, and as the Queen of England; and yet for two thousand and five hundred years we've been a colony. I don't say that in complaint; it's all our fault." 

    There is always a feeling of some impending doom in The Leopard. It feels like an inevitable wave is washing over Sicilian aristocracy, ending their way of life. It is symbolized in the life and death of the strong, muscular Fabrizio, who is a massive man in 1860, but a shell of his former self in 1880. And there are lines like this one, that Fabrizio the Prince directs towards the priest, Father Pirrone:

"We're not blind, my dear Father, we're just human. We live in a changing reality to which we try to adapt ourselves like seaweed bending under the pressure of water. Holy Church has been granted an explicit promise of immortality; we, as a social class, have not. Any palliative which may give us another hundred years of life is like an eternity to us. We may worry about our children and perhaps our grandchildren; but beyond what we can hope to stroke with these hands of ours we have no obligations. I cannot worry myself about what will happen to any possible descendants in the year 1960. The Church, yes, she must worry for she is not destined to die..." [emphasis is mine]

 And here's another good example:

The crowd of dancers, among whom he could count so many near him in blood if not in heart, began to seem unreal, made up of that material from which are woven lapsed memories, more elusive even than the stuff of disturbing dreams. From the ceiling the gods, reclining on gilded couches, gazed down smiling and inexorable as a summer sky. They thought themselves eternal; but a bomb manufactured in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was to prove the contrary in 1943. [emphasis is mine]

A big "ending" in the book comes in the final chapter, set 30 years after the Prince Fabrizio's 1880 death in 1910. In it, Fabrizio's daughters discover that the relics they believed to be genuine in their family chapel are mostly fake, and, in the words of a priest "have no value whatsoever." I think this is meant to imply that the traditions that aristocrats maintained had lost all value, if not in truth, at least in the perception of the world. The aristocrats themselves lost any societal value. And the book ends with one of Fabrizio's daughters ordering her maid to toss the taxidermized corps of his dog, Bendico, out the window. It briefly resembles the leopard on their coat of arms before landing in a trash heap.

How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith

    I really liked How the Word Is Passed. Clint Smith basically travels across the United States (plus Senegal) to chart the history of slavery, but moreso the historical memory of slavery. It is less a book about history than the modern conception of slavery as an historical phenomenon. So Smith compared Monticello, where nearly all the tour guides are white and teaches also about Jefferson the founder, with the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, which is dedicated to teaching about slavery. I also really liked how well read Clint Smith is, which shows in his frequent citations of other scholarly works. The book is really seamless in transitioning from the scholarly to the personal experiences in each site.

    I've always thought it was interesting how the ambivalence toward slavery at the founding was replaced by vehement support of it in the South. I thought it was interesting that Jefferson wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia that

There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal…The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.

American slavery was unique in relying on natural increase in slaves, whereas most slaver societies maintained profits precisely by not caring for young slaves but by raiding for new slaves in their prime working years. Slavery was so large in the South that one in three Southerners was an enslaved person in 1860, over four million people. 57% of those slaves were under the age of twenty. 

Miscellaneous Fact:

• Sam Houston, the first president of the Republic of Texas, was the only governor in the Confederacy who opposed secession, and refused to swear and oath to the Confederacy. Apparently Abraham Lincoln also offered him military assistance to prevent Texas from joining the Confederacy, but Houston refused it.
• Fernando Wood, the mayor of New York City at the outbreak of the Civil War, proposed secession to protect the cotton-trading relationship with the South.

Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable

    I thought this was a great book. It was clearly written by an admirer of Malcolm X, but it is also critical and incisive on analyzing Malcolm's weaknesses and flaws. It contains a compelling narrative about a fascinating life and was an easy book to read. It also carries special significance since it was published less than a year before the author's death, and that Marable received a Pulitzer Prize for his work. 

Early Life

    I was struck by how chaotic Malcolm X's life was as a child. And I was also struck by the many similarities to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s life. X's life seemed very similar to King's life until it went off the rails following his father's death. X's father, Earl Little, had three children with his wife in Georgia before abandoning her to move north in 1915, marrying X's mothing in Montreal in 1919. Him and his new wife were both active Garveyites, spreading the conservative message of Marcus Garvey, who did not object to segregation, but hated white people and sought to build a better world for black people separate from white rule. Garvey founded the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and was often in conflict with the NAACP, which catered to a more middle-class crowd than Garvey. Garvey embraced capitalism, and told his followers that "wealth is strength" and the "real human rights." Garvey also favored separation of the races to such an extent that he met with Klan leader Edward Young Clarke and shared an opposition to intermarriage and social relations between the races.

    Little and his new wife lived in Philadelphia for a while, but decided to move to Omaha, Nebraska, to be UNIA field organizers. In Omaha, the Little's found life very difficult, as it was the height of the 1920's KKK revival. In early 1925, while Earl was away, Klansmen rode out to the family home and demanded that Louise, pregnant with Malcolm, come out. She told them that she was alone with her three children and that her husband was in Milwaukee, preaching. They rode off after warning Louise to take her family and leave town.

    The family next moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for a few years until briefly moving to East Chicago, Indiana, before settling in Lansing, Michigan, in 1929. In November of that year, when Malcolm was four years old, the Little's house was bombed and burnt down, although no one was hurt. Instead of helping, police investigated Earl for setting the blaze to collect insurance, although it seems clear to historians that that was not the case. Then in 1931, when Malcolm was just six, his father died. It seems unclear whether it was an accident or not, but it seems like a murder the way Marable describes it. Earl was cut in half by a tram, as if he'd fallen in front of it, but it was in a part of town he wasn't expected to be in. It seems more likely that racist whites hit him with a car elsewhere and then threw his already mangled body in front of a tram in another spot. Louise was sure he had been murdered, but Malcolm was of two minds about it for the rest of his life.

    With Earl dead, the family's life was upended, and debt collectors took much of what his life insurance policy gave to his family. Louise worked hard and managed to support the family until 1937, when a suitor of hers got her pregnant and then ran off, leaving her unable to care for her children. Welfare workers stepped in to look after the children. Initially, he was placed with neighbors close by so he could still visit home, but the new baby (her eighth) pushed Louise past her breaking point. After police found her walking barefoot along a road with her baby not knowing where she was in December 1938, she was committed to Kalamazoo State Hospital, where she would be confined for twenty-four years. Malcolm rarely visited her there and was deeply ashamed. The next summer, social workers decided that Malcolm would be moved again, this time to Ingham County Juvenile Home in Mason, Michigan, ten miles to the south. At school, teachers discouraged him from following his dreams of becoming a lawyer, called him slurs, and encouraged him to take up manual labor. Within months, he was expelled from school.

    He then moved to Boston, to live with his half sister, Ella, from Earl's other marriage. But things didn't go well there. Ella enrolled Malcolm in an all-boys private school, which he went to the first morning, and never returned to after seeing there were no girls there. He never went back to a classroom. Ella, meanwhile, was not an ideal guardian, being arrested over twenty-five times, although only convicted once. Malcolm was initially scared being exposed to the big city for the first time, but started to fall to its corrupting influences.

    Soon, Malcolm was a petty criminal. He avoided the draft in 1943 by telling the psychiatrist that, "I want to get sent down South. Organize them nigger soldiers, you dig? Steal us some guns, and kill us crackers!" He was marked 4-F, unfit for duty, and never heard from the Army again. Malcolm was doing anything for money. The author even claims that he would go once a week to the house of a wealthy Bostonian, where he was paid to undress them both, pick up the old man, place him on a table, and sprinkle him all over with talcum powder until the man climaxed. He lived two lives: one in which he was a member of his family with Ella in Boston, and another in which he "participated in prostitution, marijuana sales, cocaine sessions, numbers running, the occasional robbery, and, apparently, paid homosexual encounters."

    After being caught for a gun charge, X betrayed his accomplices from a string of robberies in exchange for a lighter sentence. Instead, because two of the accomplices were white women, the justice system went easier on them and harder on the black men involved. He was sentenced to eight to ten years in prison, and his own lawyer told him it was because "You had no business with white girls!" His white female accomplice, who had also been his girlfriend, told authorities that she "lived in constant fear" of him and served only seven months. This left a profound impact on Malcolm, writing later, "All women, by their nature, are fragile and weak."

Malcolm X in Prison

    Once in prison, Malcolm was put into a mice-infested cell seven by eight feet across, without running water. Prisoners had to relieve themselves in buckets emptied only once every twenty-four hours. Prisoners also had to eat in their cells. In prison, Malcolm initially got clean, but then returned to drugs, getting high on ground up nutmeg, which can be a hallucinogen in large amounts with effects similar to ecstasy. In prison, Malcolm met Elton Bembry, twenty years older than him, who was extremely knowledgeable, and imparted wisdom on the young Malcolm. Self-study was not just for the joy on learning--it could get Malcolm a transfer to a more lenient facility, fulfilling requirements for a university extension and devouring books, including memorizing the dictionary.

    In 1948, Malcolm's brother Philbert sent him an unusual letter, informing him that he and all the members of their family had converted to Islam. Not long after, his other brother, Reginald, wrote to him, "Don't eat any more pork, and don't smoke any more cigarettes. I'll show you how to get out of prison." Malcolm was puzzled for days, but decided to follow the advice. Malcolm was sent to Massachusetts' most lenient prison soon after, where he joined a debating club and discovered a passion for public speaking.

The Nation of Islam

    After leaving jail, Malcolm was ready to join the Nation of Islam. While there had been some Muslims among the Africans enslaved in the Americas, the numbers were low. The Nation of Islam was a much newer idea that emerged in the 20th century, and had little connection to Islam as practiced around the world. The first people to bring Islam to the black community were part of the Moorish Science Temple of America, founded in 1913 but an African American named Timothy Drew. The Nation of Islam emerged in the 1930s, when a man named Wallace Fard started going door-to-door in Detroit seeking to join African-Americans to his new religion. Fard was olive-skinned, and it is unclear where he came from. It is also unclear where he went, as he disappeared in 1934 and was never seen again. But the religion became a phenomenon across the Midwest and then the Northeast among African Americans, and was led after 1934 by Elijah Muhammad. The religion found great appeal among Garveyites, since it preached a similar self-reliant, apolitical style. But it was hardly related to Islam, and preached a bizarre doctrine about the evil of white people, who were created by an evil black scientist. It resembles a cult much more than a religion. The leadership would extract huge sums of money from members in tithes and by requiring them to buy copious amounts of the periodical they produced, Muhammad Speaks.

    Malcolm rose very quickly to become one of the Nation of Islam's top preachers in the 1950s. He stood out for being one of their most effective speakers and organizers, and was sent to different Temples across the country to represent Elijah Muhammad. But the problems he kept running into were that he sometimes outshone Elijah Muhammad himself, and that X wanted to get into politics, which Elijah Muhammad was extremely opposed to. Malcolm would continually organize protests which the NOI leadership kept trying to reign in.

    As a representative of the Nation of Islam, Malcolm took a trip to the Middle East in 1959, which may have given him his first doubts about the NOI. He realized that all Muslims were clearly not black, and he also realized that he knew very little about orthodox Islam, and the Muslims of the Middle East were surprised that he could call himself Muslim without any knowledge of Arabic. Malcolm's trip would be one of the first of the trips made by senior NOI leaders that caused them to try to bring NOI closer to standard Islam. After Malcolm went, Elijah Muhammad started sending his own sons to the Middle East before and after he himself went in 1960. NOI was heavily criticized by American Muslims throughout its existence as being a heretical, fake branch of Islam. Islam is a universal religion that seeks to transcend race, and NOI was in fundamental conflict with that when it preached that Islam was a black person's religion.

    Another reason for the eventual split between Malcolm and NOI was Malcolm's discovery that Elijah Muhammad wasn't really the holy man he portrayed himself as. In fact, Muhammad was cheating on his wife with several other women, abusing his position as leader to sleep with them. Moreover, he was abandoning his children by these women. And perhaps worst of all, one of the women was Evelyn Williams, a woman that Malcolm had dated and broke up with in the past, who he may have still had feelings for. One time, two of the women brought their children by Elijah Muhammad all the way to his hideaway in Arizona and left them at his door. He turned them over to social services the next day.

    In April 1963, conflict between Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad came to a head when X flew to Phoenix to confront his leader about all the women Muhammad had impregnated. While Malcolm was seeking to find solutions, his snooping around on this issue was perceived as an attack on Muhammad. Malcolm began preaching that it wasn't necessary for a messenger like Muhammad to be perfect, contradicting the official NOI doctrine that Elijah Muhammad was perfection. At this time, Louis X (later known as Louis Farrakhan) decided along with other leaders in NOI to turn against Malcolm, and started informing against him to Elijah Muhammad. Continuing to contradict the order to avoid politics, Malcolm kept getting drawn into political disputes. One of the worst was shortly after the Kennedy assassination, which Malcolm X described (only after being prompted by reporters) as "the chickens coming home to roost" as a payback for white violence against blacks. For this comment, Muhammad suspended Malcolm for 90 days from the NOI, which meant he would be shunned by all members. The real purpose of this may have been to create an indefinite suspension from the beginning, but even if it wasn't it certainly became indefinite when Malcolm kept engaging in NOI activities. At this time Malcolm endorsed the young Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali against Sonny Liston. Ali won, and Malcolm brought him into the NOI fold, but Ali quickly chose the side of Muhammad against Malcolm X. his life was spinning out of control, and on March 8, 1964, Malcolm X announced his decision to leave the Nation of Islam.

Leaving the Nation of Islam

    It may be of some significance that as Malcolm X was leaving the Nation of Islam, the first major Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964. It seems to symbolize to me the defeat of the idea that black people could succeed by staying away from politics. It vindicated Malcolm's statements to that effect, but proved the weakness of his behavior by staying in NOI. During the legislative process to pass the bill, Malcolm X visited Washington, D.C., and went to listen to a press conference that Martin Luther King was giving after his discussions on the Civil Rights Act with senators. They encountered each other accidentally in the hallway after leaving through separate doors, and a photographer took a snapshot of them shaking hands--it was the only time the two ever met. The next month, Malcolm X gave the speech "The Ballot or the Bullet," which was momentous not for the violence it called for (Malcolm was already doing that) but because he called for political action--voting--for the first time.

    Already, Malcolm knew that NOI thugs were planning to kill him. These plots and attempts escaped scrutiny because their intended victim was Malcolm X, which left the police unsympathetic, and also because it was well-known that NOI members did not carry weapons. It was less well-known that they had enforcers who would regularly beat and intimidate members. One way to escape them was to leave the country, which he did in April of 1964, embarking for Mecca on the Hajj.

    The Hajj was an awakening for Malcolm. Not only did it mean his embrace of orthodox Islam over NOI, but it also exposed him to Islam as a universal religion, with no distinction based on race. Famously, Malcolms declared that, "I have eaten from the same place, drank from the same glass, slept on the same bed or rug, while praying to the same God . . . with fellow Muslims whose skins was the whitest of white, whose eyes were the bluest of blue . . . [for] the first time in my life . . . I didn't see them as 'white' men." This reveals the huge change Malcolm was going through, but also how naive he had been. His world had been small while he was a NOI member, and it now became large enough to fit more complexity in it. Travel broadened his horizons.

    But leaving NOI also left Malcolm in a legal struggle to keep his house, which was owned by NOI. Malcolm had put so much trust in NOI that he had few assets of his own, trusting Elijah Muhammad to always look out for him. But now the faithful swore loyalty to Muhammad in the temples, and were expected to denounce Malcolm for heresy. Meanwhile, Malcolm was attempting to set up the Muslim Mosques Incorporated (MMI) as a competitor with NOI for black Muslims while creating the Organization for Afro-American Unity (OAAU) as a secular, black nationalist organization. This structure was prone to turf struggles between the two organizations and only endured based on Malcolm's charisma. After returning to the United States from the Hajj in late May, Malcolm left again to spend nineteen weeks in Africa, leaving his organizations to flounder.

    In Africa, Malcolm sought to convince African nations to condemn the United States for its treatment of African-Americans. This effort failed as narrowly interpreted, but Malcolm was still very successful in building diplomatic inroads across the continent. He was treated like a visiting dignitary everywhere he went. But when he returned, he was back in danger.

The Assassination

    The assassination of Malcolm X was planned for a year, and attempted several times before it succeeded. Failures included trying to ram his car off the road, an ambush right in front of his house, and bombing his house. The plan that worked was a full-frontal assault during one of Malcolm's speeches. Very unfortunately, it was a rare occasion in which his wife, Betty, and their children attended. It took so long because Muhammad never exactly gave an order, but just a sort of Henry II vague desire, because Malcolm still had the respect of much of NOI, and because Malcolm had been outside the country so much.

    But it was not possible for NOI to leave him alive. He threatened the legitimacy of NOI by creating another Muslim sect, and the defections of two of Elijah Muhammad's sons, Wallace and Akbar, made the situation even more dire. Muhammad must have felt he was fighting for his life. The murder itself involved four likely gunmen. Two started a fake fight, and while attention was turned away, a third approached with a shotgun. A fourth detonated a smoke bomb to cause even more havoc, and then they all turned their guns on Malcolm until he was dead. 

    Marable makes a convincing argument that justice was not done. Only one assailant was caught on the scene--the others escaped. The shotgun-wielder was caught, and two men claimed to be the other two were as well, but Marable gives good reasons to doubt that they were actually the shooters, even though they would have had the same motive. Most shocking, the police did not secure the crime scene, and the owner of the Audubon Ballroom had the entire space cleaned up, blood mopped off the floor, to host an event four hours later.

Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.

    There are so many interesting points of comparison between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. The two were contemporaries: Malcolm X lived from 1925-65 and MLK from 1929-1968. They were the two most famous leaders of Black thought in the 1960s, but completely divergent. King was a Christian preacher, X was a Nation of Islam preacher. King sought integration, X supported segregation. King was a Southerner, and X was a Northerner. Both were sexist, but in very divergent ways. King loved women, and he was a serial womanizer, but he felt there was a certain place for women as wives and mothers, and not as leaders. Malcolm really seemed to hate women. He wanted nothing to do with his wife, and didn't enjoy the company of women like King did. While King was known for tons of affairs, X didn't cheat on his wife, but he didn't spend much time with her either. Malcolm X was also financially abusive, withholding money from his wife, even saying himself that he put her "in jail financially." They also had short careers. Malcolm X only really became involved in Civil Rights in 1957, following an altercation between NOI members and police. MLK got involved during the Montgomery bus boycott of 1956. The result is that their careers were eight and twelve years, each lasting until their assassinations. And both knew that they would be killed, making frequent comments about it before the end.

    Ideologically, I found it interesting that both men were converging on the idea that the United States needed a more radical change. Malcolm X was feeling this way by 1964, and King was certainly thinking it by 1966. Both were tempted by socialism as the answer. But Malcolm had less than a year to live after leaving NOI and was never able to fully develop his ideas. He also carried far less sway with black Americans. Consider this- Malcolm X endorsed Barry Goldwater in 1964, but LBJ carried 96% of the black vote. And he would still say insane things, like that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a "device to deceive the African people." Today and then, it was King's influence who was the greater. Black nationalism remains a fringe movement, while integrationism brought about the first black president. Interestingly, Marable identifies hip-hop and film as bringing back interest in Malcolm X in the 90s, but Islamism as a source for a revival of Malcolm X's legacy in the future.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• While living in Harlem in the 1940s, X worked at Jimmy's Chicken Shack, where both he and another employee both had red hair. Malcolm had always been called Red, and to distinguish the two, they called Malcolm "Detroit Red" (no one had heard of Lansing) and the other one "Chicago Red." Chicago Red would change his name again later when he began a comedy career, going by Redd Foxx.
• Of the 15 million Africans taken hostage to the Americas as slaves, about 650,000, or 7-8%, were Muslims.
• NOI maintained connections with the American Nazi Party due to their shared belief in segregation and the NOI doctrine that all whites were racist, and therefore the Nazis were the only ones who were honest about it.

King: A Life by Jonathan Eig

    King was an excellent book and I'm so glad I picked it up. Martin Luther King is obviously a very well-known figure, but sometimes his fame gets in the way of actually knowing who he was as a person. Eig starts and finishes the book by arguing for a fuller understanding of King not as some super hero of civil rights, but as a good but flawed man who made a massively positive impact on the country over a thirteen year career from age 26 to 39. Eig notes that King himself has been lost in the modern view of him--at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C., Eig didn't find a single one of King's books in the gift shop. His age was a huge takeaway- King was so young, but his shar shone very bright during his short time of influence. I also picked up a Malcolm X biography while reading this, since I wanted to compare the two, so some comparisons will follow below, and I'll do a separate reflection on the Malcolm X book when I finish it.

    This biography makes it clear that King's childhood primed him for church leadership and activism. Born an intelligent and thoughtful child, King's parents cultivated his intellect. But his father was also strict. This provided some discipline, but also fear. Bayard Rustin speculated that MLK's beatings from his father made him more fearful, and that even though King had no problems confronting white racists, he "could not bear conflict with older civil rights leaders." His father beat him severely as a child. King went on a trip north to Connecticut before college that really changed him and gave him perspective on the world outside of the South and segregation. King went to the northeast again after his time at Morehouse to attend Crozer, a theological seminary. During his time there, a white student pulled a gun on him, accusing him of pranking him by messing up his room. King refused to file a complaint, earning respect on campus. King also filed a suit against a tavern that refused to serve him in New Jersey while he was there.

    King had two major faults in his life. The lesser fault was plagiarism. I feel like there are at least a half a dozen instances in this book where he plagiarizes something. Part of this is explained by the culture of preachers at the time, who freely borrowed phrases from one another. Scholar Keith D. Miller wrote, "words are shared assets, not personal belongings." The greater one was adultery. I had no idea about this side of him, but it seems like everywhere he went, he was dating women and constantly pursued by them. At Crozer, he even dated a white woman that he seriously considered marrying. Harry Belafonte called her his true love. This was all fine and good as a young man, but even after he was married to Coretta, he would travel a lot and see women wherever he was. He had a kind of magnetic personality and a lot of power, which drew women. On one trip he might call as many as five women and meet up with them. We known about this now thanks to the recollections of others and also because of the massive FBI wiretapping of King everywhere he went. But the press refused to report it, because at that time the thinking was, "If you print it about him, you can print it about any man," according to the editor of the Augusta Chronical. This rule wouldn't be broken until the Gary Hart saga in 1988.

    MLK became the preacher at Dexter Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, at the young age of 26. Later that year, he was already leading the bus boycott efforts. I was struck by how small the demands of Black people in Montgomery were. They only wanted riders to remain segregated without black riders forced to get up from their seats when white people arrived, for the city to hire black drivers, and no more name-calling or insulting black riders. They didn't even ask to sit in the front of the bus. But even so, that was unacceptable to whites. The mayor responded to the bus boycott by leading a campaign of harassment against black drivers, having police issue tons of citations and tickets to them for all sorts of trumped-up violations. There was also a grassroots opposition: King's home was bombed by unknown attackers, but noone was hurt. The Ku Klux Klan rode through Black neighborhoods trying to intimidate people. But after 381 days, the Supreme Court refused to reconsider its decision ordering desegregation, and the boycott ended. But instead of desegregating, the city discontinued bus service, a strategy that would be repeated over and over with public goods.

    The Birmingham protests of 1963 were extremely significant for the movement. The response of “Bull” Connor to release dogs and use firehoses to attack protesters in full view of the press created horrific images that woke up the whole nation to who the savages were in the civil rights fight. It also lead to King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which became famous across the country. That year, the Kennedy Administration began drafting major civil rights legislation that would eventually become the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

    The movement really peaked in August 1963 with the March on Washington. It was extremely disciplined and choreographed. Marchers could only bring pre-approved signed, and black police officers were hired to provide an extra buffer between marchers and park rangers and D.C. cops. The march was primarily black--about three-quarters--but TV broadcasts made it look closer to 50-50 by focusing on white marchers. It was the biggest gathering of black people in America's entire history. It should be noted, however, that is was still symptomatic of the sexism that ran rampant through the civil rights movement. No women were offered speaking slots, although six women were asked to stand and be recognized. Rosa Parks managed to merely say, "Hello, friends of freedom, it's a wonderful day." King's "I Have a Dream" speech was written at late the night before, King having only arrived to his hotel at 10pm. He outlined it for two hours and then took another hour and a half to make a finished project, finishing at 3:30am. And at the end of his speech, he improvised. The entire final portion was off-script, including the lines about the "red hills of Georgia" and children hand-in-hand. By the end of the year, King was named Time Person of the Year. This would be the peak of King's popularity, although he still received criticism from more radical ends of the spectrum, both white and black. 

    King also evolved in his ideology over time. In Why We Can't Wait, his 1964 book, King initially included sections about a program for reparations for slavery and segregation. But after meeting with President Johnson, he decided to focus on poverty instead of race. The "Negro Bill of Rights" became the "Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged," and called for the eradication of poverty, guaranteed full employment, and an unconditional income paid to everyone as a right of citizenship. He didn't forget about race, but in 1964, King was focusing on race-neutral solutions. As his career went on, King would add to his ideology a strong opposition to the Vietnam War, and greater emphasis on social democratic policies. He also started to feel that reforming existing institutions was not the answer. By 1967, King felt that there needed to be a "reconstruction of the entire society." King also felt after the Chicago campaign that "Most Americans are unconscious racists."

    The Civil Rights Movement hit its peak in 1963 and crested until it fell in 1966. Two major national laws were passed in King's lifetime: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Civil Rights Act of 1968, which contained the Fair Housing Act, was passed by both House and Senate while King was alive, and signed into law by President Johnson a week after King's assassination. 

    King was the target of frequent assassination attempts. There were bombings, stabbings, and beatings long before his actual assassination. That was just the last in a series. From 1957, King's house was bombed with his children inside, and there were countless more attempts on King's life. He became depressed and very frequently said that he expected he would be killed too. MLK's first words to Coretta after the JFK assassination were, "This is what is going to happen to me also." And Coretta couldn't find words to respond, saying later that, "I could not say, 'It won't happen to you. I felt he was right."  At a time when he was asked about how a movie about his life would end, King replied, "It ends with me getting killed." King would talk about retiring sometimes, and often went to the hospital during bouts of depression. I think that more analysis of King's and other historical figures' mental health would be a really interesting field of future study.

    Part of the problem with the Civil Rights movement after 1965 was that they had achieved their major goals. The Civil Rights Movement, as led by King, was a southern, Christian movement attempting to end segregation. When de jure segregation ended in the South, King and others turned north, but struggled. In these cities, the major issue to fight was housing discrimination, but there was less patience for non-violent techniques. Moreover, many blacks did not want to live in integrated communities as much as they just wanted to be treated equally, so support was not as strong for change. Despite this, the Movement found major success in the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which included the Fair Housing Act, ending housing discrimination. This was the final major piece of civil rights legislation of the movement.

    Another major moment in ending the Civil Rights Movement was James Meredith's March Against Fear. Three weeks into a march through the South, Meredith was shot by a white man. Afterwards, Meredith swore he would not march unarmed again, and much of the non-violent movement was discredited. Meredith survived, and the picture taken just after he was shot (including his attacker to the left) won the Pulitzer Prize for photography in 1967. See below.

Civil rights organizations rallied to finish the march in Meredith's name, but it became incredibly divisive. The movement essentially disintegrated as Stokely Carmichael, the new SNCC chairman, introduced the phrase "Black Power," and disagreement ensued about the pace of change. It would be the last great march of the Civil Rights Movement. King's popularity was also declining. In 1964, King was the fourth most admired man in the world, but he slipped to sixth of ten in 1965 and by 1966, he was off the list entirely. In 1966, 63% of those polled viewed King negatively.

    To finish, I'll just say that by learning more about Martin Luther King as a person and not a super hero, I've come to respect him even more. Seeing him as a human being makes his achievements all the more impressive because Eig tells the story of King's struggle as well as his triumph. And we see the sadness of his fall from grace in the later 60s before his assassination. It is painful to see that at his death, King was in the political wilderness, but inspiring that he was unbowed in his determination to leave the world better than he found it.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• King was also targeted for income-tax fraud in 1957, which he was acquitted of by an all-white jury.
• At an SCLC convention in Birmingham, a large white man rose from his seat and punched King twice in the face. Witnesses said King dropped his hands and let himself be punched and commanded, “Don’t touch him, don’t touch him,” as others brought the assailant to the ground. The man was a member of the American Nazi Party, and King said that they should pray for him instead. He declined to press charges and invited the man to listen to the rest of the program.
• When LBJ's family dog died, J. Edgar Hoover gave them another, which Johnson named J. Edgar.
• King and Malcolm X only met once, briefly in Washington, D.C. Malcolm X went to Selma and wanted to meet King in January 1965, but King was in jail, and Malcolm asked Coretta to "tell Dr. King that I'm sorry I won't get to see him? I want him to know that I didn't come to make his job more difficult. I thought that if the white people understood what the alternative was they would be willing to listen to Dr. King." Malcolm X was assassinated a month later.

How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them by Barbara F. Walter

    So I liked this book overall, but I was very much put off my two things: the over-quantification of politics and the prescription at the end to just embrace the liberal policies of the Democratic party and everything will be solved. As for the second one, I don't disagree, but it was just uninteresting and unrealistic. Otherwise, the book had other good insights.

    One thing I thought was interesting was the idea that civil wars rose alongside democracies. Part of the rise of democracy has meant that legitimacy comes from popular support, so now wars for political control are fought not by a few elites, but by the entire population of a country. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, ideology and class were the primary drivers of civil war, but today, nationalism dwarfs all other causes of civil war. This is probably for the reason that democratic legitimacy comes from "the people" and most people agree that "the people" are the nation. Walter writes that in the first five years after World War II, 53 percent of civil wars were fought between ethnic factions, but since the end of the Cold War, 75 percent of civil wars have been fought between ethnic factions. What is critical to know in analyzing whether an ethnic/national civil war will begin is the trajectory of the groups. The most likely culprit to initiate a civil war is a formerly dominant ethnic group that considers itself native to the land when it sees itself losing power. This was the case of the Serbians in Yugoslavia, for example.

    One thing I wish that Walter explored more was the hard balancing act between democracy, demography, and nationalism. Democracies gain their legitimacy from their role in determining the will of the nation. They also gain legitimacy from their acceptance of a broad degree of freedom among their citizens. But when the demographics of a democracy change, the democracy is forced to choose between remaining true to its old nation or to its liberal values. Either it imposes new controls on liberty to maintain the old national demographics, or it allows the national demographics to change, but loses its source of national legitimacy. This is a hard question. But it is also the most interesting question raised by the book and doesn't get enough attention.

    Something interesting Walter touched on is the usefulness of terrorism in targeting a democracy. Terrorism targets citizens, the very people with political power. In a system like a monarchy, where one person has total power, an assassination is more useful to decapitate a powerful state. But in democracy, where the people have the power, terrorists know that they can inflict pain on the citizens to get the government to deliver concessions. Terror is also easier to do in democracies because they have more freedom of movement and less surveillance.

    Finally, I liked Walter's point about the importance of leadership in avoiding conflict. For example, as South Africa transitioned out of apartheid, it was lucky in that it had leaders in de Klerk and Mandela who were able to work together and compromise to avoid the conflict. If either one had defected from that agreement, a bloody war would have been likely.

Miscellaneous Fact:

• There was a huge increase in militia activity when Obama became president, with the number of known militias rising from 43 in 2008 to 334 in 2011. 

The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea

    This was a really intense book about a really intense storm. It's a little weird since the Andrea Gail lost radio contact, so there's not a ton to write about of the crew's actual experience. Junger fills the book with a long period of tension at the beginning, lots of facts about the sea and storms, and a long portion after the sinking of the Andrea Gail about the other people in the sea during the storm. One thing that gave me pause about the book was that it felt somewhat exploitative since the disaster happened so recently before the book was published. That made this feel more like true crime.

    The town where the Andrea Gail departed from was a fishing town. Gloucester, Massachusetts, had always fished and lost men to the sea--losing a couple hundred men a year in peak years. Since 1650, 10,000 Gloucestermen have died at sea, more than in all of the United States' major wars. From Gloucester, swordfishermen go to the Grand Banks or Georges Bank, which happen to sit on the worst storm tracks in the world. Junger writes,

Low pressure systems form over the Great Lakes or Cape Hatteras and follow jet streams out to the sea, crossing right over the fishing grounds in the process . . . As dangerous as the Grand Banks were, though, Georges Bank--only 180 miles east of Cape Cod--was even worse. There was something so ominous about Georges that fishing captains refused to go near it for nearly 300 years. Currents ran in strange vortexes on Georges, and the tide was said to run off so fast that ocean bottom was left exposed for gulls to feed on.

But Georges was also home to huge amounts of marine life, and fishing resumed in the 19th century and was hugely profitable. But, 

Because the fishing grounds were so small and close to shore, dozens of schooners might be anchored within sight of each other on a fair day. If a storm came on gradually, the fleet had time to weigh anchor and disperse into deeper water; but a sudden storm could pile ship upon ship until they all went down in a mass of tangled speared and rigging.

    So the Andrea Gail went out to catch literal tons of swordfish, and were ready to head back after a month at sea when the storm came. The storm was really three storms. One was a hurricane from the south, another was a cold front coming off the Canadian Shield, and another was a storm off of the Great Lakes. They all converged at the Grand Banks. The decision of when to haul in the lines and return to port is a calculation about how much fish you think you can catch, how much you have in the hold that needs to get back to port before it rots, and how quickly you think you can get back. Weather can be a complicating factor. For the crew of the Andrea Gail, who were already heading back, the issue was that if they took a more circuitous path to avoid the storm, they might risk losing a huge amount of their catch. Moreover, they couldn't know where the storm would head next. In a short conversation over the radio with another captain, the last words out of the Andrea Gail are, "She's comin' on boys, and she's comin' on strong." The Andrea Gail diverts slightly north to find colder water, which doesn't feed a storm as well.

    The Andrea Gail isn't the only ship caught up in the Perfect Storm. The Contship Holland a 542-footer 200 miles to the east has things written in its logbook like, "Ship labors hard in very high following seas," "water over deck and deck cargo, ship strains heavily...," and "ship no longer obeys." For reference, the Andrea Gail is just 72 feet long. And the waves are longer. Junger writes, "Forty-five foot waves have an angled face of sixty or seventy feet, which is nearly the length of the boat. There is a possible lull in the eye of the storm, that would have lasted until one AM. But if the Andrea Gail survived it, it would get worse. Bigger waves would come. On exceptionally big waves, the Andrea Gail has her stern in the trough and her bow still climbing toward the crest." The waves end up reaching 70 feet, which mean angled faces of over 100 feet, waves that very few people have ever seen and lived to tell the tale. It's very possible that the sea could have overwhelmed the Andrea Gail at that point, but another ship, a 55-footer, wasn't flipped until winds hit 100 knots and waves were 70 feet. Junger estimates that the Andrea Gail made it to the lull, but was heavily beaten, with windows out and electronics dead, the crew hoping to survive while soaked in complete darkness.

    Some waves are worse than others. Gravity waves, or swells, are unlikely to sink a ship no matter how tall they are. A cork floating on the surface would not move side-to-side, just up and down. But in shallow water, waves break when the wave drags on the bottom and the top moves forward, falling over. In the open ocean, "the opposite happens: wind builds waves up so fast that the distance between crests can't keep up, and they collapse under their own mass." These waves don't ripple out, but break, transporting a huge amount of water.

    The Coast Guard never receives a call from the Andrea Gail. This is probably because their radios are out, along with the rest of their electricity and lighting. The only link the ship has to the world is the EPIRB, an emergency device that can be triggered manually to call for rescue or is triggered by water. But at this point, there can be no rescue. No ship can reach the Andrea Gail fast enough, and no helicopter can reach the center of the storm. But the EPIRB is never tripped. That means that the captain must have thought that they could survive right until the moment they didn't. It probably means they were hit by a massive rogue wave that they couldn't see since it was pitch black. The only way to survive out there would be to meet every seventy-foot wave head on. But in the darkness, it would be impossible to see them coming. They would feel a big drop into the trough, "a lurch, and the boat starting up a slope way too steep to survive."

    Junger proceeds to tell the reader all about what drowning is like. We know what it's like from people who have drowned and been miraculously saved. It's not really possible to inhale until a person its that the last moment of consciousness. the instinct not to try to breathe underwater is too strong. Usually, a person will hold their breath until their have so much carbon dioxide and so little oxygen in their blood that they take an involuntary breath. This happens, on average, after 87 seconds underwater. If the drowning person hyperventilates beforehand, like free divers do to flush out carbon dioxide, this might be extended to as long as 140 seconds. And then Junger writes an incredibly bleak passage that I'm just going to copy below.

    Until the break point, a drowning person is said to be undergoing "voluntary apnea," choosing not to breathe. Lack of oxygen to the brain causes a sensation of darkness closing in from all sides, as in a camera aperture stopping down. The panic of a drowning person is mixed with an odd incredulity that this is actually happening. Having never done it before, the body—and the mind—do not know how to die gracefully. The process is filled with desperation and awkwardness. "So this is drowning," a drowning person might think. "So this is how my life finally ends."

    Along with the disbelief is an overwhelming sense of being wrenched from life at the most banal, inopportune moment imaginable. "I can't die, I have tickets to next week's game," is not an impossible thought for someone who is drowning. The drowning person may even feel embarrassed, as if he's squandered a great fortune. He has an image of people shaking their heads over his dying so senselessly. The drowning person may feel as if it's the last, greatest act of stupidity in his life.

    These thoughts shriek through the mind during the minute or so that it takes a panicked person to run out of air. When the first involuntary breath occurs most people are still conscious, which is unfortunate, because the only thing more unpleasant than running out of air is breathing in water. At that point the person goes from voluntary to involuntary apnea, and the drowning begins in earnest. A spasmodic breath drags water into the mouth and windpipe, and then one of two things happen. In about ten percent of people, water—anything—touching the vocal cords triggers an immediate contraction in the muscles around the larynx. In effect, the central nervous system judges something in the voice box to be more of a threat than low oxygen levels in the blood, and acts accordingly. This is called a laryngospasm. It's so powerful that it overcomes the breathing reflex and eventually suffocates the person. A person with laryngospasm drowns without any water in his lungs.

    In the other ninety percent of people, water floods the lungs and ends any waning transfer of oxygen to the blood. The clock is running down now; half-conscious and enfeebled by oxygen depletion, the person is in no position to fight his way back up to the surface. The very process of drowning makes it harder and harder not to drown, an exponential disaster curve similar to that of a sinking boat.

    Occasionally someone makes it back from this dark world, though, and it's from these people that we know what drowning feels like.

Miscellaneous Facts:

•  Fish are not equally distributed in the water column and tend to collect at the meeting point of cold and warm water. So fishermen try to hang their bait there, and to leave long lines in faster currents to cover more area.
• "A waterfront joke: What's the second thing a fisherman does when he gets home? Puts down his bags."
• More people are killed on fishing boats, per capita, than in any other job in the United States.
• Sometimes the book shows its age being from 1997. I cracked up reading this: "Fishing boats use a global positioning system for bluewater navigation. GPS, as it's called, fixes a position relative to military satellites circling the earth and then converts it to longitude and latitude. It's accurate to within fifteen feet."
• Another one of these^ "There is some evidence that average wave heights are slowly rising . . . One cause may be the tightening of environmental laws, which has reduced the amount of oil flushed into the oceans by tankers [oil spreads over and calms waters]. Another explanation is that the recent warming trend--some call it the greenhouse effect--has made storms more frequent and severe."
• "A typical hurricane encompasses a million cubic miles of atmosphere and could provide all the electric power needed by the United States for three or four years."