Category Archives: History

Books History

Notes from The Green Middle Ages: The Depiction and Use of Plants in the Western World 600-1600

November 16, 2023 – 3:09 pm

p. 19 In 512, in the same year that princess Anicia Juliana, in the city of Constantinople, received her beautiful copy of Dioscorides De materia medica, the Byzantine physician Anthimus worked at the courts of the Ostrogoth King Theordoric the Greay and of the Frankish King Theuderic I. In that year, he wrote a treatise on healthy living and eating, De observatione ciborum, that he then offered to Theuderic I. .. on the basis of this text we can develop an idea as to hom, in the sith century, people cooked in the region. Anthimus included a number of recipes and suggestions for the cooking and consumption of fruit and vegetables. Celery, coriander, dill and leeks could be added to any recipe, with the stipulation that leeks much be cooked in advance; febbel, cloves, asparagus, carrots and parsnips were considered to be always healthy. He warns against unripe fruit and uncooked beans as they are not good for the stomch or liver. He argues, without providing a reason, that fish sauce garum, a staple in Roman cooking, should be banned from all kitchens. .. Not once does he refer to philosophical treatises or the past, and certainly not to he classical gods. He barely mentions the four temperaments that, based on the writings of Glaen, would later form the foundation for an authoritative theory of health. He merely recommends that onions are wet, cabbage be eaten in winter because it produces black, bile; garlic and radishes are good for phlegmatic people and for those with a cold stomach.”

p. 166 In his Tacunium Sanitatis ‘Check board of Health,’ the Christian Arab Ibn Butlan (d. 1066) gives a detailed systematic overview of all kinds of vegan foodstuff according to the theories of the Greek physicians Hippocrates (fifth century BC) and Galen of Pergamon (second century AD) combined with the early Arabic theory of the six res non naturalis, things that are necessary for health but aren’t automatically thought of as such, of which food and drink are the most important. Because a balance of all these elements is the basis of health, the cook who has to care for an appropriate diet is the best physician.”

p. 177 “Many differents types of plants were consumed as food in the Middle Ages, among them spices from the Orient including sugar, fruit from Mediterranean countries, comfits made from quinces, mulberries and other fruits, vegetables, fruit and green herbs, grains and grapes…. A balanced diet was the best guarantee for good health and it was clear that the cook was the best doctor.”

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Books History Politics

Notes from Anti-System Politics: The Crisis of Market Liberalism in Rich Democracies

October 26, 2023 – 3:42 pm

p. 255 “Public choice theory, a key theoretical aspiration for redesigning economic institutions from the 1970s on, was quite explicit about its goal to strip elected politicians of the power to regulate, control or suppress markets, often seeing government as an unfortunate necessity that ndded to be constrained at all costs. … robbed government of the ability to intervene in the public interest when markets failed, which is precisely the scenario that unfolded after 2007… the burden of fixing the market meltdown fell on central bankers not directly accountable to voters, with the consequence that policy prioritized stabilizing the banking system rather than addressing the broader social and economic damaged caused by the crisis.”

p. 256 “The loss of political influence and organizational capacity of trade unions undermined progressive politics by isolating workers from each other and limiting the ability of broad social interests to mobilise and pressure business and government. Strikes became a rarity, and governments in many countries abandoned systemic consultation with unions over social and economic policy, while business interests maintained a direct line to decision0makers.”

“As a result of these deep structural changes to the political economy, deviating from the neoliberal playbook became increasingly difficult for elected politicians, lacking as they do the political and economic clout to resist market pressure and business lobbying. The experiences of anti-system politicians reaching government demonstrated in a short time just how difficult it is toimplement serious change, when so many of the policy instruments that would be needed are lacking.”

“The collapse of the neoliberal economic model and the political actors that sustained it make continued mass opposition to the status quo the most likely scenario, expecially in the countries worst hit by the financial crisis. Anti-system politics will not go away while the ‘system’ is perceived by a growing share of the population to have failed. The job of politicians is to develop a diagnosis of this failure, and a set of proposals for fundamental change, that make sense and resonate with voters.”

p. 257 “The idea that markets can resolve most social problems, and that government should simply provide the basic institutions to allow this to happen has run out of political capital. Whatever new paradigmm emerges must facilitate meaningful mass participation in political decision-making over whatever matters society thinks are important. In other words, what most people understand by the word “democracy”.

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Books History Women's history

Notes from The Return of the Taliban: Afghanistan After the Americans Left

October 26, 2023 – 3:19 pm

p. 64 “Sensing victory, Taliban deputy leader Sirajuddin Haqqani penned an opinion piece that – of all places – found space on the editorial page of The New York Times on February 20, 2020. He was a “specially designated international terrorist”, according to the FBI, with the US Department of State offering a reward of up to $10 million for information that would bring him to justice. While aply arguing that “Everyone is tired of War” and “that the killing and maiming must stop”, he hinted at Taliban readiness for making the compromises necessary to develop a consensus on the form of the future government of Afghanistan. The deliberate choice of words, such as making a commitment “to working with other parties in a sonsultatiuve manner of genuine respect to agree ona new, inclusive political system in which the voice of every Afghan is reflected and where no Afghan feels excluded” clearly sounded democracy-leaning to those who had no clue about Taliban ideology. References to a “right to work” and a “right to education” for women sounded equally empowering. Separately in Doha negotiations, Taliban leader Shahabuddin Delavar had provided categorical assurances about permission for women’s education and work. Kabuil was stunned; but they were now yesterday’s men.”

p. 89 “Of the 33 cabinet slots, 30 had gone to Pashtuns and only two to Tajiks and one to an Uzbek, making it obvious that the Taliban’s idea of diversity was almost meaningless.”

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Books Environmental politics History

Notes from The Wolf: Culture, Nature, Heritage

October 4, 2023 – 5:42 pm

France p. 23 “The survey indicates there are two plausible modes of wild wolf attacks on humans (a) those that are rabies related and (b) more difficult to explain predatory attacks by apparently ‘healthy’ wolves… rabid wolves attacked exclusively as a lone wold in an ‘indiscriminate’ fashion, exhibiting furious behavior as an extreme manifestation of hydrophohic canine rabies. Although rarely directly fatal to adults, violent and lunging rabid wolf attacks often resulted in serious multiple mauling injuries, often to the limbs, neck and face… evenly distributed among a broad age group and gender of human victims.”

Determined predatory attacks by one or more non-diseased wolves were identified on the basis of a swift attack and disappearance, possibly later attacking elsewhere … predominately against women and children, often resulting in serious injury and death.”

p. 26 Mariceau’s 6599 recorded wolf attacks in France span five centuries, from as early as 1421 until the last documented attack by a supposed healthy wolf in 1918. A total of 3,360 human deaths are attributable to rabid wolf attacks and 3239 can be linked to non-rabid predatory wolves, around 13 victims a year, a comparatively low figure when compared with other historic causes of human mortality such as disease, poverty and conflict … wolf-dog hybrids and perhaps feral dogs similar in appearance to wolves were involved… still possible to see big feral dogs who look like wolves (and are perhaps highly interbred with wolves) around settlements in southern and eastern Europe and the Caucasus.

p. 42 Wolves seem to have become extinct in England in the 14th century… it seems likely that the specioes became extinct in Wales around the same time…the wolf survived longest in Scotland… Sutherland, where there are records from ostensibly reliable local naturalists from the first half of the 17th century. They did not survive much longer…. Thomas Pennant (1726098)… suggested that the last wolf in Scotland was killed in 1680.”

p. 50 “Wolves occasionally and accidentally strating the streets of Rome were merely driven out of the city and largely left unharmed. Similar merciful treatment and approaches to the wolf are known from Greece. It seems that throughout Indo-European territories, from India to Ireland and from Scandinavia to Italy to Greece, the wold had attained a certain degree of untouchability that barred active persecution… The most plausible reason for this is that, during pre-Christian times, the wold was of social, perhaos even religious significance, and served as a role model of highly patriarchally organised Indo-European societies.. the koryos, the adolescents… youths aged from about 8-12 to 18-19, who for a number of years (this varies considerably in space and time) lived part or all of the year outside the protection of the teuta, having only each other to help survive the wilderness. The youngsters had no or very few possessions, perhaps only light weaponry, and had to keep alive by taking what the land had to offer, even if that had to be obtained by robbery or theft from their own kin. To do this, they had to cooperate and rely on each other above all else. For this, the koryos members might have taken example from wolves and even identified with them… In terms of social behaviour, wolves are closest to humans of all wild animals…. a sort of totem for the koryos, on both an individual and a collective level, which could explain the frequent wolf-based names of early medieval elites.”

p. 106 In March 2021, The Telegraph reported that the UK government … had been instructued by then Prime Minister Boris Johnson to create a rewilding ‘task force’ to gauge appetite for returning lynx and wolf to England. Although DEFRA soon published a refutation of this claim, the response of the chief executive of the Tenant Farmers Association, George Dunn, was decisiveL “reckless in the extreme… midguided idea about returning Britain to a sort of medieval wasteland.”

p. 109 Although the conception of the early medieval period as a wolf-infested ‘Dark Age’ is not based in historical fact, contemporary cultural products that engage with this notion are indeed rooted in the past, with the perception that life during this era as a ‘waking nightmare’ enforced and ‘reinforced by selective recreations of the Middle Ages … through the lens of gothic romance’ of the 18th to 20th centuries. The wolf is ‘an instantly recognisable companion to the crumbling castles, ruined churches and dark woods of neo-medieval goth horror’ … of the animal as a creature of ‘originary wilderness’ whose presence evokes ‘a sense of the primal’ and creates an ‘atmosphere of the long-distant and the far away.”

p. 112 “the majority of the population of early medieval England lived in far closer proximity to and intimacy with the natural world than most people do today, as is evidenced by the numerous zoocentric Old English riddles recoreded in the 10th-century Exeter Book manuscript whose author(s) contemplated non-human modes of being and ways of experiencing the world by adopting the perspective of the animal… bestial speakers … often challenge their exploitation by hjumans (for exmaple, in one riddle an animals laments its death and the transformation of its skin into the pages of a book) … known today as Wild and Eadwacer, this poem is written from the point of view of an unnamed female speaker about her lover, Wuld… an amibiguous being who can be taken as both a human and an animal… he is a sympathetic character persecuted by a group of weras (men) who in fact act more ‘wolfishly’ than he.”

p. 113 “The landscape of modern-day Britain is far more justificably described as a ‘wasteland’ than that of our medieval predecessors. These people lived alongside more than 130 species which subsequently disappeared after the turn of the 16th century”

p. 124 archaezoologists and molecular geneticists suggest that the domestication of the wolf probably occurred somewhere between 40,000 and 15,000 years ago, somewhere on the Eurasian continent, perhaps in more than one location. Two predominant origin stories seek to explain how the domestication of the wold took place. The commensual scavenger hypothesis suggests that wolves essential domesticated themse,llves by invading human settlements in seach of animal remains and other waste food discarded by hunter-gatherers. Over time, tolerance of these animals by humans gave a selective advantage to bolder, less fearful wolves… the alternative account … pet keeping or corss-species adoption… provides a different narrative. This draws heavily onf anthropoological observations of pet keeping among recent hunter-gatherers, and postulates that Palaeolitic people could have been similarly inclined to capture, adopt and rear infant mammals… provided the basis for the evolution of a cooperative social system involving both species.”

p. 152 “the wolf was chased and killed by the Japanese because it, and in particular the northern variant, the Hokkaido wolf, was allegedly a threat to newly imported developments in pasture utilisation from America (horse breeding). The Japanese wolf was one of the first victims of the orientation towards the West and the modernisation of Japan.”

p. 161 “The dingo is a naturalised Australian species. The oldest archaeological dingo remains have been carbon-dated between 3000 and 3509000 years ago … genetically disctint from both dogs and wolves for at least 8,000-11,000 years… several genomic studies have identified t he New Guinea singing dog as the dingo’s closest relative, and both dingoes and NGSDs are distinct from the free-ranging dogs found in Asia.

p. 163 “dingos strongly suppress herbivores weighing 7-100kg and introduced mesopredators in some locations … and can have beneficial effects on populations of small mammals and ground-nesting birds due to release from predation by mesopredators and vegetation suppression by herbivores… whilst hybridisation between dingos and dogs does occur, it is rare and most wild dingos carry more than 75% dingo ancestry”.

p. 179 A wild male wolf lived for eight years alone on a small cluster of islands off the south end of Vancouver Island and came to be known as Takaya … one of a unique population of wolves called coastal or sea wolves that live in the coastal habitats of British Columbia and the Alexander Archipelago of Alaska… at one time the sea wolf population extended from Alaska to California.”

p. 230 The Thylacine or Tasmanian wolf (Thylacinus cynocephalus) was the sole surviving member of the Thylacinidae lineage and the largest marsupial carnivor to have existed into modern tims… 19th century … considered slow, stupid, morose and cowardly, all of which could not be further from the truth.. notable feature … was its enormous gape, at 80 degrees the largest of any mammal… undoubtedly an advantage in securing fast moving prey, such as wallabies, but it was also used as a cautionary warning if threatened. The Thylacine’s tail also set it aside from the canids, as it was not abruptly separated from the body, but gradually tapered, like that of a kangaroo.”

p, 261 Greater Voyageurs Ecosystem, Minnesota Wold predation on beavers in the GVE fluctuates in predictable ways during the ice-free season (approximately April to October). As ice cover disappears in April, beavers begin foraging on land to replenish body fat lost during winter. Wolves respond to this and kill vulnerable beavers who venture on land. Predation peaks in May when young dispersing beavers, travelling in shallow waterways and across land, are readily killed when discovered by wolves. During May, beavers constitute approximately 53% of wolf pack diets in the GVE, although this varies considerably among packs, with beaver constituting up to 88% of some packs’ diets in May. Wolf predation on beavers decreases dramatically in June and July as wolves switch to hunting vulnerable deer fawns that are born at the end of May … increases again in late summer and autumn, when beavers forage more frequently on land too stockpile food for the upcoming winter … on average 24% of Sept-Oct wolf diest… substantial pack-level difference in predation … 53% of one packs, only 6% of another pack’s diet. Interestingly beaver density was c. 50% higher in the territory of the latter pack. By late autumn, lakes, ponds and rivers are frozen over and beavers remain largely locked below the ice.”

p. 264 “Wolves choose ambush locations to counter and capitalise on the sensory abilities of beavers. Beavers, like wolves, have well-developed olfactory acilities, which is their primary mode of detecting predators. On the other hand, beavers have extremely poor eyesight and visual acuity, and are therefore incapable of detecting motionless predators when on land… wolves almost always take into account wind direction when chosing ambush locations … often wolves wait in areas with little to no visual cover, suggesting wolves understand beavers cannot visually detect motionless predators. Beavers, can, however, visually detect pursuing predators. Thus wolves generally choose ambush locations very close (<5m) to where they expect beavers to be on land”

p. 291 There are countless examples in the world of people and communities managing to coexist with wild animals, in many cases animals that are much more dangerous and much more difficult to coexist with than our world… the village of Charotar, in central Gujarat in India, where people have learned to live alongside one of nature’s most danerous predators, the crocodile. Villagers have built islands for crocodiles where they can lie in the sun. Perhaps because they know that people help them from time to time, and because they do not expect anything to be done to them, crocodiles tolerate human encroachment, and even accept it when fishermen pick up and drag the animals. The day before setting their nets, fishermen moor their boats in the lake as a warning to the predatorws. They then usually retreat to neighbouring wetlands, or densely vegetated parts of the lake, giving the fishermen space.”

p. 292 “famous example of from the Australian whaling village of Eden, where for centuries local whalers in Twofold Bay cooperated with the resident orcas when hunting baleen whales”

p. 374 Lakes district, the Helsfell Wolf, lived between 1139 and 1197.. in a timeline when wolves coexisted with humans in our landscape … the density of place name distribution reveals the ‘shadowy presence’ of wolves across the North West

p. 377 The history of Britain is of an ever-downward spiral of destruction of wild nature from the elimination of predators inconvenient to land users. This led to the judgement by the Addison Committee, the first Parliamentary Committee on National Parks, in 1931, that there was no need of the types of National Park seen in North America that gave free, unfettered space to wild nature because Britain was a “country where the fauna is practically limited to birds, insects and the smaller mammals”… in whcat would be a well-rehearsed objection since then to reinstatement of large carbivors, the Committee went on to say: “Great Britain is small, densely populated and highly developed and has relatively little land which is not already put to some economic or productive use.” In effect, the report repudiated the notion that the depauperate state of Britain’s wild nature could be reversed.”

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Books History Women's history

Notes from Women of the Left Bank: Paris 1900-1940

October 4, 2023 – 4:10 pm

p. 48 “Women not protected in the higher reaches of society met secretly in restaurants and bars, travelled by train and hired cans, and frequently risked exposure, if not legal punishment, should they reveal their sexual orientation through dress of publicly demonstrated erotic attachments. … The Marquise de Belbeuf became an object for woman-haters, who considered her perverse and degenerate. Adopting male dress and forms of behaviour, the marquise reversed the premises by which patriarchal society functioned, assuming for herself male pivileges and power … On 3 January 1907, the Marquise de Belbeuf and Colette were very nearly arrested for enacting a scene of lesbian love in a pantomime skit at the Moulin Rouge…. the mime portrayed the awakneing of a mummy from her eternal sleep by the kiss of a former lover. The scene incited a near-riot in the theater, making it necessary to call in the police. Future performances of the play were banned by Lepine at the request of the marquise’s ex-husband; Willy, Colette’s estranged husband lost his position no the newspaper L’Echo de Paris, and the two women were forced to stop living openly together.”

p. 99 For women, America was a particularly oppressive environment, and amond the expatriate women were those who took up Edith Wharton’s ‘argument with America’ on the ‘woman question’ finding in their personal sense of alienation from their native land important literary themes.”

p. 101 Janet Flanner’s only published novel, The Cubical City, recreates the cultural life of New York in the 1920s… the t hematic concerns of the novel turn on American sexual puritanism – in particular its double standard of behaviour for men and women – and it contrasts life for a modern woman set ‘in the midst of a mechanical civilisation (New York City) with that of ‘ancient females who in small select numbers had received in absentia grain, praters, milk, worship of hyacinth buds placed on credulous rural shrines… “for thousands of years the concernrated aim of society has been to cut down kissing. With that same amount of energy … society could have stopped war, established liberty, given everybody a free education, free bathtubs, free music, free pianos and changed the human mind to boot.”.. reflects her determined effort to break free of midwestern puritanical thought.”

p. 139 In 1937, “writing from Budapest following her trip to Salzberg and Vienna, Flanner commented almost as an aside that ‘history looks queer when you’re standing close ot it, watching where it is coming from and how it is being made.” .. It was precisely her avility to capture the ‘queerness’ of history observed close up, her instinctive knowledge of ‘where it is coming from and how it is being made’ that is revealed in retrospective reading of the Paris Letters.

p. 188 “Stein distinguished herself by making herself appear to be a man… Once her liaison with Toklas was established, Stein made the following remark in her notebook: ‘Pablo & Matisse have a maleness that belongs to genius. Moi aussie, perhaps.” (A Different Language, 136, fn 31)… Unable to step outside the heterosexual cultural imperative, Stein clothed her homosexuality in heterosexual forms.”

p. 194 Adrienne Monnier – “An unabashedly feminist analysis of women’s relation to books, ‘Les Amies des Livres’ examined the historical circumstances that had traditionally prevented women from becoming part of the reading public. These conditions included differences in education between males and females but more important were the circumstances of family and marital life that made the home the place of woman’s work rather than of leisure: ‘Women are asked to take care of their persons and their homes above all; they are not praised for devoting themselves to housework and it is not considered proper for them to become lost in books, whether these books be frivolous or serious”.

p. 217 “the misogyny of Surrealism, a subject Anne Chisholm discusses at some length in her biography of Nancy Cunard who was – briefly – Louis Aragon’s mistress. “…Women plated a small part in the Surrealist scheme of things. For all their desire to live unconventionally and to shock the bourgeoisie, the Surrealists had highly conventional, even traditional, ideas about women. No woman writer or painter emerged to join their activities or sign their manifestos. They found it thrillling to visit brothels and befriend prostitutes but at the same time there was a strong romantic, almost puritanical streak in their sexual attitudes.The ideal was an exclusive, reciprocated love with the perfect woman. Foreign women were fashionable in the group, perhaps because they tended to be more independent and available than middle- or uppper-class Frenchwomen; but Nancy was all too obviously someone, a person in her own right, with more money and freedom of movement than seemed safe or appropriate.”

p. 243 Djuna Barnes “poetry did not seem to follow the currenst of the most recent American and English poetry – and there is no reason why it should have … her interest in earlier historical periods and to the use of outmoded and antiquated verbal forms. But Barnes was also at work reconstructing the ‘abandoned traditions’ of woman’s culture. This effort simultaneously searcged for woman in the patriarchal culture that had abandoned her and sought to give back to woman the voice that had for so long been silenced… Barnes’s work has fallen prey to the same set of received notions that until very recently informed studies of Gertrude Stein: both women have been chastised for being significantly different from their Paris colleagues and for failing to maste the Modernist enterprise.

p. 268 Natalie Barney “saw in English culture and extreme form of patriarchal power and described England as a country “where nothing is provided for women, not even men”. (Chalon, Portrait of a Seductress, 15)

p. 400 “The thirties has been defined as a ‘masculine decade’, a male preserve in which narrowly defined class distinctions exluded ‘issues of gender and sexual politics’. The collective experience of this generation of writers was masculine, its participants products of the English public school The Auden Generation, like the men of Bloomsbury, shared preparatory and public school experiences, were educated at Oxford and Cambridge, and were predmoinately homosexual.

p. 401 “homosexuals of the period defined themselves against a romanticized image of the rugged and heroic young men who died on the battlefields in World War I…. feared a failure of courage and conscience, imagined war as the ultimate ‘Test’ of masculinity, and dreamed of ways to escape the death sentence meted out to those who passed the ‘Test’.”

p. 411 Woolf saw in the Fascist state a more violent and indoctrinated form of the patriarchal dominance already at work in Western society, a force that associated the female with weakness in order to keep women (and other marginal elements) outside the societal power structure. As an alternative to the masculine values enforced by the Fascist state, Woolf proposed in Three Guineas that women establish themselves as a Society of Outsides, defining the goals of freedom, equality and peace in terms radically different from those established under state patronage.”

p. 415 Natalie Barney shockingly racist, anti-Jewish views

p. 419 Nancy Cunard “began her work as a journalist at the outbreak of the Ethiopian war, reporting first for the Associated Negro Press at the League of Nations. During the Spanish Civil War she wrote for various British publications, including the Manchester Guardian, the most prestigious of the pro-Republican English papers, and practiced a form of activist jounalism more common roday than in the 1930s… also took an active part in relief work,”

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Books History Politics

Notes from Derek Thompson On Work

October 4, 2023 – 10:35 am

p. x The decline of organized religion and social integration in the 20th century left many Americans bereft of any sense of spiritual progress in their lives. For some, work rose to fill the void. Many people today ask their jobs to provide community, transcendence, meaning, self-actualization, existential therapy … these workers – particularly highly educated workers in the white-collar economy – feel that their jobs cannot be “just jobs” and that their careers cannot be “just careers”. Their jobs must be their callings.

p. 45 “There is new enthusiasm for universal policies – like universal basic income, parental leave, subsidized childcare and a child allowance which would make long working hours less necessary for all Americans. These changes alone might not be enough to reduce Americans’ devotion to work for work’s sake, since it’s the rich who are most devoted. But they would spare the vast majority of the public from the pathological workaholism that grips today’s elites, and perhaps create a bottom-up movement to displace work as the center of the secular American identity.

On a deeper level, Americans have forgotten an old-fashioned goal of working. It’s about buying free time. The vast majority of workers are happier when they spend more hours with family, friends and partners, according to research conducted by Ashley Williams… In one study, she concluded that the happiest young workers were those who said around the time of their college graduation that they preferred careers that have them time away from the office to focus on their relationships and their hobbies. How quaint that sounds. But it’s the same perspective that inspired economist John Maynard Keynes to predict in 1930 that Americans would eventually have five-day weekends, rather than five-day weeks. It is the belief… that work is not life’s product, but its currency. What we choose to buy with it is the ultimate project of living.”

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