Quotulatiousness

July 18, 2015

Want to bone up on India’s armed forces?

Filed under: India, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

If so, you’ll want to read all of Shashank Joshi‘s recommendations (full disclosure … I haven’t actually read any of the linked sites myself):

Peter Mattis’ explanation of what one should read to be an expert on China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) made me wonder: What might a similar list look like for India-watchers? Western interest in India’s armed forces is considerably slighter, largely because India looms far smaller in U.S. strategic thinking and is viewed as a potential partner rather than probable military adversary. But there’s a large and growing volume of writing on Indian military affairs, almost all of it in English, with cutting-edge books or articles appearing every month. So where should one begin?

Each service has its own doctrine and/or strategy — most recently the army in 2004, the navy in 2009 (remarkably, it is not available online), and the air force in 2012 (the official link is — perhaps aptly — perpetually broken, but you can get it here) — but these are of limited use, not least because they’re not written in close coordination with other services or with a coherent national military strategy in mind. So most analyses depend on secondary texts, occasional statements by serving officers, and writing by retirees.

“No Irish need apply”

Filed under: History, Religion, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Megan McArdle on the imaginary-then-not-so-imaginary prejudice against Irish workers in the United States:

“No Irish Need Apply.” The signs are legendary in the collective memory of Irish Americans. Our ancestors were warned away from the jobs that were open only to “real Americans,” not to the Papist hordes streaming across the Atlantic, with their drinking and their brawling and their unsavory politicking. It is the epigraphic summation of a long war with America’s WASP elite, one that may now be forgotten by the Anglo Protestants who waged it, but not by the great-great-grandchildren of Erin.

I call it legendary. Historian Richard Jensen actually called it a myth.

Jensen, a professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago, wrote a long article in 2002, in which he argued that these advertisements were rare, and when they were found, applied almost exclusively to women, who disproportionately worked as domestics. Jensen searched the digital archives of a number of newspapers, and found that “ads for men were extremely rare — fewer than two per decade. The complete absence of evidence suggests that probably zero such signs were seen at commercial establishments, shops, factories, stores, hotels, railroads, union halls, hiring halls, personnel offices, labor recruiters etc. anywhere in America, at any time.”

This is a bit of a blow to the pride of Irish Americans, who do love a good martyrdom. Something in me rebelled when I saw this article, but as an empirical matter, there’s no reason it couldn’t be true. I filed it away under “History, maybe not quite as bad as you thought, though still quite bad” and moved on to contemplating the perfidy of Oliver Cromwell.

Then, the other day, another article caught my eye. It seems that Rebecca Fried, a high school student from the Sidwell Friends school in Washington, has done a more thorough search of newspaper archives, made possible by advances in digitizing archives since Professor Jensen did his work. Her results have been published in the Oxford Press Journal of Social History, the same place where the original paper was published. And she found lots of examples of both “No Irish Need Apply” advertisements and newspaper accounts of “No Irish” signs, even though the available archives still cover only a small fraction of the thousands of papers in which such ads and accounts might have appeared.

Early anthropology

Filed under: History, Science — Tags: — Nicholas @ 02:00

At The Scientist, Ian Tattersall describes the early days of anthropological studies:

Before the mid-1900s, human fossils were for the most part studied and pronounced upon by specialists in human anatomy. Based in medical schools, these researchers were exquisitely attuned to variation within Homo sapiens, but were largely unconcerned with the riotous diversity of species out there in the living world. Ignorant of taxonomic norms, they branded newly discovered hominin fossils with new Latin names, much as they gave each of their children a separate name. In this way, throughout the first half of the 20th century the rapidly expanding paleoanthropological literature became littered with formal names — even though many of the freshly unearthed fossils actually belonged to species that had already been described.

I write about this crucible of discovery and folly in my new book, The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack.

The haphazard application of species names to every new hominin fossil was a practice that could not continue indefinitely. And in 1950 the ornithologist Ernst Mayr, one of the fathers of the Evolutionary Synthesis, took it upon himself to lecture the paleoanthropologists on the error of their ways. The Synthesis was an elaboration of evolutionary theory that saw most evolutionary change as the gradual accumulation, via natural selection, of small genetic innovations within ancestor-descendant sequences. So Mayr depicted human evolution as the slow modification of a single lineage culminating in Homo sapiens. Among the fifteen hominin genera then described, Mayr said, there was in reality only one: our own genus, Homo. What’s more, the Homo lineage contained only three species: Homo transvaalensis (an early biped) had given rise to Homo erectus, which in turn had evolved into Homo sapiens. Acutely aware that their nomenclatural proliferation lacked any theoretical justification, the paleoanthropologists capitulated. For half a century thereafter, most of them viewed human evolution as a single-minded progression from primitiveness to sapient perfection driven by natural selection: an idea that fit rather well with the undeniable fact that only one hominin exists in the world today.

From the beginning, though, it was obvious that Mayr’s scheme was a huge oversimplification. As fossil discoveries rapidly continued to accumulate, his single lineage began to bulge at the seams. A new image of hominin evolution began to develop.

QotD: Sherman’s March to the Sea

Filed under: History, Military, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Southerners grew confident that the besieger Sherman would become the besieged in Atlanta after the election, as his long supply lines back to Tennessee would be cut and a number of Confederate forces might converge to keep him locked up behind Confederate lines.

Instead, Sherman cut loose on November 15, 1864 — despite Grant’s worries and Lincoln’s bewilderment — and headed to the Atlantic Coast in what would soon be known as “The March to the Sea,” itself a prelude to an even more daring winter march through the Carolinas to arrive at the rear of Robert E. Lee’s army, trapped in Virginia at war’s end.

After daring Sherman to leave Atlanta, and declaring that he would suffer the fate of Napoleon in Russia, Confederate forces wilted. The luminaries of the Confederacy — Generals Bragg, Hardee, and Hood — pled numerical inferiority and usually avoided the long Northern snake that wound through the Georgia heartland. Sherman’s army had been pared down of its sick and auxiliaries, but was still huge, composed of Midwestern yeomen who liked camping out and were used to living off the land. Post-harvest Georgia was indeed rich, and Sherman’s more than 60,000 marchers soon learned that they could live off the land in richer style than they ever had while occupying Atlanta. In their wake, they left a 300 mile-long, 60 mile-wide swath of looting and destruction from Atlanta to Savannah.

Yet there was a method to Sherman’s mad five-week march. He burned plantations, freed slaves, destroyed factories, and tore up railroads — but more or less left alone the farms and small towns of ordinary Southerners. His purposes were threefold: to punish the plantation class, the small minority of Confederates who owned slaves, as the culprits for the war; to destroy the Southern economy and remind the general population, as Sherman put it, “that war and individual ruin were now to be synonymous”; and to humiliate the Confederate military, especially what he called the cavalier classes that boasted of their martial audacity but would not dare confront such a huge army of battle-hardened troopers from Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, and other Midwestern states. In this context, the message was not lost: Unionists were not just New England Yankee manufacturers, but farmers who did their own hard work in harsh, cold lands more challenging than temperate Georgia; material advantages and repeating rifles were not antithetical to martial audacity, as a Michigan farmer with a Sharps rifle was more than a match for a plumed Southern cavalryman who boasted of killing Yankees.

Victor Davis Hanson, “Sherman at 150”, Victor Davis Hanson’s Private Papers, 2014-08-06.

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