Font of Knowledge

I was browsing around the internet this evening when I found out that the entire 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica is available in the public domain; hosted for free, online, at archive.org!
Check it out:

Whole Earth Catalog

Since Steve Jobs died, everyone's been passing around a speech he made for the 2005 Stanford Commencement. Someone printed it out and left it in the break room at work. I was parsing through this transcript when I noticed that Jobs mentioned the Whole Earth Catalog. I love stuff like that, phone-book sized reference books or miscellanies which bring together thousands of bits of esoteric knowledge, so I noted it down. It brought to mind the Zine subculture of the 1980s and 1990s, or the mail-order sections of Popular Mechanics. A quick search revealed that the catalog is still solvent in some form and has a website. The back issues are downloadable for a fee, or you can browse them online:

Whole Earth Catalog, Volume 07, Issue 01, 1986, Spring

Thumbnail Book Reviews: Summer Reading

I've been reading a lot lately, both in connection with my current research and for interest. Here are some brief reviews/ summaries of some notable history titles (click on the citation for a link to the worldcat.org entry).

Fredriksen, John C. The United States Army in the War of 1812: Concise Biographies of Commanders and Operational Histories of Regiments, with Bibliographies of  Published and Primary Resources. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2009.

John C. Fredricksen’s 2009 book is a valuable resource for scholars, researchers, and history enthusiasts alike. Many of the regular US Army regiments that fought in the War of 1812 were reshuffled into oblivion when the army was reduced at war’s end. While genealogical and historical materials are relatively plentiful for the citizen-soldiers of various state militias, the regulars remain the forgotten soldiers, so to speak, of a forgotten war. As Fredriksen notes in his preface, “Compared to that vast body of literature on America’s military establishment during the Civil War or World War II,” the lack of historical studies of the U.S. Army is “as puzzling as it is glaring.” The war, excepting bright and isolated legends such as the bombardment of Fort McHenry and the Battle of New Orleans, is all but forgotten in modern culture. This book is a nuts-and-bolts attempt to rescue this period in history from oblivion, because it provides scholars with links to historical sources that can flesh out the long lost units of the American Army of 1812.

Hoffer, Peter Charles. The Treason Trials of Aaron Burr. Lawrence, Kan: University Press of Kansas, 2008. 

Peter Charles Hoffer's 2008 study of the Aaron Burr trial manages to deal with legal and constitutional history in an incisive and entertaining way. In 1806 Burr, the former Vice President who had shot Alexander Hamilton in a duel, was indicted in a plot to either invade Mexico (then a Spanish possession) or to cause some of the western states to secede from the Union.  Historians are still as much divided over his true intentions as were the friends and admirers of Burr and his arch-rival, then-President Thomas Jefferson. Oddly, he was turned over to Jefferson by none other than General James Wilkinson, who at the time was a paid spy for the Spanish government, and tried for treason. Another prominent early American operator, General William Eaton, tried to leverage his knowledge of the plot in order to get Jefferson to pay his Tripoli War expenses. Hoffer navigates the murky world of Federal era politics with a deft pen, using the case as a study in Constitutional law.

Foote, Shelby. The Civil War, a Narrative. New York: Random House, 1958. 

Shelby Foote's classic three-part survey of the American Civil War is perhaps the most ambitious, and comprehensive history of the war that has yet been attempted. Foote brings it off in style, combining theater- and campaign level narratives with individual accounts of battles to create an entertaining and enlightening summary of the war. He spices up his narrative with colorful stories, and manages to keep a balanced perspective despite being raised in the postbellum South. While The Civil War is no substitute for more in-depth studies and histories of individual units,  campaigns and battles, Foote's narrative goes beyond the better-known struggles of the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac to give the reader some sense of the vast scale of the Civil War. For admirers of Kevin Burns' documentary series, these three volumes prove familiar, but also offer far more than what the 5-part television documentary could deal with.

Rasmussen, Daniel. American Uprising: The Untold Story of America's Largest Slave Revolt. New York, NY: Harper, 2011.
I'm currently listening to the unabridged audiobook version of Daniel Rasmussen's 2011 book about an 1811 Louisiana slave revolt. Tracing the revolt to its roots in the development of a vast empire of sugar producing plantations in the lower Mississippi Valley, Rasmussen places the revolt in the context of a heterogeneous and unsettled social climate in the Louisiana Territory, newly acquired from Spain by way of Napoleonic France. It's interesting to note that while Aaron Burr was put on trial for treason (mostly) on suspicion of filibustering against Spanish territories in 1806, Governor Claiborne employed an adventurer named Skipworth to do pretty much the same thing in Western Florida in 1809.  Rasmussen provides an important glimpse at a relatively obscure incident in the history of the frontier, one that threatened the very fabric of plantation society. It is interesting to note that 1811 was the same year of the great New Madrid Earthquake, the first voyage of a steam boat down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, as well as the year that Tecumseh traveled south to acquire new allies for his Indian Confederacy (which in November would openly engage the United States in a prelude to the War of 1812 at Tippecanoe).

Pepys' Blog

Samuel Pepys (pronounced "peeps") was a Chief Secretary to the Admiralty and MP during the reign of King Charles II. He's best known to posterity for keeping a daily journal that reveals a lot about Restoration-era London. Phil Gyford began posting the daily entries from this diary online in 2003 (starting with 1 January 1660 on 1 January 2003). You can follow them here. It's pretty neat to get daily blog posts from the 17th Century. I wonder if something similar could be done with Twitter... Historical telegrams perhaps?

Dune copy book

I've been listening to the unabridged audiobook Children of Dune, one of the sequels that Frank Herbert wrote for his epic novel Dune. The entire series as Herbert wrote it spanned nearly 5500 years and dealt with human evolution, the nature of religion, ecology, and society. Each chapter in the novels is headed by a excerpt from a book within the Dune universe, creating a kind of meta-library of imaginary works.

Many of these quotes can be found here:

Above all else, the mentat must be a generalist, not a specialist. It is wise to have decisions of great moment monitored by generalists. Experts and specialists lead you quickly into chaos. They are a source of useless nit-picking, the ferocious quibble over a comma. The mentat-generalist, on the other hand, should bring to decision-making a healthy common sense. He must not cut himself off from the broad sweep of what is happening in his universe. He must remain capable of saying: "There's no real mystery about this at the moment. This is what we want now. It may prove wrong later, but we'll correct that when we come to it." The mentat-generalist must understand that anything which we can identify as our universe is merely a part of larger phenomena. But the expert looks backward; he looks into the narrow standards of his own specialty. The generalist looks outward; he looks for living principles, knowing full well that such principles change, that they develop. It is to the characteristics of change itself that the mentat-generalist must look. There can be no permanent catalogue of such change, no handbook or manual. You must look at it with as few preconceptions as possible, asking yourself: "Now what is this thing doing?"

  --The Mentat Handbook

 Religion must remain an outlet for people who say to themselves, "I am not the kind of person I want to be." It must never sink into an assemblage of the self-satisfied. 

Last words of Toure Bomoko, in "Appendix II: The Religion of Dune"

"You've heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap? There's an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in the trap, endure the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind.

Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, testing Paul Atreides with the Gom Jabbar.

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear.

Devil’s Dictionary-- Diary

From the Devil’s Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce:

DIARY, n. A daily record of that part of one's life, which he can relate to himself without blushing.

Hearst kept a diary wherein were writ All that he had of wisdom and of wit. So the Recording Angel, when Hearst died, Erased all entries of his own and cried: "I'll judge you by your diary." Said Hearst: "Thank you; 'twill show you I am Saint the First" -- Straightway producing, jubilant and proud, That record from a pocket in his shroud. The Angel slowly turned the pages o'er, Each stupid line of which he knew before, Glooming and gleaming as by turns he hit On Shallow sentiment and stolen wit; Then gravely closed the book and gave it back. "My friend, you've wandered from your proper track: You'd never be content this side the tomb -- For big ideas Heaven has little room, And Hell's no latitude for making mirth," He said, and kicked the fellow back to earth.

"The Mad Philosopher"

 

(It’s true, I keep a diary and consistently omit all the things which I would blush to have others read--- or my mind whitewashes the memory for me. So instead of the stupid or thoughtless or rather, course things we do that pass the small moments of the day, my diary merely records what I think about things when the nib meets the paper: of course its a departure from reality, and an exercise in self-gratification to boot.

But in the end, what should I strive to record in my diary? Certainly not just important things, since life is mainly made up of ordinary, boring moments. Certainly not every mundane thing that comes to mind, since that would be of no interest. Perhaps, what I like to read in journals that have come down to us from the past: interesting things, and the flavor of daily life. Especially the latter, since in time all our world will fade away, and be replaced by new things.)

Humanism

Listening to an audio book this afternoon regarding the Enlightenment, I realized that I have not distinguished in my thought between several flavors or definitions of humanism. There is, of course, the modern sense of humanism being theories or doctrines “which take human experience as the starting point for man’s knowledge of himself and the work of God and Nature.” (New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought sv. Humanism).

However, the term was first coined in 1808 by F.J. Niethammer to describe the study of the classics, “the revival of which had been one of the distinguishing features of the Italian Renaissance, later spreading to the rest of Europe as ‘the New Learning’.” (Ibid.) So there is another sense of the word humanism, which basically describes the humanities. Wikipedia.org’s article concerning humanism includes this interesting section on the importance of sources:

The humanists' close study of Latin literary texts soon enabled them to discern historical differences in the writing styles of different periods. By analogy with what they saw as decline of Latin, they applied the principle of ad fontes, or back to the sources, across broad areas of learning, seeking out manuscripts of Patristic literature as well as pagan authors. In 1439, while employed in Naples at the court of Alfonso V of Aragon (at the time engaged in a dispute with the Papal States) the humanist Lorenzo Valla used stylistic textual analysis, now called philology, to prove that the Donation of Constantine, which purported to confer temporal powers on the Pope of Rome, was an eighth-century forgery.^[24] For the next 70 years, however, neither Valla nor any of his contemporaries thought to apply the techniques of philology to other controversial manuscripts in this way. Instead, after the fall of the Byzantine Empire to the Turks in 1453, which brought a flood of Greek Orthodox refugees to Italy, humanist scholars increasingly turned to the study of Neoplatonism and Hermeticism, hoping to bridge the differences between the Greek and Roman Churches, and even between Christianity itself and the non-Christian world.^[25] The refugees brought with them Greek manuscripts, not only of Plato and Aristotle, but also of the Christian Gospels, previously unavailable in the Latin West. After 1517, when the new invention of printing made these texts widely available, the Dutch humanist Erasmus, who had studied Greek at the Venetian printing house of Aldus Manutius, began a philological analysis of the Gospels in the spirit of Valla, comparing the Greek originals with their Latin translations with a view to correcting errors and discrepancies in the latter. Erasmus, along with the French humanist Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples, began issuing new translations, laying the groundwork for the Protestant Reformation. Henceforth Renaissance humanism, particularly in the German North, became concerned with religion, while Italian and French humanism concentrated increasingly on scholarship and philology addressed to a narrow audience of specialists, studiously avoiding topics that might offend despotic rulers or which might be seen as corrosive of faith. After the Reformation, critical examination of the Bible did not resume until the advent of the so-called Higher criticsm of the 19th-century German Tübingen school.

I think the study of sources, and of how some of these manuscripts came to be saved and enshrined in the corpus of Western thought whilst others disappeared forever is very interesting. Kind of like peering at the source code of Western civilization.

Fake Journal Month and Meta-Fiction

International Fake Journal Month is an event sort of like National Novel Writing Month, but instead of completing a novel in a month (does anyone know someone who’s actually accomplished that?), participants create a fictional journal for the month of April. Often these journals have interesting stories going on, and incorporate sketches and other artwork chronicling the (fictional) authors’ life.

I’m a junkie for any kind of meta-fiction or “in-universe” publication, like the fake websites promoting Star Wars Episode II (which purported to be a news site from the Star Wars version of the Internet, the Holonet). I also have a “the lost journal of Indiana Jones” published in 2008 by Simon and Schuster, Inc. as a merchandised item for Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull. In both cases, the “in-Universe” or meta-fictional items are more entertaining and interesting than the movies that they promote.

Another popular form of meta-fiction is the Alternate-Reality Game, or ARG. In this type of game, reality blends with fiction, as the participants hunt for fictional clues in the real world, calling phone numbers and even going to real-world locations to get more clues. Oftentimes ARGs turn out to be forms of viral marketing for new films or products.

Maybe, in our information-dense universe of the 21st Century, meta-data or meta-fiction has become the hallmark genre of our era. Of course, there are plenty of examples of meta-fiction from the past, such as the Necronomicon of H.P. Lovecraft’s horror stories. And sometimes, this meta-fiction is taken as reality: I’ve met individuals who honestly believe that the witch-cults and Necronomicon are real, and that Lovecraft was documenting, rather than inventing, his unnamable horrors.