Quotulatiousness

October 19, 2021

Places – Lost in Time: The Crystal Palace

Filed under: Architecture, Britain, History, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Ruairidh MacVeigh
Published 1 Jun 2020

This is a reupload of my original Crystal Palace video, which I had to take down and do some amendments to in order to fix some technical issues.

Hello! ๐Ÿ˜€

Not to change the format so early in it’s conception, but here I present an idea I’ve had for several years now, but am proud to finally bring to fruition.

For as long as I can remember I have been fascinated by places that have either been abandoned or destroyed, not so much out of interest for how they were lost, but more the microcosm of society that revolved around them — how people interacted with them and made them more human. Specifically, places which existed in living memory or photographic record are the ones that have captured my imagination the most, as you can see how people did interact with these wondrous locations and almost put yourself in their shoes.

Therefore, without further ado, I present Episode 1 of Places — Lost in Time, with my first feature being the lavish and opulent Crystal Palace in London. This video follows the history of the two structures to share this iconic name, and how both were created through Victorian engineering feats, how they became icons of British culture, and how they eventually met their end.

All video content and images in this production have been provided with permission wherever possible. While I endeavour to ensure that all accreditations properly name the original creator, some of my sources do not list them as they are usually provided by other, unrelated YouTubers. Therefore, if I have mistakenly put the accreditation of “Unknown”, and you are aware of the original creator, please send me a personal message at my Gmail (this is more effective than comments as I am often unable to read all of them): rorymacveigh@gmail.com

The views and opinions expressed in this video are my personal appraisal and are not the views and opinions of any of these individuals or bodies who have kindly supplied me with footage and images.

If you enjoyed this video, why not leave a like, and consider subscribing for more great content coming soon.

Thanks again, everyone, and enjoy! ๐Ÿ˜€

References:
– British Library (and their respective references)
– Victoria and Albert Museum (and their respective references)
– Wikipedia (and its respective references)

Music – YouTube Audio Library

Semiauto FAMAS F1 Rifle

Filed under: France, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 9 Aug 2016

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons

The French FAMAS was one of the first bullpup rifles to be adopted and built in large numbers by a military power. It was adopted by France in 1978 at right about the same time as the Steyr AUG was being adopted by the Austrian military. Bullpup rifles offered a short overall length without sacrificing barrel length, an advantage that seemed quite valuable for troops who were to spend significant amounts of time in vehicles, where space is at a premium. In French service, the FAMAS was also made the formal replacement for both the MAS-49/56 rifle and the MAT-49 submachine gun, thanks to its compact nature.

The FAMAS is interesting mechanically, as it is one of very few production delayed-blowback rifle designs (the other common one being the CETME/HK series). The FAMAS uses a lever-delaying system, which allows a very simple bolt and action mechanism. The F1 model (adopted by the French Army and still in use today, making up the bulk of FAMAS production) has a 1:12″ twist to its rifling, effectively limiting it to 55 grain projectiles — and it also requires steel-cased ammunition to run reliably. The G2 variant (adopted in 1995 by the French Navy) changed to a 1:9″ twist, introduced a full-hand trigger guard, and also uses NATO standard AR15 magazines instead of the proprietary 25-round magazine of the F1.

In the late 1980s a small number of semiauto FAMAS rifles were made by St Etienne and imported into the US by Century. Most people say 100-125 rifles, although serial number suggest this may have actually been 225-250 rifles. Regardless, they are quite scarce and expensive today.

QotD: Slaves and indentured servants in early Virginia

Filed under: Americas, Britain, History, Law, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I saw from the start that some of Nikole [Hannah-Jones]’s 1619 rubbish merely exposed her utter ignorance of her subject. The blacks whom the Virginians bought from a Portuguese slave trader in 1619 were treated like whites โ€“ that is, they were treated as indentured servants who after 10 years were freed, given some farm tools, pointed at a plot of land and left to get on with it. (Some of them got on so well that before mid-century they were buying white and black indentured servants themselves to work their expanding acreages.)

One could justly say these early-arriving blacks were not treated exactly like poor English whites who โ€“ unless convicted of a crime โ€“ had always chosen to sign their ten-year indenture, to pay for transport across the Atlantic and survival while they found their feet. The closer analogy is to some Scottish whites. More than one clan chief sold some clansmen on indentures across the Atlantic when funds were low, and in 1707 a leading Scottish parliamentarian informed his peers that there was no need for them to fix the disastrous financial situation by accepting the English payment and voting their own abolition โ€“ Scotland’s elite could keep their separate parliament and avoid national bankruptcy by selling enough poor Scots to the Americas instead.

When the Portuguese offered to sell black slaves, those 1619 Virginians could only buy them as ten-year-indentured servants. They were still wholly under English common law and Lord Mansfield’s 1770s ruling merely echoed a two-centuries earlier ruling of Elizabethan judges that English common law knew no such state as slavery. It took the Virginians decades to start even questioning this and almost a century to unlearn it fully. As late as the 1690s, a black man who petitioned the Virginia council that his white master had made him serve not for ten years but for twelve “contrarie to all right and justice“, was freed by their order. If Nikole had called it the 1705 project, I’d have thought she at least knew something about the actual faults of the country whose history she was travestying. Only positive statute law can override English common law’s aversion to slavery, said Lord Mansfield โ€“ and 1705 was the year the Virginia legislature completed providing it. I knew from the start that Nikole was not just lying about all that, not just indifferent to the truth of all that โ€“ she was also pretty clueless about it.

Niall Kilmartin, “Critical Race Theorist literally knows nothing”, Samizdata, 2021-07-16.

October 18, 2021

“If Extinction Rebellion had brains, they’d be blockading building sites rather than airports”

Filed under: Architecture, Britain, Environment — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Andrew Hunt runs through the invisible environmental costs of the building industry and points out that despite the eye-opening amount of carbon emissions, the buildings we’re putting up everywhere are just not built to stand the test of time:

The Centre national de la danse in Pantin (Seine-Saint-Denis), designed in 1965 by Jacques Kalisz.
Photo by Cinerama14 via Wikimedia Commons.

In the run up to COP26, you can be sure we won’t be spared the preaching about windmills, electric cars and heat pumps, along with pious admonishments against any form of human pleasure, from taking holidays to eating a steak. As always, those in charge will ignore the elephant in the room. The world’s biggest polluter by far is the construction industry. According to the UN, it produces 38 per cent of global emissions. By comparison, airlines produce just 2 per cent. If Extinction Rebellion had brains, they’d be blockading building sites rather than airports.

Politicians seem equally blind. They fetishise house-building, but fail to notice that building even a two-bed house creates 80 tonnes of carbon and uses 150 tonnes of materials โ€“ the same amount of landfill as an average household creates over 300 years! By comparison, powering your house produces about 2 tonnes of CO2 per year. Even if you could build a truly net zero home tomorrow (which you can’t), it would take forty years to break even.

A big part of the problem is modern construction materials. Producing concrete (180kg of CO2/tonne) and steel (1.85 tonnes of CO2/tonne!) are two of the most ubiquitous and environmentally destructive industries on the planet. By contrast, sandstone has a carbon footprint of just 77kg/tonne, and wood can be CO2 negative as it locks in carbon. Those old materials last longer as well. There are stone buildings that have been knocking around for more than a millennium โ€” Rome’s Pantheon is 1900 years old. If treated properly, wooden buildings can last almost as long. The world’s oldest inhabited house in the Faroe Islands is 900 years old and built from wood. China’s ornately carved Nanchang Temple has been welcoming Buddhists since the 8th century.

Pre-stressed concrete meanwhile has a lifespan of 50-100 years, meaning many of the first concrete structures have already crumbled into carcinogenic dust.

It’s not just the materials. For buildings to last, we must love them enough to preserve them.

In a little-known study, “Sustainable Build Heritage“, a group of Danish academics looked at why some buildings stand for centuries while others are demolished in as little as a generation. Their conclusion was that buildings that last are made of good materials, are functional and, above all, are beautiful. They acknowledged the timelessness of traditional notions of beauty: how some buildings give us the same gut reactions as they did our ancestors. Copenhagen is of course full of examples โ€” not least her colourful townhouses that have been standing for over two centuries. They have had to be adapted, but they have always been popular places to live.

Closer to home, badly built eyesores are being torn down barely a generation after their construction: tower blocks from the 60s, council offices from the 70s and shopping centres from the 90s. That’s billions of tonnes of fossil fuels and mining degradation ending up as landfill.

Has anything been learnt? The Prime minister’s “Build Back Better” plan is in no way green. Construction can never be green. Is it possible to conceive of a crueller thing to do to future generations than a debt-fuelled frenzy of brutalist carbuncles that will be theirs to demolish? When Greta Thunberg described Build Back Better as “blah-blah-blah”, she was being generous. It’s an environmental catastrophe.

Look at Life — The Rocket Age Lancers (1961)

Filed under: Britain, History, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

PauliosVids
Published 20 Nov 2018

Looking to the future with the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers.

QotD: Harold Macmillan’s “Gold Pass” on British Railways

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Quotations, Railways — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

One of my worst and most embarrassing failures as a journalist was my attempt to interview Harold Macmillan, the former British prime minister. It happened on a train near Cambridge. He was 83. I was 26. He physically fought me off, declaring in a quavering voice, “I don’t want to be interviewed; I’m much too old for that sort of thing,” as he jabbed fiercely (and quite painfully) at me with his gnarled walking stick.

Too old? Just a few years later that same wily showman drove a memorable stiletto into Margaret Thatcher’s ribs, using the same falsely quavering voice to attack her policy of selling off national assets. But I remember the humiliating occasion of my failed interview for another reason. Macmillan was able to drive me away partly because he was occupying an entire first-class compartment, reserved for him personally, on the London express. Compartments โ€” oh, how I miss them โ€” had sliding doors, which cut them off from the rest of the train. You could even pull the blinds down between you and the corridor. They could be marvelous private spaces for all kinds of purposes on long journeys. But you had to be lucky to get one to yourself. Once the ex-premier had driven me out, he was safe.

But Macmillan (who in those days had not given into vanity and accepted a peerage) did not have to be lucky. He had once been a director of the Great Western Railway, which had been taken into state ownership in the 1940s. So to the end of his life (in compensation for his lost power) he possessed a magical shiny token called a Gold Pass. This entitled him to free first-class travel, without limit, on any train in Great Britain. It was even rumored that it gave him the power to have trains stopped for him at stations where they did not normally halt. I often thought I would rather have such a pass than be prime minister.

Peter Hitchens, “Why I Love Trains”, First Things, 2020-07-16.

October 17, 2021

Stalingrad, Stalingrad, Stalingrad, No Retreat! – WW2 – 164 – October 16, 1942

Filed under: Germany, History, Japan, Military, Pacific, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 16 Oct 2021

The Americans win a naval victory off Guadalcanal and even manage to reinforce the Marines there with the first Army units to arrive, but as the week ends the Japanese launch a major offensive on the island. Meanwhile far across the globe, Adolf Hitler orders that all German offensive operations except those at Stalingrad and in the Caucasus cease. There is plenty to do in Stalingrad, though, because this week all hell breaks loose there.
(more…)

October 15, 2021

The Battle of Orlรฉans 1870 – French Raw Recruits vs. Experienced German Soldiers

Filed under: France, Germany, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Real Time History
Published 14 Oct 2021

All across France French Armies have been raised from any available troops. From international volunteers to raw teenaged recruits. How these sub-par soldiers fare against professional German soldiers is not hard to guess and we can see how that goes in the first battles for Orlรฉans.

Special Thanks to Jonathan Ferguson from Royal Armouries. Check out their Channel: https://www.youtube.com/RoyalArmouries

ยป THANK YOU TO OUR CO-PRODUCERS
John Ozment
James Darcangelo
Jacob Carter Landt
Thomas Brendan
James Giliberto
Kurt Gillies
Albert B. Knapp MD
Tobias Wildenblanck
Richard L Benkin
Scott Deederly
John Belland
Adam Smith
Taylor Allen
Jim F Barlow
Rustem Sharipov

ยป OUR PODCAST
https://realtimehistory.net/podcast – interviews with historians and background info for the show.

ยป LITERATURE
Arand, Tobias: 1870/71. Der Deutsch-Franzรถsische Krieg erzรคhlt in Einzelschicksalen. Hamburg 2018

Milza, Pierre: L’annรฉe terrible. La guerre franco-prussienne. Septembre 1870 โ€“ mars 1871. Paris 2009

ยป SOURCES
Bernhardt, Sarah: Mein Doppelleben. Leipzig 1908

Hรฉrisson, Maurice Graf d’: Journal d’un officier d’ordonannce. Juillet 1870 โ€“ Fรฉvrier 1871. Paris 1885

Kรผhnhauser, Florian: Kriegs-Erinnerungen eines Soldaten des kรถniglich bayerischen Infanterie Leibregiments. Partenkirchen 1898 (Neudruck 2012)

Meisner, Heinrich Otto (Hrsg.): Kaiser Friedrich III. Das Kriegstagebuch von 1870/71. Berlin, Leipzig 1926

N.N. (Hrsg.): Theodor Fontane. Kriegsgefangen โ€“ Erlebtes 1870. Briefe 1870/71. Berlin (Ost) 1984

ยป OUR STORE
Website: https://realtimehistory.net

ยปCREDITS
Presented by: Jesse Alexander
Written by: Cathรฉrine Pfauth, Prof. Dr. Tobias Arand, Jesse Alexander
Director: Toni Steller & Florian Wittig
Director of Photography: Toni Steller
Sound: Above Zero
Editing: Toni Steller
Motion Design: Philipp Appelt
Mixing, Mastering & Sound Design: http://above-zero.com
Maps: Battlefield Design
Research by: Cathรฉrine Pfauth, Prof. Dr. Tobias Arand
Fact checking: Cathรฉrine Pfauth, Prof. Dr. Tobias Arand

Channel Design: Battlefield Design

Contains licensed material by getty images
All rights reserved – Real Time History GmbH 2021

Nazis “Restore” Law and Order – WAH 044 – October 1942, Pt. 1

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, Germany, Greece, History, Japan, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 14 Oct 2021

Resistance against occupation starts rising in the Autumn of 1942. It faces opposition not only from the occupiers, but also from collaborators killing their own countrymen.
(more…)

QotD: England and the English

Filed under: Britain, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

When you come back to England from any foreign country, you have immediately the sensation of breathing a different air. Even in the first few minutes dozens of small things conspire to give you this feeling. The beer is bitterer, the coins are heavier, the grass is greener, the advertisements are more blatant. The crowds in the big towns, with their mild knobby faces, their bad teeth and gentle manners, are different from a European crowd. Then the vastness of England swallows you up, and you lose for a while your feeling that the whole nation has a single identifiable character. Are there really such things as nations? Are we not forty-six million individuals, all different? And the diversity of it, the chaos! The clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road, the queues outside the Labour Exchanges, the rattle of pin-tables in the Soho pubs, the old maids hiking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning โ€“ all these are not only fragments, but characteristic fragments, of the English scene. How can one make a pattern out of this muddle?

But talk to foreigners, read foreign books or newspapers, and you are brought back to the same thought. Yes, there is something distinctive and recognizable in English civilization. It is a culture as individual as that of Spain. It is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes. It has a flavour of its own. Moreover it is continuous, it stretches into the future and the past, there is something in it that persists, as in a living creature. What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.

And above all, it is your civilization, it is you. However much you hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it for any length of time. The suet puddings and the red pillar-boxes have entered into your soul. Good or evil, it is yours, you belong to it, and this side the grave you will never get away from the marks that it has given you.

Meanwhile England, together with the rest of the world, is changing. And like everything else it can change only in certain directions, which up to a point can be foreseen. That is not to say that the future is fixed, merely that certain alternatives are possible and others not. A seed may grow or not grow, but at any rate a turnip seed never grows into a parsnip. It is therefore of the deepest importance to try and determine what England is, before guessing what part England can play in the huge events that are happening.

George Orwell, “The Lion And The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, 1941-02-19.

October 14, 2021

Canada’s carrier-borne fighters onboard HMCS Bonaventure; the story of the McDonnell F2H-3 Banshee

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Polyus Studios
Published 2 Apr 2021

Don’t forget to like the video and subscribe to my channel!
Support me on Patreon – https://www.patreon.com/polyusstudios

Up until the late 1960s the Canadian Navy operated a modern aircraft carrier. It had an angled flight deck, steam catapults, and fighter jets. The jets were comparable to land-based aircraft like the CF-100 but could pack a vicious air-to-air punch with their Sidewinder missiles. They saw a brief service aboard HMCS Bonaventure before being retired without replacement. It was the McDonnell F2H Banshee, Canada’s premiere sea-based jet fighter.

0:00 Introduction
0:29 Canadian Navy aircraft carriers 1945 to 1957
2:13 New Fighter Selection
3:34 Specifications
5:07 Comparison to the CF-100
5:50 Operational Service
8:23 Accidents and Retirement

Music:
Denmark – Portland Cello Project

Research Sources:
CASM-Aircraft Histories – HMCS Bonaventure CVL-22 by Robert T. Murray
McDonnell Banshee – Royal Canadian Air Force – http://www.rcaf-arc.forces.gc.ca/en/a…
Magnificent Moments by Vintage Wings of Canada – http://www.vintagewings.ca/VintageNew…
McDonnell Banshee – Shearwater Aviation Museum – http://www.shearwateraviationmuseum.n…
HMCS Bonaventure: Canada’s Last Aircraft Carrier by Kevin Patterson – http://www.sevenyearproject.com/canad…

Footage Sources:
HMCS Magnificent (CVL 21) – Majestic Class Light Aircraft Carrier – Camildoc – https://youtu.be/_Zvnz06-MRc
HMCS Bonaventure (CVL 22) – Majestic Class Aircraft Carrier – Camildoc – https://youtu.be/QmFD5bijrok

#Banshee #CanadianAerospace #PolyusStudios

Tank Chats #128 | Panzer 61 | The Tank Museum

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum
Published 4 Jun 2021

Curator David Willey examines one of Switzerland’s first indigenously designed and produced tanks, the Panzer 61, put into service during the Cold War.
(more…)

QotD: Americans’ perception of foreign economic threats

Filed under: China, Economics, Japan, Quotations, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I am old enough to remember when almost everyone believed that the Russians were, as Khrushchev put it, going to “bury” us. Even leading economists such as Paul Samuelson were taken in by such nonsense. Of course, no such burial occurred, because just producing vast quantities of concrete, steel, and H-bombs is no evidence that anything of genuine value is being produced. Later Japan became the Godzilla that was going to eat the U.S. and European economies with its bureaucratic setup for picking and subsidizing “winners.” Before long that setup too collapsed in a heap and gave way to perpetual stagnation. Now almost everyone quakes in his boots while beholding the mighty Chinese economy. Again the hysteria has no firm foundation. An economy shaped and guided by government bureaucrats and Communist bigwigs by means of tariffs, subsidies, state-controlled credit, and state-owned industries cannot be a real growth miracle for long. This too shall pass.

And when it does Americans will learn nothing from their most recent mistake. If people really understood sound economics, they would not continue to make this same mistake again and again.

Robert Higgs, “China — Americans’ Economic Bugaboo du Jour”, The Beacon, 2018-12-19.

October 13, 2021

Josip Broz Tito — The “Maharaja of the Balkans”

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Critic, Thomas Gallagher looks at the man and the myth of Yugoslavia’s communist leader, known to the world as “Tito”:

Decades after his death in 1980, Josip Broz Tito still casts a spell as a larger-than-life figure.

The legend portrays him as a famous military leader and anti-fascist guerrilla fighter who fought off the Nazis and defied Stalin. He then went on to be a champion of peace who stood up for various small nations snapping the coils of European overlordship. He was at home on imperial estates or, more often, on his secluded luxury home on the island of Brioni, with Old Masters adorning his walls and kings, emperors and fellow communist strongmen paying homage.

Despite clumsy language and hyperbole in places, as well as some avoidable errors, Tito’s Secret Empire seeks to debunk Tito’s legend and in several key respects it succeeds. The authors William Klinger and Dennis Kuljiลก accord some honours to their subject.

He was a unique character well-equipped to surmount various obstacles during his 88-year life. For the British diplomat, Sir Fitzroy Maclean, he was “a fail-proof survivor”. In 1974 he was hailed by Germany’s Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, as “the greatest of the winners of the Second World War”.

A benign image persisted, despite Tito being responsible for more acts of mass cruelty than any other European communist leader with the exception of the Soviets. He was admired as a wheeler-dealer in international affairs, from murky transactions to the most delicate undertakings in statecraft. This well-researched book deserves attention for those who wish to peer beyond the carefully cultivated image.

[…]

His 1954 state visit to then-royalist Greece, a regime which he had spent years trying to topple, was an unmistakable indication that he was placing himself at the head of a hybrid regime. Britain’s foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, had already visited him and urged the United States to prop up Tito financially. The favour was not returned. Evidence is provided that Tito played a major role in encouraging Egypt to nationalise the Suez Canal. He saw President Nasser as a kindred spirit, a populist unencumbered by ideology. Tito even more keenly sought to end French rule in Algeria, arming the rebels and offering diplomatic support.

In September 1961, he welcomed dozens of leaders from the promising new “non-aligned” bloc to a conference in Belgrade. Next year China invaded India and his soul-mate, Nehru, turned to the West for help. Thereafter, the non-aligned movement’s influence waned, as did Tito’s with it.

He increasingly became a pensioner of the Soviet Union. American ardour cooled as it became clear how reliant he was on Soviet arms and industrial licences which enabled this supposed ambassador of peace to export weapons to the Third World.

A War Without Hate? – The Officers and Gentlemen of North Africa – WW2 – Gallery 05

Filed under: Africa, Australia, Britain, Germany, History, Italy, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 12 Oct 2021

In the history of European-style warfare, there has always been the ideal of “rules of warfare”. The horrors of the Eastern Front and the Pacific prove how hollow this ideal can be, but there is one theatre where some officers are trying to maintain it: North Africa.
(more…)

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