Predestination is Calvinism’s fundamental doctrine. To the Calvinist, all human effort is utterly futile, since nothing we could ever possibly do could affect our salvation, or lack thereof, which was decreed by God long before the foundations of the world were laid. How the hell you get from “all human effort is futile” to “we must totally remake society” is above my pay grade, feel free to check Walzer if you want to give it a go, but it’s obvious that the Calvinists did get there — see the English Civil Wars, which themselves were a sideshow to the whole charming episode we pros call The Period of the Wars of Religion, 1517-1648.
The Puritans, as English Calvinists were called, wrote difficult prose, but in translation it sounds shockingly modern. The Puritans were the SJWs of their day, obsessed with their own pwecious widdle selves. They didn’t get around to making up xzheyr own pronouns, but they did give themselves self-righteous new names — when Ben Johnson called his caricature Puritan Zeal-of-the-Land Busy he got big laughs, but he wasn’t really joking, they really did stuff like that. To be a Puritan requires two things: An obsessive focus on the tiniest micro-movements of your own soul …
… and an equally obsessive focus on forcing other people to disclose the tiniest micro-movements of their souls. There’s nothing anyone could ever do, so trivial that a Puritan could in good conscience overlook it. Calvin’s Geneva was the closest thing to a police state 16th century technology allowed, and when their turn came, Oliver Cromwell and the boys gave importing it to England the old college try. And, of course, Plymouth Bay Colony started as a Puritan police state …
Ideology, then, removes the distinction between public and private. You can’t simply say you’re a Puritan, you really have to BE one — constantly, perfectly, since there’s nothing that Puritanism doesn’t touch. And the only way to do that, of course, is to do everything in full public view at all times. Calvin did — as Walzer remarks, John Calvin, the man, is almost completely absent from Calvin’s writings. (Unlike Luther, whose idiosyncratic, not to say lunatic, personality comes through in practically every sentence). Calvin achieved that clear windowpane prose Orwell claimed was the mark of a great writer — nothing between audience and subject at all. Calvin would, indeed, take the remark that he’s almost a complete cipher, personally, as a very high compliment.
Severian, “Ideology II”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-11-09.
June 1, 2023
May 31, 2023
Improvised Weapons of WW2 | Anti-Tank Chats #8 | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published 10 Feb 2023Historian Stuart Wheeler is back with another Anti-Tank Chat. In this episode, he looks at the development and use of improvised, thrown and placed infantry anti-tank weapons, available to British and Commonwealth forces in World War II.
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May 30, 2023
Ban all the words!
Chris Bray reflects on the historical context of literature bans:
Before the Civil War, Southern states banned abolitionist literature. That ban meant that postmasters (illegally!) searched the mail, seized anti-slavery tracts, and burned them. And it meant that people caught with abolitionist pamphlets faced the likelihood of arrest. The District of Columbia considered a ban, then didn’t pass the thing, but Reuben Crandall was still arrested and tried for seditious libel in 1833 when he was caught with abolitionist literature. He was acquitted, then died of illness from a brutal pre-trial detention. Seizure, destruction, arrest: abolitionist literature was banned.
The Soviet writer Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote a 1924 novel, We, depicting a world in which an all-powerful government minutely controlled every aspect of life for an enervated population, finding as an endpoint for their ideological project a surgery that destroyed the centers of the brain that allowed ordinary people to have will and imagination. The Soviet government banned Zamyatin’s work: They seized and destroyed all known copies, told editors and publishers the author was no longer to allowed to publish, and sent Zamyatin into exile, where he died without ever seeing his own country again. Seizure, destruction, exile: Yevgeny Zamyatin’s work was banned.
During World War I, the federal government banned literature that discouraged military service, including tracts that criticized conscription. Subsequently, “socialists Charles Schenck and Elizabeth Baer distributed leaflets declaring that the draft violated the Thirteenth Amendment prohibition against involuntary servitude”. They were arrested, convicted, and imprisoned. The Supreme Court upheld the conviction. Anti-conscription literature was banned: It was seized and destroyed, and people caught distributing it were sent to prison.
In 2023, the tedious midwit poet Amanda Gorman posted on Twitter that she was “gutted” — the standard emotion for tedious midwits — to discover that one of her poems had been “banned” by a school in Florida. The news media raced to proclaim that Florida schools are banning books, the leading edge of the Ron DeSantis fascist wave.
As others have already said, Gorman’s boring poem was moved from an elementary school library shelf to a middle school library shelf, without leaving the library
M1886 Lebel Rifle at the Range
Forgotten Weapons
Published 17 Mar 2013The French M1886 Lebel was the first smallbore smokeless powder rifle adopted by a major military, and was a game changer in the European arms race in the 1880s. It wasn’t an outstanding design in many ways (like the slow-loading tube magazine and requirement to use a screwdriver to remove the bolt), but its 8mm smokeless cartridge jumped France to the front of the technological race regardless. Today, we’re taking one out to the range to see how it shoots.
May 29, 2023
“I’m starting to think that Just Stop Oil is a Big Oil plant”
Tom Slater on the amazing tone-deafness of the Just Stop Oil “activists”:
“Just Stop Oil Courtauld Gallery 30062022” by Just Stop Oil is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 
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I’m starting to think that Just Stop Oil is a Big Oil plant. What else could explain these campaigners’ phenomenal ability to turn the public against them and confirm their critics’ worst prejudices. Namely, that this environmental activism / amdram troupe is stuffed with upper-middle-class irritants who couldn’t give a damn about working-class people. Surely, this has got to be on purpose?
Take their recent “slow marches” through London, aimed at bringing traffic to a standstill. The whole point of these stunts seems to be to force cab drivers, delivery men and builders to sit in traffic so that these protesters can preach their miserable little gospel. And as Edred Whittingham‘s (don’t laugh) deranged antics at the Crucible recently showed us, you now can’t even escape these bourgeois millenarians during your leisure time.
That this new generation of environmentalists are almost uniformly posh is an established empirical fact. An academic survey of those involved in Extinction Rebellion – the mothership organisation from which Just Stop Oil and Insulate Britain were spawned – found, to the surprise of precisely no one, that they were overwhelmingly middle class, highly educated and from the south. A full 85 per cent of them have some form of university degree.
So what we have here is the comfortably off classes – those with sufficient free time to glue themselves to roads on a Wednesday mid-morning – forcing their weird hangups on everyone else. Time and again, when they are criticised for making people’s lives a misery, they offer only patronising lectures. “We’re so sorry that we have to disrupt the lives of ordinary people”, said Just Stop Oil’s Eben Lazarus (I know) to Vice last year, but “hopefully people will see, further down the line, that the disruption we’re causing is microscopic compared to the disruption that we’re going to face because of the climate crisis”. Translation: we know better, you cretins.
No wonder that so many now respond to these cunning stunts with instant, visceral fury. First there was the Battle of Canning Town in 2019, when east-London commuters pulled two Extinction Rebellion people down from the top of a Tube train. And as police have failed to deal with these protests – they now seem to escort rather than stop these “slow marches” – motorists have increasingly decided to take matters into their own hands. Several clips of workers clashing – sometimes physically – with Just Stop Oil activists have gone viral in the past week alone, including one of a man shoving JSOers on Blackfriars Bridge, before promptly being arrested.
The Moment D-Day Was Announced
World War Two
Published 28 May 2023D-Day is just around the corner, we’re in the end game now. You can learn more about the project and how to get involved at http://DDay.TimeGhost.tv
May 28, 2023
Breakout from Anzio! – WW2 – Week 248 – May 27, 1944
World War Two
Published 27 May 2023After four months, the Allies breakout from their bridgehead at Anzio and meet with the advancing troops heading north after the fall of Monte Cassino last week. The Japanese begin phase two of their big operation in China, and both the Soviets and the Western Allies continue making plans for their massive June offensives to squeeze the Axis from both sides of Europe.
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Musical copyrights – crazy as they are now – were far worse in history
Ted Gioia outlines just how the concept of musical copyrights produced even more distortions in the past than they do today:
Assignments of copyrights photostat copies by mollyali (CC BY-NC 2.0) https://flic.kr/p/5JbsPE
People tell me it was never this bad before. But they’re wrong. The music copyright situation was even crazier 500 years ago.
The Italians took the lead in this, and it all started with Ottaviano Petrucci gaining a patent from the Venetian Senate for publishing polyphonic music with a printing press back in 1498. Andrea Antico secured a similar privilege from Pope Leo X, which covered the Papal States.
It’s hard to imagine a Pope making decisions on music IP, but that was how the game was played back then. In 1516, Pope Leo actually took away Petrucci’s monopoly on organ music, and gave it to Antico instead. You had to please the pontiff to publish pieces for the pipes.
Over time, this practice spread elsewhere. In a famous case, the composer Lully was granted total control over all operas performed in France. He died a very wealthy man — with five houses in Paris and two in the country. His estate was valued at 800,000 livres—some 500 times the salary of a typical court musician.
But the most extreme case of music copyright comes from Elizabethan England. Here the Queen gave William Byrd and Thomas Tallis a patent covering all music publishing for a period of 21 years. Not only did the two composers secure a monopoly over English music, but they also could prevent retailers or other entrepreneurs in the country from selling “songs made and printed in any foreign country.”
If anybody violated this patent, the fine was 40 shillings. And the music itself was seized and given to Tallis and Byrd. They probably had quite a nice private library of scores by the time the patent expired.
But that’s not all. Byrd and Tallis’s stranglehold on music was so extreme it even covered the printing of blank music paper. That meant that other composers had to pay Tallis and Byrd even before they had written down a single note. Not even the Marvin Gaye estate makes those kinds of demands.
Tallis died a decade after the patent was granted—putting Byrd in sole charge of English music. I’d like to tell you that he exercised his monopoly with a fair and open mind—especially because I so greatly esteem Byrd’s music, and also I’d like to think that composers are better at arts management than profit-driven businesses. But the flourishing of music publishing in England after the expiration of the patent — when, for a brief spell, anybody could issue scores — makes clear that Byrd did more to constrain than empower other composers.
May 27, 2023
The true purpose of the Great Exhibition of 1851
In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes considers the “why” of the 1851 Great Exhibition:
The Crystal Palace from the northeast during the Great Exhibition of 1851, image from the 1852 book Dickinsons’ comprehensive pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851
Wikimedia Commons.
Ever since researching my book on the history of the Royal Society of Arts, I’ve been fascinated by the Great Exhibition of 1851, which they initiated. Like most people, I had once assumed that the exhibition was just a big celebration of Victorian technological superiority — a brash excuse to rub the British Industrial Revolution in the rest of the world’s faces. But my research into the origins of the event revealed that it was almost the opposite. Far from being a jingoistic expression of superiority, it was actually motivated by a worry that Britain was rapidly losing its place. It was an attempt to prevent decline by learning from other countries. It was largely about not falling behind.
Industrial exhibitions already had a long history in 1851, as a crucial weapon in other countries’ innovation policy arsenals. They were used by countries like France in particular — which held an exhibition every few years from 1798 — as a means of catching up with Britain’s technology. This sounds strange nowadays, when the closest apparent parallels are vanity projects like the Millennium Experience, the recent controversial “Festival of Brexit” that ended up just being a bunch of temporary visitor attractions all over the country, and glitzy mega-events like the World’s Fairs. But the World’s Fairs, albeit notional successors to the Great Exhibition, have strayed very far from the original vision and purpose. They’re now more about celebration, infotainment and national branding, whereas the original industrial exhibitions had concrete economic aims.
Industrial exhibitions were originally much more akin to specialist industry fairs, with producers showing off their latest products, sort of combined with academic conferences, with scientists demonstrating their latest advances. Unlike modern industry fairs and conferences, however, which tend to be highly specialised, appealing to just a few people with niche interests, industrial exhibitions showed everything, altogether, all at once. They achieved a more widespread appeal to the public by being a gigantic event that was so much more than the sum of its parts — often helped along by the impressive edifices that housed them. The closest parallel is perhaps the Consumer Electronics Show, held since 1967 in the United States. But even this only focuses on particular categories of industry, and is largely catered towards attendees already interested in “tech”. Industrial exhibitions were like the CES, but for everything.
The point of all this, rather than just being an event for its own sake, was to actually improve the things on display. This happened in a number of ways, each of them complementing the other.
Concentration generated serendipity. By having such a vast variety of industries and discoveries presented at the same event, exhibitions greatly raised the chances of serendipitous discovery. A manufacturer exhibiting textiles might come across a new material from an unfamiliar region, prompting them to import it for the first time. An inventor working on a niche problem might see the scientific demonstration of a concept that had not occurred to them, providing a solution.
Comparison bred emulation. Producers, by seeing their competitors’ products physically alongside their own, would see how things could be done better. They could learn from their competitors, with the laggards being embarrassed into improving their products for next time. And this could take place at a much broader, country-wide level, revealing the places that were outperforming others and giving would-be reformers the evidence they needed to discover and adopt policies from elsewhere.
Exposure shattered complacency. The visiting public, as users and buyers of the things on display, would be exposed to superior products. This was especially effective for international exhibitions of industry, of which the Great Exhibition was the first, and simulated an effect that had only ever really been achieved through expensive foreign travel — by being exposed to things they hadn’t realised could already be so much better than what they were accustomed to, consumers raised their standards. They forced the usual suppliers of their products to either raise their game or lose out to foreign ones.
QotD: The war elephant’s primary weapon was psychological, not physical
So it is possible – even without special anti-elephant weapons or tactics – for very high quality infantry (and we should be clear about this: Alexander’s phalanx was as battle hardened as troops come) to resist the charge of elephants. Nevertheless, the terror element of the onrush of elephants must be stressed: if being charged by a horse is scary, being charged by a 9ft tall, 4-ton war beast must be truly terrifying.
Yet – in the Mediterranean at least – stories of elephants smashing infantry lines through the pure terror of their onset are actually rare. This point is often obscured by modern treatments of some of the key Romans vs. Elephants battles (Heraclea, Bagradas, etc), which often describe elephants crashing through Roman lines when, in fact, the ancient sources offer a somewhat more careful picture. It also tends to get lost on video-games where the key use of elephants is to rout enemy units through some “terror” ability (as in Rome II: Total War) or to actually massacre the entire force (as in Age of Empires).
At Bagradas (255 B.C. – a rare Carthaginian victory on land in the First Punic War), for instance, Polybius (Plb. 1.34) is clear that the onset of the elephants does not break the Roman lines – if for no other reason than the Romans were ordered quite deep (read: the usual triple Roman infantry line). Instead, the elephants disorder the Roman line. In the spaces between the elephants, the Romans slipped through, but encountered a Carthaginian phalanx still in good order advancing a safe distance behind the elephants and were cut down by the infantry, while those caught in front of the elephants were encircled and routed by the Carthaginian cavalry. What the elephants accomplished was throwing out the Roman fighting formation, leaving the Roman infantry confused and vulnerable to the other arms of the Carthaginian army.
So the value of elephants is less in the shock of their charge as in the disorder that they promote among infantry. As we’ve discussed elsewhere, heavy infantry rely on dense formations to be effective. Elephants, as a weapon-system, break up that formation, forcing infantry to scatter out of the way or separating supporting units, thus rendering the infantry vulnerable. The charge of elephants doesn’t wipe out the infantry, but it renders them vulnerable to other forces – supporting infantry, cavalry – which do.
Elephants could also be used as area denial weapons. One reading of the (admittedly somewhat poor) evidence suggests that this is how Pyrrhus of Epirus used his elephants – to great effect – against the Romans. It is sometimes argued that Pyrrhus essentially created an “articulated phalanx” using lighter infantry and elephants to cover gaps – effectively joints – in his main heavy pike phalanx line. This allowed his phalanx – normally a relatively inflexible formation – to pivot.
This area denial effect was far stronger with cavalry because of how elephants interact with horses. Horses in general – especially horses unfamiliar with elephants – are terrified of the creatures and will generally refuse to go near them. Thus at Ipsus (301 B.C.; Plut. Demetrius 29.3), Demetrius’ Macedonian cavalry is cut off from the battle by Seleucus’ elephants, essentially walled off by the refusal of the horses to advance. This effect can resolved for horses familiarized with elephants prior to battle (something Caesar did prior to the Battle of Thapsus, 46 B.C.), but the concern seems never to totally go away. I don’t think I fully endorse Peter Connolly’s judgment in Greece and Rome At War (1981) that Hellenistic armies (read: post-Alexander armies) used elephants “almost exclusively” for this purpose (elephants often seem positioned against infantry in Hellenistic battle orders), but spoiling enemy cavalry attacks this way was a core use of elephants, if not the primary one.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: War Elephants, Part I: Battle Pachyderms”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-07-26.
May 26, 2023
The introduction of BBC Verify proves that Ben Rhodes was correct
Chris Bray on the BBC’s new effort to provide NPCs and would-be NPCs with the “correct” narratives:
I’ve spent a lot of time talking about things like this, breaking down the difference between what media and political figures perform and what they actually know and do, but it begins to feel like I’m telling you that another lump of shit is a lump of shit. “Chew it carefully, and you’ll see that this, too, has the distinct flavor of fecal matter.” It’s important to notice propaganda, and to say that hey, that’s propaganda!, but let’s not be tedious about it.
In other news, I was reminded this week about the Ben Rhodes interview in which he shrugged and told the New York Times that OF COURSE the Obama administration lied to the news media about the terms of the nuclear deal with Iran — because why on earth wouldn’t you lie to journalists, who have no ability to figure out that you’re lying? Actual quote from a person who worked in the White House:
All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus. Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.
Specifically, I was reminded of the image of 27 year-old journalists who literally know nothing because of this:
Paging Ben Rhodes: BBC has empowered an actual 27 year-old to tell the world what it may be permitted to perceive as truth. Marianna Spring has no discernible training or experience in law, history, economics, or science, but she’s been on television for, like, several years, now, so. She is the arbiter. Fall into line, everyone.
Overwhelmed by stupidity and falsehood, baffled by the social psychosis of major institutions, I need to spend a few days thinking about how I want to handle the growing schism between observable reality and, how can one say this, the metastasizing Marianna Springness of the world. We’re battered by madness, or rather by what seems to be a calculated effort to inculcate madness, all day and every day. Florida is a terrorist state, it’s very dangerous for people like me, I just went there for spring break. What can I say about that? What’s worth saying? So I’m going to take a few days to recalibrate and figure out a plan for the immediate future. I don’t think very often, but man, when I do, I really go for it.
Update: John Ellwood has more at The Conservative Woman:
TCW Defending Freedom has received the following press release from the BBC announcing the launch of BBC Vilify.
THE exponential growth of manipulated and distorted news reports and video means that seeing is no longer believing. Our dwindling number of consumers tell us they can no longer trust that the video in their news feeds is genuine. This is why we at the BBC must urgently begin to show and share the work we do behind the scenes, to check and vilify truthful but inconvenient information to ensure that it does not appear on our platforms.
To this end we have brought together journalists and expert talent from across the BBC. They including our analysis editor Ros Atkins, disinformation specialist Marianna Spring and their teams. In all, BBC Vilify comprises about 60 highly paid journalists who will form a specialised operation with a range of forensic investigative skills and open-source intelligence (Osint) capabilities at their fingertips. Key sources will include the Guardian, Washington Post, World Economic Forum and CNN.
BBC Vilify will fact-check disinformation and analyse data to explain complex stories and ensure that our ability to manipulate and propagandise is not impaired.
How domestic use of coal transformed Britain
Jane Psmith reviews The Domestic Revolution: How the Introduction of Coal into Victorian Homes Changed Everything by Ruth Goodman:
… Even today, few people record the mundane details of their daily lives; in the days before social media and widespread literacy it was even more dramatic, so anyone who wants to know how our ancestors cleaned, or slept, or ate has to go poking through the interstices of the historical record in search of the answers — which means they need to recognize that there’s a question there in the first place. When they don’t, we end up with whole swathes of the past we can’t really understand because we’re unfamiliar with the way their inhabitants interacted with the physical world.
The Domestic Revolution is about one of these “unknown unknowns”, the early modern English transition from burning wood to coal in the home, and Ruth Goodman may be the only person in four hundred years who could have written it. With exactly the kind of obsessive attention to getting it right that I can really respect, she turned an increasingly intensive Tudor reënactment hobby into a decades-long career as a “freelance historian”, rediscovering as many domestic details of Tudor-era life as possible and consulting for museums and costume dramas. Her work reminds me of the recreations of ancient Polynesian navigational techniques, a combination of research and practical experiments aimed at contextualizing what got remembered or written down, so of course I would love it. (A Psmith review of her How To Be a Tudor is forthcoming.) She’s also starred in a number of TV shows where she and her colleagues live and work for an extended time in period environs, wearing period costume and using period technology1, and because she was so unusually familiar with running a home fired by wood — “I have probably cooked more meals over a wood fire than I have over gas or electric cookers”, she writes — she immediately noticed the differences when she lived with a coal-burning iron range to film Victorian Farm. A coal-fired home required changes to nearly all parts of daily life, changes that people used to central heating would never think to look for. But once Goodman points them out, you can trace the radiating consequences of these changes almost everywhere.
The English switched from burning wood to burning coal earlier and more thoroughly than anywhere else in the world, and it began in London. Fueling the city with wood had become difficult as far back as the late thirteenth century, when firewood prices nearly doubled over the course of a decade or two, and when the population finally recovered from the rolling crises of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the situation became dire once again. Wood requires a lot of land to produce, but it’s bulky and difficult to transport by cart: by the 1570s the court of Elizabeth I found it cheapest to buy firewood that had been floated more than a hundred miles down the Thames. Coal, by contrast, could be mined with relative ease from naturally-draining seams near Newcastle-upon-Tyne and sailed right down the eastern coast of the island to a London dock. It already had been at a small scale throughout the Middle Ages, largely to fuel smithies and lime-burners, but in the generation between 1570 and Elizabeth’s death in 1603 the city had almost entirely switched to burning coal. (It had also ballooned from 80,000 to 200,000 inhabitants in the same time, largely enabled by the cheaper fuel.) By 1700, Britain was burning more coal than wood; by 1900, 95% of all households were coal-burning, a figure North America would never match. Of course the coal trade itself had consequences — Goodman suggests that the regular Newcastle run was key in training up sailors who could join the growing Royal Navy or take on trans-Atlantic voyages — and it certainly strengthened trade networks, but most of The Domestic Revolution is driven by the differences in the materials themselves.
The most interesting part of the book to me, a person who is passionately interested in all of human history right up until about 1600, were the details of woodland management under the wood-burning regime. I had, for instance, always assumed that early modern “woodcutters” like Hansel and Gretel’s father were basically lumberjacks chopping down full-grown trees, but actually most trees aren’t killed by removing their trunks. Instead, the stump (or roots, depending on the species) will send up new, branchless shoots, which can be harvested when they reach their desired diameter — anywhere from a year or two for whippy shoots suitable for weaving baskets or fences to seven years for firewood, or even longer if you want thick ash or oak poles for construction. This procedure, called coppicing, also extends the life of the tree indefinitely: an ash tree might live for two hundred years, but there are coppiced ash stools in England that predate the Norman Conquest. (My ignorance here wasn’t entirely chronological provincialism: the pines and other conifers that make up most North American timberland can’t be coppiced.)2 The downside to coppicing is that the new shoots are very attractive to livestock, so trees can also be pollarded — like a coppice, but six or eight feet up the trunk,3 quite a dramatic photo here — which is harder to harvest but means you can combine timber and pasture. This made pollarded “wood pasture” a particularly appealing option for common land, where multiple people had legal rights to its use.4 The woodcutters of the Grimms’ tales probably had a number of fenced coppiced patches they would harvest in rotation, ideally one fell for each year of growth it took to produce wood of the desired size, though a poor man without the upfront capital to support planting the right kind of trees could make do with whatever nature gave him.
There’s plenty more, of course: Goodman goes into great but fascinating detail about the ways different woods behave on the fire (hazel gets going quickly, which is nice for starting a fire or for frying, but oak has staying power; ash is the best of both worlds), the ways you can change the shape and character of your fire depending on what you’re cooking, and the behavior of other regional sorts of fuel like peat (from bogs) and gorse (from heathland). But most of the book is devoted to the differences between burning wood and burning coal, of which there are three big ones: the flame, the heat, and the smoke. Dealing with each one forced people to make obvious practical changes to their daily lives, and in turn each of those changes had second- and third-order consequences that contributed to the profound transformations of the modern period.
The most obvious difference is the fire itself. The flames of wood fires merge together to form a pyramid or spire shape, perfect for setting your pot over: the flames will curl around its nicely rounded bottom to heat it rapidly. Coal, on the other hand, forms “a series of smaller, lower, hotter and bluer flames, spaced across the upper surface of the bed of embers,” suitable for a large flat-bottomed pot. More importantly, though, burning coal requires a great deal more airflow: a coal fire on the ground is rapidly smothered by its own buildup of ash and clinker (and of course it doesn’t come in nice long straight bits for you to build a pyramid out of). The obvious solution is the grate, a metal basket that lifts the coal off the ground, letting the debris fall away rather than clogging the gaps between coals, and drawing cold air into the fire to fuel its combustion. This confines the fire to one spot, which may not seem like a big deal (especially for people who are used to cooking on stoves with burners of fixed sizes) but is actually quite a dramatic change. As Goodman explains, one of the main features of cooking on a wood fire is the ease with which you can change its size and shape:
You can spread them out or concentrate them, funnel them into long thin trenches or rake them into wide circles. You can easily divide a big fire into several small separate fires or combine small fires into one. You can build a big ring of fire around a particularly large pot stood at one end of the hearth while a smaller, slower central fire is burning in the middle and a ring of little pots is simmering away at the far end. You can scrape out a pile of burning embers to pop beneath a gridiron when there is a bit of toasting to do, brushing the embers back into the main fire when the job is done.
In other words, the enormous fireplaces you may have seen in historical kitchens aren’t evidence of equally enormous fires; they were used for lots of different fires of varying sizes, to cook lots of different dishes at the same time. The iron grate for coal, on the other hand, is a fixed size and shape, like a modern burner — though unlike a modern burner the heat is not adjustable. The only thing you can do, really, is put your pot on the grate or take it off.
1. Several of them are streaming on Amazon Prime; I don’t much TV, but I did watch Tudor Monastery Farm with my kids and we all loved it.
2. Some firs can be regrown in a related practice called “stump culture“, which is particularly common on Christmas tree farms, but it’s much more labor-intensive than coppicing.
3. If you live in the southern United States, you’ve probably seen pollarded crape myrtles.
4. Contrary to the impression you may have gotten from the so-called tragedy of the commons, the historical English commons had extremely clearly delineated legal rights. More importantly, these rights all had fabulous names like turbary (the right to cut turves for fuel), piscary (the right to fish), and pannage (the right to let your pigs feed in the woods). I’m also a big fan of the terminology of medieval and early modern tolls, like murage (charged for bringing goods within the walls), pontage (for using a bridge), and pavage (using roads). Since the right to charge these tolls was granted to towns and cities individually, a journey of any length was probably an obnoxious mess of fees (Napoleon had a point with the whole “regulating everything” bit), but you can’t help feeling that “value added tax” is pretty boring by comparison. I suggest “emprowerage”, from the Anglo-Norman emprower (which via Middle English “emprowement” gives us “improvement”) as a much more euphonious name for the VAT. Obviously sales tax should “sellage”. I can do this all day.
May 25, 2023
The Hoplite Heresy: Why We Don’t Know How the Ancient Greeks Waged War
The Historian’s Craft
Published 9 Feb 2023Hoplites are probably one of the first things that come to mind when one thinks of “Ancient Greece”. Equipped with a bronze spear and wearing bronze armor or a linothorax, and hefting the aspis — the hoplite‘s bronze shield — they fought in phalanxes. The classic mode of fighting in this formation was the “othismos“, the push, with the aim being to disrupt the enemy phalanx and break their formation. But, over the past few decades, views on hoplite warfare have been called into question and seriously revised, because there are problems in the source material. So, what are these problems, and how do historians of Ancient Greece understand hoplite warfare?
May 24, 2023
The American flagship of Standing NATO Maritime Group 2 (SNMG2)
CDR Salamander has thoughts on the state of the current flagship of Standing NATO Maritime Group 2 (SNMG2), USS James E. Williams … unhappy thoughts:
One of the most high profile alliance units is Standing NATO Maritime Group 2 (SNMG2).
Consisting of a half dozen or so destroyers and frigates from assorted alliance members, it cruises about refining how we work together, conducting exercises, and showing the flag around the Mediterranean and Atlantic as time and livers allow. It is also an opportunity for nations to show their allies their professionalism.
Really, for a Sailor of any nation, it is some of the best duty you can find this side of BALTOPS … but I digress. We’ll return to BALTOPS at the bottom of the post.
Because of its high profile and extended operations with alliance nations, the ships we assign to SNMG2 don’t just represent the USA as any warship that “shows the flag” does, but it imprints on the mind of military and civilian leaders in Europe the quality of the US Navy and by extension, the nation it serves.
Our opponents in the world will also see it as an indication of our general health, morale, and the respect we show our friends.
I had an interesting seat as a junior officer. A little more than a month after reporting to my first sea duty command, I found myself with a front row seat to not just Desert Shield/Storm, but to the last year or so of the Soviet Union. I then watched from the Mediterranean and Atlantic the slow decay of the now Russian naval forces through the 1990s. A common refrain was as we got a close look at them was, “Did you see the condition they’re in?”
Looks matter. With ships, even more than people, the external manifestations of poor condition are a warning of significant problems inside the skin of the ship
The Arleigh Burke-class Flight IIA guided missile destroyer USS James E. Williams (DDG 95) as it was leaving Toulon, France, May 22, 2023. Yes, the ship named after a Boatswain’s Mate First Class looks like that. I am sorry BM1, we tried.
Photo from https://twitter.com/WarshipCam/status/1660740976942501893.
SNMG2 decided to honor the United States Navy by having one of its destroyers be its flagship. That’s right kiddies; that rusting eyesore is the flagship of SNMG2.
The US Navy decided that this was the warship they wanted to represent the US Navy and the nation it serves. This was an act of commission – of intent – as conscious of an act as that which ensured that in the last few years that warship was not manned, trained, equipped, or maintained at a level which would allow for basic maintenance. Even as she got ready to get underway, no one stopped her. No one tried a last minute fix. The whole evolution has an ambiance of, “Who cares. Send her.”
Don’t think the insult isn’t properly understood, if not to Congress and the American people, but to our friends and competitors. Don’t think this isn’t the talk of allied wardrooms.
Darne Model 1933: An Economic & Modular Interwar MG
Forgotten Weapons
Published 15 Feb 2023The Darne company was one of relatively few private arms manufacturers in France, best known for shotguns. During World War One they got into the machine gun trade, making licensed Lewis guns for the French air service. After making a few thousand of those, Regis Darne designed his own belt-fed machine gun in 1917. A large order was placed by the French military, but it was cancelled before production began because of the end of the war.
Darne continued to develop this design in the 1920s, while also producing sporting arms to keep the business running. The gun was intended mostly as an aircraft gun, but designed in a rather modular fashion, easily made into both magazine-fed and belt-fed infantry versions as well as downing, wing, and observer aerial models. It was actually bought by the French Air Force, as well as several other countries during the inter-war period.
The example we are looking at today is an infantry configuration, with a bipod and light-profile barrel. It is chambered for the French 7.5x54mm cartridge, and is officially the Model 1933 (one of the last iterations made).
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