Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician

    I got a pretty random urge to read something about Cicero's life, and I'd had this on my shelf for a while waiting for the right time. I would say that Everitt's book is a good resource on Cicero's life, and does a good job as a biography, but it falls short. On one hand, there are a lot of materials surviving about Cicero's life, but they must not be enough to give a really good analysis of his personality. Everitt doesn't get deep into his mind, and really only hypothesizes briefly about Cicero's inner life. And then, Cicero's biography isn't enough to learn about the fall of the Roman Republic. Sure enough, Cicero's son-in-law is Dolabella and briefly a tutor to Octavian, but his interactions with some of the big players aren't enough to tell the story of the fall of the Republic, so Everitt has to sideline Cicero several times to get that story in a way that a biography of Julius Caesar doesn't have to do. Now maybe that's not the purpose of a biography of Cicero, but because the inner life wasn't coming through, it left me with a feeling of something missing.

    That said, Everitt does really interesting discussions of why the Republic fell. Above all, attributes to the Republic the property of being "a state without most of the institutions needed to run a state." There was no civil service, so governors needed to have their own people on payroll, necessitating corruption to pay for them. Without a police force, mobs could take over the capital. There was no public prosecution service, and private individuals had to being lawsuits. Without prisons, penalties had to be execution, exile, or a fine. There was no banking system, and the government had no bureaucracy to collect taxes, selling the right to collect taxes to the highest bidder. Over the centuries, Rome's "constitution" accreted new layers, much like the British constitution did approximately two millennia later. This created institutions a mile wide and an inch deep, capable of conquering the lands around the Mediterranean, but also fragile enough to be overthrown by its own armies, or mobs in the capital.

    Rome was also a victim of its own success. Sooner or later, everyone has to do land reform. Either the country isn't expanding and everything is gobbled up by large landowners, or the country is expanding, and needs to decide how to parcel out newly acquired land. Rome faced both issues in the second century BC, with Italian lands turning into large ranches, forcing peasants into Rome, and new lands being acquired on the borders. That distribution of lands created the major political issues of the fall of the Republic, for about a century from 146 BC, when Rome finally conquered Carthage as well as Corinth, until 31 BC, when Octavian defeated Marc Antony and became the emperor.

    Sulla's Civil War, fought in 83 and 82 BC, dominated the young lives to Cicero (20 years old) and Caesar (18 years old). The war culminated in Sulla's victory, reforms to strengthen the Senate, and proscriptions that went way over the top and led to killings not due to any criminality, but just to seize the property of the proscribed. Sulla became dictator, and set a new precedent for the use of force in public life against Romans (although he hadn't been the first or last). While Cicero took away the idea that Republican traditions must be jealously guarded, Caesar felt that radical reforms were needed. Maybe this was because Caesar had been proscribed.

    Cicero rose to become a Consul as a conservative, more on the side of the optimates than the populares as Rome became increasingly polarized. Catilina, who tried to stage a coup, was on the side of the populares, and championed land reform. I hadn't realized that Cicero was a conservative. But he was not strictly ideological. He was mainly in favor of preservation of the Republic, and as long as that was in reach, he would play all sides. He regularly corresponded with Caesar, and later Octavian, even though the assassins of Caesar championed Cicero as a hero of the Republic. So he was very confusing to read about since everyone had this simultaneous respect for him but also disdain for the fact that he didn't come from an old family and was always bragging about himself.

    Cicero had two periods of great power: the first, when he defeated Catiline as Consul, and the second, when he held no office, but led the Senate for about six months after the assassination of Caesar. In that time, he attempted to divide Octavian from Marc Antony, keeping them apart so that Brutus and Cassius Longinus could defeat Antony and save the Republic. But it was not to be. Octavian and Marc Antony formed the Second Triumvirate with Lepidus and overthrew the Republic before casting Lepidus aside. The critical problem is that both sitting Consuls, Hirtius and Pansa, were each killed in the First and Second Battles of Mutina against Marc Antony, and left the Senate without leadership. The Senate was divided on naming the 19-year-old Octavian as a Consul, and when they did not do so, Octavian turned against them. While Cicero had a chance to join Octavian has consul, he didn't, and Octavian allowed Marc Antony to proscribe Cicero, and he was hunted down on the Southern Italian coast. He told his assassin, "I am stopping here. Come here soldier. There is nothing proper about what you are doing, but at least make sure you cut off my head properly."

    The final chapter, "Postmortems," contains the best analysis of the book. In it, Everitt identifies that the turning point in Cicero's career was his decision not to join Pompey, Caesar, and Crassus in their political alliance in the 50s. Cicero never sold out his values/ideals, but he rightly acquired a reputation for vacillation, always sitting on the fence. He knew that was a powerful place to be, since everyone had to win him over. Ultimately, he fell off the fence. He didn't understand what was necessary to save the Roman Republic, only that he wanted to save it. But maybe there was not way of saving it--after all, no one did. Cicero thought that everything needed to be put back the way it is, but Caesar understood that, to borrow a line from another Italian, "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change." Caesar understood the necessity of a completely new means of government, but didn't live to implement it, so we will never know what he would have created. Instead, his grandnephew Octavian turned Rome from a city of bricks into a city of marble, and the rest is history. Everitt ends the book very appropriately, quoting Octavian, who had been tutored by Cicero, and who had also signed Cicero's death warrant. After seeing his grandson reading from a book of Cicero's, decades after Cicero's assassination, the now-Augustus said of Cicero, "an eloquent man, my child, an eloquent man, and a patriot."

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Roman life was "lived in daylight hours," because there were no public streetlights. People needed to carry torches to get around the city. This can't be unique at all, but is a fact about premodern life that really colors my entire perspective.
• Cicero had a career as a very successful "advocate" (read: lawyer), who would have been crushed by any judge following the Federal Rules of Evidence in 2026. The stuff he was saying in court was waaaaayyyy out of order by modern standards. But it was a different time, and so he could tell the jurors that if they voted to convict, then everyone would know that they must have been bribed.
  
• The Senate would sit to hear trials in Republican Rome, which was actually still going on in the American colonies in the 1700s, when the legislatures of the colonies would handle judicial business like King Henry VII in the Star Chamber centuries before.
• Ancient Roman texts are written without differentiation into capital and lowercase letters, without spaces between words, without paragraphs, and without punctuation. Absolute madness. 
• Cicero's first wife, Terentia, lived to be 103 years old.

Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom is Wrong - and What You Really Need to Know by Emily Oster

    Expecting Better was a great book highly recommended by multiple friends that I read to learn more about pregnancy (since my wife is pregnant). Most of the book is about researching the facts about pregnancy to find out how pregnant women can best assess risk without resorting to hard rules. Emily Oster is a really valuable writer because she is a trained economist who has applied her economics background to pregnancy and parenting. I previously read Cribsheet, but didn't do much of a reflection on it--it's crazy to think I read it seven years ago!

    Oster is very nonjudgmental, which is really good since pregnant women are faced with tons of judgments about their decisions to have a glass of wine, rest, exercise, you name it. So the book is filled with tons of things like her analysis of drinking coffee, which basically shows that there is really no clear evidence of any effect of caffeine intake on pregnancy health for mother or child. It is likely difficult to conduct studies because nausea during pregnancy is correlated with a low rate of miscarriage, and nauseous women usually don't crave coffee. But the hard rule of 200mg of coffee a day doesn't seem necessary. With alcohol, it appears that the real factor is speed of drinking that overwhelms the liver. Seven drinks a week may actually be safe as long as they're spread out--drinking a glass of wine slowly is unlikely to have any effects on the baby. Problems only arise when significant amounts of alcohol get into fetal tissues, but after mom's metabolization of the alcohol, that's usually not happening if it's just a little. She also does a really good analysis of raw fish: eating raw fish may make pregnant women sick, and it's worse to be sick when pregnant. But the real risk is mercury, which requires that women know the mercury levels of fish they are eating and reduce exposure by eating less fish with high mercury levels, but doesn't require full abstinence to stay safe. In fact, the mercury levels of many fish may reduce baby's IQ, but the omega-3s they have may increase IQ, so who knows?

Miscellaneous Facts:

• During the first half of a woman's cycle, her body temperature is below 98 degrees, then, the day after ovulation, it increases by about half a degree or more.
• Almost 90% of women have nausea during pregnancy, usually peaking between 8 or 9 weeks and falling off after. 50% of women report vomiting at some point in weeks 5 to 8 of pregnancy, but less than 15 to 20 percent by 17 weeks. At the worst point in pregnancy, 13% of women report throwing up 3 or more times a day.
• Airplane travel is unlikely to create enough radiation exposure to be a danger. It takes three round trip flights from New York to Tokyo to reach 1% of the level at which there is a demonstrated risk of birth defects or miscarriage. This can be relevant for women who work on airplanes, but not for the most frequent of frequent flyers.
• Kegels during pregnancy are highly effective at reducing urinary incontinence post-partum. Randomly assigned women who did 3 sets of 8 kegels twice a day for 6 seconds each had significantly lower urinary incontinence before and after delivery. Prenatal yoga also had beneficial effects, but not nearly as significant.
• Lying flat seems to have no effect on fetal health unless it makes the mother uncomfortable. Otherwise, there don't seem to be significant effects from sleeping position. The mother's discomfort may be a sign of blood flow constriction. A small minority of women feel faint from lying flat, but those who don't feel faint experience no negative effects that have been observed.
• Queen Victoria was one of the first women to use anesthesia during childbirth--inhaled chloroform for her seventh child. In the 20th century, women were sometimes given a combination of morphine and scopolamine that put them in "twilight sleep," where they experienced some pain, but forgot it. In the turn of the century, doctors administered cocaine to women in childbirth.
• Epidurals were used in two-thirds of births in the United States in 2008, although they often require use of more instruments due to the fact that epidurals make pushing harder. This can cause more tearing.
• Women who were randomly assigned a doula were half as likely to have a C-section and less likely to use an epidural.
• Eating and drinking during labor is usually prohibited, but probably doesn't need to be. The prohibition came from a time when women were put under full anesthesia, and the prohibition on eating was to avoid them throwing up during surgery and choking to death without anyone noticing. This was rare even in that situation, and today, thanks to epidurals, even less frequent. However, most women aren't hungry during the later stages of labor anyway, but if they are, they probably shouldn't be stopped from eating. Clear juices and Gatorade are a decent compromise.

Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans by Michaeleen Doucleff

    Hunt, Gather, Parent was a really cool parenting meets anthropology book. I would not call it a parenting guide by any means, although chapters end with bulleted lists of techniques. But it is an entertaining read of different parenting styles across the world in hunter-gatherer societies compared with our more Western ways of parenting. A good recommendation from my wife, who I already discussed this book with, so I don't have a lot of motivation to write it all down here.

    A lot of the advice in the book boils down to regulating parent and child emotions. She recommends that parents do things with their kids, but not for their kids--so no activities that are fun only for the kids. Instead, kids become part of the family by doing things with parents. This is especially useful when kids learn to do chores, or at least watch parents do chores. That way, they expect chores to be a part of their lives, and the parents and children are sort of on the same schedule having done the chores together and then being ready to rest together. Other themes of the book are about giving kids more autonomy, and really picking battles whenever possible. Parents shouldn't argue with children, and lessons are best learned after emotions are passed, and at a lower volume. All in all, a cool book, and I'm jealous of this mom and daughter who got to travel the world together to do the research for it.

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

    What. A. Book! Lonesome Dove is an absolute epic, and reading it right after Moby Dick makes it feel like an amazing foil to Moby Dick. But on its own merits, Lonesome Dove is this incredible collection of events on a big cattle drive from Texas to Montana, and I definitely want to watch the miniseries, which is apparently amazing as well.

    I couldn't stop thinking about the Moby Dick comparison. The two books are both set around the same period, just a few decades apart in the mid-19th century. Both of them are stories of men going on a journey, but one is on land, and another is at sea. In Moby Dick, everything builds towards an absolutely massive climax, but in Lonesome Dove, the feeling you're left with over and over is anti-climax. Almost no one achieves their goals in Lonesome Dove. Almost everyone dies. The language is also very different in each book. Moby Dick is highly stylized and rich language, while Lonesome Dove is bare bones, especially in dialogue. McMurtry likes to go one for paragraphs or pages about a character's internal thoughts, but then make their dialogue almost nothing. Lonesome Dove is filled with characters not telling each other how they feel or what they think. But the characters are similar to Moby Dick in that they are all on the frontier, having few opportunities for good conversation.

    The best character in Lonesome Dove is The West. The West is like The Whale in Moby Dick, except no one can be mad at The West since none of the cowboys are as insane as Ahab. Except that in Lonesome Dove, by the end of the book, Call can't stop going north, getting a little hint of the madness that struck Ahab from the beginning. There are all these confrontations with nature itself in lightning storms, sand storms, flooding rivers, thirst, etc. Then you have all these intermittent confrontations with other men in the west, a lot like in Cormac McCarthy's books.

    In sum, this book was excellent, one of the best I've read in a very long time.

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

 Little Women is a classic and I’m so glad I read it after being introduced by my wife to the newer movie by Greta Gerwig. I love that movie and I came away appreciating it way more after reading the book. The book is fantastic and I really appreciated how well the movie updated it and reinterpreted it for a modern audience. The original book is very old fashioned in a lot of ways, and it was interesting to think about how Gerwig changed the timeline and a little bit of the tone. I think she did especially well with Amy’s character. I was surprised that this monologue wasn’t in the book:

“Well, I’m not a poet. I’m just a woman. And as a woman, there’s no way for me to make my own money. Not enough to earn a living or to support my family. And if I had my own money, which I don’t, that money would belong to my husband the moment we got married. And if we had children, they would be his, not mine. They would be his property. So don’t sit there and tell me that marriage isn’t an economic proposition because it is. It may not be for you, but it most certainly is for me.”

In the book, the conversation with Amy and Laurie in Nice plays out a little differently, and Gerwig is really inserting the opposite of what Marmee teaches in the book- life isn’t as simple as just being virtuous all the time. Marmee is always giving the best advice and teaching the girls, but in Gerwig’s movie, she’s a little deemphasized and the problems they face are a little more morally complicated.

Little Women is also very funny, and has a great narrator. I loved this line:

“There are many Beths in the world, shy and quiet, sitting in corners till needed, and living for others so cheerfully that no one sees the sacrifices till the little cricket on the hearth stops chirping, and the sweet, sunshiny presence vanishes, leaving silence and shadow behind.

If anybody asked Amy what the greatest trial of her life was, she would have answered at once, ‘My nose.’”

I like that Jo isn’t so much the heroine and Amy not so villainized in the book as in the movie. In the movie Amy isn’t necessarily the “bad guy” but it has you rooting a lot more for Jo than for her in order to build up her redemption in the end. I didn’t feel that way in the book. For example, in the book, it was Jo’s fault she didn’t get invited to France, since she went on a diatribe in front of Aunt March about not needing anything from anyone. I don’t remember that in the movie.

There’s also an interesting Germanophile streak in the book. Louisa May Alcott makes all these references to Goethe and Germany and Germans, and that got left out of the movie. I’ll stop here, I don’t have the time to write this post anymore.

The Book of Czestochowa edited by M. Szucman (and a committee)

    This is another yizkor book made up of a compilation of individual survivors' recollections of their time in Czestochowa before and after the war. I found it thanks to the World Society of Czestochowa Jews, which maintains incredible resources on the Jewish community that existed there. A concept that this book introduced me to, although I haven't confirmed it's truth, is that Czestochowa was the "last remaining large Jewish community in Poland." Natan Eck, who wrote one of the longer chapters in the book, recalls saying that to other Jews after a meeting of the Judenrat to discuss the possibility of mass exterminations, in which most couldn't believe what was going on. In a similar vein regarding the uniqueness of Czestochowa, Aron Gelbard recalls that proportionately, more people from Czestochowa transports survived than from other cities, due to a high requirement of laborers.

    The strength of the book is obviously its personal stories. Szlojme Waga, who wrote another yizkor book, tells the story of a local man whose daughter had married a German and lived in Berlin. That daughter had written a letter home to her parents in Czestochowa advising them to commit suicide and naming the drugs they should take. The letter was warped from her tears, and she described how committing suicide would ensure that they would have graves for some survivor to visit after the war. Apparently the letter was shared widely and contributed to a sense of panic in the ghetto. In another story recounted by Szlojme Waga, he met the former city Chazan (cantor), who bitterly told him, "I have become a bachelor," because his wife and seven children were all deported. His beard was shaved off and he was thin. He suddenly straightened up and his face reddened, and he yelled, "The murderers! They've made me young! Turned me into a bachelor! Annihilated my seven children! Murdered my wife!" The same Aron Gelbard above recalled how he worked at Treblinka for 19 days, and in that time, would help throw naked people into piles of baggage, and then secretly pull them out later and give them clothes to escape. Unfortunately, some of the people they threw in didn't understand what they meant by doing so, and jumped back up and continued running.

    I always hope to find some mention of my family in these yizkor books, but nothing found in this one. What is interesting is the addresses. Like ul. Nadrzeczna 71, the home of the kibbutz that resisted the Nazis (although I also see reference to a kibbutz at Garncarska 72). At ul. Nadrzeczna 66, there was another house of resistance, known as the "66 Group." In December 1942, Mojtek Ziberberg started to try to unify these groups into one resistance. He would be killed in the uprising and ghetto liquidation on June 25th, 1943. I think I will try to put together a little map of the relevant addresses of the resistance.

Moby Dick or, The Whale by Herman Melville

    Classics can be hit or miss, but this was a huge hit for me. Moby Dick is one of the best books I have ever read, and I know I will be coming back to it for years to come. Melville writes language that is so close to being over the top, but writes with such confidence and skill that it works. The language is super Romantic and makes clear that Melville is in love with whales and whaling. His passion is just poured on the page and you can tell that he knew he was doing something here.

    The one thing that takes away from the book is the intense racism of its narrator. Melville was probably racist himself. The book seemed to start out with a lot more racist language and then eased up, but I might have just gotten used to it and managed to ignore it. I think the argument could be made that that racist perspective is just what should be expected from an 1850s whaler, but it also made it hard to read. For example, in chapter 42, "The Whiteness of the Whale," Melville analyzes the titular topic, and talks all about how whiteness usually enhances beauty, going on about how the whiteness of his skin gives "the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe," yet the whiteness of the whale makes it scarier. We could pretend this is just the narrator, but this it Melville expressing his own idea matter-of-factly, just like he would talk about the anatomy of the sperm whale, he would say that the white man is the master of the world.

    But the writing is amazing. I just took note of a few great lines and passages because they deserve to be reprinted here. They're over the top, but something about seeing someone go on for pages about the anatomy of whales and the makeup of whaling ships with references to Greek mythology and classic literature just makes it all work. Melville also writes some chapters with stage directions like a play, and has the sailors break into song.

Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map, true places never are.

I just like that line. The next multi-paragraph passage is just a really funny bit on how kings and queens are anointed with whale oil. 

    It is well known that at the coronation of kings and queens, even modern ones, a certain curious process of seasoning them for their functions is gone through. There is a saltcellar of state, so called, and there may be a caster of state. How they use the salt, precisely--who knows? Certain I am, however, that a king's head is solemnly oiled at his coronation, even as a head of salad. Can it be, though, that they anoint it with a view of making its interior run well, as they anoint machinery? Much might be ruminated here, concerning the essential dignity of this regal process, because in common life, we esteem but meanly and contemptibly a fellow who anoints his hair, and palpably smells of that anointing. In truth, a mature man who uses hair-oil, unless medicinally, that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere. As a general rule, he can't amount to much in his totality.

     But the only thing to be considered here, is this--what kind of oil is used at coronations? Certainly it cannot be olive oil, not macassar oil, nor castor oil, not bear's oil, nor train oil, nor codliver oil. What then can it possibly be, but sperm oil in its unmanufactured, unpolluted state, the sweetest of all oils?

    Think of that, ye loyal Britons! we whalemen supply your kings and queens with coronation stuff!

Melville is so funny for dedicating these little chapters to asides like that. That was almost the entire chapter above, and it was just to make a point about how valuable and important whale oil is/was! Here's another:

    As the three boats lay there on that gently rolling sea, gazing down into its eternal blue noon; and as not a single groan or cry of any sort, nay, not so much as a ripple or a bubble came up from its depths; what landsman would have thought, that beneath all that silence and placidity, the utmost monster of the seas was writhing and wrenching in agony! Not eight inches of perpendicular rope were visible at the bows. Seems it credible that by three such thin threads the great Leviathan was suspended like the big weight to an eight day clock. Suspended? and to what? To three bits of board. It this the creature of whom it was once so triumphantly said--"Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons? or his head with fish spears? The sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold, the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon: he esteemeth iron as straw; the arrow cannot make him flee; darts are counted as stubble; he laugheth at the shaking of a spear!" This the creature? this he? Oh! that unfulfilments should follow the prophets. For with the strength of a thousand thighs in his tail, Leviathan had run his head under the mountains of the sea, to hide him from the Pequod's fish-spears!

     In that sloping afternoon sunlight, the shadows that the three boats sent down beneath the surface, must have been long enough and broad enough the shade half Xerxes' army. Who can tell how appalling to the wounded whale must have been such huge phantoms flitting over his head!

Here's another one:

 Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle in his head.

And another:

The ship tore on; leaving such a furrow in the sea as when a cannon-ball, missent, becomes a ploughshare and turns up the level field.

You see what he did there with cannonballs into ploughshares like swords into ploughshares? This guy can write! And I love the image of Ahab's death, in the final chapter of the book:

    The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting velocity the line ran through the groove;--ran foul. Ahab stooped to clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone. Next instant, the heavy eye-splice in the rope's final end flew out of the stark-empty tub, knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in it's depths.

    I'll finish by saying that this book is so modern. I read it less like a work of fiction than like a modern work of literary-esque nonfiction. I think of The Perfect Storm, a nonfiction book that maintains a really engaging story while still stuffing the reader full of facts about fishing, the Atlantic Ocean, and what drowning is like. Melville is doing that a century earlier, teaching the reader about whaling while using this story. I think this is especially good in chapters 74 and 75, titled, "The Sperm Whale's Head" and "The Right Whale's Head." He introduces these two anatomy lessons from the point of view of the narrator, Ishmael, on the Pequod, giving a tour to the reader as if you were on the ship with him. The tour happens at that moment only because we have reached a point in the events of the book when the ship has two whales' heads tied to either side. So Ishmael says, "Here, now, are two great whales, laying their heads together; let us join them, and lay together our own," and "as a head of each is this moment hanging from the Pequod's side; and as we may freely go from one to the other, by merely stepping across the deck:--where, I should like to know, will you obtain a better chance to study practical cetology than here?" How can you not love that?! And then he goes on to tell you about how whale bones are used in umbrellas, and how the whales are even philosophers, with the Right Whale being a stoic and the Sperm Whale a Platonian. Truly one of the best books ever written. I get it.

 

 

 

 

 

A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

    A Midwife's Tale is a really cool work of scholarship that absolutely masters what would seem like a small task: publicizing and contextualizing the diary of a midwife from 1785-1812. The author's work is so important because it reveals Maine history that was otherwise totally lost and also teaches by example that getting women's perspectives on history can completely change the modern perception of events. In countless instances, Martha Ballard's diary provides completely unique or very different interpretations of events, and sometimes records names and events unrecorded elsewhere. 

    Martha Ballard seems like an incredible woman. She delivered over 600 babies, and saved countless lives of children and mothers. She crossed frozen rivers and streams, and on one occasion, fell through the ice, and arrived soaking wet and freezing to deliver a baby in December. At the time, women practiced "social childbirth," meaning that as labor got closer to delivery, female relatives and neighbors attended births and assisted the midwives. They would often become midwives themselves after this informal apprenticeship, since it was not infrequent that a midwife would be delayed or called too late to attend the birth. Martha Ballard probably developed her career as a midwife in this way, and the author writes that it is no mistake that Ballard's midwifery picked up more when her daughters were old enough to weave, freeing up her time. Ballard was also a member of one of the last generations of women to engage in this system of social childbirth and midwifery in the United States, as doctors started to take a greater and greater role in childbirth in the 19th century, and midwife's slipped into a role as doctors' assistants.

I thought this passage was particularly good:

To celebrate such a life is to acknowledge the power--and the poverty---of written records. Outside her own diary, Martha has no history. Although she considered herself "the head of the family," a full partner in the management of a household, no independent record of her work survives. It is her husband's name, not hers, that appears in censuses, tax lists, and merchant accounts for her town. She is not listed in Hallowell's poor relief records, though we know she relieved the poor, not in the earliest records of the Augusta First Church, though she was a member. Nor does any extant court records acknowledge the testimony she took from unwed mothers in delivery. Her name appears on a list of witnesses at the North rape trial, but no one, except she, preserved a record of what was said. Henry Sewall mentioned her five times in his diary, four in relation to births and once when she died, but he never explicitly identified her as a midwife or acknowledged paying a fee.

It is incredible to think how a long life can be summed up. She delivered 600 babies, testified in a rape trial of a judge, witnessed the aftermath of a family annihilation-style mass murder, and did so much more in 77 years of life, and all that is left of her is her diary, miraculously-preserved.  

Common Sense

    Around the same time I finished A Midwife's Tale, I read "Common Sense," by Thomas Paine, which was an extremely good essay, although way more religious than I ever realized. It is totally within the tradition of the other essays I read in the Revolution, although it is really strange to read something written in January 1776, after the war began, but before the Declaration of Independence was written. Of course, this essay gives the best reasons for the necessity of declaring independence. 

    One thing that I thought was interesting was that Paine is clear on the lack of necessity of government and obviously has a more positive view of men's ability to live in a smaller-government world. He writes in one good line, "the plain truth is that it is wholly owing to the constitution of the people, and not to the constitution of the government that the crown is not as oppressive in England as it is in Turkey." He is also really strong against the English monarchy. He refers to William the Conqueror: "A French bastard landing with an armed banditti and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives is, in plain terms, a very paltry rascally original." The part that I knew from the essay, that it is ridiculous for a small island to govern a continent so far away, only shows up wedged in the middle of the long essay, and doesn't take up that much space. But the government Paine proposes is very similar to the government eventually adopted, although I like his idea of having the presidency rotate among the states.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• It isn't surprising that Martha Ballard spelled and punctuated words and sentences more or less randomly. What is interesting, though, is that she used different spellings for the names even of her own family members. That's a very different way of thinking about names before everyone was literate and writing.
• It was not uncommon for Ballard to receive payment for a delivery as much as four years after the fact.
• In the eighteenth century, it was believed that a woman could not lie about the father of her child while in labor, and it was sometimes considered a legal necessity for an unwed woman to declare the father of her child while in childbirth in order to establish which man was legally responsible.

The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution by Alfred F. Young

    After getting big historical and ideological context for the American Revolution, I am honing in on three books addressing three disadvantaged groups of the period: the poor, women, and slaves. This is the first, on the poor, and covers the life and popular discovery of George Twelves Hewes. Hewes was a young man who participated in the Boston Tea Party, and was rediscovered as an old man in 1834, when two books were published about him amidst a reinitiation of interest in the Boston Tea Party.

    One complaint about the book is that Hewes is not as important as the book makes him seem, and the premise that the Boston Tea Party had been forgotten and rediscovered, which was teased in the introduction, is revealed by the end to not be true. No one had forgotten the Boston Tea Party. And although the 1830s biographies of Hewes were the first works in print to name the event the "Boston Tea Party," Young's investigation reveals that the term had been used colloquially probably since the event itself, but was only formally referred to as the spilling of the tea in Boston Harbor or something to that effect.

    What is interesting is that the spilling of the tea was not commemorated as a holiday for about half a century after the revolution. Boston was dominated by the Federalists, who were more aristocratic and resented the Boston Tea Party and the Boston Massacre as the "wrong" kind of events in the American Revolution, being led by the mob. It was not until Democrats began to dominate the city in the 1820s and 1830s that celebrations of the mass actions became more popular in Jacksonian America. July 4th had taken over all the other Boston commemorations once the war had ended, whereas during the war, Bostonians had celebrated opposition to the Stamp Act on August 14th, the resistance to the Redcoats in 1770 on March 5th, the old Pope's Day celebration of the Gunpowder Plot being foiled on November 5th, and the Tea Party on December 16th. These were all swallowed up into the 4th of July after the war. New public memory was rekindled by the War of 1812, and by Congressional acts that sought to grant pensions to surviving veterans of the Revolutionary War. One such act required veterans to write about their experiences, which created a surge of popular memory about the war. Additionally, Lafayette's visit to America in 1824 spawned more interest, as well as fiftieth anniversary celebrations in that decade. Finally, increased interest came from men like George Twelves Hewes, who were well-understood to be the last exemplars of that generation.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• In the summer of 1768, there were four thousand British soldiers posted in Boston, a town of fewer than sixteen thousand inhabitants. That gives a lot of context to the Revolutionary-era fear of standing armies.

The Radicalism of the American Revolution by Gordon S. Wood

    I can tell why this book is a classic. I always wanted to read the authors name-dropped in Good Will Hunting and now I can start regurgitating Gordon Wood. Wood's primary thesis is that the American Revolution's place in history should be revised from being seen as a more conservative revolution (especially when compared with the French Revolution) to being extremely ideologically radical in its own right. The French Revolution's radicalism was obviously greater in its violence, but the American Revolution was just as much if not more ideologically radical. Above all, Wood argues that the American Revolution transformed society, not just government. While we may look back today and see an unfinished revolution for slaves and women, the equalization of all landowning men was an incredibly radical step at the time, and the Revolution really continued into the 19th century, when all white men, not just landowners, were made full citizens. Books like this are at their best when they distill the development of ideas into a path that clearly shows the contradictions and coherencies of thought at the time. You end up feeling that, because it was all explained so well, that the development of these ideas was inevitable. 

Slavery

    Indentured servitude in the New World was not a brand new concept. In England, servants usually had yearlong contracts. Indentured servitude in the colonies became especially long (five to seven years) to pay the large expenses of transporting someone across the ocean, obviously not a factor when they stayed in England. Due to the high value of these servants, the governments instituted a system of passes that was not needed in England to control their comings and goings. White servants were treated nearly as bad as black ones if not worse in the minds of some contemporary observers. Apparently they were sold like chattel as well. The big difference though, is that the white servants were on a contract that would end, while black slaves were in bondage for perpetuity. Wood uses this example to illustrate why colonial thinkers took so long to identify the abolition of slavery as a political goal. For the colonial thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries, slavery was a difference in degree from indentured servitude, not in kind. Of course, there was still a different, but when society was so harshly graded into strict hierarchies as the society of 18th century America was, abolition of slavery didn't seem so high a priority. 

    What is really interesting is that the idea for the liberation of the slaves comes out of the same intellectual tradition as the liberation of Englishmen living in America. Once people started to think that they could not be taxed without representation and that colonists had been made slaves of the King and Parliament, they started to think about the freeing of actual slaves. But for all of human history until that point, very few if any had thought that slavery, in any of its many forms, should be abolished. Until the late 18th and early 19th century, slavery was just another low status in a world of low status people. That meant that once white men were transformed from subjects into citizens, the difference between black slaves and white free men (who started calling themselves gentlemen) transformed from a difference in degree into a difference in kind in the early 19th century. Only then did slavery become an aberration that required explanation. It isn't hard to see how the same thing could happen for women. In that way, liberation begets liberation.

The Transition from a Medieval World into a Capitalist World

    You could give a rough sketch of the medieval world as a world based on status and hierarchy that emphasized identity, while contrasting it with a Capitalist world that emphasized production and services. To illustrate, a medieval man worked in a trade because he was apprenticed into an appropriate trade due to his status in the community. A capitalist man worked in a trade because it could make him money. There were no businessmen in the medieval world, but in early America, Toqueville describes everyone as a businessman. A medieval nobleman owned land that was in his family for generations. Capitalist men bought and sold land to make money and speculated on its value. A medieval shopkeeper would sell to an aristocrat on credit because of his family name. A capitalist shopkeeper said "show me the money." America was a test case of early diminution of community, dominated by personal connections, in favor of society, dominated by impersonal dealings based on self-interest. Coincidentally, Adam Smith was writing in 1776 that self-interest would be the best basis for running the world. By the 19th century, that's how America was operating.

    One change in this category was about who should be serving in government. For a long time, there would hardly be an idea of "corruption" as a public vice. Public servants were not paid a full salary and were not expected to dedicate all their time to public servants. Before the American Revolution, public servants were expected to donate some of their talents to run the country for a time before returning back to their gentlemanly interests. Therefore, corruption wouldn't be looked at the same. It was common for individuals in government to face huge conflicts of interest and resolve them in their own favor. But while we would view this today as exploiting public offices for private interests, in the old world, they would have thought that the government was exploiting those private individuals for public interests, and their gains were an acceptable price to pay. Gentlemen, because of who they were, were expected to supply the officer corps and lead the government. After the American Revolution, all men were gentlemen. Indeed, even before the Revolution, rich Americans didn't have the funds necessary to fund themselves in government. So the idea transformed. Instead of being part time government leaders, America would pay it's officials, and eventually transform their posts into full-time jobs.

    Wood points out that in the Revolution, the great divide was not rich vs. poor, workers vs. employers, or democrats vs. aristocrats. Instead, it was patriots vs. courtiers. The self-made men of the colonies rebelled against the men who held positions based on their connections. It was a matter of rank/position coming from below versus above. It was only after the Revolution was complete, starting in the 1780s and becoming most obvious in the debates over ratifying the Constitution, that the key debate became democrats vs. aristocrats, with democrats represented by the Democratic-Republicans and the aristocrats represented by the Federalists.

Democrats Against Aristocrats

    With the actual war against Britain complete, the major conflict in American society centered around populism for decades thereafter. Once the courtiers were ejected by the patriots, the patriots were divided into two groups: those who thought politicians should only be wealthy, disinterested gentlemen, and those who supported the presence of "interest" in politics. The "interested" populists won, and their victory brought about a change in government. A big part of the reason that officeholders needed to be disinterested before the American Revolution was because the legislatures of the states (and Parliament) for that matter, had nearly absolute powers. Like was discussed in Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, the King's absolute authority was replaced by the legislature's absolute authority. Legislatures adjudicated disputes that are now for the courts. They had unitary power over lawmaking and enforcement. The reason that it was possible to run a government with interested officeholders was thanks to checks and balances dividing government into different branches that would check each other. The genius of the system is that it would democratize government by pitting societally forces against each other through their direct representatives, rather than requiring their virtual representation by wealthy landowners who would claim to speak in society's interest.

    To illustrate the conflict, Wood hones in on the debate in the Pennsylvania Assembly in 1786 regarding the rechartering of the Bank of North America. The two protagonists of the debate were Robert Morris, the wealthiest merchant in the state, who supported rechartering the bank, and William Findley, a Scotch-Irish ex-weaver from western Pennsylvania, who supported debt-relief and paper money. This debate continues to modern day: monetary hawks versus doves. It is interesting how the same exact debate continues today, in similar form. Findley was accused of being "narrow, illiberal, and interested in the promotion of paper money and debtor-relief legislation," just like Andrew Jackson and Donald Trump. It is interesting to see how liberalism can adopt these aristocratic tendencies time and time again that results in working class debtors aligning themselves with populists. But what is interesting is how the debate between Findley and Morris foreshadowed the victory of the populists. Findley argued that, first of all, Morris was not disinterested, and was advocating for his own interest as a wealthy banker. And Findley, rather than arguing Morris' interestedness was the problem, argued that there was no issue, but that simply Findley was interested in the other direction, and thought it was hypocritical to pass off their interestedness as disinterested virtue. Wood writes that Findley suggested that interest "was quite legitimate, as long as it was open and aboveboard and not disguised by specious claims of genteel disinterestedness. The promotion of private interests was in fact what American politics ought to be about."

Cosmopolitanism

    Wood writes that "the revolutionary generation" was the most cosmopolitan of any in American history." They did not make a "national" revolution in any sense, since they considered themselves defending their rights either as Englishmen or as natural rights given by God. Many of them were deists, and thought Freemasonry could serve as a social binding that would replace religion. They were also men of science. Wood writes,

When Franklin was minister to Frace during the Revolutionary War, he issued a document to English explorer Captain Cook protecting him from American depredations at sea during his voyage of 1779. Franklin told all American shop commanders that they must regard all English scientists not as enemies but 'as common friends of Mankind.' When an American captain seized a British ship with some thirty volumes of medical lecture notes, Washington sent them back to England, saying that the United States did not make war on science.

Conclusion
    This was another excellent book that taught me about things I didn't even know I didn't know. I came away especially interested in how the Democratic-Republicans, despite essentially being made up of the losers from the fight for ratification of the Constitution, just trounced the Federalists for years and years after Adams was kicked out of the presidency. The country just became much more populist and rekindled the revolutionary spirit after Washington was gone. It was a total social transformation in which gentlemen and aristocrats were ejected from the ruling class. By the middle of the 19th century, the idle leisure that Washington and Jefferson embodied was held in contempt by a massive middle-class that valued hard work. Then, the same principles were applied to slaveholders, another aristocratic class that would lose to the value of hard work. 

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Land ownership was completely different in England and the colonies in 1776. At that time, 3/4 of English farmland was owned by noble and gentry landlords, and four hundred families owned a fifth of all land in England. Meanwhile, 2/3 of white American men owned land, while just a fifth of Englishmen owned land.
• Wood writes that young Americans at the end of the 18th century may have used pregnancy to force marriages of their choice rather than their parents'. At that time, between a quarter and a third of all brides were pregnant before their marriage.
• Members of Parliament did not receive salaries until 1911.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Constance Garnett

    Unfortunately, I did not get this novel like I did War and Peace, so it was a big disappointment. Usually I don't finish books that I don't like, but I finished this one because I thought I was getting it up towards the 2/3 point of the book, and then stopped getting whatever it was. I never really connected to any characters or understood the book. I apologize to myself for wasting my own time. 

    The book is interesting in the sense that it is a cool historical artifact of the 1870s in Russia, but beyond that, I just didn't connect with it. Apparently it's one of the best books ever written, but I just don't understand why.

The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution by Bernard Bailyn

    As I continue my learning about 1776 and the American Revolution in the year of its 250th anniversary, I reached this classic of the subject. In addition to The Ideological Origins I was interested in reading Pamphlets of the American Revolution, Bailyn's earlier work that led to writing this one. However, I learned that there is only really one edition and no digital copies readily available, so I settled for this book. I am glad I did, because it was fantastic. But in addition to reading Ideological Origins, I read some of those pamphlets:

• A Discourse concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers - Jonathan Mayhew - 1750
• The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved - James Otis - 1763
• The Rights of the Colonies Examined - Stephen Hopkins - 1764
• Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes in the British Colonies, for the Purpose of Raising a Revenue, by Act of Parliament - Daniel Dulany - 1765
• Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania - Jonathan Dickinson - 1767-68

These pamphlets were an amazing primer into Revolutionary thought. I will admit that they were hard reads and I missed a lot from them. In particular, I thought the James Otis pamphlet was interesting, but I didn't really get Otis' sheer importance until I read Ideological Origins. Now I see how important it is that Otis and others conceived of a source of power not in the King or in Parliament, but in the People, who possess inalienable natural rights, that no man can be justified in taking away. This originates in the unwritten English constitution, but for the Americans, goes much further. I was more focused in reading the pamphlets on the grievances that the Americans had for the English based out of the French and Indian War, but if I read these again, I would focus more on the ideological issues that Bailyn talks about.

    Otis stands out as the best writer of the pamphleteers, probably followed by Dickinson. Otis is clear in his stance that Parliament cannot rule absolutely: "The parliament cannot make 2 and 2, 5." Otis represents an early American exceptionalism and superiority complex: "The province of the Massachusetts, I believe, has expanded more men and money in war since the year 1620, when a few families first landed at Plymouth, in proportion to their ability, than the three Kingdoms together." Hopkins is also particularly clear in expressing the danger that colonists foresaw. During the French and Indian War, colonists became aware of the massive power England and Parliament exerted over them, and how a standing army could arrive and take control of the colonies so easily. In fact, the result of the war was that the colonists realized France could pose no threat, being decisively defeated, and now the greatest threat to their liberty came from their own government, which was stationing a standing army in the colonies.

    The Americans were not complaining that their rights were taken, but that their rights were treated as privileges granted by the Parliament, which could be taken at the prerogative of parliament. It meant that the 17th century had placed an absolute legislature in the role of an absolute monarch. This was most apparent in the intersection of taxation on mercantile monopolies. England would force the colonists to buy certain products only from England, rather than France or Spain. This created uproar when England raised the tax on those products, essentially unilaterally raising the price when no competition was allowed to exist. Even if not a deathblow to the economy, colonists saw this for the tyrannical overreach that it was.

    The pamphlets themselves were important as a medium for the messages that inspired the Revolution, and their physical properties influenced the ideas that were contained in them. The pamphlet emerged in the 16th century and was a one-man show, possible for a man to write in a day or two and to print just as quickly. It is short and unbound, not requiring the lengthier publication process of a book, and usually pamphlets were considered "lowbrow." Pamphlets were also somewhat flexible in size, being possible to fold into ten or fifty pages, containing between 5,000 and 25,000 words. The revolutionary pamphleteer favored a length in the middle of that range, long enough for a polemic but short enought to be read quickly and passed on to the next reader.

    Ideological Origins is mainly a work of intellectual unification of the ideas of the pamphleteers of the 1760s and 1770s, in which Bailyn identifies and analyzes how these pamphlets influenced one another to form a somewhat coherent, although not a dogmatic, ideology that catalyzed the Revolution. For one, the pamphleteers drew on the same sources. Obvious points of influence include the Bible and the Roman Republic, but there were less obvious, more contemporary events arising out of states that we would not consider democracies today--but they were liberal. Denmark, apparently, had transitioned from a liberal power-sharing arrangement between the king and the nobility to a system in which the king was absolute. Poland was a more democratic state that had fallen into dysfunction. Conspiracy theories penetrated all levels of society between the French and Indian War and the American Revolution. Colonists were concerned about what the British had done, but were more concerned about what the British would be doing. As Baylin writes, laws like the Stamp Act were not considered evil in themselves, but as harbingers of greater evils to come. 

    The high point of the book comes in Part V: Transformation, which features three chapters on Representation and Consent, Constitution and Rights, and Sovereignty. Part VI: The Contagion of Liberty also forms the meat of the book. Starting with Representation and Consent, I learned something I had never heard before, which is that in medieval England, the earliest form of representation in Parliament was a trustee-based system in which the Parliament that existed until the fifteenth century was made up of local men whose business ended with their constituency, which had given each one specific instructions on how to vote and lobby. These men were basically attorneys for their electors, who would seek redress from the king and were authorized to grant specific amounts of financial aid to the king. These men were tightly bound to their constituency: they were not national delegates expected to vote in the best interests of the country as a whole, but to narrowly exact the best deal for the propertied men that essentially hired them to go to London. They were instructed minutely on their powers. But as Parliament transformed into a system of delegates of all the commons, for one assembly, one interest, and one nation, colonists reproduced the older English institution "in miniature." Moreover, like their medieval forebears, Americans lived similarly to autonomous medieval towns in the wilderness, far from central government. They felt that they were the benefactors of the central government, not the beneficiaries of it, and did not identify their interest with the central government's interest. It was required, in Massachusetts first, and then elsewhere, that representatives be residents of and property owners in, the places for which they acted as representatives. The upshot is that colonists valued their representation in their state assemblies than they did their "virtual representation" in Parliament by delegates whom they did not elect.

    Another huge question that men like Otis were dealing with was what it meant to have a "constitution," and whether that constitution, or anything for that matter, could be a limit on lawmaking bodies. It's really the basis of Marbury v. Madison and the Bill of Rights that was being formed in the 1760s and colonists argued the Parliament could not exercise unlimited power. The reason that this idea came about in America was due to the prior existence of written constitutions in the colonies. And I had never thought about this before. But in each colony, there were documents existing long prior to the 1760s that established some of the rights of the colonists. The Massachusetts Bay Colony charter originated in commercial charters, and evolved to frame government in that state. Crown charters in Connecticut and Rhode Island were designed as instruments of government, and proprietary grants, such as in New York, Maryland, and North and South Carolina provided for governmental institutions. William Penn, described by Bailyn as "courtier and sectarian; saint, schemer, and scholar," created frameworks of government in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Bailyn writes that, "By the Revolutionary period, the surviving charters, which in origins had been the instruments of the aggressive creation, or legitimation, of power, had become defensive bulwarks against the misuse of power." They were viewed as confirming a much older common law of Englishmen, with rights for the colonists that could not be abridged so easily by their colonial assemblies.

    Another major question was where sovereignty rested in government. In the 17th century, England had battled over the question between sovereignty between Parliament and the King and the Parliament won, executing a king, and bringing over William of Orange as a king some decades later. In the Thirteen Colonies, the colonists argued that there was no absolute power within government at all--that power resided in the people, and needs to be divided within government and within federalism, a new idea. The idea morphed into the idea that Parliament could only legally issue external taxes on the colonies before colonists soon started arguing that Parliament had no right to tax the colonies at all. 

    This was a fantastic book that I would recommend to any reader of American history. It is encouraging to read as an American about the genius of our Founding Fathers. Bailyn sums up the ideological revolution of the American Revolution well. He points out that it was Americans who conceived of legislative assemblies as mirrors of society and the people. Americans were those who believed that human rights existed above the law and stand as the measure of the law's validity. Americans were those who saw that absolute sovereignty in government didn't need to be the monopoly of one agency but could be shared between agencies and branches of government to regulate itself. These ideas were revolutions in thought that have since swept the world over in a global ideological revolution.

Miscellaneous:

• I thought this was interesting. Jonathan Mayhew envisioned future streams of refugees leaving Europe for liberty in America, and asked "who knows?" that "our liberties being thus established, ... on some future occasion ... we or our posterity may even have the great felicity and honor to ... keep Britain herself from ruin," which of course is exactly what happened in WWII. 

Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

    I really liked this book, which has been recommended to me for years, and I'm happy I read it when I did after reading a couple yizkor books, in order to really appreciate it as a yizkor book in its first half, in which Frankl describes his experience in the Holocaust. I was amazed to learn that he wrote the portion about his Holocaust in just nine days in 1945. It is so interesting to have such a great thinker also be a Holocaust survivor, and makes me think how many other great thinkers were murdered in the Holocaust, and left manuscripts unpublished. Like so many others, Frankl feels that his life was decided by forces greater than him. He describes an opportunity to escape, to leave Austria before the Holocaust began, but that he was stuck in a dilemma, unsure whether he should leave, or stay to take care of his elderly parents. He was looking for a sign. He writes:

It was then that I noticed a piece of marble laying on a table at home. When I asked my father about it, he explained that he had found it on the site where the National Socialists had burned down the largest Viennese synagogue. He had taken the piece home because it was part of the tablets on which the Ten Commandments were inscribed. One gilded Hebrew letter was engraved on the piece; my father explained that this letter stood for one of the Commandments. Eagerly I asked, "Which one is it?" He answered, "Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days be long upon the land." At that moment I decided to stay with my father and my mother upon the land, and to let the American visa lapse.

    Frankl's book is most interesting because he can address the behaviors of Holocaust victims and survivors from a trained psychological perspective. One interesting aspect was humor: he describes entering showers with several other men, and them joking that at least it was water coming out of the sprays instead of gas. Another was curiosity: at some points, he didn't fear death as much as he was just curious whether he would live or die. Another time, as prisoners were shipped in an overpacked cattle car from Auschwitz through Bavaria, they marveled at the beauty of the mountains they could see through holes and slats in the wooden walls. In camp, they observed beautiful sunrises in th midst of their slavery and torture.

    One thing that I think was horrible for survivors was the trauma of dreaming about the Holocaust for the rest of their lives, and how painful it would be to relive that memory. But something less obvious is how painful dreaming would be for those same people as they lived through the Holocaust, since waking up was worse than any nightmare! Frankl describes that, as one time he observed a man writhing around, obviously having a nightmare. But he decided not to wake him, since whatever the nightmare was in the man's sleep would be better than their waking nightmare. 

    Frankl comes away with several short life lessons that I'll list here:

• The salvation of man is through love and in love.
• From Nietzsche: That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.
• A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthlessness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease. 
• Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also the being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips. 
• Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now.
• Also Nietzsche: He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

There is also an additional chapter in which Frankl discusses the tragic triad of (1) pain, (2) guilt, and (3) death. How can one embrace life in spite of those three things? He calls it "tragic optimism," which is: (1) turning suffering into a human achievement and accomplishment; (2) deriving from guilt the opportunity to change oneself for the better; and (3) deriving from life's transitoriness an incentive to take responsible action.

    Frankl is just a strong believer that, for most people, mental health is shaped by circumstances and how we react to circumstances. No one can take away a man's source of meaning. But no one can give him one either. Every person has to figure it out for themselves, and he observed, in the camps, people who gave up on life and died shortly after. His book is a classic because suffering is classic, and Frankl shows his readers how to find meaning in suffering.

Flight to Survival: Wloclawek - Warszawa - Czestochowa ... Eretz Yisrael by Peninah Cypkewicz-Rosin, translated by Sarah and Mordehai Kopfstein, and Josef Rosin

    This was my favorite of all the yizkor books I've read, mainly because it continues onward until she makes it to Israel and has a family there, so it is a very happy ending. In her memoir, Peninah recalls how no one had any idea in 1940 and even 1941 what was in store--it was generally thought that there would be pogroms and killings here and there, but no one at the time imagined the scale of slaughter that was coming. Peninah arrived to Czenstochowa at the end of 1941, about a year and a half after my grandpa's family. She says that Czenstochowa had a population of about 28,000 in 1939, of which one in five were Jewish. When she arrived, the Judenrat was already up and running, and the ghetto was still physically open to the rest of the city, and while it was forbidden for Poles to stop and shop at Jewish stores in the ghetto, that rule was often broken.

    Like my grandfather, Peninah attributes so much of her reason for survival on luck. In one case, she was at selection on September 22nd, 1942, when she was un-selected as "not needed," Yet moments later, Degenhart, the commander of the "action," called her back and said to the SS man that perhaps they would need her. It was impossible for Jews to understand what was real and what wasn't. Around the time of her selection, Peninah recalls that the Jewish intelligentsia were gathered and told that a deal had been reached to send them to Israel. Instead, they were taken to the Jewish cemetery and shot.

    The most amazing part of the book for me was Peninah's description of an event I already knew about from my grandfather. He had told us about how he had been digging a tunnel through a bunker to reach outside the walls of the ghetto. But that while he was at work with his brothers, the Germans surrounded the Jews in the bunker, who tried to use the tunnel. The Germans knew about it and were waiting at the other end, where they massacred the Jews as they came through the tunnel. Peninah provides a date for that event: June 25, 1945, as the ghetto was liquidated. She even writes the address of the bunker: Nadzhechna 88. Apparently, Avraham Zilberstein told Peninah that 40 people had gathered in the bunker and planned to throw a grenade at the Nazis while others escaped through the tunnel to the Polish side of town that connected into a deserted shop near a German sentry post, which they would then attack, taking the sentries' guns and break into the ghetto and set everything on fire. But at about mid-day, after the day shift and the night shift switched, the Germans came and killed nearly everyone involved in the plan. This is detailed on pages 88-90 and 137. On the earlier pages, she writes:

On June 25, 1943, Germans surrounded the ghetto. This was preceded by two weeks of tension, alarms and standbys in the underground. On that morning a standby and call up of the members had also been declared. About 40 people gathered in the central bunker at Nadzhechna No 88. The plan, according to Avraham Zilberstein ... was that in case of an Action or detection of the bunker, the Germans were to be stopped by throwing a grenade at them. At the same time we were to get into the passage and crawl through the tunnel to its exit at the Polish side of the town that was camouflaged in a deserted shop of light drinks near the house of the German sentry post. We were to then attach the post by taking the sentries guns, and breaking through into the ghetto from the outside, setting fire to everything possible and urging the ghetto population to escape....

 Suddenly, at about 10:00 AM, we heard footsteps and knocks at the door above. It was clear the Germans were looking for the entrance to the bunker. Tenson was great and we waited to see what the Germans' next step would be, but then at 11:00 AM it became quiet. Our guards reported that the workers from the nightshift had entered the ghetto, the dayshift went out to work, and that the Germans had left. We were relieved and waited until 1:30 PM, at which time the standby state was cancelled."

At that point, Peninah describes hearing the outcry from her point of view, and picks it up from the action in the bunker on page 137 from the point of view of Avraham Silberstein:

 He said that on June 25th and 26th of 1943, the day of the liquidation of the Small Ghetto, one group of underground members went to the bunker at Garncharska St. 40. Their plan was to leave through the tunnel in this bunker, to the polish side, and then continue on to the partisans in Konitspol. Avraham was in that group. When, after crawling to the outside, he suddenly heard shots. At that moment he realized they had been betrayed and that the Germans knew all about the exit of the tunnel and were waiting for them. Since he was last in line, he stayed put, clinging to the wall beneath the exit, so that the Germans could not see him. They also lit up the tunnel and shot into it, but fortunately Avraham was not hurt. 

Outside a battle raged with unequal forces with most of the underground members killed. In that battle one German was killed and a few wounded. Only one member of the group managed to escape to Konitspol under a smoke screen from a grenade he threw. Avraham stayed in the tunnel until he was sure that the Germans had left and then went out to the Polish side and continued to Zharky." 

 My grandfather said the following about the same tunnels:

... so me and my brothers and some other people were very seriously considering to dig in a big tunnel, and this was a long tunnel, so went into another house where the other people lived, and went in downstairs, in the cellar, and we started to dig a tunnel. We had no--we're not prepared to dig tunnels. We needed materials to support the earth, and that they're done. And we dug pail by pail of sand every time we came home from work, at first, we went to HASAG every day to work until they made it permanent. So whenever we came home from work, after an afternoon, we went into the--or Sunday or Saturday, dig the tunnel. We dig the tunnel, and we hoped that when we have the tunnel finished, if something happens, we knew that sooner or later, they're going to liquidate it. They're going to liquidate that ghetto. So when we find out that they're going to liquidate the ghetto, we were going to start make use of that tunnel. That tunnel led us to what's more, called the manhole, you know, was covered with a [garbled].

So when we heard that they're going to liquidate together, we're going to do that. In the meantime, they got a hold of us, and they put us into the HASAG to work. But when they liquidated the ghetto later, after we were already at work, we heard from other people that came later, that other people made use of that tunnel, not us. But everyone that was in a tunnel, the Nazis were standing with a machine gun from the distance, and didn't say nothing, and they made everybody come out bang, like rats coming out from the tunnel everybody was killed. Had we not been stuck, put to work there first, maybe I wouldn't be talking to you today. You could never plan nothing you didn't know. So luck played for us in this way, you can call it.

The summer of 1943 would mean the end of the Jewish ghetto and the transfer of all Jews to concentration camps, including Hasag, also located in Czestochowa. On July 20, 1943, all the Jewish policemen and their families were taken to the Jewish cemetery and murdered.

    Peninah was transferred to Hasag, where my grandfather was forced to work, and also described Director Luth as a more or less decent man. He apparently stopped the prisoners from being forced to wear striped pajamas like in other camps, and that conditions were bad, but better than in other camps. She describes different departments of the camp on pages 97-98. Unlike my grandfather, Peninah was lucky to be liberated from Czestochowa instead of deported into Germany. However, they both would have experienced the arrival of SS men weeks before liberation who took everyone out to run around the yard several times each morning, and generally escalated the mistreatment of the prisoners.

American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750 - 1804 by Alan Taylor

    American Revolutions was a creative telling of American History from 1750 to 1804, which told the story of the split of the Thirteen Colonies from Britain in chapters like "land," "allies," and "wests" that sought to thematically cover the Revolution while also moving chronologically. That was cool. Otherwise, the book was just a solid survey of the American Revolution period that was pretty good. It felt like a very undergraduate book, and, at least for the purposes of this unit I was doing on the American Revolution, it worked as a reminder book to reorient me to what I already knew, but was otherwise pretty basic.

    One thing that is clear about the American Revolution to me is that it is in large part an issue of the victors not getting the spoils they expected. American colonists fought the French and Indian War, but didn't get what they expected. They thought that victory would mean new lands to settle west of the Appalachians and in Canada, but they were deemed outlaws for settling that land. But British law failed to stop them. New York's population doubled from 80,000 to 168,000 from 1761 to 1771, mostly growing on the frontier. North Carolina's population grew sixfold from 1750 to 1775 and Georgia grew by a factor of fourteen. Colonists were having lots of babies and creating a huge demographic pressure that pushed up against the Appalachian boundary that was once a physical boundary, later a diplomatic boundary with the French, and by the mid-1760s, was just a flimsy internal boundary that could no longer be enforced.

    While most American focus is on why the Thirteen Colonies rebelled, it is just as interesting to learn about why the other colonies in Canada and the Caribbean didn't rebel. In Canada, it was mainly because Britain granted the French new liberties that had never been granted before in the Protestant empire: allowing Catholics to own land and serve in government. They also enlarged Quebec to extend south to the Ohio River and west to the Mississippi. With so many fewer people (so no demographic pressures to settle), the French-Canadians didn't have much reason in rebel. Their lives got better when they entered the British empire, since they entered a republic where they could participate in government and were enriched by entering a larger, freer trade zone. In the Caribbean, they didn't rebel mostly because they still needed the Redcoats to provide security to keep down the slave population. Whereas slaves made up about 40% of people in the southern portion of the Thirteen Colonies, they made up over 90% in the Caribbean, well past the threshold that the slavers could manage without government help.

    So, it looks like there were six big laws that connect the post-French and Indian War revenue-raising attempts to the Revolutionary War protest against "taxation without representation." They are the Sugar Act, the Currency Act, the Quartering Act, the Stamp Act, the Tea Act, and the Intolerable Acts. After the French and Indian War, the British intended to maintain a 10,000-strong army in North America. In order to raise the revenue to pay for that army (as well as to pay down the national debt that had ballooned during the war), the British taxed sugar exports from the Caribbean. This hit at the same time as a post-war economic downturn in North America, and led to boycotts.  At the same time, Britain his the colonies with the Currency Act of 1764, which more tightly controlled the production of paper money, exacerbating the economic downturn by essentially doing the 18th century version of a modern-day Fed raising interest rates. Then, in 1765, the Quartering Act required colonial authorities to pay the costs of housing and feeding British soldiers, and was resisted and circumvented in all colonies except Pennsylvania. In the same year, the Stamp Act directly taxed Americans and required that basically all printed materials be printed on specific paper from London that was embossed with a stamp. This was also extremely unpopular and spawned the "no taxation without representation" outcry, since no American consented to the tax. In 1773, the Tea Act was passed. This one was interesting because it actually reduced the tax on tea in order to undercut tea smuggling from the Dutch East Indies. But colonial merchants, who saw that they were being undercut, were angrier than tea consumers were made happy, and everyone joined a conspiratorial mindset that this was part of a plot to take away American liberty, leading to the Boston Tea Party. Finally, in response to the Boston Tea Party, Britain passed the "Intolerable Acts," also known as the "Coercive Acts," which were five punitive laws that closed the port of Boston, removed Massachusetts' charter (brining it under direct British control), allowed trials to be removed from Massachusetts to Great Britain, brought back quartering (which had lapsed in 1767), and dramatically increased the size of Quebec (thus restricting the frontier). These acts combined to inspire the colonists to hold the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1764.

    I would love to get deeper into more military history. But for now, the American Revolution can be described as this: in 1775, British forces attempted to impose control in Boston. They failed to do that at Bunker Hill. In 1776, the British occupied New York City, the Americans declared independence, and George Washington crossed the Delaware to win victories that did not win the war for the Americans, but prevented the British from winning the war. After a cold winter at Valley Forge in 1777, the French (and to a lesser extent the Spanish) joined the war in 1778, which required the British to focus forces elsewhere. As the war went on, support for the Patriot cause increased, and the British were unable to recruit loyalists to form militias. While the classic divide is one-third Patriot, one-third Loyalist, one-third neutral, Taylor says it was more like one-third Patriot, one-tenth Loyalist, and the rest were neutral. Without local support, and forced to deal with old rivals, Great Britain was basically not able to win the war by 1778, and fought the Battle of Yorktown in 1781, lost, and signed a peace treaty recognizing American independence in 1783.

    The result of the revolution, according to Lord Macartney, was that without America "the building not only looks much better but is a great deal stronger." It worked out for Britain to lose the Thirteen Colonies, since it subordinated the rest of the empire in India, Africa, and the West Indies to taxation. The empire was now less ethnically British, but had gained many more people--for example, Bengal had 20 million, more than double the population England and more than seven times the population of the Thirteen Colonies. These people wouldn't be so troublesome in "demanding their rights as Englishmen." The British made good on a 1778 pledge to no longer tax colonists purely for revenue, so in the time immediately after the war, Americans paid higher taxes than Canadians, and dealt with a period of near-anarchy under the Articles of Confederation until the Constitution was ratified in 1787. Westward expansion proceeded, at the great expense predicted by the British, but the Americans were willing to make the investment since they could have the reward. Western warfare would drain revenue for years, and even cost up to five-sixths of all federal expenditures under Washington, but would obviously yield big gains in years to come.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• The Seven Years' War brought British national debt from 74 million pounds to 133 million pounds, and servicing the debt in the mid-1760s cost five million of the empire's annual eight million pound budget.
• In 1764, the British Empire transferred smuggling cases from colonial courts to vice-admiralty courts, which took away jury trials that regularly favored the accused.
• I thought this was a good quote from the loyalist perspective, Mather Byles, 1774: "Which is better--to be ruled by one tyrant three thousand miles away or by three thousand tyrants not a mile away?"
• The English landed on Staten Island on July 2nd, 1776, and brought enough ships over the coming years to require participation of half the Royal Navy, two-thirds of the British army, and 8,000 Hessian mercenaries.
• The women who were camp followers of the Continental Army actually drew rations and pay and were subject to court-martial.
• Deborah Sampson used a fake name to serve for nearly two years in the Continental Army before she was discovered after being wounded. She later got a veteran's pension (paid to her husband) and publicly reenacted her time in uniform to make money later in life.
• In January 1778, Washington boosted recruitment, which was faltering, by endorsing plans to recruit the enslaved in New England states (this plan was stopped in the South), and by the end of the war, Blacks made up a tenth of the Continental Army, double the rate of proportion in the northern population. Southern states considered and shot down similar plans.
• Rhode Island remained independent until Congress barred its trade with the United States in May 1790.
• The early American republic had one of the highest literacy rates in the world with about three-quarters of free American adults being literate. There was just one American magazine in 1785, but 28 in 1795. There were 100 American newspapers in 1790 and nearly 400 by 1810. There were 69 post offices in 1788 and 903 by 1700.
• In 1807, Thomas Jefferson said, "Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper... The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them."
• In New Jersey, women who owned property had the right to vote from 1776 until 1807, when Democratic-Republicans rewrote the law.

The Destruction of Czestochowa by Shlomo Waga, edited and translated by Gloria Berkenstat Freund

    This one was not as good as Resistance and Death, but as a yizkor book, it is just a memoir of someone's time, so my criticism is not with what their memories were, it is just that Resistance and Death had several authors, whereas Destruction was just one person's memory. Some things that I thought were interesting were descriptions of ID cards for Jews, Gypsies, and Poles, the five aktsias in September-October 1942, and the description of a Jew named Fajner initiating resistance in 1943 that led to the liquidation of the ghetto. Also, I am noting that certain individuals like Degenhardt, Linderman, and Kurland are mentioned by many people, and it might be interesting to compile a "who's who" list of notable people in the ghetto.

The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson

    I was shocked at how much I disliked The Odyssey after reading The Iliad. As a kid, I loved Odysseus and the children's version of The Odyssey with pictures. I never had that much exposure to The Iliad besides the movie, Troy. But reading both of them now, I liked The Iliad way more. I think that the most interesting parts of The Odyssey, the tricking of the cyclops, the passing between Scylla and Charybdis, are actually just way shorter as parts of the book than I realized. A huge amount of the book takes place back in Ithaca before and after Odysseus' return. 

    The best part of the book was really Emily Wilson's introduction, which artfully explains the history of the composition of The Odyssey, the Greek Epic Cycle, the importance of these works to the Greeks themselves and the Western canon, and how she translated it. Her introduction to The Iliad was equally good. I came away liking Odysseus less than I did when I enjoyed the children's book version of The Odyssey. He's not quite as heroic in the modern sense. End of the day, it's still a good story, and an interesting view into the world of the Ancient Greeks.

Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America 1754-1766 by Fred Anderson

    Crucible of War is a hell of a book about Britain's attempt to build its empire in North America through war with the French and Indians as well as in Europe. The Seven Years' war is a confusing name since the war lasted nine years. The French and Indian War isn't much better since there was a lot of fighting with the Prussians and Austrians. This is an amazing book because it does what all amazing works of history must do: it connects huge geopolitical movements, which are beyond the decision-making authority of any one person, and connects them to the individuals on the ground, who sometimes played a part in causing, say, the war between England and France, or felt the effect, say, of the Iroquois selling out the Delaware.

    Of critical importance to the start of the Seven Years' War was the diminution of Iroquois power in the borderlands between the French and English. This covered the Ohio Territory (west of the Appalachians) and the Pays d'en haut, surrounding the Great Lakes in modern day Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, etc. While the Iroquois maintained independence of action, they could balance the two empires against one another. But by the mid 18th century, the English had grown far more powerful than either the Iroquois or the French and were beginning to exert pressure on their borders. The Iroquois had come to power by the mid-seventeenth century, and their access to Dutch firearms made them a force to be reckoned with. The Five Nations, originally the Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, and Seneca (with the Tuscarora added in the 18th century), formed at some point before European contact in order to end the Mourning Wars, which referred to the constant wars to gain captives as compensation for those lost in raids. So war begot war, and it was useful to come together to agree not to raid one another. That said, they still raided non-joiners, and those outside the Confederacy, like the Eries and the Hurons, suffered for it. Iroquois power peaked in the 1660s, when the Dutch, their main supplier of weapons, were forced out of New Amsterdam, which was renamed New York, and the Iroquois exhausted themselves out of constant war.

    

    The Iroquois supported "half-kings," sort of viceroys or smaller leaders who could govern allied tribes. One half-king of Mingoes (Iroquois allies living in the Ohio Valley) was known as Tanaghrisson. His crossing of paths with a twenty-one-year-old George Washington and French Ensign Joseph Coulon de Jumonville would change history. In short, Washington led two expeditions on behalf of the Governor of Virginia into the Ohio Territory. In the first, he led his freezing men to a French fort in December 1753 in order to deliver a letter ordering the French to vacate a fort they had built in modern-day Pennsylvania. In May of the following year, Washington returned to the Ohio Country with Tanaghrisson, and fought a battle with the French at Jumonville Glen, modern-day southwestern Pennsylvania, which resulted in a slaughter of Ensign de Jumonville and many of his men who had surrendered. But how? Anderson does a good analysis. First, he points out that a massacre certainly happened, despite those who claim that the French casualties were actually the result of battle. While shots fired in battle at that time "almost invariably" result in 2-4 times as many wounds as deaths (and indeed there is a three-to-one wounded to dead ratio among the Virginia men), the French suffered thirteen dead and only one wounded. I didn't take good enough notes on this, but my recollection of what happened is that England wanted the colonials to take a harder line on French fort-building west of the Appalachians, but not necessarily to start a war. Dinwiddie, the Virginia governor sent Washington to deliver that message to the French, but to strike at them if they were taking offensive measures. The French actually planned on having a diplomatic meeting with the Virginians they knew were coming their way. But Tanaghrisson, sick of the French for his own reasons, manipulated events to cause a battle, and after Tanaghrisson and Washington had won by surprising the French, he scalped and killed those who surrendered to cause embarrassment to the French.

    

    As the war progressed, it required greater English investment in the colonies and greater interference with the English colonists, who were unable to successfully coordinate the war effort amongst themselves. The confrontations that resulted from this are especially interesting for how they foreshadowed issues in the American Revolution and the War of 1812, especially with regards to military justice and contracts. Whereas English officers, coming from a world of immense class differences, were used to instant obedience by their enlisted soldiers, Americans were more contractually minded. Americans weren't desperate to fight the war. They signed contracts to do so, and if not landowners in their own right, they had greater social mobility than was available in England at the time. When the contracts they signed weren't respected, English soldiers tended to acquiesce, while American soldiers would eventually mutiny or desert. Similarly, the English were confronted, in the summer of 1756, with colonial governments that refused to provide adequate housing for their troops. To the English, it was hard to understand why Americans would not house the soldiers sent to protect them, but to the Americans, who had lived under "salutary neglect" for so long, the idea of supporting soldiers at their personal expense was shocking, and after all, it wasn't like the individual housing the soldiers would see the benefits of victories in Canada and Ohio. The French and English were ultimately both dealing with similar issues: convincing their colonists and the nearby Indians to fight for them. Initially, the French were more successful, but the Marquis de Montcalm alienated Indian allies later on, and the English would eventually overwhelm the French not only with Indian allies but way larger armies made of colonials (the English colonial population was far larger than the French).

    

    Different states had different reasons for not supporting the war effort. Maryland did not support the effort at all due to a small western border that gave them little reason to support. Virginia supported more due to a theoretical state western boundary all the way on the Pacific Ocean. Pennsylvania is an interesting case. Pennsylvanian politics had been deadlocked since 1740 over how to tax "proprietary" lands, that is, lands owned by the Penn family. Pennsylvania's governors had long refused requests from the legislature to raise funds by taxing Penn family lands, which provided most of the incomes for the Penn family, and in response, the legislature would not levy any tax on the population without also taxing the Penns. Meanwhile, the Quakers in the assembly, being pacifists, refused to appropriate any funds for war. There was no breakthrough until German settlers who had been attacked by Mingoes came through the streets of Philadelphia carrying the mangled corpses of their relatives and Scots-Irish settlers threatened to take up arms against the assembly itself. This actually caused the end of Quaker participation in politics in protest of the war funding, and the few Quakers who remained were excommunicated.

    I had planned to write a lot more about the actual specifics of the war itself--battles, tactics, etc.--but looking at that now is a lot of work. In short, the war was basically a war of attrition in the end. The decisive English victory began with several losses, since the French used maneuver warfare and irregular warfare with Indian allies to exact significant losses on British columns and fortresses. However, because the English had far more colonists in the area by an order of magnitude, and because the English were able to recruit Indian allies (or at least keep them from fighting for the French), the English won. As an illustration, the campaigns of 1758 featured 50,000 Anglo-American troops, which was a number that would be two-thirds of the entire population of Canada. The French had 6,800 regular troops, and 16,000 total if you count the untrained militia. A difficulty for the French was how to use their Indian allies. They were most useful to the French at the beginning of the war. But they were unreliable allies since (1) they didn't care about French territorial gains, and (2) were more interested in war prizes, so they would leave a campaign after just one battle when they took a captive, or a scalp, or some treasure. I definitely can't blame them. The whole war was just to decide which colonial power would dominate them, so it didn't make sense for them to tie themselves to any one power. The knockout blow of the war, according to Anderson, was not the Battle of Quebec, when the English took the French capital, but the Battle of Quiberon Bay, when the English gained the naval supremacy in the Atlantic and cut off any French resupply.

    The parts about military justice were especially interesting to me. The culture shock between the Englishmen in the English Army and New Englanders who had served in provincial militias and armies were huge. The New Englanders were used to serving as civilians in arms. Anderson writes of the New Englanders, "A soldier who insulted his captain could expect to bear the consequences, which--depending upon the officer--might range from being knocked down on the spot to being placed under arrest, being court-martialed, and receiving ten or twenty lashes with a cat-o'-nine-tails. But under regular military discipline, insolence to an officer was a crime that carried a penalty of five hundred lashes; the theft of a shirt could earn a man a thousand; and desertion (no uncommon act among New England troops) was punishable by hanging or a firing-squad execution." New Englanders also had a superiority complex about being sons of freeholders and descendants of religious dissenters, and they certainly didn't have the inferiority complex that was found among the lower classes that made up the English Army.

    Part of what made the English so dominant in this period was sort of an economy of scale that came from rolling up all of North America into one market. Since France, England, and Spain were only permitting their colonies to trade with the mother country's network, there was a snowballing effect from building a bigger network. The result was that, instead of being made poorer by being conquered, the people conquered by the English in the Seven Years' War all across the world would have seen more economic activity after the conquest than before. This secured cooperation from the conquered, instead of resistance. But while this was true for the conquered, the conquerors (the Americans) were then asked to pay the price of that conquest with The Sugar Act, The Stamp Act, and so on. These acts that imposed greater taxes on Americans are described in detail in the book, but I won't get into them here, since I think they will be covered in my other books on the Revolution. All in all, I think that distinction between the conquered and the conquerors sort of reversing roles is important in understanding why the Revolution would happen among those who felt like they should have reaped more rewards for defeating the French.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• In 1756, it cost nearly sixpence a milt to move a two-hundred-weight barrel of beef from Albany to Lake George, but by the end of 1757, the same barrel only cost less than twopence a mile on the same route. This illustrates the massive development efforts on roads into the frontier during the war.
• I'm pretty sure "habanero" like the pepper also means it comes from Havana a.k.a. Habana.