Quotulatiousness

October 7, 2020

The Great Swamp Fight: The Bloodiest Day of King Philip’s War

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

Atun-Shei Films
Published 6 Oct 2020

In December 1675, in the midst of King Philip’s War, an army of Puritan colonists made a preemptive strike against the neutral Narragansett tribe. Their desperate battle in the snowy wilderness of Rhode Island became a touchstone in the cultural lore of Anglo New England, while the subsequent massacre would go down as the darkest, most tragic event in Narragansett history.

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#KingPhilipsWar #NewEngland #AmericanHistory

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~REFERENCES~

[1] Eric Schultz and Michael Tougias. King Philip’s War: The History and Legacy of America’s Forgotten Conflict (1999). The Countryman Press, Page 269

[2] Douglas Leach. Flintlock and Tomahawk: New England in King Philip’s War (1958). Parnassus Imprints, Page 58-62

[3] Leach, Page 112-117

[4] Schultz & Tougias, Page 246-247

[5] Schultz & Tougias, Page 247-255

[6] Leach, Page 127-129

[7] Schultz & Tougias, Page 259

[8] Leach, Page 129

[9] Leach, Page 148-149

[10] Joseph Dudley. Second Letter of Joseph Dudley (2001). Bigelow Society http://bigelowsociety.com/rod/battles…

[11] Schultz & Tougias, Page 260-261

[12] Leach, Page 130-131

[13] Benjamin Church. Entertaining Passages Relating to King Philip’s War, Tercentenary Edition (1975). Pequot Press, Page 95-102

[14] Schultz & Tougias, Page 264-265

[15] Leach, Page 131

[16] Church, Page 101

[17] “History – Perseverance.” Narragansett Indian Nation http://narragansettindiannation.org/h…

September 1, 2020

King Philip’s War: The Most Important American War You’ve Never Heard Of

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

[Update, 29 Dec 2022 – Andy has uploaded a new video to correct some of the errors he made in this presentation.]

Atun-Shei Films
Published 9 Jan 2019

A generation after the first Thanksgiving, the sachem of the Wampanoag led a coalition of Native American tribes to battle against the ever-encroaching European colonists of New England.
(more…)

August 18, 2020

Jamestown v. Plymouth: Where is America’s Hometown?

Filed under: Americas, Britain, History, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Atun-Shei Films
Published 11 Feb 2020

With the help of the Witchfinder General, I examine the historical mythology surrounding Jamestown and Plymouth, the first two permanent English colonies in the continental United States. Can we confidently point to the founding of these two settlements as the origin of American identity and culture? No, thou knave!

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#Jamestown #Plymouth #AmericanHistory

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July 16, 2020

The Witchfinder General Defends the Great State of Massachusetts

Filed under: History, Humour, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Atun-Shei Films
Published 14 Jul 2020

The greate Common-Wealth of Massachusetts is oft unjustly slandered. The Ignorant shall saye that the inhabitants of this fair colonie drive Carriages like mad-men; that they are too much enamored with Crimson Stockings and Those Who Love Their Countrie; and that they are as sullen and cruel as a New-England winter. The Witchfinder General dis-proves this Slander, and denounces it for the Profession of Heresy that it is.

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#Puritan #Witch #Boston

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From the comments:

Atun-Shei Films
1 day ago
The awesome baroque song at the end of this video is the brand-new Witchfinder General theme composed by the insanely talented Dillon DeRosa, who’s currently hard at work putting together a new theme for Checkmate Lincolnites and a bunch of other incidental music for this channel. His music was also one of the best parts of my movie ALIEN, BABY! and he’s done a bunch of other film scores as well. Check out his website, and never forget that thou art a wretched sinner, utterly unworthy of God’s love: http://dillonderosa.com/

June 21, 2020

A Tale of Two Swords

Filed under: Americas, Britain, History, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Atun-Shei Films
Published 19 Jun 2020

Myles Standish and Benjamin Church were military commanders in 17th century colonial Massachusetts who lived a generation apart. Standish came over on the Mayflower, and commanded the militia of the Plymouth Pilgrims in the 1620s; Church lived his whole life in the New World, and led the crack troops that tracked down Metacomet, sachem of the Pokanoket Wampanoag, during King Philip’s War in the 1670s. Standish carried an elegant German rapier, while Church used a simple naval cutlass. What changed? And what story can these two swords tell about the men who wielded them?

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#PlymouthPilgrims #KingPhilipsWar #AmericanHistory

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~REFERENCES~

[1] Jeremy Dupertuis Bangs: “Myles Standish, Born Where? (2010).” Sail 1620 https://web.archive.org/web/201011301…

[2] Nathaniel Philbrick: Mayflower (2006). Penguin Books, Page 59-60

[3] “Short Men ‘Not More Aggressive'” (2007). BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/65…

[4] Charles Francis Adams: The New English Canaan of Thomas Morton (1883). The Prince Society, Page 284 https://archive.org/details/newenglis…

[5] Philbrick, Page 164

[6] Philbrick, Page 151-152

[7] Benjamin Church: Entertaining Passages Relating to King Philip’s War, Tercentenary Edition (1975). Pequot Press, Page 67-73

[8] Church, Page 75

[9] Church, Page 105-106

[10] Church, Page 108

[11] Church, Page 140

[12] Lisa Brooks: Our Beloved Kin (2018). Yale University Press, Page 322

[13] Church, Page 142

[14] Douglas Edward Leach: Flintlock and Tomahawk (1958). Parnassus Imprints, Page 231

[15] Philbrick, Page 338

[16] Church, Page 170

[17] Leach, Page 237

[18] Brooks, Page 337

November 28, 2019

QotD: The native view of the Pilgrims

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

Shorter than the natives, oddly dressed, and often unbearably dirty, the pallid foreigners had peculiar blue eyes that peeped out of the masks of bristly, animal-like hair that encased their faces. They were irritatingly garrulous, prone to fits of chicanery, and often surprisingly incompetent at what seemed to Indians like basic tasks. But they also made useful and beautiful goods — copper kettles, glittering colored glass, and steel knives and hatchets — unlike anything else in New England. Moreover they would exchange these valuable items for cheap furs of a sort used by Indians as blankets. It was like happening upon a dingy kiosk that would swap fancy electronic goods for customers’ used socks — almost anyone would be willing to overlook the shopkeeper’s peculiarities.

Charles Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, 2006.

November 26, 2019

Communal farming nearly killed off the Plymouth Colony

Filed under: Britain, History, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

What saved them was abandoning the “common property” communalism and adopting private ownership of the farms:

The Plymouth Colony 1620-1691.
Map by Hoodinski via Wikimedia Commons.

The first few years of the settlement were fraught with hardship and hunger. Four centuries later, they also provide us with one of history’s most decisive verdicts on the critical importance of private property. We should never forget that the Plymouth colony was headed straight for oblivion under a communal, socialist plan but saved itself when it embraced something very different.

In the diary of the colony’s first governor, William Bradford, we can read about the settlers’ initial arrangement: Land was held in common. Crops were brought to a common storehouse and distributed equally. For two years, every person had to work for everybody else (the community), not for themselves as individuals or families. Did they live happily ever after in this socialist utopia?

Hardly. The “common property” approach killed off about half the settlers. Governor Bradford recorded in his diary that everybody was happy to claim their equal share of production, but production only shrank. Slackers showed up late for work in the fields, and the hard workers resented it. It’s called “human nature.”

The disincentives of the socialist scheme bred impoverishment and conflict until, facing starvation and extinction, Bradford altered the system. He divided common property into private plots, and the new owners could produce what they wanted and then keep or trade it freely.

Communal socialist failure was transformed into private property/capitalist success, something that’s happened so often historically it’s almost monotonous. The “people over profits” mentality produced fewer people until profit — earned as a result of one’s care for his own property and his desire for improvement — saved the people.

Over the centuries, socialism has crash-landed into lamentable bits and pieces too many times to keep count — no matter what shade of it you pick: central planning, welfare statism, or government ownership of the means of production. Then some measure of free markets and private property turned the wreckage into progress. I know of no instance in history when the reverse was true — that is, when free markets and private property produced a disaster that was cured by socialism. None.

A few of the many examples that echo the Pilgrims’ experience include Germany after World War II, Hong Kong after Japanese occupation, New Zealand in the 1980s, Scandinavia in recent decades, and even Lenin’s New Economic Policy of the 1920s.

September 27, 2019

A visual masterclass in trolling

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

For all that Donald Trump is known for trolling his opponents on Twitter, he’s certainly not the only one, as these makeshift posters in Massachusetts illustrate:

The locals are outraged, but as Alaa Al-Ameri describes, they’re not quite sure how to safely express their fury:

Think of Posie Parker’s billboards quoting the dictionary definition of the word “woman”. The power of such acts comes from two things. First, they acknowledge – usually with irreducible simplicity – that something that went without saying a moment ago has suddenly become unsayable. Secondly, the outrage they provoke does not come from any epithet, caricature or insult, but rather from having the nerve to draw the viewer’s attention to an act of cognitive dissonance that we are all engaging in, but would rather not acknowledge.

The result is that those who attempt to explain why the act is offensive end up simply tying themselves in knots, while revealing that they have never given a moment’s thought to the position they find themselves defending. This seems to generate even more anger, with the inevitable online mob quickly joined by politicians, journalists and other public figures, eager to see that the heretic is made an example of.

At their best, these acts of public disobedience are examples of real-life Winston Smiths pointing out to the rest of us that “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four”. Their persecutors, like his, are those who know and fear the truth of Smith’s next sentence: “If that is granted, all else follows.”

The example of perfectly crafted dissent that I’d like to submit here appears in this video from Massachusetts local TV news, showing some reactions to the fly-posting of white sheets of paper bearing the statement “Islam is right about women”. The reactions are deeply revealing. Nobody can clearly point out why they object to the statement – indeed, nobody seems to object to the statement at all on its face. Yet most seem to express offence at it – if a little unconvincingly.

The reason for their dilemma is obvious enough to anyone who has been paying attention. Western society has managed to convince itself (at least in public) that any statement criticising any aspect of Islam is, by definition, bigotry. As a result, Western societies have effectively decided to enforce Islamic restrictions on blasphemy, and called it “tolerance”.

The strain of conforming to this lie is evident in the fumbling attempts by the interviewees to explain their objections. Do they believe that Islam is right about women? If so, why the objection? Do they believe that Islam is wrong about women? If so, in what sense is the statement an attack on Islam or Muslims? Do they believe that the author of the poster is saying that “Islam is right about women”, but doing so ironically? In which case, the objection can only be that the author is guilty of a thoughtcrime by stating that “two and two make five” with insufficient sincerity. Or do they worry that they are guilty of thoughtcrime for noticing the irony?

December 23, 2018

QotD: Christmas

Filed under: Humour, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Christmas, according to Hillary Rodham Clinton in 1999, is when those in that particular faith tradition celebrate “the birth of a homeless child.” Or, as Al Gore put it in 1997, “Two thousand years ago, a homeless woman gave birth to a homeless child.” For Pete’s sake, they weren’t homeless — they couldn’t get a hotel room. They had to sleep in the stable only because Dad had to schlep halfway across the country to pay his taxes in the town of his birth, which sounds like the kind of cockamamie bureaucratic nightmare only a blue state could cook up. Except that in Massachusetts, it’s no doubt illegal to rent out your stable without applying for a Livestock Shelter Change of Use Permit plus a Temporary Maternity Ward for Non-Insured Transients License, so Mary would have been giving birth under a bridge on I-95.

Mark Steyn, National Review, 2004-12-13.

June 18, 2018

The Only German Submarine Attack On US Shore in WW1 I OUT OF THE ETHER

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 16 Jun 2018

Paul Hodos’ Book about U-Kreuzer: https://amzn.to/2JzXkIY

After a long time, we are back with our format Out Of The Ether and this week we tell you about the only time Germany directly attacked US mainland with a submarine.

February 2, 2018

QotD: Infrastructural sclerosis

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I have an op-ed in the Boston Globe today on infrastructure, addressing the issue of quality rather than quantity of investment. Rachel Lipson, a graduate student at Harvard, and I describe the fiasco that has emerged from what should have been a routine maintenance project on the Anderson Memorial Bridge over the Charles River next to my office in Cambridge. Though the bridge took only 11 months to build in 1912, it will take close to five years to repair today at a huge cost in dollars and mass delays.

Investigating the reasons behind the bridge blunders have helped to illuminate an aspect of American sclerosis — a gaggle of regulators and veto players, each with the power to block or to delay, and each with their own parochial concerns. All the actors — the historical commission, the contractor, the environmental agencies, the advocacy groups, the state transportation department — are reasonable in their own terms, but the final result is wildly unreasonable.

At one level this explains why, despite the overwhelming case for infrastructure investment, there is so much resistance from those who think it will be carried out ineptly. The right response is to advocate for reforms in procurement policies, regulatory policies and government procedures to make the investment process more efficient and effective. This is all clear enough.

At another level, though, our story may illustrate phenomena that go way beyond infrastructure. I’m a progressive, but it seems plausible to wonder if government can build a nation abroad, fight social decay, run schools, mandate the design of cars, run health insurance exchanges, or set proper sexual harassment policies on college campuses, if it can’t even fix a 232-foot bridge competently. Waiting in traffic over the Anderson Bridge, I’ve empathized with the two-thirds of Americans who distrust government.

Larry Summers, “Why Americans don’t trust government”, Washington Post, 2016-05-26.

May 4, 2016

QotD: The Puritans

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

I hear about these people every Thanksgiving, then never think about them again for the next 364 days. They were a Calvinist sect that dissented against the Church of England and followed their own brand of dour, industrious, fun-hating Christianity. Most of them were from East Anglia, the part of England just northeast of London. They came to America partly because they felt persecuted, but mostly because they thought England was full of sin and they were at risk of absorbing the sin by osmosis if they didn’t get away quick and build something better. They really liked “city on a hill” metaphors.

I knew about the Mayflower, I knew about the black hats and silly shoes, I even knew about the time Squanto threatened to release a bioweapon buried under Plymouth Rock that would bring about the apocalypse. But I didn’t know that the Puritan migration to America was basically a eugenicist’s wet dream.

Much like eg Unitarians today, the Puritans were a religious group that drew disproportionately from the most educated and education-obsessed parts of the English populace. Literacy among immigrants to Massachusetts was twice as high as the English average, and in an age when the vast majority of Europeans were farmers most immigrants to Massachusetts were skilled craftsmen or scholars. And the Puritan “homeland” of East Anglia was a an unusually intellectual place, with strong influences from Dutch and Continental trade; historian Havelock Ellis finds that it “accounts for a much larger proportion of literary, scientific, and intellectual achievement than any other part of England.”

Furthermore, only the best Puritans were allowed to go to Massachusetts; Fischer writes that “it may have been the only English colony that required some of its immigrants to submit letters of recommendation” and that “those who did not fit in were banished to other colonies and sent back to England”. Puritan “headhunters” went back to England to recruit “godly men” and “honest men” who “must not be of the poorer sort”.

Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Albion’s Seed“, Slate Star Codex, 2016-04-27.

August 22, 2015

Coming soon to Massachusetts (maybe) – pot pubs

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Forbes, Jacob Sullum looks at the finalized ballot initiative to be presented to Massachusetts voters in the next general election:

When the Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol in Massachusetts unveiled the text of its 2016 legalization initiative this month, the group highlighted several features of the measure but omitted the most interesting one. The Regulation and Taxation of Marijuana Act would allow consumption of cannabis products on the premises of businesses that sell them, subject to regulation by the state and approval by local voters.

That’s a big deal, because until now no jurisdiction has satisfactorily addressed the obvious yet somehow touchy question of where people can consume the cannabis they are now allowed to buy. The legalization initiatives approved by voters in Colorado, Washington, Oregon, and Alaska all promised to treat marijuana like alcohol, which implies allowing venues similar to taverns where people can consume cannabis in a social setting. Yet all four states say businesses that sell marijuana may not let customers use it on the premises.

Although a few “bring your own cannabis” (BYOC) clubs have popped up to accommodate people who want to use marijuana outside their homes from time to time, the legality of such establishments is a matter of dispute. The result is that people can openly buy marijuana without fear, but they still have to consume it on the sly, just like in the bad old days. The problem is especially acute for visitors from other states, since pot-friendly hotels are still pretty rare.

December 3, 2014

The Tech Model Railroad Club’s role in the rise of the hacking community

Filed under: Railways, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

Steven Levy talks about one of the less likely origins of part of the hacking world — MIT’s model railroad club:

Peter Samson had been a member of the Tech Model Railroad Club since his first week at MIT in the fall of 1958. The first event that entering MIT freshmen attended was a traditional welcoming lecture, the same one that had been given for as long as anyone at MIT could remember. LOOK AT THE PERSON TO YOUR LEFT … LOOK AT THE PERSON TO YOUR RIGHT … ONE OF YOU THREE WILL NOT GRADUATE FROM THE INSTITUTE. The intended effect of the speech was to create that horrid feeling in the back of the collective freshman throat that signaled unprecedented dread. All their lives, these freshmen had been almost exempt from academic pressure. The exemption had been earned by virtue of brilliance. Now each of them had a person to the right and a person to the left who was just as smart. Maybe even smarter.

There were enough obstacles to learning already — why bother with stupid things like brown-nosing teachers and striving for grades? To students like Peter Samson, the quest meant more than the degree.

Sometime after the lecture came Freshman Midway. All the campus organizations — special-interest groups, fraternities, and such — set up booths in a large gymnasium to try to recruit new members. The group that snagged Peter was the Tech Model Railroad Club. Its members, bright-eyed and crew-cutted upperclassmen who spoke with the spasmodic cadences of people who want words out of the way in a hurry, boasted a spectacular display of HO gauge trains they had in a permanent clubroom in Building 20. Peter Samson had long been fascinated by trains, especially subways. So he went along on the walking tour to the building, a shingle-clad temporary structure built during World War II. The hallways were cavernous, and even though the clubroom was on the second floor it had the dank, dimly lit feel of a basement.

The clubroom was dominated by the huge train layout. It just about filled the room, and if you stood in the little control area called “the notch” you could see a little town, a little industrial area, a tiny working trolley line, a papier-mache mountain, and of course a lot of trains and tracks. The trains were meticulously crafted to resemble their full-scale counterparts, and they chugged along the twists and turns of track with picture-book perfection. And then Peter Samson looked underneath the chest-high boards which held the layout. It took his breath away. Underneath this layout was a more massive matrix of wires and relays and crossbar switches than Peter Samson had ever dreamed existed. There were neat regimental lines of switches, and achingly regular rows of dull bronze relays, and a long, rambling tangle of red, blue, and yellow wires—twisting and twirling like a rainbow-colored explosion of Einstein’s hair. It was an incredibly complicated system, and Peter Samson vowed to find out how it worked.

There were two factions of TMRC. Some members loved the idea of spending their time building and painting replicas of certain trains with historical and emotional value, or creating realistic scenery for the layout. This was the knife-and-paintbrush contingent, and it subscribed to railroad magazines and booked the club for trips on aging train lines. The other faction centered on the Signals and Power Subcommittee of the club, and it cared far more about what went on under the layout. This was The System, which worked something like a collaboration between Rube Goldberg and Wernher von Braun, and it was constantly being improved, revamped, perfected, and sometimes “gronked” — in club jargon, screwed up. S&P people were obsessed with the way The System worked, its increasing complexities, how any change you made would affect other parts, and how you could put those relationships between the parts to optimal use.

March 9, 2014

QotD: Puritan art

Filed under: Humour, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:35

The saddest thing that I have ever heard in the concert hall is Herbert K. Hadley’s overture, “In Bohemia.” The title is a magnificent piece of profound, if unconscious irony. One looks, at least, for a leg flung in the air, a girl kissed, a cork popped, a flash of drawer-ruffles. What one encounters is a meeting of the Lake Mohonk Conference. Such prosy correctness and hollowness, in music, is almost inconceivable. It is as if the most voluptuous of the arts were suddenly converted into an abstract and austere science, like comparative grammar or astro-physics. Who’s Who in America says that Hadley was born in Somerville, Mass., and “studied violin and other branches in Vienna.” A prodigy thus unfolds itself: here is a man who lived in Vienna, and yet never heard a Strauss waltz! This, indeed, is an even greater feat than being born an artist in Somerville.

H.L. Mencken, “The Allied Arts: The Puritan as Artist”, Prejudices: Second Series, 1920.

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