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2010-11-15T06:25:00.005-05:00

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delanceyplace.com 11/15/10 - the most important newspaper in the world

2010-11-15T03:36:00.001-05:00

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In today's excerpt - by 1890, 80 percent of New York City's population was either foreign-born or of foreign parentage. Joseph Pulitzer, an immigrant himself, bought and also-ran New York World newspaper and transformed it into the most widely read and influential paper in the world by using sensational headlines and short sentences to attract his audience:

"The paper abandoned its old, dull headlines. In place of BENCH SHOW OF DOGS: PRIZES AWARDED ON THE SECOND DAY OF THE MEETING IN MADISON SQUARE GARDEN on May 10 came SCREAMING FOR MERCY,
HOW THE CRAVEN CORNETTI MOUNTED THE SCAFFOLD on May 12. Two weeks later the World''s readers were greeted with BAPTIZED IN BLOOD, on top of a story, complete with a diagram, on how eleven people were
crushed to death in a human stampede when panic broke out in a large
crowd enjoying a Sunday stroll on the newly opened Brooklyn Bridge. In a city where half a dozen newspapers offered dull, similar fare to readers each morning, Pulitzer's dramatic headlines made the World stand out like a racehorse among draft horses.

"If the headline was the lure, the copy was the hook. Pulitzer could write all the catchy headlines he wanted, but it was up to the reporters to win over readers. He pushed his staff to give him simplicity and color. He admonished them to write in a buoyant, colloquial style comprising simple nouns, bright verbs, and short, punchy sentences. If there was a 'Pulitzer formula,' it was a story written so simply that anyone could read it and so colorfully that no one would forget it. The question 'Did you see that in the World?' Pulitzer instructed his staff, should be asked every day and something should be designed to cause this.

"Pulitzer had an uncanny ability to recognize news in what others ignored. He sent out his reporters to mine the urban dramas that other papers confined to their back pages. They returned with stories that could leave no reader unmoved. Typical, for instance, was the World's front-page tale, which ran soon after Pulitzer took over, of the destitute and widowed Margaret Graham. She had been seen by dockworkers as she walked on the edge of a pier in the East River with an infant in her arms and a two-year-old girl clutching her skirt. 'All at once the famished mother clasped the feeble little girl round her waist and, tottering to the brink of the wharf, hurled both her starving young into the river as it whirled by. She stood for a moment on the edge of the stream. The children were too weak and spent to struggle or to cry. Their little helpless heads dotted the brown tide for an instant, then they sank out of sight. The men who looked on stood spellbound.' Graham followed her children into the river but was saved by the onlookers and was taken to jail to face murder charges.

"For Pulitzer a news story was always a story. He pushed his writers to think like Dickens, who wove fiction from the sad tales of urban Victorian London, to create compelling entertainment from the drama of the modern city. To the upper classes, it was sensationalism. To the lower and working classes, it was their life. When they looked at the World, they found stories about their world.

"In the Lower East Side's notorious bars, known as black and tans, or at dinner in their cramped tenements, men and women did not discuss society news, cultural events, or happenings in the investment houses. Rather, the talk was about the baby who fell to his death from a roof-top, the brutal beating that police officers dispensed to an unfortunate waif, or the rising cost of streetcar fares to the upper reaches of Fifth Avenue and the mansions needing servants. The clear, simple prose of the World drew in these readers, many of whom were immigrants struggling to master their first words of English. Writing about the events that mattered in their lives in a way they could understand, Putitzer's World gave these New Yorkers a sense of belonging and a sense of value. In one stroke, he simultaneously elevated the common man and took his spare change to fuel the World's profits. ...

"Pulitzer found readers where other newspaper publishers saw a threat. Immigrants were pouring into New York at a rate never before seen. By the end of the decade, 80 percent of the city's population was either foreign-born or of foreign parentage. Only the World seemed to consider the stories of this human tide as deserving news coverage, The other papers wrote about it; the World wrote for it."

Author: James McGrath Morris
Title: Pulitzer
Publisher: Harper
Date: Copyright 2010 by James McGrath Morris
Pages: 213-214

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Delanceyplace is a brief daily email with an excerpt or quote we view as interesting or noteworthy, offered with commentary to provide context. There is no theme, except that most excerpts will come from a non-fiction work, mainly works of history, are occasionally controversial, and we hope will have a more universal relevance than simply the subject of the book from which they came.

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delanceyplace.com 11/12/10 - the myth of mass panic

2010-11-12T03:36:00.003-05:00

In today's excerpt - the myth of the mass panic. In disasters, rather than descending into disorder and a helpless state, people come together and give one another strength:

"The image of the panicked deeply ingrained in the popular imagination. Hardly any self-respecting Hollywood disaster movie would be complete without one scene of people running wildly in all directions and screaming hysterically. Television newscasters perpetuate this stereotype with reports that show shoppers competing for items in what is described as 'panic buying' and traders gesticulating frantically as 'panic' sweeps through the stock market.

"The idea of mass panic shapes how we plan for, and respond to, emergency events. In Pennsylvania, for example, the very term is inscribed in safety regulations known as the state's Fire and Panic Code. Many public officials assume that ordinary people will become highly emotional in an emergency, especially in a crowded situation and that providing information about the true nature of the danger is likely to make individuals panic even more. Emergency management plans and policies often intentionally conceal information: for ex- ample, event marshals may be instructed to inform one another of a fire using code words, to prevent people from overhearing the news - and overreacting.

"Mathematicians and engineers who model 'crowd dynamics' often rely on similar assumptions describing behaviors such as 'herding,' 'flocking' and, of course, 'panic.' As the late Jonathan Sime (an environmental psychologist formerly at the University of Surrey in England) pointed out, efforts to 'design out disaster' have typically treated people as unthinking or instinctive rather than as rational, social beings. Therefore, more emphasis is placed on the width of doorways than on communication technologies that might help people make informed decisions about their own safety.

"These ideas about crowd behavior permeate the academic world, too. For many years influential psychology textbooks have illustrated mass panic by citing supposed examples such as the Iroquois Theater fire of 1903 in Chicago in which some 600 people perished and the Cocoanut Grove Theater fire of 1942 in Boston in which 492 people died. In the textbook explanations, theatergoers burned to death as a result of their foolish overreaction to danger. But Jerome M. Chertkoff and Russell H. Kushigian of Indiana University, the first social psychologists to analyze the Cocoanut Grove fire in depth, found that the nightclub managers had jeopardized public safety in ways that are shocking today. In a 1999 book on the psychology of emergency egress and ingress, Chertkoff and Kushigian concluded that physical obstructions, not mass panic, were responsible for the loss of life in the infamous fire.

"A more recent example tells a similar story. Kathleen Tierney and her co-workers at the University of Colorado at Boulder investigated accusations of panicking, criminality, brutality and mayhem in the aftermath of Hurricane Ka- trina. They concluded that these tales were 'disaster myths.' What was branded as 'looting' was actually collective survival behavior: people took food for their families and neighbors when store payment systems were not working and rescue services were nowhere in sight. In fact, the population showed a surprising ability to self-organize in the absence of authorities, according to Tierney and her colleagues.

"Such work builds on earlier research by two innovative sociologists in the 1950s. Enrico Quarantelli - who founded the Disaster Research Center at Ohio State University in 1985 and later moved with it to the University of Delaware - examined many instances of emergency evacuations and concluded that people often flee from dangerous events such as fires and bombings, because usually that is the sensible thing to do. A fleeing crowd is not necessarily a panicked, irrational crowd.

"The second pioneering sociologist, Charles Fritz, was influenced by his ex- periences as a soldier in the U.K. during the World War II bombings known as the Blitz. 'The Blitz spirit' has become a cliché for communities pulling together in times of adversity. In the 1950s, as a researcher at the University of Chicago, Fritz made a comprehensive inventory of 144 peacetime disaster studies that confirmed the truth of the cliché. He concluded that rather than descending into disorder and a helpless state, human beings in disasters come together and give one another strength. Our research suggests that if there is such a thing as panic, it probably better describes the fear and helplessness of lone individuals than the responses of a crowd in the midst of an emergency."

Author: John Drury and Stephen D. Reicher
Title: "Crowd Control"
Publisher: Scientific America Mind
Date: November/December 2010
Pages: 60-61

delanceyplace.com 11/11/10 - andalusia, the caliphate, and tolerance

2010-11-11T03:34:00.002-05:00

In today's encore excerpt - in the middle ages, a vast portion of what is now Spain was ruled by Muslims, who were a model of religious tolerance, and who provided Europe with the knowledge and technology that was one of the keys to its resurgence in the Renaissance until they were finally driven from Spain in 1492 by Ferdinand and Isabella. Their territory is in part remembered today as Andalusia - "Al Andalus":

"After the Moorish conquest of Spain in the eighth century, the emir of Al Andalus had been a vassal of the caliphs of Damascus and Baghdad. But this western outpost of Islam was the first of the Muslim provinces to break free of its Oriental masters. When the Mongols destroyed the caliphate in Baghdad in 1258, the independence of Al Andalus was solidified, and the Spanish Moors began to relate more to Europe than the Middle East.

"In arts and agriculture, learning and tolerance, Al Andulus was a beacon of enlightenment to the rest of Europe. In the fertile valleys of the Guadalquivir and the Guadiana rivers, as well as the terraced slopes of the Alpujarras, agriculture surpassed anything elsewhere on the continent. Moorish filigree silver- and leatherwork became famous throughout the Mediterranean. In engineering, the skill of the Spanish Moors had no parallel, and the splendor of their architecture was manifest in the glorious mosque of Cordoba, the Giralda and Alcazar of Seville, and the Alhambra of Granada. Its excellence in art and literature, mathematics and science, history and philosophy defined this brilliant civilization.

"Among its finest achievements was its tolerance. Jews and Christians were welcomed, if not as equals, then as full-fledged citizens. They were permitted to practice their faith and their rituals without interference. This tolerance was in keeping with the principles of the Koran, which taught that Jews and Christians were to be respected as 'peoples of the Book' or believers in the word of God. Jews and Christians were assimilated into Islamic culture, and occasionally, Moorish leaders helped to build Christian houses of worship.

"In 1248, work began on the colossal Alhambra in Granada. With its thirteen towers and fortified walls above the ravine of the Darro River, the river of gold, the red palace took shape over the next hundred years. The extraordinary rooms of its interior - the Courtyard of the Lions, the Hall of the Two Sisters, the Court of the Myrtles - were finished at the end of the long process under the reign of Yusef I in the mid-fourteenth century. With their arabesque moldings and gold ornament and vegetal carvings, these rooms became the wonder of the world. Most stunning of all was the Courtyard of the Lions, whose Oriental feel was more reminiscent of Japan than the Middle East and whose vision was to replicate the Garden of Paradise."

Author: James Reston, Jr.
Title: The Dogs of God
Publisher: Anchor
Date: Copyright 2005 by James Reston
Pages: 7-8

delanceyplace.com 11/10/10 - teenage love

2010-11-10T03:34:00.002-05:00

In today's excerpt - in the now classic epistolary novel, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, a high school freshman named Charlie gets advice from two upper classmen, Patrick and Sam, regarding girls in general and his new girlfriend Mary Elizabeth in particular. This book had the distinction of being third on the American Library Association's list of the top ten most frequently challenged books of 2009, for reasons including the book's treatment of drugs, homosexuality, sex, and suicide:

Patrick then explained some things to me, so I would know how to be around girls ...

"Charlie, has anyone told you how it works?"

"I don't think so."

"Well, there are rules you follow here not because you want to, but because you have to. You get it?"

"I guess so."

"Okay. You take girls, for example. They're copying their moms and magazines and everything to know how to act around guys. ... I mean it's not like in the movies where girls like assholes or anything like that. It's not that easy. They just like somebody that can give them a purpose."

"A purpose?"

"Right. You know? Girls like guys to be a challenge. It gives them some mold to fit in how they act. Like a mom. What would a mom do if she couldn't fuss over you and make you clean your room? And what would you do without her fussing and making you do it? Everyone needs a mom. And a mom knows this. And it gives her a sense of purpose. You get it?"

"Yeah," I said even though I didn't. But I got it enough to say "Yeah" and not be lying, though.

"The thing is some girls think they can actually change guys. And what's funny is that if they actually did change them, they'd get bored. They'd have no challenge left."

[Later a female friend of Charlie's, Sam, gives him advice on his first date - which happens to be with a girl named Mary Elizabeth.]

Sam told me how to treat a girl on a date, which was very interesting. She said that with a girl like Mary Elizabeth, you shouldn't tell her she looks pretty. You should tell her how nice her outfit is because her outfit is her choice whereas her face isn't. She also said that with some girls, you should do things like open car doors and buy flowers, but with Mary Elizabeth (especially since it's the Sadie Hawkins' dance), I shouldn't do that. So, I asked her what I should do, and she said that I should ask a lot of questions and not mind when Mary Elizabeth doesn't stop talking. I said that it didn't sound very democratic, but Sam said she does it all the time with boys.

Sam did say that sex things were tricky with Mary Elizabeth since she's had boyfriends before and is a lot more experienced than I am. She said that the best thing to do when you don't know what to do during anything sexual is pay attention to how that person is kissing you and kiss them back the same way. She says that is very sensitive, which I certainly want to be.

[But after a few dates, things are not going very smoothly with Mary Elizabeth.]

Mary Elizabeth has been acting completely different. She's nice all the time, but it doesn't feel right. I don't know how to describe it. It's like we'll be having a cigarette outside with Sam and Patrick at the end of the day, and we'll all be talking about something until it's time to go home. Then, when I get home, Mary Elizabeth will call me right away and ask me, "What's up?" And I don't know what to say because the only thing new in my life is my walk home, which isn't a lot. But I describe the walk anyway. And then she starts talking, and she doesn't stop for a long time. She's been doing this all week. That and picking lint off my clothes.

At one point two days ago, she was talking about books, and she included a lot of books I had read, And when I told her that I had read them, she asked me very long questions that were really just her ideas with a question mark put at the end. The only thing I could say was either "yes" or "no." There was honestly no room to say anything else. After that, she started talking about her plans for college, which I had heard before, so I put down the phone, went to
the bathroom, and when I came back, she was still talking. I know that was the wrong thing to do, but I thought if I didn't take a break, I would do something even worse. Like yell or hang up the phone.

Author: Stephen Chbosky
Title: The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Publisher: MTV Books/Pocket Books
Date: Copyright 1999 by Stephen Chbosky
Pages: 22-23, 112-113, 128-129

delanceyplace.com 11/9/10 - chinggis khan

2010-11-09T02:55:00.002-05:00

In today's excerpt - when declining temperatures created a climate crisis in Mongolia, it started Chinggis (Ghengis) Khan and his heirs on campaigns of conquests that ultimately grew to include most of China, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe - the largest contiguous land-based empire in history:

"In the late twelfth century [the Mongolian steppe] region was facing a subsistence crisis because a drop in the mean annual temperature had reduced the supply of grass for grazing animals. The man who saved the situation by gaining access to the bounty of the agricultural world for them was Chinggis (Ghengis, c.1162-1227).

"A brilliant and utterly ruthless military genius, Chinggis proudly asserted that there was no greater joy than massacring one's enemies, seizing their horses and cattle, and ravishing their women. His career as a military leader began when he avenged the death of his father, a tribal chieftain who had been murdered when Chinggis was still a boy. As he subdued the Tartars, Kereyid, Naiman, Merkid, and other Mongol and Turkic tribes, Chinggis built up an army of loyal followers. In 1206 the most prominent Mongol nobles gathered at an assembly to name him their overlord, or great khan.

"He then fully militarized Mongol society ignoring traditional tribal affiliations to form an army based on a decimal hierarchy, 1,000 horsemen in the basic unit. A new military nobility was thus created of commanders loyal to Chinggis. They could pass their posts to their sons, but the great khan could remove any commander at will. Chinggis also created an elite bodyguard of 10,000 sons and brothers of commanders, which served directly under him. To reduce internal disorder, he issued simple but draconian laws; the penalty for robbery and adultery, for instance, was death. He ordered the Uighur script to be adopted for writing Mongol, seeing the utility of written records even though he was illiterate himself.

"His organization in place, Chinggis initiated one of world history's most astonishing campaigns of conquest. He began by subjugating nearby states. First he would send envoys to demand submission and threaten destruction. Those who submitted without fighting were treated as allies and left in power, but those who put up a fight faced the prospect of total destruction. City-dwellers in particular evoked his wrath and were often slaughtered en masse or used as human shields in the next battle. In the Mongol armies' first sweep across the north China plain in 1212-13, they left ninety-odd cities in rubble. When they sacked the Jurchen's northern capital at Beijing in 1215, it burned for more than a month.

"Chinggis's battle-hardened troops were capable of enduring great privation and crossing vast distances at amazing speed. In 1219 he led 200,000 troops into Central Asia, where the following year they sacked Bukara and Samarkand. Before his death in 1227, Chinggis ... ruled from the Pacific Ocean on the east to the Caspian Sea on the west.

"Chinggis's death created a crisis due to the Mongol tradition of succession by election rather than descent. In the end the empire was divided into four sections, each to be governed by one of the lines of his descendants. Ogodei, Chinggis's third son, got control of Mongolia. In 1234 he crushed the Jin and became ruler of north China. By 1236 he had taken all but four of the fifty-eight districts in Sichuan, previously held by the Song, and had ordered the total slaughter of the one million plus residents of the city of Chengdu, a city the Mongols had taken easily with little fighting. Even where people were not slaughtered, they were frequently seized as booty along with their grain stores and livestock. Ogodei's troops also participated in the western campaigns begun in 1237. Representatives of all four lines ... campaigned into Europe in 1237, taking Moscow and Kiev in 1238 and striking into Poland and Hungary in 1241 and 1242. Although they looted cities in central Europe on these campaigns, the Mongols soon retreated to Russia, which they dominated for over a century."

Author: Patricia Buckley Ebrey
Title: China
Publisher: Cambridge
Date: Copyright 1996 by Cambridge University Press
Pages: 169-171

delanceyplace.com 11/8/10 - newborns

2010-11-08T03:35:00.003-05:00

In today's excerpt - the invention, and reinvention, of incubators for newborns:

"Sometime in the late 1870s, a Parisian obstetrician named Stephane Tarnier took a day off from his work at Maternite de Paris, the lying-in hospital for the city's poor women, and paid a visit to the nearby Paris Zoo. Wandering past the elephants and reptiles and classical gardens of the zoo's home inside the Jardin des Plantes, Tarnier stumbled across an exhibit of chicken incubators.

Seeing the hatchlings totter about in the incubator's warm enclosure triggered an association in his head, and before long he had hired Odile Martin, the zoo's poultry raiser, to construct a device that would perform a similar function for human newborns. By modern standards, infant mortality was staggeringly high in the late nineteenth century, even in a city as sophisticated as Paris. One in five babies died before learning to crawl, and the odds were far worse for premature babies born with low birth weights. Tarnier knew that temperature regulation was critical for keeping these infants alive, and he knew that the French medical establishment had a deep-seated obsession with statistics. And so as soon as his newborn incubator had been installed at Maternite, the fragile infants warmed by hot water bottles below the wooden boxes, Tarnier embarked on a quick study of five hundred babies. The results shocked the Parisian medical establishment: while 66 percent of low-weight babies died within weeks of birth, only 38 percent died if they were housed in Tarnier's incubating box. You could effectively halve the mortality rate for premature babies simply by treating them like hatchlings in a zoo. ...

"Modern incubators, supplemented with high-oxygen therapy and other advances, became standard equipment in all American hospitals after the end of World War II, triggering a spectacular 75 percent decline in infant mortality rates between 1950 and 1998. ...

"In the developing world, however, the infant mortality story remains bleak. Whereas infant deaths are below ten per thousand births throughout Europe and the United States, over a hundred infants die per thousand in countries like Liberia and Ethiopia, many of them premature babies that would have survived with access to incubators. But modern incubators are complex, expensive things. A standard incubator in an American hospital might cost more than $40,000. But the expense is arguably the smaller hurdle to overcome. Complex equipment breaks, and when it breaks you need the technical expertise to fix it, and you need replacement parts. In the year that followed the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the Indonesian city of Meulaboh received eight incubators from a range of international relief organizations. By late 2008, when an MIT professor named Timothy Prestero visited the hospital, all eight were out of order, the victims of power surges and tropical humidity, along with the hospital staff's inability to read the English repair manual. ...

"Prestero and his team decided to build an incubator out of parts that were already abundant in the developing world. The idea had originated with a Boston doctor named Jonathan Rosen, who had observed that even the smaller towns of the developing world seemed to be able to keep automobiles in working order. The towns might have lacked air conditioning and laptops and cable television, but they managed to keep their Toyota 4Runners on the road. So Rosen approached Prestero with an idea: What if you made an incubator out of automobile parts?

"Three years after Rosen suggested the idea, the team introduced a prototype device called the NeoNurture. From the outside, it looked like a streamlined modern incubator, but its guts were automotive. Sealed-beam headlights supplied the crucial warmth; dashboard fans provided filtered air circulation; door chimes sounded alarms. You could power the device via an adapted cigarette lighter, or a standard-issue motorcycle battery. Building the NeoNurture out of car parts was doubly efficient, because it tapped both the local supply of parts themselves and the local knowledge of automobile repair. These were both abundant resources in the developing world context, as Rosen liked to say. You didn't have to be a trained medical technician to fix the NeoNurture; you didn't even have to read the manual. You just needed to know how to replace a broken headlight."

Author: Steve Johnson
Title: Where Good Ideas Come From
Publisher: Riverhead
Date: Copyright 2010 by Steven Johnson
Pages: 25-28

delanceyplace.com 11/5/10 - election day

2010-11-05T08:08:00.002-04:00

In today's excerpt--Election Day, 1968. The Democrat Lyndon Johnson had won the presidency in 1964 in a historic landslide, but only four years later the Republican Richard Nixon eked out a victory over Hubert Humphrey. What accounted for the shift? A lot, most notably civil rights legislation, race riots, and the specter of busing that had given rise to Southern demagogues such as George Wallace. Nixon had won in part by subtly and deftly adopting some of the Southern message:

"The stroke of midnight: Hubert Humphrey was ahead by a point in the popular vote, with four of ten returns counted. In Nixon's familiar old suite at the Waldorf, ... [Nixon was] scribbling on yellow pads, working the phones, puzzling out the nation's precincts, the labyrinth that he knew better than any other man alive, as the nation's will slowly, agonizingly revealed itself.

"He knew it by 3:15 a.m.

"The networks weren't sure until well into the 9 a.m. hour.

"Humphrey didn't concede until eleven thirty. In fact, the victory wouldn't be certified for weeks. ...

"[Nixon won] with something no other Republican presidential candidate, with minor exceptions, had ever had before: electoral votes from the South. Wallace took Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana. But Nixon got Arkansas, Tennessee, Florida, Virginia, North Carolina--and Strom Thurmond's South Carolina.

"George Wallace sent a congratulatory telegram. Nixon never acknowledged it. It spoke to the agony of victory. For it was barely a victory. 301 electoral votes for Nixon and 191 for Humphrey, 46 for George Wallace--and, in the popular vote, 43.42 percent, 42.72 percent, and 13.53 percent. Nixon had received only five or so points more than Barry Goldwater's humiliating share in 1964. With George Wallace claiming that symbolically the victory belonged as much to him as to Nixon: 'Mr. Nixon said the same thing we said,' he declared. If he hadn't, was Wallace's point, Nixon wouldn't have won. And indeed, a few thousand more votes for Wallace in North Carolina and Tennessee, a shift of 1 percent of the vote in New Jersey or Ohio from Nixon to Humphrey, and the election would have been thrown into the House of Representatives, because Nixon wouldn't have won an electoral college majority."

Author: Rick Perlstein
Title: Nixonland
Publisher: Scribner
Date: Copyright 2008 by Rick Perlstein
Pages: 353-354

delanceyplace.com 11/4/10 - cognitive misers

2010-11-04T03:35:00.002-04:00

In today's encore excerpt - the human brain is a "cognitive miser"- it can employ several approaches to solving a given problem, but almost always chooses the one that requires the least computational power:

"We tend to be cognitive misers. When approaching a problem, we can choose from any of several cognitive mechanisms. Some mechanisms have great computational power, letting us solve many problems with great accuracy, but they are slow, require much concentration and can interfere with other cognitive tasks. Others are comparatively low in computational power, but they are fast, require little concentration and do not interfere with other ongoing cognition. Humans are cognitive misers because our basic tendency is to default to the processing mechanisms that require less computational effort, even if they are less accurate. Are you a cognitive miser? Consider the following problem, taken from the work of Hector Levesque, a computer scientist at the University of Toronto. Try to answer it yourself before reading the solution.

Problem: Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married, but George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person?

A) Yes
B) No
C) Cannot be determined

"More than 80 percent of people choose C. But the correct answer is A. Here is how to think it through logically: Anne is the only person whose marital status is unknown. You need to consider both possibilities, either married or unmarried, to determine whether you have enough information to draw a conclusion. If Anne is married, the answer is A: she would be the married person who is looking at an unmarried person (George). If Anne is not married, the answer is still A: in this case, Jack is the married person, and he is looking at Anne, the unmarried person. This thought process is called fully disjunctive reasoning - reasoning that considers all possibilities. The fact that the problem does not reveal whether Anne is or is not married suggests to people that they do not have enough information, and they make the easiest inference (C) without thinking through all the possibilities. Most people can carry out fully disjunctive reasoning when they are explicitly told that it is necessary (as when there is no option like 'cannot be determined' available). But most do not automatically do so, and the tendency to do so is only weakly correlated with intelligence.

"Here is another test of cognitive miserliness, as described by Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleague Shane Frederick.

"A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

"Many people give the first response that comes to mind - 10 cents. But if they thought a little harder, they would realize that this cannot be right: the bat would then have to cost $1.10, for a total of $1.20. IQ is no guarantee against this error. Kahneman and Frederick found that large numbers of highly select university students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton and Harvard were cognitive misers, just like the rest of us, when given this and similar problems."

Author: Keith E. Stanovich
Title: "Rational and Irrational Thought: The Thinking That IQ Tests Miss"
Publisher: Scientific American
Date: November/December 2009
Pages: 35-36

delanceyplace.com 11/3/10 - american english

2010-11-03T03:36:00.002-04:00

In today's excerpt - American culture in the late 1700s and early 1800s was more homogeneous than in European countries. In England, France and Germany, villagers on one part of the country could not understand the dialect of those in another part (a condition that was still true in China in the early 1900s), and the upper class spoke differently from them all. Americans, however, all spoke a mutually understandable dialect, and also had fewer religious customs, which created a more uniform culture, with all the attendant advantages in commerce and governance:

"Americans thought that they were less superstitious and more rational than the peoples of Europe. They had actually carried out religious reforms that European liberals could only dream about. Early Americans were convinced that their Revolution, in the words of the New York constitution of 1777, had been designed to end the 'spiritual oppression and intolerance wherewith the bigotry and ambition of weak and wicked priests' had 'scourged mankind.' Not only had Americans achieved true religious liberty, not just the toleration that the English made so much of, but their blending of the various European religions and nationalities had made their society much more homogeneous than those of the Old World.

"The European migrants had been unable to bring all of their various regional and local cultures with them, and re-creating and sustaining many of the peculiar customs, craft holidays, and primitive practices of the Old World proved difficult. Consequently, morris dances, charivaries, skimmingtons, and other folk practices were much less common in America than in Britain or Europe. The New England Puritans, moreover, had banned many of these popular festivals and customs, including Christmas, and elsewhere the mixing and settling of different peoples had worn most of them away. ... Since enlightened elites everywhere in the Western world regarded these plebeian customs and holidays as remnants of superstition and barbarism, their relative absence in America was seen as an additional sign of the New World's precocious enlightenment.

"America had a common language, unlike the European nations, none of which was linguistically homogeneous. In 1789 the majority of Frenchmen did not speak French but were divided by a variety of provincial patois. Englishmen from Yorkshire were incomprehensible to those from Cornwall and vice versa. By contrast, Americans could understand one another from Maine to Georgia. It was very obvious why this should be
so, said John Witherspoon, president of Princeton. Since Americans were 'much more unsettled, and move frequently from place to place, they are not as liable to local peculiarities, either in accent or phraseology.' With the Revolution some Americans wished to carry this uniformity further. They wanted their language 'purged of its barbaric dross' and made 'as pure, simple, and systematic as our politics.' It was bound to happen in any case. Republics, said John Adams, had always attained a greater 'purity, copiousness, and perfection of language than other forms of government.'

"Americans expected the development of an American English that would be different from the English of the former mother country, a language that would reflect the peculiar character of the American people. Noah Webster, who would eventually become famous for his American dictionary, thought that language had divided the English people from one another. The court and the upper ranks of the aristocracy set the standards of usage and thus put themselves at odds with the language spoken by the rest of the country. By contrast, America's standard was fixed by the general practice of the nation, and therefore Americans had 'the fairest opportunity of establishing a national language, and of giving it uniformity and perspicuity, in North America, that ever presented itself to mankind.' Indeed, Webster was convinced that Americans already 'speak the most pure English now known in the world.' Within a century and a half, he predicted, North America would be peopled with a hundred millions of people, 'all speaking the same language.' Nowhere else in the world would such large numbers of people 'be able to associate and converse together like children of the same family.'

"Others had even more grandiose visions for the spread of America's language. John Adams was among those who suggested that American English would eventually become 'the next universal language.' In 1789 even a French official agreed; in a moment of giddiness he actually predicted that American English was destined to replace diplomatic French as the language of the world. Americans, he said, 'tempered by misfortune,' were 'more human, more generous, more tolerant, all qualities that make one want to share the opinions, adopt the customs, and speak language of such a people.' "

Author: Gordon S. Wood
Title: Empire of Liberty
Publisher: Oxford
Date: Copyright 2009 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
Pages: 47-49

delanceyplace.com 11/2/10 - social darwinism

2010-11-02T03:35:00.002-04:00

In today's excerpt - social Darwinism. The greatest U.S. economic crisis prior to the Great Depression itself was "the Panic of 1873," a depression that lasted from 1873-1879. It brought unprecedented unemployment to the country, and unloosed a nationwide hysteria known as "the Tramp Scare." Thousands unemployed "tramps" crossed the country looking for work that wasn't to be found. Instead of reacting with aid and compassion, cities and states passed harsh "anti-Tramp" laws and labeled the unemployed as morally inferior. Conveniently, Charles Darwin's brand new theory of evolution was available could be freely adapted to the social world to provide justification for this scorn:

"Impressed with what they took to be the hard, scientific fact of natural selection, many prominent American intellectuals, politicians, and businessmen followed [leading intellectual] Herbert Spencer in wanting to extend Charles Darwin's insights on nature to society. To those who enjoyed the benefits of American prosperity, unrestrained capitalism appeared a law of nature, and one that should be obeyed by all and not altered, as to do so would undermine social progress. Daniel S. Gregory's popular Christian Ethics argued that 'The Moral Governor has placed the power of acquisitiveness in man for a good and noble purpose,' so that interfering with greed was actually a sin. Not surprisingly, the rich and their acolytes crafted an ideology from this perception that equated wealth with morality and poverty with a defective character. No one gave voice to this belief system better than the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, the most famous - and highly paid - minister in America: 'The general truth will stand, that no man in this land suffers from poverty unless it be more than his fault - unless it be his sin.'

"Though it had its origins in England with Spencer's writings, social Darwinism became an obsession among educated Americans in the late 1870s. While scholars place the first use of the phrase 'social Darwinism' in Europe in 1879, it is telling that the phrase actually first appears in the public press in the United States in 1877 - and then in the context of the tramp menace. The Nation converted to social Darwinism in 1877, its editor, E.L. Godkin, declaring that nothing of value 'is not the result of successful strife.' Those who are successful in life deserve their wealth, while trying to lift up the weak undermines this natural struggle and thus social progress. ...

"So popular had evolutionary theory become in 1877 that The Congregationalist complained that too many 'preachers seem to think it their duty to give their congregations dilutions of John Tyndall and Thomas Huxley and Herbert Spencer,' the leading promoters of Darwin's work. They noted with concern that Harvard students are now expected to read Spencer. Later in the year, Harvard's professor John McCrary, who held the chair in geology, resigned in opposition to this cult of Herbert Spencer. But his was a lonely voice, as readings of Spencer became common at high school exercises throughout the country, even in Milwaukee. Despite their rejection of evolution, most Protestant ministers and intellectuals were entranced by social Darwinism. The Reverend William A. Halliday used Darwin to point out that progress is certain, but that not everyone advances together; 'the survival of the fittest is nothing the unfit can cheer about.' ...

"[Yale professor] William Graham Sumner found in Spencer scientific justification for his extreme version of laissez-faire. Sumner could thus claim it was a fact, 'fixed in the order of the universe,' that government intervention threatened to disrupt the workings of natural selection - from the eight-hour day to public education, protective tariffs to the post office, they all thwarted progress. Appearing before the House of Representatives, Sumner was asked, 'Professor, don't you believe in any government aid to industries?' To which he emphatically replied, 'No! It's root, hog, or die.' ... Meanwhile, Henry Ward Beecher turned to Spencer to argue that economic success is evidence of the working of both God's will and natural selection. Given that double authority, no one should attempt to ameliorate economic inequality. Science proved God's will in making certain that 'the poor will be with you always.' "

Author: Michael A. Bellesiles
Title: 1877
Publisher: The New Press
Date: Copyright 2010 by Michael A. Bellesiles
Pages: 127-129

delanceyplace.com 11/1/10 - land and war

2010-11-01T03:36:00.002-04:00

In today's excerpt - we all know the causes of the American Revolutionary War and the American Civil War, they are enshrined in our national consciousness: the Revolutionary War was fought to end taxation without representation, and the Civil War was fought to end slavery (or, if you have Southerner sympathies, it was fought over the issue of states' rights). These reasons, though true in part, may be insufficient to fully capture the causes of these wars. The colonists had lower tax rates than their English brethren, more independence on many matters, and an equally high standard of living. Parliament removed taxes from the colonists quickly after it imposed them, and left a token tax in place as a face-saving maneuver. And in the 1850s, the abolitionist movement was a tiny fraction of the U.S. population.

Historians Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton point out that those two wars both started roughly twelve years after the acquisition of control over vast news areas of land, and thus put in play huge potential shifts in the balance of power within the newly controlling governments. The Revolutionary War started shortly after the British and their colonists wrested control the remainder of the continent east of the Mississippi away from the French in the French and Indian War. The Civil War started shortly after the U.S. wrested half of Mexico's territory away from it in the Mexican American War, and thus gained effective control of the continent west of the Mississippi:

"Unlike the three previous wars between Britain and France, the vast conflict known in Europe as the Seven Years' War (1756-63; its North American phase, 1754-60, is sometimes called the French and Indian War) ended in a decisive victory, as a result of which the North American empire of France ceased to exist and Spain (France's ally in the final year of the war) was compelled to surrender its imperial claims east of the Mississippi River. This left Britain (in theory at least) the proprietor of the eastern half of North America. ...

"The victorious British ... so alienated their colonists by attempted reforms that just a dozen years after the Peace of Paris that ended the Seven Years War, the thirteen North American colonies took up arms against the empire. In their efforts to mount resistance to a sovereign king in Parliament in the decade before war broke out, colonial leaders used arguments that stressed what had usually been called the rights of Englishmen, stressing the centrality of political freedom and the protection of property and other rights. Because the colonists were a chronically divided lot, however, the leaders of the resistance movement took care to couch their explanations and appeals in universalistic language: as defenses of natural rights, not merely the liberties of Englishmen.

"The War for American Independence (1775-83) shattered the British empire and made those universalized ideas the foundation of American political identity. It took another dozen years after the end of the war in 1783, however, to produce the complex of agreements and understandings we call
the Revolutionary Settlement. ...

Great Britain and the United States ceased to compete militarily after 1815, leaving Mexico, which declared its independence from Spain in 1821, as the last remaining obstacle to the dominion of the United States in North America. ... The Mexican leaders' fears of revolution and racial war, along with the rich geographic diversity of their nation, inhibited the emergence of an American-style revolutionary settlement and created a fertile field for caudillos, violence, and local rebellions. One of the latter, on the remote northeastern fringe of Mexico, created the Republic of Texas in 1836. A decade later, the United States annexed Texas, provoking a war with Mexico in 1846. Within two years American soldiers overwhelmed Mexican resistance, seized the national capital, and forced a peace, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), that deprived Mexico of fully half its territory.

"As in the aftermath of the Seven Years' War, the accession of vast amounts of territory created a furious debate that shredded the political fabric of the victorious empire. Then it had taken twelve years for the imperial community to collapse in civil war; it now took thirteen. Adding the lands from the Rockies to the Pacific coast to what Americans thought of as the empire of liberty made the question of slavery's expansion into the conquests inescapable. The Revolutionary Settlement broke down as Northern and Southern Americans came to see each other as potential tyrants intent on subjugation. Thus in April 1861, Southerners and Northerners went to war to make the American empire safe for their own, mutually exclusive, notions of liberty, convinced that no alternative remained but an appeal to the god of battles."

Author: Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton
Title: The Dominion of War
Publisher: Penguin
Date: Copyright 2005 by Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton
Pages: xvi-xix

delanceyplace.com 10/29/10 - life in the royal court

2010-10-29T03:35:00.002-04:00

In today's excerpt - the 1700s saw the last gasps of court life for kings with any true overriding authority in Britain and France, and during this period court life evolved to exaggerated extremes. Lords, ladies and the hundreds of court employees that swirled around them were required to be present at court and strive for the attention and favor of the regents. Their status, land, titles, and livelihood were at stake, and the least faux pas could have real and devastating consequences. In this excerpt we see the court of King George I of England at Kensington Palace in the early 1700s. The fawning within these courts finds its echoes in the capitals and large corporations of today:

"The Great Drawing Room, crammed full of courtiers, lay at the heart of the Georgian royal palace. Here the king mingled most evenings with his guests, signaling welcome with a nod and displeasure with a blank stare or, worse, a turned back.

"The winners and the losers of the Georgian age could calculate precisely how high they'd climbed - or how far they'd fallen - by the warmth of their reception at court. High-heeled and elegant shoes crushed the reputations of those who'd dropped out of favor, while those whose status was on the rise stood firmly in possession of their few square inches of space.

"In the eighteenth century, the palace's most elegant assembly room was in fact a bloody battlefield. This was a world of skulduggery, politicking, wigs and beauty spots, where fans whistled open like flick knives. Intrigue hissed through the crowd, and court factions were also known as 'fuctions'. Beneath their powder and perfume, the courtiers stank of sweat, insecurity and glittering ambition.

"The ambitious visitors crowding into the drawing room were usually unaware that they were under constant observation from behind the scenes. The palace servants - overlooked but ever-present - knew of every move made at court. ...

"The Georgian royal household was staggeringly vast and complicated. The highest ranking of its members, the courtiers proper, were the ladies- and gentlemen- in-waiting. These noblemen and women were glad to serve the king and queen in even quite menial ways because of the honor involved.

"Beneath them in status were about 950 other royal servants, organized into a byzantine web of departments ranging from hair-dressing to rat-catching, and extending right down to the four 'necessary women' who cleaned the palace and emptied the 'necessaries' or chamber pots. ...

"While the monarchy was slowly sinking in status throughout the eighteenth century, the glamour of the court still attracted the pretty, the witty, the pushy and the powerful.

"But although Kensington Palace teemed with ambitious and clever people in search of fame and fashion, it was also a lonely place, and courtiers and servants alike often found themselves weary and heart-sore. Success in their world demanded a level head and a cold heart; secrets were never safe, a courtier had to keep up appearances in the face of gambling debts, loss of office or even unwanted pregnancy.

"Thousands longed to be part of the court, but John Hervey [a courtier in the Georgian court], knew all too well that danger lay hidden behind the palace walls. 'I do not know any people in the world,' he wrote to a courtier colleague, 'so much to be pitied as that gay young company with which you and I stand every day in the drawing-room.' "

Author: Lucy Worsley
Title: The Courtiers
Publisher: Walker
Date: Copyright 2010 by Lucy Worsley
Pages: 3-5

delanceyplace.com 10/28/10 - adultery and romance

2010-10-28T06:56:00.001-04:00

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In today's encore excerpt - in the chivalrous twelfth century, relationships and sex, viewed as dutiful and dispassionate under the Church, begin to emerge as rapturous and transcendent. The new age of courtly love sweeps through the courts of Europe and engenders a new genre of songs and poems. Aiding in this transformation are Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122-1204) and the troubadors:

"The [new] game of courtly love is an elaborate blueprint for the building of desire, as opposed to the quenching of it. The higher it builds without fulfillment, the more perfect a lover the knight proves himself to be. ...

"Consummated or not, courtly love is by definition adulterous. The knight who jousts on horseback, sword in hand, competes against other knights for a highly desirable lady. But they're not fighting for her hand in marriage, or even for the privilege of courting her. She already has a husband. Initially, at least, they're not even fighting for the privilege of sleeping with her. They're fighting for the privilege of loving her - synonymous with serving her. ...

"In 1154, Henry, Duke of Normandy, captures the English throne as Henry I, making his wife Eleanor [of Aquitaine] a queen for the second time - and [through her] bestowing upon the English court a resident expert on the rules of the game. From there the ideal of love ... will be converted into the middle-class ideal of marriage: the melding of two minds, bodies, and hearts into one. ... Eleanor and her kin would find it next to unimaginable that the heady quality of adultery would one day converge with the dutiful, dispassionate quality of marriage as they experience it.

"Maybe that's what finally enables the convergence: Love enters marriage through the extramarital back door. As [Christian author] C.S. Lewis noted in his study of courtly doctrine, Allegory of Love, 'Any idealization of sexual love, in a society where marriage is purely utilitarian, must begin by an idealization of adultery.' ...

"What troubadors bring about is the reinvention of love. They make its pursuit desirable, even admirable. Previously, epic tales of sexual desire ended in mutually assured destruction for all concerned. ... [Now], to gamble all you have, even your life, on romantic rapture becomes the route to transcendence. The most memorable romantic lovers of courtly literature - Tristan and Isolde, Lancelot and Guinevere, Troilus and Cressida - meet tragic ends, but noble ones. They martyr themselves for the glory of the faith. The new religion of love is a wedge to the future."

Author: Susan Squire
Title: I Don't
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Date: Copyright 2008 by Susan Squire
Pages: 151-159
Tags: Love

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delanceyplace.com 10/27/10 - spartacus

2010-10-27T03:35:00.002-04:00

In today's excerpt - ancient Rome was built on slavery, and slaves constituted as much as forty percent of the population. This slavery could be unspeakably gruesome, whether it was the tens of thousands of slaves that died in the Roman mines in Spain, or those that were condemned to die as gladiators, and so Rome was left to ruthlessly crush innumerable slave rebellions:

"Spartacus, who was born north of Greece, in Thrace, received training in the Roman army as a barbarian 'auxiliary' (ally) before becoming a slave in 73 BCE. It's not clear why he was enslaved after serving Rome. However, his combat skills made him a natural candidate for the gladiator school at Capua, about one hundred miles from Rome.

"Here Spartacus and his fellow slaves learned how to entertain a Roman audience with dramatic hand-to-hand combat. Knowing they were going to their certain deaths, however, about eighty gladiators followed Spartacus into rebellion - using kitchen utensils as weapons. Before long they armed themselves with real weapons, slaughtering Roman soldiers who tried to stop them. Then they escaped to the countryside, where Spartacus incited a general slave uprising, attracting thousands of field workers to his cause. He led the rebel slaves to a mountaintop, where they built a fortified encampment.

"At first the Roman Senate viewed the uprising as a minor threat, but they soon learned better, and dispatched two commanders (praetors) to besiege the mountain and starve the slave army into submission. Spartacus launched a daring counterattack, ordering his soldiers to use vines to rappel down the side of the mountain.

"Of course the Roman Senate couldn't allow the slave rebellion to succeed, as the Roman economy was increasingly based on slavery. So they dispatched a new commander, Crassus, with twelve legions - a huge force - only to have the advance force of two legions annihilated by the slave army.

"Spartacus now led the rebels south, to Sicily, where he planned to
rendezvous with pirates he'd hired to take them to safety. But the pirates never showed, and the slaves found themselves trapped on a narrow peninsula. ... Desperate, Spartacus decided he had no choice but to fight the Romans head on. Here the Romans finally defeated the rebel army, showing no mercy as they butchered sixty thousand runaway slaves, including women and children. Sixty-six hundred survivors were crucified along the Appian Way connecting Capua to Rome. However, the body of Spartacus was never found."

Author: Erik Sass and Steve Wiegand
Title: The Mental Floss History of the World
Publisher: Harper
Date: Copyright 2008 by Mental Floss LLC
Pages: 83-84

delanceyplace.com 10/26/10 - william penn

2010-10-26T03:35:00.002-04:00

In today's excerpt - William Penn's utopian vision enabled him to establish one of the most successful colonies in the New World, but he died deep in debt and a broken man, despite having received a generous charter which made him the world's largest private (non-royal) landowner with over 45,000 square miles of land. He left his estate in such shambles that it took thirteen years to untangle, but his heirs and his personal representative, James Logan, did far better financially after his demise:

"[Late in his life], Penn was arrested for debt [incurred in developing Pennsylvania] and confined from January to October 1708 in debtors' prison. Ultimately, he and [his lender] settled out of court for a payment of £7,600, a sum that Penn borrowed (of course) from nine wealthy Friends, including his father-in-law. Lacking any other asset, the proprietor mortgaged the province to them as security for the loan.

"Early in 1709, Penn, now sixty-four years old, [attempted] the sale of Pennsylvania's government to the crown for £20,000. The province had become, in Penn's view, no more than the cause of 'a Sorrow, that if not Supported by a Superior hand, might have overwhelm'd me long agoe': a place that for its inhabitants had 'prov'd a Land of Freedom & flourishing,' but which for him was 'the cause of Grief Trouble & Poverty.'

"Penn was in the midst of negotiations with the crown in April 1712 when he suffered the first of a series of strokes. The one that finally incapacitated him came in October while he was writing to James Logan, pleading for him to send money and 'deliver me from my present thralldom ... for it is my excessive expenses upon Pennsylvania that sunk me so low, & nothing else, my expenses yearly in England ever fal[I]ing short of my yearly income.' ... He lived on in increasingly frail health for another five years, losing first the ability to write, then the capacity to speak intelligibly, then the ability to walk unaided, and finally the ability to recognize friends and relatives. He died in his sleep on July 30, 1718.

"Although his efforts had given him little but years of frustration and ultimately left him a broken man, William Penn died as the most successful agent of imperial expansion that England had yet produced. In 1700, Philadelphia's customhouse annually yielded revenues to the Exchequer that exceeded £8,000; yet the expenses of provincial administration and Indian diplomacy were still borne almost entirely by [Penn himself]. ...

"[Upon Penn's death his estate,] tangled beyond recognition, was consigned to the Court of Chancery, where it disappeared under a mountain of pleadings and counterpleadings. The case remained unresolved for another seven years. [His second wife] Hannah herself did not live to see the case settled; she died, worn out with grief and worry, in the spring of 1727.

"The chancery decision, rendered in July of that year, assigned the entire proprietorship to the sons of [his second wife] Hannah Penn, but that judgment, in the time-honored way of actions in chancery, did not resolve the issue. It was not until 1731, thirteen years after the death of William Penn and nearly twenty after he had lost the capacity to exercise his proprietary powers competently, that the children (and grandchildren) from the first marriage renounced their claim to the proprietorship in return for a cash payment from the children of the second marriage. Without this out-of-court settlement, another set of suits would in all likelihood have kept the ownership of the province tied up in chancery for at least another decade. ...

"When Richard, John, and Thomas Penn took over the administration of their father's province, Pennsylvania finally became a consistent producer of revenue for the family. James Logan disliked their grasping ways but never failed to facilitate them: whereas the Penn family had realized an average of
£400 annually from land sales between 1701 and 1730, they earned an average of £7,150 a year between 1731 and 1760, an eighteen fold increase. Logan was hardly in a position to despise them for their greed. He had himself done magnificently and had never been excessively scrupulous about how he made his fortune."

Author: Fred Anderson and Andrew Clayton
Title: The Dominion of War
Publisher: Penguin
Date: Copyright 2005 by Fred Anderson and Andrew Clayton
Pages: 83, 95, 102
Tags: America, States

delanceyplace.com 10/25/10 - henry clay

2010-10-25T03:35:00.004-04:00

In today's excerpt - wars with Spain, divorce, veteran aid, wolf pelts, gerrymandering, roads, billiard tables, and the location of the state capital. New state representative Henry Clay and his colleagues wrestled with the issues of the day in the Kentucky state legislature during that state's earliest days. Clay, hero to Abraham Lincoln, later served as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, and was part of the "Great Triumvirate" or "Immortal Trio," along with his colleagues Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun:

"Speeches backed by pluck won (Democratic-Republican) Henry Clay election to the Kentucky House in his first bid for public office, and in November 1803, he took the seat he would hold for the next six years. In his first session, the legislature gathered on the second floor of the stone capitol in Frankfort abuzz with rumors of looming war with Spain.

"The purchase of Louisiana from Napoleonic France had set off celebrations only months before, but soon disturbing reports began circulating that the deal was hardly certain. Spain was insistent that it had ceded Louisiana to Napoleon only on the condition that France not sell it to the United States. Cash-strapped Napoleon, however, sold the province to Thomas Jefferson's administration so quickly that Spain was still in possession of it. Now Spain threatened to block its transfer to the United States. The entire West rose up in arms. Clay arrived in Frankfort that November as Kentucky militiamen were assembling with fight in their eyes, and he was quickly caught up in the war fever. He certainly knew that political laurels would likely result from participating in a campaign against the Spaniards, and he immediately signed on as an aide to the militia's command-in-general, Samuel Hopkins. The militia's preparations had hardly begun, however, before word reached Kentucky that Spain would turn over Louisiana after all. The excitement died down as quickly as it started, disappointing more than a few boys who were spoiling for a fight, especially against Spaniards. Nobody liked Spaniards.

"The distraction of a possible war removed, the legislature began its work in earnest. Most of the session's business was routine. Divorce petitions took up a fair amount of time, because a marriage could be dissolved in Kentucky only after an act of the legislature allowed the suit to be brought in the courts. Voting aid to veterans of the Revolution and Indian wars was a high priority, while placing bounties on wolf pelts answered farmers' complaints about losing livestock to predators. But there was also residual rancor over old disputes with Federalists. ... Clay's first important legislative initiative was a proposal to gerrymander Kentucky Federalists out of presidential politics. Four of Kentucky's six electoral districts would be eliminated to swallow up Federalist enclaves and prevent even a single Federalist elector from being chosen in the 1804 presidential election. ...

"Clay urged that Kentucky finance internal improvements to boost commerce in all parts of the state, foreshadowing his life's work on the national scene. He demonstrated an ability to bring together seemingly irreconcilable factions through compromise, and he became wedded to the idea that the key to political success was to promote the possible and avoid the unattainable ideal. Often that was accomplished through sleight of hand, sometimes with the simplest solutions. When he chaired a select committee on raising revenue, for example, a bill was proposed to tax billiard tables at $200 each. It was likely that such a measure would not generate much revenue but would instead make owning a billiard table beyond the means of taverns. Clay had the amount reduced to $50 but with an amendment naming the bill 'an act more effectually to suppress the practice of gaming.' Critics groused that he was more interested in saving billiards than promoting morality, but the tables survived, and the treasury profited.

"There were a few missteps. He offended Frankfort's citizens by repeatedly trying to have the state capital moved to Lexington. Frankfort was too small, he said; it lacked the radiating road system for which Lexington served as a hub. All of this was true, but it was impolitic to say so. Clay was never able to muster the two-thirds vote necessary to move the capital, but it was not for want of trying."

Author: David S. and Jeanne T. Heidler
Title: Henry Clay
Publisher: Random House
Date: Copyright 2010 by David Heidler and Jeanne Heidler
Pages: 47-48, 51-52
Tags: Presidents, States, Napoleon

delanceyplace.com 10/22/10 - abraham lincoln

2010-10-22T03:36:00.001-04:00

In today's excerpt - twenty-eight year old Abraham Lincoln's speech to the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois. Titled "The Perpetuation of our Political Institutions," Lincoln's 1838 comments addressed the rampant lynchings that followed the Emancipation Act of 1833, and his belief that America's greatest dangers came not from abroad but from within:

"We find ourselves in the peaceful possession of the fairest portion of the earth, as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate. ... At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.

"At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. ...

"I hope I am over wary; but if I am not, there is, even now, something of ill-omen amongst us. I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive minister of justice. ... Accounts of outrages committed by mobs form the everyday news of the times. ...

"When men take it in their heads to day, to hang gamblers, or burn murderers, they should recollect, that, in the confusion usually attending such transactions, they will be as likely to hang or burn someone, who is neither a gambler nor a murderer as one who is; and that, acting upon the example they set, the mob of to-morrow, may, and probably will, hang or burn some of them, by the very same mistake. And not only so; the innocent, those who have ever set their faces against violation of law in every shape, alike with the guilty, fall victims to the ravages of mob law; and thus it goes on, step by step, till all the walls erected for the defense of the persons and property of individuals, are trodden down, and disregarded. But all this even, is not the full extent of the evil. By such examples, by instances of the perpetrators of such acts going unpunished, the lawless in spirit, are encouraged to become lawless in practice; and having been used to restraint, but dread of punishment, they thus become, absolute unrestrained. ... Thus, then, by the operation of this mobocratic spirit, which all must admit is now abroad in the land, the strongest bulwark of any Government, and particularly of those constituted like ours, may effectually be broken down and destroyed ... [and] this Government cannot last. ...

"The question recurs, 'how shall we fortify against it?' The answer is simple. Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well wisher to his posterity, swear by the blood of the Revolution, never to violate in the least particular, the laws of the country; and never to tolerate their violation by others. As the patriots of seventy-six did to the support of the Declaration of Independence, so to the support of the Constitution and Laws, let every man remember that to violate the law, is to trample on the blood of his father, and to tear the character of his own, and his children's liberty. ... In short, let it become the political religion of the nation; and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the brave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars.

"The scenes of the revolution are not now or ever will be entirely forgotten; but that like everything else, they must fade upon the memory of the world, and grow more and more dim by the lapse of time. ... They were the pillars of the temple of liberty; and now, that they have crumbled away, that temple must fall, unless we, their descendants, supply their places with other pillars, hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason. Passion has helped us; but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason must furnish all the materials for our future support and defense. Let those materials be molded into general intelligence, sound morality and, in particular, a reverence for the constitution and laws. ...

"Upon these let the proud fabric of freedom rest, as the rock of its basis; and as truly as has been said of the only greater institution, 'the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.' "

Author: Abraham Lincoln
Title: "The Perpetuation of our Political Institutions"
Date: January 1838
Tags: Speeches, Presidents, Lynching

delanceyplace.com 10/21/10 - bureaucracies

2010-10-21T03:34:00.001-04:00

In today's encore excerpt - if you happen to work for a bureaucracy, you'll need to know the subtleties of "officespeak":

"This section deals with the technical aspects of officespeak, such as passive voice, circular reasoning, and rhetorical questions. These are the nuts and bolts of the Rube Goldberg contraption that is the language of the office. Obscurity, vagueness, and a noncommittal stance on everything define the essence of officespeak. No one wants to come out and say what they really think. It is much safer for the company and those up top to constantly cloak their language in order to hide how much they do know or, just as often, how much they don't know. ...

Passive voice: The bread and butter of press releases and official statements. For those who have forgotten their basic grammar, a sentence in the passive voice does not have an active verb. Thus, no one can take the blame for 'doing' something, since nothing, grammatically speaking, has been done by anybody. Using the passive voice takes the emphasis off yourself (or the company). Here [is an] few example of how the passive voice can render any situation guiltless:

'Five hundred employees were laid off.' (Not 'The company laid off five hundred employees,' or even worse, 'I laid off five hundred employees.' These layoffs occurred in a netherworld of displaced blame, in which the company and the individual are miraculously absent from the picture.) ...

Circular reasoning: Another favorite when it comes time to deliver bad news. In circular reasoning, a problem is posited and a reason is given. Except that the reason is basically just a rewording of the problem. Pretty nifty. Here are some examples to better explain the examples:

'Our profits are down because of [a decrease in revenues].'
'People were laid off because there was a surplus of workers.' ...

Rhetorical questions: The questions that ask for no answers. So why even ask the question? Because it makes it seem as though the listener is participating in a true dialogue. When your boss asks, 'Who's staying late tonight?' you know he really means, 'Anyone who wants to keep their job will work late.' Still, there's that split second when you think you have a say in the matter, when you believe your opinion counts. Only to be reminded, yet again, that no one cares what you think. ...

Hollow statements: The second cousin of circular reasoning. Hollow statements make it seem as though something positive is happening (such as better profits or increased market share), but they lack any proof to support the claim.

'Our company is performing better than it looks.'
'Once productivity increases, so will profits.' ...

They and them: Pronouns used to refer to the high-level management that no one has ever met, only heard whispers about. 'They' are faceless and often nameless. And their decisions render those beneath them impotent to change anything. 'They' fire people, 'they' freeze wages, 'they' make your life a living hell. It's not your boss who is responsible - he would love to reverse all these directives if he could. But you see, his hands are tied.

'I'd love to give you that raise, you know I would. But they're the ones in charge.'
'Okay, gang, bad news, no more cargo shorts allowed. Hey, I love the casual look, but they hate it.' ...

Obfuscation: A tendency to obscure, darken, or stupefy. The primary goal of the above techniques is, in the end, obfuscation. Whether it's by means of the methods outlined above or by injecting jargon-heavy phrases into sentences, corporations want to make their motives and actions as difficult to comprehend as possible."

Author: D.W. Martin
Title: Officespeak
Publisher: Simon Spotlight
Date: Copyright 2005 by David Martin
Pages: 11-20
Tags: Business, Rhetoric, Humor

delanceyplace.com 10/20/10 - flies, elephants, cities, and ideas

2010-10-20T03:35:00.004-04:00

In today's excerpt - flies, elephants, cities, and ideas:

"Scientists and animal lovers had long observed that as life gets bigger, it slows down. Flies live for hours or days; elephants live for half-centuries. The hearts of birds and small mammals pump blood much faster than those of giraffes and blue whales. But the relationship between size and speed didn't seem to be a linear one. A horse might be five hundred times heavier than a rabbit, yet its pulse certainly wasn't five hundred times slower than the rabbit's. After a formidable series of measurements in his Davis lab, [Swiss scientist Max] Kleiber discovered that this scaling phenomenon stuck to an unvarying mathematical script called 'negative quarter-power scaling.' If you plotted mass versus metabolism on a logarithmic grid, the result was a perfectly straight line that led from rats and pigeons all the way up to bulls and hippopotami. ...

"The more species Kleiber and his peers analyzed, the clearer the equation became: metabolism scales to mass to the negative quarter power. The math is simple enough: you take the square root of 1,000, which is (approximately) 31, and then take the square root of 31, which is (again, approximately) 5.5. This means that a cow, which is roughly a thousand times heavier than a woodchuck, will, on average, live 5.5 times longer, and have a heart rate that is 5.5 times slower than the woodchuck's. As the science writer George Johnson once observed, one lovely consequence of Kleiber's law is that the number of heartbeats per lifetime tends to be stable from species to species. Bigger animals just take longer to use up their quota. ...

"Several years ago, the theoretical physicist Geoffrey West decided to investigate whether Kleiber's law applied to one of life's largest creations: the superorganisms of human-built cities. Did the 'metabolism' of urban life slow down as cities grew in size? Was there an underlying pattern to the growth and pace of life of metropolitan systems? Working out of the legendary Santa Fe Institute, where he served as president until 2009, West assembled an international team of researchers and advisers to collect data on dozens of cities around the world, measuring everything from crime to household electrical consumption, from new patents to gasoline sales.

"When they finally crunched the numbers, West and his team were delighted to discover that Kleiber's negative quarter-power scaling governed the energy and transportation growth of city living. The number of gasoline stations, gasoline sales, road surface area, the length of electrical cables: all these factors follow the exact same power law that governs the speed with which energy is expended in biological organisms. If an elephant was just a scaled-up mouse, then, from an energy perspective, a city was just a scaled-up elephant.

"But the most fascinating discovery in West's research came from the data that didn't turn out to obey Kleiber's law. West and his team discovered another power law lurking in their immense database of urban statistics. Every datapoint that involved creativity and innovation - patents, R&D budgets, 'supercreative' professions, inventors - also followed a quarter-power law, in a way that was every bit as predictable as Kleiber's law. But there was one fundamental difference: the quarter-power law governing innovation was positive, not negative. A city that was ten times larger than its neighbor wasn't ten times more innovative; it was seventeen times more innovative. A metropolis fifty times bigger than a town was 130 times more innovative.

"Kleiber's law proved that as life gets bigger, it slows down. But West's model demonstrated one crucial way in which human-built cities broke from the patterns of biological life: as cities get bigger, they generate ideas at a faster clip. This is what we call 'superlinear scaling': if creativity scaled with size in a straight, linear fashion, you would of course find more patents and inventions in a larger city, but the number of patents and inventions per capita would be stable. West's power laws suggested something far more provocative: that despite all the noise and crowding and distraction, the average resident of a metropolis with a population of five million people was almost three times more creative than the average resident of a town of a hundred thousand."

Author: Steve Johnson
Title: Where Good Ideas Come From
Publisher: Riverhead
Date: Copyright 2010 by Steven Johnson
Pages: 8-11
Tags: Animals, Innovation, Science, Cities

delanceyplace.com 10/19/10 - mark twain, his mother, and slaves

2010-10-19T03:35:00.002-04:00

In today's excerpt - Samuel Clemens attempted to write his autobiography over several decades but never finished, and instructed that the draft not be made available for 100 years. In just-released manuscripts, Clemens wrote of his early schoolboy friendships with black slaves, including characters that appeared later in his most famous fictional works:

"All the negroes were friends of ours, and with those of our own age we were in effect comrades. I say in effect, using the phrase as a modification. We were comrades, and yet not comrades; color and condition interposed a subtle line which both parties were conscious of, and which rendered complete fusion impossible. We had a faithful and affectionate good friend, ally and adviser in 'Uncle Dan'l,' a middle-aged slave whose head was the best one in the
negro-quarter, whose sympathies were wide and warm, and whose heart was honest and simple and knew no guile. He has served me well, these many, many years. I have not seen him for more than half a century, and yet spiritually I have had his welcome company a good part of that time, and have staged him in books under his own name and as 'Jim,' and carted him all around - to Hannibal, down the Mississippi on a raft, and even across the Desert of Sahara in a balloon - and he has endured it all with the patience and friendliness and loyalty which were his birthright. It was on the farm that I got my strong liking for his race and my appreciation of certain of its fine qualities. This feeling and this estimate have stood the test of sixty years and more and have suffered no impairment. The black face is as welcome to me now as
it was then.

"In my schoolboy days I had no aversion to slavery. I was not aware that there was anything wrong about it. No one arraigned it in my hearing; the local papers said nothing against it; the local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was a holy thing, and that the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind - and then the texts were read aloud to us to make the matter sure; if the slaves themselves had an aversion to slavery they were wise and said nothing. In Hannibal we seldom saw a slave misused; on the farm, never.

"There was, however, one small incident of my boyhood days which touched this matter, and it must have meant a good deal to me or it would not have stayed in my memory, clear and sharp, vivid and shadowless, all these slow-drifting years. We had a little slave boy whom we had hired from some one, there in Hannibal. He was from the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and had been brought away from his family and his friends, half way across the American continent, and sold. He was a cheery spirit, innocent and gentle, and the noisiest creature that ever was, perhaps. All day long he was singing, whistling, yelling, whooping, laughing - it was maddening, devastating, unendurable. At last, one day, I lost all my temper, and went raging to my mother, and said Sandy had been singing for an hour without a single break, and I couldn't stand it, and wouldn't she please shut him up. The tears came into her eyes, and her lip trembled, and she said something like this -

" 'Poor thing, when he sings, it shows that he is not remembering, and that comforts me; but when he is still, I am afraid he is thinking, and I cannot bear it. He will never see his mother again; if he can sing, I must not hinder it, but be thankful for it. If you were older, you would understand me; then that friendless child's noise would make you glad.'

"It was a simple speech, and made up of small words, but it went home, and Sandy's noise was not a trouble to me any more. She never used large words, but she had a natural gift for making small ones do effective work. She lived to reach the neighborhood of ninety years, and was capable with her tongue to the last - especially when a meanness or an injustice roused her spirit. She has come handy to me several times in my books, where she figures as Tom
Sawyer's 'Aunt Polly.' I fitted her out with a dialect, and tried to think up other improvements for her, but did not find any. I used Sandy once, also; it was in 'Tom Sawyer;' I tried to get him to whitewash the fence, but it did not work. I do not remember what name I called him by in the book."

Author: Samuel Clemens
Title: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1
Publisher: University of California Press
Date: Copyright 2010, 2001 by the Mark Twain Foundation
Pages: 211-212
Tags: Slavery, Authors

delanceyplace.com 10/18/10 - rutherford b. hayes

2010-10-18T03:36:00.002-04:00

In today's excerpt - the deadlocked presidential election of 1876, during the nation's centennial, pitted New York Democrat Samuel Tilden against Ohio Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. At stake was enough autonomy for Southern states to disenfranchise blacks - and massive voting fraud in states like South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana gave Tilden the electoral edge. President Grant armed Washington against rumored attacks, and the crisis was not resolved until March of 1877 in a deal that gave Hayes the presidency in trade for the tacit authority these Southern states sought:

"As the new year of 1877 dawned, the nation appeared hopelessly deadlocked.
Officially Tilden had 184 electoral votes and Hayes 165, leaving 20 votes up for
grab. Hayes needed them all; Tilden required only a single vote to be president. The framers of the Constitution had not considered such a situation, simply stating that the electoral votes should be 'directed to the President of the Senate,' typically the vice president of the United States, who 'shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the Certificates and the votes shall then be counted.' But who decided which votes to open and read if there were two [different sets of votes] - or, as with Florida, three sets? ...

"Congress struggled to find a solution, remaining in continuous session into March. In January, each house appointed a committee to investigate the election. The House committee, dominated by Democrats, discovered that
corruption in the three questionable states meant that all three should go to
Tilden; the Senate committee, dominated by Republicans, concluded that fraud
and voter suppression in the three states meant that all should go to Hayes. This was not helpful. The House judiciary Committee then suggested the appointment of a joint special commission, which, after some very careful negotiation, led to a commission of five House members, five senators, and five Supreme Court justices. Originally the five justices were to be drawn from a hat, but Tilden killed that plan with the bon mot, 'I may lose the Presidency, but I will not raffle for it.' While Tilden and many other political leaders doubted the constitutionality of the commission, a consensus emerged that there were so many recipes for disaster that some resolution was required as quickly as possible, no matter how tenuous the legality of the process. Hayes and Tilden reluctantly accepted the commission in order to avoid a civil war. When one of Tilden's advisers suggested publicly opposing the commission, Tilden shot back, 'What is left but war?'

"Tilden's fears found validation in the increasing calls for violence circulating
through the country. It was a time of rumors, disturbing and bizarre - and occasionally true - as well as loud demands for violence. Reportedly, President Grant was planning a coup, while Confederate general Joseph Shelby supposedly announced in St. Louis that he would lead an army on Washington to put Tilden in the White House. Hearing this latter story, Confederate hero Colonel John S. Mosby, the 'Gray Ghost,' went to the White House and offered Grant his services to help ensure Hayes's inauguration. ...

"Troubled by the professed willingness of his fellow Americans to take up arms
so soon after their devastating Civil War, President Grant prepared to defend the capital. Grant could call on only 25,000 unpaid troops, most of them in the
West, and had to tread lightly. He could not afford to alienate the Democrats,
but they gave every indication of deliberately weakening the ability of the federal government to protect its democratic institutions. Grant adroitly maneuvered his available units to send a message of resolve while not appearing aggressive, ordering artillery companies placed on all the entrances to Washington, D.C., the streets of which, as the New York Herald reported, 'presented a martial appearance.' Grant ordered the man-of-war Wyoming to anchor in the Potomac River by the Navy Yard, where its guns could cover both the Anacostia Bridge from Maryland and the Long Bridge from Virginia. Meanwhile, a company of Marines took up position on the Chain Bridge. General Sherman told the press, 'We must protect the public property, . . . particularly the arsenals.' There was no way Sherman was going to let white Southerners get their hands on federal arms without a fight, and his clever placement of a few units helped to forestall possible coups in Columbia and New Orleans." ...

"Members of Congress began bringing pistols to the Capitol, and in Colum-
bus, Ohio, a bullet was shot through a window of the Hayes home while the
family was at dinner."

Author: Michael A. Bellesiles
Title: 1877
Publisher: The New Press
Date: Copyright 2010 by Michael A. Bellesiles
Pages: 38-41
Tags: Presidency, Elections

delanceyplace.com 10/15/10 - start-ups

2010-10-15T03:36:00.003-04:00

In today's excerpt - the extraordinary entrepreneurial culture of Israel:

"[Israel boasts] the highest density of start-ups in the world (a total of 3,850 start-ups, one for every 1,844 Israelis), [and] more Israeli companies are listed on the NASDAQ exchange than all companies from the entire European continent. ...

"In 2008, per capita venture capital investments in Israel were 2.5 times greater than in the United States, more than 30 times greater than in Europe, 80 times greater than in China, and 350 times greater than in India. Comparing absolute numbers, Israel - a country of just 7.1 million people - attracted close to $2 billion in venture capital, as much as flowed to the United Kingdom's 61 million citizens or to the 145 million people living in Germany and France combined. And Israel is the only country to experience a meaningful increase in venture capital from 2007 to 2008 [in the face of a global financial crisis.]

"After the United States, Israel has more companies listed on the NASDAQ than any other country in the world, including India, China, Korea, Singapore, and Ireland. And Israel is the world leader in the percentage of the economy that is spent on research and development. Israel's economy has also grown faster than the average for the developed economies of the world in most years since 1995.

"Even the wars Israel has repeatedly fought have not slowed the country down. During the six years following 2000, Israel was hit not just by the bursting of the global tech bubble but by the most intense period of terrorist attacks in its history and by the second Lebanon war. Yet Israel's share of the global venture capital market did not drop - it doubled, from 15 percent to 31 percent. And the Tel Aviv stock exchange was higher on the last day of the Lebanon war than on the first, as it was after the three-week military operation in the Gaza Strip in 2009.

"The Israeli economic story becomes even more curious when one considers the nation's dire state just a little over a half century ago.

"[The importance of start-ups and venture capital in any country is hard to overstate.] According to the pioneering work of Nobel Prize winner Robert Solow, technological innovation is the ultimate source of productivity and growth. It' s the only proven way for economies to consistently get ahead - especially innovation born by start-up companies. Recent Census Bureau data show that most of the net employment gains in the United States between 1980 and 2005 came from firms younger than five years old. Without start-ups, the average annual net employment growth rate would actually have been negative."

Author: Dan Senor and Saul Singer
Title: Start-Up Nation
Publisher: Twelve/Hachette
Date: Copyright 2009 by Dan Senor and Saul Singer
Pages: 11-19
Tags: Israel, Business, Venture Capital, Start-ups, Jobs

delanceyplace.com 10/14/10 - oklahoma!

2010-10-14T03:35:00.002-04:00

In today's encore excerpt - in 1942, in spite of over twenty years of success on Broadway, primarily in songwriting partnership with Larry Hart, Richard Rodgers and his sponsor, The Theater Guild, found themselves struggling and groveling to raise the $83,000 ($1,000,000 in today's dollars) needed for his new play Oklahoma!, in part because of his new and lesser known songwriting partner, Oscar Hammerstein. Oklahoma!, of course, went on to be one of the greatest financial successes in Broadway history, and Rodgers and Hammerstein went on to be its most successful songwriting team, with a long string of triumphs including South Pacific, The Sound of Music, and Carousel:

"Oscar Hammerstein's first choice of title for the musical, Oklahoma!, was discarded lest backers assume the show was about 'Okies' in the Depression. Cherokee Strip, an alternative suggestion was likewise abandoned for fear people would think it was a burlesque show. So, although no one really liked it, the safer Away We Go! - borrowed from square dancing lingo - became the working title. ...

"At first, the Guild's lack of funds did not worry the composers; they had a half-century of experience between them, a string of great successes behind them. The money would come. But no matter how industriously [director Terry] Helburn tried, the major producers would not touch the show with a ten-foot pole, and it was not difficult to see why. Apart from Rodgers, none of the principals involved had much to commend them to investors. Hammerstein hadn't written anything successful for a decade. ... Choreographer Agnes de Mille, a niece of the film director Cecil B. de Mille, had choreographed only two shows in the past half-decade, neither successful. Nothing there to attract the money men.

"Feeling that established stars might encourage investment, Terry Helburn had suggested Shirley Temple for the role of Laurey and Groucho Marx for the part of the leering peddler, Ali Hakim. Rodgers and Hammerstein held out for singers and actors who would be right for the parts, regardless whether their names had box-office appeal. Innovative, perhaps, and courageous, certainly, but not the stuff to attract an $83,000 investment. Do another show with Larry Hart, Rodgers was urged. Give us another [hit], but not, for God's sake, a musical about two cowboys competing to take a farmer's daughter to a box social.

"These reactions forced Rodgers and Hammerstein into what must have been one of the most humiliating experiences of their lives. With half a century of hits behind them, a formidable record of writing successfully for both stage and screen, they were reduced to working the 'penthouse circuit' cap in hand, trying to raise money for the show. It was no fun, as Hammerstein recalled. 'It was hard to finance, all right. We didn't have any stars, and those who were putting up money for plays felt you had to have stars. Dick and I would go from penthouse to penthouse giving auditions. Terry Helburn would narrate the story. Dick would play and I would sing 'Pore Jud Is Dead,' We weren't hugely successful.' ...

"Even when they augmented their penthouse performances with the singers, the process of raising money remained totally unreliable and painfully slow. Often, they would provide an evening of music and story for the beautiful people in their glittering palaces - and raise not a penny. ...

"Through producer Max Gordon, the Guild approached the forceful, leather-tongued Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Pictures, and got him to attend an audition at Steinway Hall. Cohn loved what he saw and promised to put up the money. For a few days, everyone thought their troubles were over, but then Columbia Pictures' board of directors disagreed with Cohn. The offer was withdrawn, although Cohn did invest $15,000 of his own money. Seeing the hard-headed Cohn put that kind of money into the show persuaded Max Gordon also to invest.

"Agnes de Mille related how the last of the money was raised. Terry Helburn went to see S. N. Behrman, a playwright who had won great acclaim with plays produced by the Guild. 'Sam,' she said, 'you've got to take $20,000 of this, because the Guild has done so much for you.' And he said, 'But, Terry, that's blackmail.' 'Yes,' she said. 'It is.' "

Author: Frederick Nolan
Title: The Sound of Their Music
Publisher: Applause
Date: Copyright 2002 by Frederick Nolan
Pages: 13-16
Tags: Broadway, Persistence

delanceyplace.com 10/13/10 - suicide bombers

2010-10-13T03:35:00.002-04:00

In today's excerpt - the cause of suicide terrorism:

"Suicide terrorism is rising around the world, but there is great confusion as to why. Since many such attacks - including, of course, those of September 11, 2001 - have been perpetrated by Muslim terrorists professing religious motives, it might seem obvious that Islamic fundamentalism is the central cause. This presumption has fueled the belief that future 9/11's can be avoided only by a wholesale transformation of Muslim societies, a core reason for broad public support in the United States for the recent conquest of Iraq.

"However, the presumed connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism is misleading and may be encouraging domestic and foreign policies likely to worsen America's situation and to harm many Muslims needlessly.

"I have compiled a database of every suicide bombing and attack around the globe from 1980 through 2003 - 315 attacks in all. It includes every attack in which at least one terrorist killed himself or herself while attempting to kill others; it excludes attacks authorized by a national government, for example by North Korea against the South. This database is the first complete universe of suicide terrorist attacks worldwide. I have amassed and independently verified all the relevant information that could be found in English and other languages (for example, Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, and Tamil) in print and on-line. The information is drawn from suicide terrorist groups themselves, from the main organizations that collect such data in target countries, and from news media around the world. More than a 'list of lists,' this database probably represents the most comprehensive and reliable survey of suicide terrorist attacks that is now available.

"The data show that there is little connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, or any one of the world's religions. In fact, the leading instigators of suicide attacks are the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a Marxist-Leninist group whose members are from Hindu families but who are adamantly opposed to religion. This group committed 76 of the 315 incidents, more suicide attacks than Hamas.

"Rather, what nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland. Religion is rarely the root cause, although it is often used as a tool by terrorist organizations in recruiting and in other efforts in service of the broader strategic objective.

"Three general patterns in the data support my conclusions. First, nearly all suicide terrorist attacks occur as part of organized campaigns, not as isolated or random incidents. Of the 315 separate attacks in the period I studied, 301 could have their roots traced to large, coherent political or military campaigns.

"Second, democratic states are uniquely vulnerable to suicide terrorists. The United States, France, India, Israel, Russia, Sri Lanka, and Turkey have been the targets of almost every suicide attack of the past two decades, and each country has been a democracy at the time of the incidents.

"Third, suicide terrorist campaigns are directed toward a strategic objective. From Lebanon to Israel to Sri Lanka to Kashmir to Chechnya, the sponsors of every campaign have been terrorist groups trying to establish or maintain political self-determination by compelling a democratic power to withdraw from the territories they claim. Even al-Qaeda fits this pattern: although Saudi Arabia is not under American military occupation per se, a principal objective of Osama bin Laden is the expulsion of American troops from the Persian Gulf and the reduction of Washington's power and influence in the region."

Author: Robert A. Pape
Title: Dying to Win
Publisher: Random House
Date: Copyright 2005 by Robert A. Pape
Pages: 3-4
Tags: Suicide, Terrorism, Middle East

delanceyplace.com 10/12/10 - the new south

2010-10-12T03:35:00.002-04:00

In today's excerpt - our American narrative says that in 1865 the slaves of the south were free. But in 1877, and in the decades that followed, the lot of blacks had scarcely improved. Enforced servitude, intimidation and murder were routinely carried out and condoned, and federal troops were scantily available to travel south and enforce the new laws of the land. A former slave named Henry Adams kept a list:

"Henry Adams kept a list. It was a long list, and one that kept growing. Every
time whites committed a violent act against blacks in his northern Louisiana
parish of Clairborne, Adams would add a new entry. There was number 323,
Manuel Gregory, who was hanged for 'talking to a white girl,' and number 333,
Abe Young, who boasted that he was going to vote Republican, for which crime he was 'shot by white men.' Number 453, Jack Shanbress, was whipped and then shot 'because he was president of a Republican club.' Ben Gardner, number 454, was 'badly beaten by white men' for refusing to work another year on 'Mr. Gamble's plantation.' Eliza Smith, number 486, was 'badly whipped by Frank Hall' for 'not being able to work while sick,' while a black man known only as Jack, number 599, was 'hung dead, by white men,' for having 'sauced a white man' - talking back after having received instructions. By the time Henry Adams presented his list to a committee of the United States Senate in 1878, there were 683 violent incidents.

"When the committee asked Adams what they could do to help, he responded
that only federal troops proved effective in curbing violence. The white terrorists, called 'bulldozers' in Louisiana, had no reason to fear local law enforcement, which they dominated. When federal troops came into his parish during the 1876 election, the bulldozers 'stopped killing our people as much as they had been; the White Leagues stopped raging about with their guns so much.' But only the governor could request federal assistance, and that office had fallen into the hands of the terrorists themselves.

"Henry Adams had been a slave for twenty-two years and knew well the anger
of Louisiana's whites. But when he joined the United States Army, he met whites worthy of his respect, and in 1869 at Fort Jackson he began attending a school for black soldiers run by a white woman named Mrs. Bentine. Adams learned to read and write, and felt a new world opening before him, one that promised greater equality and opportunity. The following year he voted for the first time and perceived the potential of democracy, becoming a leader in his community and a successful businessman. As an organizer for the Republican Party, he found a number of whites with whom he could work and whom he esteemed for their honesty and courage, but the majority of whites belonged to the Democratic Party and sought to silence those with whom they disagreed.

Reconstruction gave the former slaves hope for the future, but it aroused the rage of the defeated Confederates who despised the new order. ... Those who did not share a conviction in the inherent right of white men to rule totally were to be silenced and the South would speak with a single voice. These
whites, so often the same people who had supported slavery and secession in the past, did not hesitate to use violence to attain their ends - thus Adams's list.

"Joe Johnson was another name on that list, but also Adams's friend. He had
been elected constable in East Feliciana Parish on the Republican ticket in November 1876. When Adams went to visit his friend in the first days of 1877, he found a grieving widow standing by the smoldering ruin of Johnson's house. She told him how more than fifty white men had come to their house and killed her husband 'because he refused to resign his office as constable.' They set fire to the house with Johnson inside, leaving him for dead. But Johnson crawled from the house into a pool of water, even though 'all the skin was burnt off of him.' The terrorists saw Johnson and shot him several times, though he lingered on for several days before dying. Adams had to admit to Johnson's widow that there was little chance for justice, 'as I knew that white men had been killing our race so long, and they had not been stopped yet.' Standing with her children, Mrs. Johnson wept, 'O, Lord God of Hosts, help us to get out of this country and get somewhere where we can live.' "

Author: Michael A. Bellesiles
Title: 1877
Publisher: The New Press
Date: Copyright 2010 by Michael A. Bellesiles
Pages: 21-22
Tags: Slavery, Hate, Civil War

delanceyplace.com 10/11/10 - pulitzer and death

2010-10-11T03:34:00.003-04:00

In today's excerpt - Joseph Pulitzer, a penniless Hungarian immigrant, came to America alone at seventeen and became one of America's wealthiest citizens through the newspaper empire he founded. Through it all, he was driven and haunted by death:

"Despite having secured a place in the upper echelons of Pest (the city in Hungary across the Danube from Buda) Jewish society, the succession of deaths continued to haunt the Pulitzer [family]. Before leaving [the Hungarian village of] Mako, they had lost two of their children. In Pest, five more died. Because they were living in a prosperous urban setting where infant death had become rarer, the loss of these children was harder to bear than before. The deaths in Pest included their eldest son, who succumbed to tuberculosis, ending their plans for him to take over the family business. Death's grip on the family did not end here. On July 16, 1858, [Joseph's father] Fulop died. Only forty-seven years old and at the peak of his business success, he also had contracted tuberculosis.

"Four years older than Albert, [his only surviving brother,] Joseph understood more fully the extent of the calamity. He had been nine when his older brother died, ten when his younger brothers and sister died, eleven when his father died, and thirteen at the death of his last sister. Albert, in contrast, was not yet
nine when the last sibling died. Under the best of circumstances, Joseph would have felt guilty for having survived. But in his case, he responded in other ways as well. The deaths led to an obsession with his health that would remain with him until the end of his life. Every ailment, no matter how small, was accompanied by an underlying fear that he was dying. Further, he developed a phobia of funerals. Even when his closest friends died, Joseph would refuse to attend their burials, and, pointedly, he would not attend the funeral of either his mother or his only surviving brother.

"As an additional cruelty, his father's death created a financial nightmare. In his will, Fulop instructed that his estate be divided among his surviving children, with his wife as ward of the shares. But Fulop's prolonged illness had depleted his savings. By the time the executor sent ten florins to the Jewish hospital and to a poorhouse, about the price of an eimer (pail) of wine, there was almost nothing left.

" 'Thus was my mother,' said Albert, 'left to provide for her boys and one daughter, alone and unfriended.' Since she had no business experience, it was only a matter of time before the enterprise went bankrupt. Within six months their property was seized by authorities for failure to pay taxes. The family limped along. Elize did her best to earn an income and to keep paying for the education of her children. 'What efforts she put forth to give us a thorough education,' said Albert. 'How she deprived herself of all that she held most dear to her comfort and well being! '

"Financial relief appeared in the form of a marriage proposal. Max Frey, a merchant from the southeastern Hungarian town of Detta, won Elize's consent but not that of Joseph or Albert. ... In Joseph's case Frey's entrance into the family, or what little was left of the family, increased his sense of loss and solitariness. Years later, writing an intimate, confessional letter, he conveyed the toll from the deaths and the remarriage. He described himself as 'a poor
orphan who never even enjoyed as much of a luxury as a father.' "

Author: James McGrath Morris
Title: Pulitzer
Publisher: Harper
Date: Copyright 2010 by James McGrath Morris
Pages: 15-17
Tags: Death, Business, Family

delanceyplace.com 10/8/10 - buddha's teachings

2010-10-08T03:35:00.002-04:00

In today's excerpt - the teachings of Siddhatta Gotama (Siddhartha Gautama), the Buddha (circa 500 BCE), did not include such items as an explanation of the origin of the universe, because he was only concerned with those teachings that helped relieve suffering:

"The Buddha had no time for doctrines or creeds; he had no theology to impart, no theory about the root cause of dukkha (suffering), no tales of an Original Sin, and no definition of the Ultimate Reality. He saw no point in
such speculations. Buddhism is disconcerting to those who equate faith with belief in certain inspired religious opinions. A person's theology was a matter of total indifference to the Buddha. To accept a doctrine on somebody else's authority was, in his eyes, an 'unskillful' state, which could not lead to
enlightenment, because it was an abdication of personal responsibility. He saw no virtue in submitting to an official creed. 'Faith' meant trust that Nibbana (nirvana) existed and a determination to prove it to oneself. The Buddha always insisted that his disciples test everything he taught them against their
own experience and take nothing on hearsay. A religious idea could all too easily become a mental idol, one more thing to cling to, when the purpose of the dhamma (dharma, religious teachings or truths) was to help people to let go.

" 'Letting go' is one of the keynotes of the Buddha's teaching. The enlightened person did not grab or hold on to even the most authoritative instructions. Everything was transient and nothing lasted. Until his disciples recognized this in every fiber of their being, they would never reach Nibbana. Even his own
teachings must be jettisoned, once they had done their job. He once compared them to a raft, telling the story of a traveler who had come to a great expanse of water and desperately needed to get across. There was no bridge, no ferry, so he built a raft and rowed himself across the river. But then, the Buddha would ask his audience, what should the traveler do with the raft? Should he decide that because it had been so helpful to him, he should load it onto his back and lug it around with him wherever he went? Or should he simply moor it and continue his journey? The answer was obvious. 'In just the same way, bhikkhus (monks), my teachings are like a raft, to be used to cross the river and not to be held on to,' the Buddha concluded. 'If you understand their raft-like nature correctly, you will even give up good teachings, not to mention bad ones! '

"His Dhamma was wholly pragmatic. Its task was not to issue infallible definitions or to satisfy a disciple's intellectual curiosity about metaphysical questions. Its sole purpose was to enable people to get across the river of pain to the 'further shore.' His job was to relieve suffering and help his disciples
attain the peace of Nibbana. Anything that did not serve that end was of no importance whatsoever.

"Hence there were no abstruse theories about the creation of the universe or the existence of a Supreme Being. These matters might be interesting but they would not give a disciple enlightenment or release from dukkha. One day, while living in a grove of simsapa trees in Kosambi, the Buddha plucked a few
leaves and pointed out to his disciples that there were many more still growing in the wood. So too he had only given them a few teachings and withheld many others. Why? 'Because, my disciples, they will not help you, they are not useful in the quest for holiness, they do not lead to peace and to the direct
knowledge of Nibbana.' He told one monk, who kept pestering him about philosophy, that he was like a wounded man who refused to have treatment until he learned the name of the person who had shot him and what village he came from: he would die before he got this useless information. In just the
same way, those who refused to live according to the Buddhist method until they knew about the creation of the world or the nature of the Absolute would die in misery before they got an answer to these unknowable questions. What difference did it make if the world was eternal or created in time? Grief, suffering and misery would still exist. The Buddha was concerned simply with the cessation of pain. 'I am preaching a cure for these unhappy conditions here and now,' the Buddha told the philosophically inclined bhikkhu, 'so always remember what I have not explained to you and the reason why I have refused to explain it.' "

Author: Karen Armstrong
Title: Buddha
Publisher: Penguin
Date: Copyright 2001 by Karen Armstrong
Pages: 100-103
Tags: Religion

delanceyplace.com 10/7/10 - marco polo and the renaissance

2010-10-07T03:36:00.002-04:00

In today's encore excerpt - the Renaissance in Europe owed a tremendous debt to the inventions that Marco Polo (1254-1324), his father Niccolò and his uncle Maffeo brought back to Venice from their twenty-four years of travel in China:

"[Upon their return from China], the three Polos received respect from their fellow citizens, with Marco singled out for special attention. 'All the young men went every day continuously to visit and converse with Messer Marco,' Giambattista Ramusio claimed. 'who was most charming and gracious, and to ask of him matters concerning Cathay (China) and the Great Khan, and he responded with so much kindness that all felt themselves to be in a certain manner indebted to him.'

"It is easy to understand why Marco attracted notice. The significance of the inventions that he brought back from China, or which he later described in his Travels, cannot be overstated. At first, Europeans regarded these technological marvels with disbelief, but eventually they adopted them.

"Paper money, virtually unknown in the West until Marco's return, revolutionized finance and commerce throughout the West.

"Coal, another item that had caught Marco's attention in China, provided a new and relatively efficient source of heat to an energy-starved Europe.

"Eyeglasses (in the form of ground lenses), which some accounts say he brought back with him, became accepted as a remedy for failing eyesight. In addition, lenses gave rise to the telescope - which in turn revolutionized naval battles, since it allowed combatants to view ships at a great distance - and the microscope. Two hundred years later, Galileo used the telescope - based on the same technology - to revolutionize science and cosmology by supporting and disseminating the Copernican theory that Earth and other planets revolved around the Sun.

"Gunpowder, which the Chinese had employed for at least three centuries, revolutionized European warfare as armies exchanged their lances, swords, and crossbows for cannon, portable harquebuses, and pistols.

"Marco brought back gifts of a more personal nature as well. The golden paiza, or passport, given to him by Kublai Khan had seen him through years of travel, war, and hardship. Marco kept it still, and would to the end of his days. He also brought back a Mongol servant, whom he named Peter, a living reminder of the status he had once enjoyed in a far-off land.

"In all, it is difficult to imagine the Renaissance - or, for that matter, the modern world - without the benefit of Marco Polo's example of cultural transmission between East and West."

Author: Laurence Bergreen
Title: Marco Polo
Publisher: Knopf
Date: Copyright 2007 by Laurence Bergreen
Pages: 320-321
Tags:

delanceyplace.com 10/6/10 - whales

2010-10-06T03:35:00.002-04:00

In today's excerpt - in the late 1800s, the newly well-to-do middle classes of England and America developed an insatiable fascination with the exotic, including a chance for an up-close view of living whales. But they didn't know how to keep those whales alive, including the P.T. Barnum whale that was roasted to death:

"In 1861, Phineas T. Barnum had imported a pair of belugas to his American Museum on Broadway. Fished out of the waters off Labrador and brought south in hermetically sealed boxes lined with seaweed, the whales were twenty-three and eighteen feet long respectively. Their basement tank measured fifty-eight by twenty-five feet, but it was barely seven feet deep, and was filled with fresh water. ...

"This fascination with the whale ... was an expression of Victorian fashion, a characteristic marriage of ingenious science and human curiosity. In England, live whales were delivered to aquaria in Manchester and Blackpool (although one porpoise show was closed, for fear the flagrant activities of its performers
should offend genteel dispositions), and in September 1877 a beluga whale arrived in Westminster, in the centre of the world's greatest city. The nine-foot, six-inch specimen had also been caught - along with ten others - off Labrador, where it had stranded at high tide and was netted by Zack Coup and his men.
From there it began its long journey to London.

"Taken in a narrow box by sloop to Montreal, the whale was put on a train to New York - a trip that took two weeks. The animal spent seven months at Coney Island's Summer Aquarium where 'he contracted his habit of swimming in a circle', before being taken out of its tank and put on a North German Lloyd
steamship, the Oder, bound for Southampton (England). During the voyage, it was kept on deck in a rough wooden box lined with seaweed, and was wetted with salt water every three minutes. Despite such intensive care, the whale had already begun to live off its own blubber.

"At Southampton the beluga was transferred to the South-Western Railway, traveling on an open truck to Waterloo Station and to its final home, an iron tank forty-four feet long, twenty feet wide, and six feet deep, at the Royal Aquarium, a grand gothic structure recently built opposite the Houses of Parliament. The whale waited as the tank took two hours to fill. 'He had been
lying still in the box breathing once every 23 seconds. He flapped feebly with his tail when he felt them moving the box. He fell out of it sidelong into the water and went down to the bottom like lead.' The animal was allowed three hours of privacy before the public, 'in great numbers,' were admitted to view it from a specially built grandstand. ...

"In what appeared to be delirious behaviour, the whale - which was in fact a female - swam up and down the tank rapidly, hitting its head on the wall. Then, 'having somewhat recovered, it again swam several times round the tank, again came into collision with the end of the tank, turned over, and died.'...

"A necropsy performed by eminent naturalists and physicians ... discovered that far from starving, the whale had a full stomach - but also highly congested lungs. The fact that the animal had been kept on open deck on its way over the Atlantic, and, rather than keeping it alive, the regular dousing it
had received had resulted in rapid evaporation between soakings, causing it to catch cold. ...

"Back in New York, Barnum's whales met with their predicted fate. Victims of equally inappropriate conditions, like fairground fish brought home in plastic bags, they too had died within days - only to be replaced by successive specimens until a fire destroyed the museum in 1865. Futile attempts were made to rescue the last beluga, until a compassionate fireman smashed the tank with a hook, 'So the whale merely roasted to death instead of undergoing the distress of being poached.' "

Author: Philip Hoare
Title: The Whale
Publisher: Ecco, Harper Collins
Date: Copyright 2010 by Philip Hoare
Pages: 12-15

delanceyplace.com 10/5/10 - pulitzer

2010-10-05T03:35:00.002-04:00

In today's excerpt - Joseph Pulitzer (1847-1911), the son of Hungarian Jews, and his New York World newspaper brought in the age of mass communications. His circulation battle with his upstart competitor William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951) is often credited with precipitating the Spanish-America War:

"[Even in his twilight years, as he traveled the globe, Joseph] Pulitzer never relaxed his grip on the World, his influential New York newspaper that had ushered in the modern era of mass communications. An almost unbroken stream of telegrams, all written in code, flowed from ports and distant destinations to New York, directing every part of the paper's operation. The messages even included such details as the typeface used in an advertisement and the vacation schedule of editors. Managers shipped back reams of financial data, editorial reports, and espionage-style accounts of one another's work. Although he had set foot in his skyscraper headquarters on Park Row only three times, whenever anyone talked about the newspaper it was always 'Pulitzer's World.'

"And it was talked about. Since Pulitzer took over the moribund newspaper in 1883 and introduced his brand of journalism to New York, the World had grown at meteoric speed, becoming, at one point, the largest circulating newspaper on the globe. Six acres of spruce trees were felled a day to keep up with its demand for paper, and almost every day enough lead was melted into type to set an entire Bible into print.

"Variously credited with having elected presidents, governors, and mayors; sending politicians to jail; and dictating the public agenda, the World was a potent instrument of change. As a young man in a hurry Pulitzer had unabashedly used the paper as a handmaiden of reform, to raise social consciousness and promote a progressive - almost radical - political agenda. The changes he had called for, like the outlandish ideas of taxing inheritances, income, and corporations, had become widely accepted.

"'The World should be more powerful than the President,' Pulitzer once said. ...

"The [explosion of the USS Maine], coming at a time of rising tension between Spain and America, became incendiary kindling in the hands of battling newspaper editors in New York. William Randolph Hearst, a young upstart imitator from California armed with an immense family fortune, had done the unthinkable. In 1898 his paper, the New York Journal, was closing in on the World's dominance of Park Row. Fighting down to the last possible reader, each seeking to outdo the other in its eagerness to lead the nation into war,
the two journalistic behemoths fueled an outburst of jingoistic fever. And when the war came, they continued their cutthroat competition by marshaling armies of reporters, illustrators, and photographers to cover every detail of its promised glory.

"The no-holds-barred attitude of the World and Journalput the newspapers into a spiraling descent of sensationalism, outright fabrications, and profligate spending. If left unchecked, it threatened to bankrupt both their credibility and their businesses. ... In the end, the two survived this short but intense circulation war. But their rivalry became almost as famous as the Spanish-American War itself. Pulitzer was indissolubly linked with Hearst as a purveyor of vile Yellow Journalism. In fact, some critics suspected that Pulitzer's current
plans to endow a journalism school at Columbia University and create a national prize for journalists were thinly veiled attempts to cleanse his
legacy before his approaching death."

Author: James McGrath Morris
Title: Pulitzer
Publisher: Harper
Date: Copyright 2009 by James McGrath Morris
Pages: 2-4

delanceyplace.com 10/4/10 - violence

2010-10-04T03:34:00.000-04:00

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In today's excerpt - violence is a recurring problem in America. Five years after
their initial injury, twenty percent of those who have had a
gunshot or stab wound will be dead:

"According to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), young black men have a higher rate of both fatal and nonfatal violence than any other group. National statistics show that homicide is the leading cause of death for African American men between the ages Of 15 and 34. In 2006, 2,946 black males between the ages Of 15 and 24 were victims of homicide. This means that the homicide rate for black males aged 15 to 24 was 92 in 100,000. For white males in the same age range, the homicide rate was 4.7 in 100,000. In other words, the homicide death rate was more than 19 times higher for young black men than young white men.

"Homicide numbers across the nation have decreased over the past decade, but a closer look at these homicide statistics shows disturbing trends. Daniel Webster and his colleagues at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health have found that although overall homicide rates have appeared stable since 1999, the homicide rate among African American men between the ages of 25 and 44 has increased substantially. It is no wonder, then, that as these homicides are reported in the news, flashed across television screens, and recapitulated in films, we would come to associate young black men with homicide.

"But homicide represents only the tip of the iceberg with regard to violence. Nonfatal injuries are far more common than fatal injuries. The CDC estimates that for every homicide, there are more than 94 nonfatal violent incidents. Even with the increasing lethality of the guns available, the ratio of firearm-related injuries from nonfatal physical assaults to firearm-related homicides was four to one. In other words, for every person who gets shot and dies, another four get shot and survive.

"While it is true that a person is more likely to die of a gunshot wound than from injuries delivered by other kinds of weapons, many young people are stabbed or assaulted. The ratios of nonfatal to fatal injuries for other types of violence show the same pattern. For those who are stabbed or cut, 64 people
survive for each person who dies. For physical assaults, 3,243 people survive for each person who dies. In nonfatal injury, just as in homicide, black males are disproportionately affected. In data from the year 2000, the overall violent assault rate for black males was 4.6 times higher than the rate for non-Hispanic white males. Countless others suffer trauma or near-trauma that never comes to the attention of the health care system, like being shot at or being grazed by a bullet or beaten up but not badly enough to seek medical care.

"Studies also show that violence is a recurrent problem. Up to 45 percent of people who have had a penetrating injury - a gunshot or stab wound - will have another similar injury within five years. More disturbing is the finding that five years after their initial injury, 20 percent of these individuals are dead."

Author: John A. Rich, M.D., M.P.H.
Title: Wrong Place, Wrong Time
Publisher: Johns Hopkins
Date: Copyright 2009 by Johns Hopkins University Press
Pages: ix-xi

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delanceyplace.com 10/1/10 - the presidency

2010-10-01T03:35:00.002-04:00

In today's excerpt - the U.S. presidency. Our founding fathers hotly debated the extent of the powers of the president when crafting America's constitution. In the end though, the powers of the president were placed in the constitution after the powers of congress, and the president was given powers that were in no small measure subordinate to the powers of Congress. These more modest powers were even reflected in the choice of the more modest title of "president" for the position:

"On Friday, June 1, 1787, the Philadelphia Convention turned to the seventh resolution of the Virginia Plan introduced three days earlier, 'that a national Executive be instituted, to be chosen by the National Legislature.' With George Washington, the delegates' unanimous choice for convention president, looking on, James Wilson of Pennsylvania made a bold suggestion. He moved 'that the
Executive consist of a single person.' After South Carolina's Charles Pinckney seconded the motion, 'a considerable pause' ensued.

"What sort of officer would this be? An elected monarch, as several of the delegates feared?' Or something far less imposing?

"The title the delegates settled on for the chief executive was humble enough. As commonly used in the 18th century, the term indicated the presiding officer of a legislature, with an emphasis on the 'presiding' function, 'almost to the exclusion of any executive powers,' a position 'usually [held by] men whose talents and reputations matched their office.'

"In fact, some found the very modesty of the title irritating. Even 'fire companies and a cricket club' could have a 'president,' Vice President John Adams complained shortly after taking his place as presiding officer of the new Senate. On April 23, 1789, three days after arriving in New York - then the seat of the national government - Adams delivered an extensive speech to the Senate insisting that the president and vice president needed honorific titles to lend an air of dignity and majesty to government. At Adams' behest, the Senate appointed a committee to confer with the House of Representatives on what titles would be appropriate. The House wanted nothing to do with the idea. James Madison, then serving as a representative from Virginia, scorned Adams' effort. 'The more simple, the more republican we are in our manners,' Madison told his colleagues, 'the more national dignity we shall acquire.' When the joint committee recommended against 'annex[ing] any style or title to [those] expressed in the Constitution,' the House unanimously adopted the committee's report.

"Yet, Adams wouldn't take no for an answer. At his urging, the Senate appointed a new Title Committee, which on May 9 proposed that the president be addressed as 'His Highness, the President of the United States, and Protector of their Liberties.' When the Senate moved to postpone consideration of the report, Adams launched into a 'forty minute ... harangue' on the 'absolute necessity' of titles.

"In this debate, Adams had a formidable opponent, Senator William Maclay of Pennsylvania, a man possibly more Jeffersonian than Jefferson, a partisan republican before factions had properly formed. In Maclay's private journal, which remains one of our best records of the proceedings of the first Senate, he condemned the 'base,' 'silly,' and 'Idolatrous' attempt to append quasi-monarchical titles to the nation's new constitutional officers."

Author: Gene Healy
Title: The Cult of the Presidency
Publisher: Cato
Date: Copyright 2008 by the Cato Institute
Pages: 15-16

delanceyplace.com 9/30/10 - the comedian albert brooks

2010-09-30T03:36:00.002-04:00

In today's encore excerpt - comedian Albert Brooks (b. 1947), graduate of Beverly Hills High School and veteran of such films as Broadcast News and Lost in America, was a stand-up comedian in the late 1960s in the vanguard of a new direction in comedy. Where Lenny Bruce and his acolytes had set out to make comedy more socially relevant, Brooks set out to lampoon the narcissism of celebrity and show business itself:

"Brook's comedy didn't seem to be about anything but show business itself - or more to the point, making fun of show business. ...

"For the most part they were lampoons of bad show business acts. Brooks played an animal trainer, for example, whose elephant has gotten sick at the last moment and has to be replaced by a frog; he gamely tries to do his routine with the stand-in, apologizing when the tricks (roll over; grab a peanut) don't come off. He did a parody of the old vaudeville stunt in which a man tries to keep a dozen plates spinning simultaneously on top of poles. Instead of plates, Brooks brought a half-dozen people on stage and tried to keep them all laughing at the same time; whenever the yuks started to die down, he scurried around trying to rev them up again with a new joke.

"In another bit, Brooks dressed up in a leotard, slippers, and Marcel Marceau whiteface to play the world's worst mime. He starts out by telling a bit of his life story ('My mother was quite domineering. I was afraid to speak ...') and becomes so caught up in the monologue that soon he's puffing a cigar and delivering Vegas zingers ('Take my wife - si vous plait!'). When he finally performs his mime, he provides a running commentary to explain what he's doing ('climbing ze stairs'), before belting out 'Make Someone Happy' for the schmaltzy, Jolson-style big finish.

"It was inspired nonsense, Brooks's demolition of the entire history of cheesy showbiz. ... At the first American Music Awards, he appeared as a children's songwriter who performs a Vegas-style tribute to his own greatest hits, simplistic ditties like 'Eat Your Beans' and 'Brush Your Teeth.' ...

"Some dubbed it post-funny, or anti-comedy: the joke was how bad the jokes were. Comedians before him, like Carlin and Klein, had poked fun at the slick and foolish and insincere in show business. But Brooks carried it a step further: he was making fun of how show business had infected all of us, creating a world of amateurs and wannabes so desperate for applause that they could barrel through any kind of inanity."

Author: Richard Zoglin
Title: Comedy at the Edge
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Date: Copyright 2008 by Richard Zoglin
Pages: 110-114

delanceyplace.com 9/29/10 - clouds

2010-09-29T03:35:00.002-04:00

In today's excerpt - clouds and the names of clouds:

"The person most frequently identified as the father of modern meteorology was an English pharmacist named Luke Howard, who came to prominence at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Howard is chiefly remembered now for giving cloud types their names in 1803. ...

"Howard divided clouds into three groups: stratus for the layered clouds, cumulus for the fluffy ones (the word means 'heaped' in Latin), and cirrus (meaning 'curled') for the high, thin feathery formations that generally presage colder weather. To these he subsequently added a fourth term, nimbus (from the Latin for 'cloud'), for a rain cloud. The beauty of Howard's system was that the basic components could be freely recombined to describe every shape and size of passing cloud - stratocumulus, cirrostratus, cumulocongestus, and so on. It was an immediate hit, and not just in England. The poet Johann von Goethe in Germany was so taken with the system that he dedicated four poems to Howard.

"Howard's system has been much added to over the years, so much so
that the encyclopedic if little read International Cloud Atlas runs to two volumes, but interestingly virtually all the post-Howard cloud types - mammatus, pileus, nebulosis, spissatus, floccus, and mediocris are a
sampling - have never caught on with anyone outside meteorology and not terribly much there, I'm told. Incidentally, the first, much thinner edition of that atlas, produced in 1896, divided clouds into ten basic types, of which the plumpest and most cushiony-looking was number nine, cumulonimbus.* That seems to have been the source of the expression 'to be on cloud nine.'

"For all the heft and fury of the occasional anvil-headed storm cloud, the average cloud is actually a benign and surprisingly insubstantial thing. A fluffy summer cumulus several hundred yards to a side may contain no more than twenty-five or thirty gallons of water - 'about enough to fill a bathtub,' as James Trefil has noted. You can get some sense of the immaterial quality of clouds by strolling through fog - which is, after all, nothing more than a cloud that lacks the will to fly. To quote Trefil again: 'If you walk 100 yards through a typical fog, you will come into contact with only about half a cubic inch of water - not enough to give you a decent drink.' In consequence, clouds are not great reservoirs of water. Only about 0.035 percent of the Earth's fresh water is floating around above us at any moment.

" *If you have ever been struck by how beautifully crisp and well defined the edges of cumulus clouds tend to be, while other clouds are more blurry, the explanation is that in a cumulus cloud there is a pronounced boundary between the moist interior of the cloud and the dry air beyond it. Any water molecule that strays beyond the edge of the cloud is immediately zapped by the dry air beyond, allowing the cloud to keep its fine edge. Much higher cirrus clouds are composed of ice, and the zone between the edge of the cloud and the air beyond is not so clearly delineated, which is why they tend to be blurry at the edges."

Author: Bill Bryson
Title: A Short History of Nearly Everything
Publisher: Broadway
Date: Copyright 2003 by Bill Bryson
Pages: 263-265

delanceyplace.com 9/28/10 - war and crime

2010-09-28T03:37:00.002-04:00

In today's excerpt - soldiers, demobilizing after the end of a war, are vulnerable to the lures of crime. They are largely young, have few marketable skills, are often unemployed, and are trained to fight. Two of the greatest periods of pirate activity in the Mediterranean and Caribbean followed the ends of two of England's long wars, and those periods of piracy died out soon after those generations passed:

"Two of the most dramatic increases in pirate activity took place when peace was declared after long periods of naval warfare and large numbers of seamen were out of work.

"[The first such surge began] when fifty years of hostilities between England and Spain were finally ended in 1603, [and] hundreds of seamen from the Royal Navy and from privateers were thrown on the streets. Their only skill was in handling a ship, and many turned to piracy. For the next thirty years, shipping in the English Channel, the Thames estuary, and the Mediterranean was ravaged by pirates

"The second surge in piracy took place in the years following the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713, which brought peace among England, France, and Spain. The size of the Royal Navy slumped from 53,785 in 1703 to 13,430 in 1715, putting 40,000 seamen out of work. There is no proof that these men joined the ranks of the pirates, and Marcus Rediker has pointed out that most pirates were drawn from the merchant navy, not the Royal Navy; but many contemporary observers believed that the rise in pirate attacks in the years after the Peace of Utrecht was due to the large numbers of unemployed seamen. They particularly blamed the Spanish for driving the logwood cutters out of the bays of Campeche and Honduras after the Treaty of Utrecht, and they also blamed the privateers. Many privateering commissions had been issued in the later years of the seventeenth century, particularly in the West Indies. Peace put an end to this, and the Governor of Jamaica warned London of the likely outcome: 'Since the calling in of our privateers, I find already a considerable number of seafaring men at the towns of Port Royal and Kingston that can't find employment, who I am very apprehensive, for want of occupation in their way, may in a short time desert us and turn pirates.' "

Author: David Cordingly
Title: Under the Black Flag
Publisher: Random House
Date: Copyright 1996 by David Cordingly
Pages: 192-193

delanceyplace.com 9/27/10 - the dark ages

2010-09-27T03:35:00.002-04:00

In today's excerpt - the dark ages:

"The decline and eventual collapse of the Roman Empire in the West during the fifth century CE plunged the world into centuries of doom and gloom, wherein humanity became a collection of dull-witted, superstition-ridden dolts who accomplished next to nothing and waited around for the Renaissance to begin.

"Or not.

"Actually, the 'Dark Ages' - the term used to describe the first half of what is traditionally described as the 'Middle Ages' - is something of a misnomer. So is the 'Middle Ages' for that matter. The idea that there was a thousand-year period between the end of the Roman Empire and the beginnings of the Renaissance where nothing much happened was fostered mainly by intellectuals starting in the fifteenth century, especially in Italy. These bright lights wanted to believe - and wanted others to believe - that they had much more in common with the Classical Age than they did with the centuries that had just preceded them. By creating, and then denigrating, the Dark, or Middle, Ages, the 'humanists' also sought to separate themselves from the very real decline in the quality of life in most of the European continent after the Roman system fell apart.

"It was a pretty Eurocentric view of things. In reality, there were a lot of places in the world where mankind was making strides. Centered on what is now Turkey, the Byzantine Empire was a direct link to the culture and learning of ancient Greece and Rome. In the deserts of what is now Saudi Arabia, an empire centered on the new religion of Islam was spreading with lightning speed, and carrying with it not only new beliefs but also new ways of looking at medicine, math, and the stars. In the North Atlantic, Scandinavian ships were exploring the fringes of a New World, while in the Pacific, the Polynesians were pushing across even more vast aquatic distances to settle in virtually every inhabitable island they could find.

"In the jungles of Central America, the Maya were reaching the peak of a fairly impressive civilization. In the jungles of Southeast Asia, the Khmer were setting up an equally impressive cultural and trade center. Even in Europe, which admittedly was pretty much a mess, devoted monks were doing their best to keep the flame of learning burning. ... [and] there was progress. Stone and wooden tools were replaced with metal implements. The water-powered mill became commonplace. Farmers learned to rotate their crops in order to rejuvenate soil. And the harness was redesigned so that it fell across a horse's shoulders rather than its throat, thus increasing its proficiency in pulling a plow.

"There were astounding feats of human endeavor, such as the construction of the Grand Canal in China, which stretched more than 1,200 miles and connected the farmlands of the Yangtze Valley with the markets of Luoyang and Chang-an. ... And there were equally astounding feats of individual endeavor, such as the founding of a major world religion by a comfortably fixed middle-aged Arab trader who became known as the Prophet Muhammad...."

Author: Erik Sass and Steve Wiegand
Title: The Mental Floss History of the World
Publisher: Harper
Date: Copyright 2008 by Mental Floss LLC
Pages: 127-128, 137

delanceyplace.com 9/24/10 - chinese christians

2010-09-24T07:52:00.001-04:00

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In today's excerpt - efforts by Christian missionaries in the 1800s to convert the largely rural Chinese to their faith stumbled badly, amid cultural dissonance, social and political maneuvering, and libelous claims and counterclaims. But British economic and military superiority soon made it advantageous to for Chinese to convert:

"Out of a total population of over four hundred million, only a tiny fraction of rural Chinese in the 1890s had ever seen a white man. Villagers were by nature open and friendly toward strangers, but in times of crisis there was a dread of foreign things...

"By 1870 some two hundred fifty Catholic missionaries could claim a Chinese flock of four hundred thousand. The three hundred fifty Protestant missionaries, who spent the greater part of their time quarreling among themselves, could claim only six thousand converts. ... Missionaries forbade their converts to take part in any form of ancestor worship or to contribute financially to rituals and festivals that in a village were the only distraction from a life of toil. This set Chinese Christians apart and increased the burden on everyone else. Anxious to save souls and to keep account books, missionaries often were satisfied with converts who were the dregs of society-freeloaders referred to contemptuously by Chinese as 'Rice Christians' - and uncharitably demanded preferential treatment for them in lawsuits and disputes over land.

"At Ningpo, nearly all the Protestant Chinese converts were in the direct employ of the missionaries who had 'converted' them. By professing Christianity they got jobs and job security.

"By the 1890s resentment of these Rice Christians and their missionary sponsors was being deliberately provoked by clever, widely distributed anti-Christian propaganda ... [which] accused Christians of indulging in incest, sodomy, emasculating little boys, and using magic to accomplish perverted ends. ... Stimulated in this way, antiforeign and anti-Christian fury grew as the nineteenth century ended; missionaries and converts were attacked and murdered and mission property destroyed. During the 1890s antimissionary outbreaks occurred in all eighteen provinces. Missionaries were accused of being spies, profiteering merchants, and hedonists. ...

"Great Britain threatened to intervene militarily if the Chinese government failed to punish the regional officials taken to be responsible. Peking gave in and sacked and degraded the governor of Szechwan and six other mandarins, executed thirty-one peasants, and imprisoned or banished thirty-eight others. Edicts were issued making it clear that further attacks on foreign missionaries, their churches, and their Chinese converts would not be tolerated. Other edicts warned local officials that they would be held responsible if there were further incidents. The message was loud and clear that from here on Christians would be given imperial protection. ...

"The result in places like rural western Shantung was that local officials became reluctant to risk any confrontation with missionaries or their flocks, and there was a flood of conversions by Chinese who were seeking missionary protection from local enemies or trying to avoid prosecution by local officials for a wide range of crimes. Whole bandit communities put themselves under the protection of Catholic priests. Village rivals facing lawsuits had themselves baptized in order to gain legal advantage in court. Recognizing a golden opportunity for more conversions, Catholic priests defended converts willy-nilly, pressing their cases before government officials, or had pressure applied in provincial capitals and even through the bishop to legations in Peking. Every demonstration of Christian influence attracted more converts, many of them bad characters. Shantung's governor, General Li Ping-heng, called them 'weed people.' A vicious cycle began in which individual missionaries were encouraged to abuse their temporal power to increase their heavenly dividends."

Author: Sterling Seagrave

Title: Dragon Lady

Publisher: Vintage

Pages: 289-291

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delanceyplace.com 9/23/10 - indian fire

2010-09-23T03:37:00.003-04:00

In today's encore excerpt - Native Americans systematically used large-scale fires to transform the American landscape in the centuries before European dominance of the continent:

"Adriaen van der Donck was a Dutch lawyer who in 1641 transplanted himself to the Hudson River Valley. ... He spent a lot of time with the Haudenosaunee [tribe], whose insistence on personal liberty fascinated him. ... Every fall, he remembered, the Haudenosaunee set fire to 'the woods, plains, and meadows,' to 'thin out and clear the woods of all dead substances and grass, which grow better the ensuing spring.' At first the wildfire had scared him, but over time van der Donck had come to relish the spectacle of the yearly burning. 'Such a fire is a splendid sight when one sails on the [Hudson and Mohawk] rivers at night while the forest is ablaze on both banks,' he recalled. With the forest burning to the right and the left, the colonists' boats passed through a channel of fire, their passengers as goggle-eyed at the blaze as children at a video arcade. 'Fire and flames are seen everywhere and on all sides...a delightful scene to look on from afar.' ...

"[From] Hudson's Bay to the Río Grande, the Haudenosaunee and almost every other Indian group shaped their environment, at least in part, by fire. ... For more than ten thousand years, most North American ecosystems have been dominated by fire. ...

"Fire is a dominating factor in many if not most terrestrial landscapes. It has two main sources: lightning and Homo sapiens. In North America, lightning fire is most common in the western mountains. Elsewhere, though, Indians controlled it - at least until contact, and in many places long after. In the Northeast, Indians always carried a deerskin pouch full of flints, Thomas Morton reported in 1637, which they used 'to set fire of the country in all places where they come.' The flints ignited torches, which were as important to the hunt as bows and arrows. Deer in the Northeast; alligators in the Everglades; buffalo in the prairies; grasshoppers in the Great Basin; rabbits in California; moose in Alaska: all were pursued by fire. Native Americans made big rings of flame, Thomas Jefferson wrote, 'by firing the leaves fallen on the ground, which, gradually forcing animals to the center, they there slaughter them with arrows, darts, and other missiles.' Not that Indians always used fire for strictly utilitarian purposes. At nightfall tribes in the Rocky Mountains entertained the explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark by applying torches to sap-dripping fir trees, which then exploded like Roman candles. ...

"Indian fire had its greatest impact in the middle of the continent, which Native Americans transformed into a prodigious game farm. Native Americans burned the Great Plains and Midwest prairies so much and so often that they increased their extent; in all probability, a substantial portion of the giant grassland celebrated by cowboys was established and maintained by the people who arrived there first. 'When Lewis and Clark headed west from [St. Louis],' wrote ethologist Dale Lott, 'they were exploring not a wilderness but a vast pasture managed by and for Native Americans.'

"In 1792 the surveyor Peter Fidler examined the plains of southern Alberta systematically, the first European to do so. Riding with several groups of Indians in high fire season, he spent days on end in a scorched land. 'Grass all burnt this day,' he reported on November 12. 'Not a single pine to be seen three days past.' A day later: 'All burnt ground this Day.' A day later: 'The grass nearly burnt all along this Day except near the Lake.' A month later: 'The Grass is now burning [with] very great fury.' ... ' 'These fires burning off the old grass,' he observed, 'in the ensuing Spring & Summer makes excellent fine sweet feed for the Horses & Buffalo, &c.' ... Captain John Palliser, traveling through the same lands as Fidler six decades later, lamented the Indians' 'disastrous habit of setting the prairie on fire for the most trivial and worse than useless reasons.' ...

"Carrying their flints and torches, Native Americans were living in balance with Nature - but they had their thumbs on the scale. Shaped for their comfort and convenience, the American landscape had come to fit their lives like comfortable clothing. It was a highly successful and stable system, if 'stable' is the appropriate word for a regime that involves routinely enshrouding miles of countryside in smoke and ash."

Author: Charles C. Mann
Title: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
Publisher: Vintage
Date: Copyright 2005, 2006 by Charles C. Mann
Pages: Kindle Loc. 4587-4681.

delanceyplace.com 9/22/10 - pirates

2010-09-22T03:36:00.002-04:00

In today's excerpt - pirates. Pirates have been present throughout history, have long been most numerous in the teeming shipping lanes of the Far East, but are best remembered in Western culture for the Caribbean pirates of the early 1700s:

"There has been piracy since the earliest times. There were Greek pirates and Roman pirates, and centuries of piracy when the Vikings and Danes were ravaging the coasts of Europe. The southern shores of England were infested with smugglers and pirates during Tudor times. A group of Dutch pirates called the Sea Beggars, or Watergeuzen, played a small but critical role in the history of the Netherlands. ...

"In the Mediterranean, pirates took part in the holy war which was waged between the Christians and the Muslims for several centuries: Barbary corsairs intercepted ships traveling through the Strait of Gibraltar or coming from the trading ports of Alexandria and Venice, swooping down on the heavily laden merchantmen in their swift galleys powered by oars and sails. They looted
their cargoes, captured their passengers and crews, and held them to ransom or sold them into slavery.

"The French played a major part in the history of piracy. Many of the most successful and most fearsome of the buccaneers who prowled the Spanish Main came from French seaports. Corsairs based at Dunkirk menaced the shipping in the English Channel in the mid-seventeenth century. Their most famous leader was Jean Bart, who was responsible for the capture of some eighty ships. He later joined the French navy and was ennobled by King Louis XIV in 1694.

"The Red Sea and the Persian Gulf were always notorious for pirates, and the Malabar coast on the western shores of India was home to the Maratha pirates, led by the Angria family, who plundered the ships of the East India Company during the first half of the eighteenth century.

"In the Far East there was piracy on a massive scale. The Ilanun pirates of the Philippines roamed the seas around Borneo and New Guinea with fleets of large galleys manned by crews of forty to sixty men, launching savage attacks on shipping and coastal villages until they were stamped out by a naval expedition in 1862. But the most formidable of all, in terms of numbers and cruelties, were the pirates of the South China Sea. Their activities reached a peak in the early years of the nineteenth century, when a community of around forty thousand pirates with some four hundred junks dominated the coastal waters and attacked any merchant vessels which strayed into the area.
From 1807 these pirates were led by a remarkable woman called Mrs. Cheng, a former prostitute from Canton.

"[But] this book concentrates on the pirates of the Western world, and particularly on the great age of piracy, which began in the 1650s and was brought to an abrupt end around 1725, when naval patrols drove the pirates from their lairs and mass hangings eliminated many of their leaders. It is this period which has inspired most of the books, plays, and films about piracy, and has been largely responsible for the popular image of the pirate in the West today."

Author: David Cordingly
Title: Under the Black Flag
Publisher: Random House
Date: Copyright 1996 by David Cordingly
Pages: xv-xvii

delanceyplace.com 9/21/10 - roman concrete

2010-09-21T03:36:00.002-04:00

In today's excerpt - creating and sustaining the world's first city of one million people took many things; among them control of the entire Mediterranean, the continual extraction of food from the farthest regions of its empire, and the invention of concrete used to build the aqueducts that supplied its water:

"Although not famed for their technological originality, Romans did use water to make one transformational innovation - concrete - around 200 BC that helped galvanize their rise as a great power. Light, strong, and waterproof, concrete was derived from a process that exploited water's catalytic properties at several stages by adding it to highly heated limestone. When skillfully produced, the end process yielded a putty adhesive strong enough to bind sand, stone chips, brick dust, and volcanic ash. Before hardening, inexpensive concrete could be poured into molds to produce Rome's hallmark giant construction projects. One peerless application was the extensive network of aqueducts that enabled Rome to access, convey, and manage prodigious supplies of wholesome freshwater for drinking, bathing, cleaning, and sanitation on a scale exceeding anything realized before in history and without
which its giant metropolis would not have been possible. ...

"Yet nowhere was Rome's public water system more influential than in Rome itself. Indeed, Rome's rapid growth to a grand, astonishingly clean imperial metropolis corresponded closely with its building its 11 aqueducts over five centuries to AD 226, extending 306 miles in total length and delivering a continuous, abundant flow of fresh countryside water from as far away as 57 miles. The aqueducts funneled their mostly spring-fed water through purifying settling and distribution tanks to sustain an urban water network that included 1,352 fountains and basins for drinking, cooking and cleaning, 11 huge imperial baths, 856 free or inexpensive public baths plus numerous, variously priced private ones, and ultimately to underground sewers that constantly flushed the wastewater into the Tiber. ...

"Sustaining and housing a population of I million may not seem like much of an accomplishment from the vantage point of the twenty-first century with its megacities. Yet for most of human history cities were unsanitary human death traps of inadequate sewerage and fetid water that bred germs and disease-carrying insects. Athens at its peak was about one-fifth the size of Rome, and heaped with filth and refus at its perimeter. In 1800, only six cities in the world had more than half a million people - London, Paris, Beijing, Tokyo, Istanbul, Canton. Despite Rome's hygienic shortcomings - incomplete urban waste disposal, overcrowded and unsanitary tenements, malaria-infested, surrounding lowlands - the city's provision of copious amounts of fresh, clean public water washed away so much filth and disease as to constitute an urban sanitary breakthrough unsurpassed until the nineteenth century's great sanitary awakening in the industrialized West.

"Although there are no precise figures in ancient records on how much freshwater was delivered daily, it is widely believed that Roman water availability was stunning by ancient standards and even compared favorably with leading urban centers until modern times - perhaps as much as an average of 150 to 200 gallons per day for each Roman. Moreover, the high quality of the water - the Roman countryside offered some of the best water quality in all Europe, and still does so today - was an easily overlooked historical factor in explaining Rome's rise and endurance."

Author: Steven Solomon
Title: Water
Publisher: Harper
Date: Copyright 2010 by Steven Solomon
Pages: 85-88

delanceyplace.com 9/20/10 - winning

2010-09-20T03:35:00.001-04:00

In today's excerpt - tennis superstar Andre Agassi wins Wimbledon, his first grand slam tournament and the pinnacle of achievement in his sport, and reports what many sports champions have reported before him - winning does not feel as good as losing feels bad, and fame is a surreality that quickly becomes ordinary:

"I'm supposed to be a different person now that I've won a slam. Everyone says so. No more Image is Everything. Now, sportswriters assert, for Andre Agassi, winning is everything. After two years of calling me a fraud, a choke artist, a rebel without a cause, they lionize me. They declare that I'm a winner, a player of substance, the real deal. They say my victory at Wimbledon forces them to reassess me, to reconsider who I really am.

"But I don't feel that Wimbledon has changed me. I feel, in fact, as if I've been let in on a dirty little secret: winning changes nothing. Now that I've won a slam, I know something that very few people on earth are permitted to know. A win doesn't feel as good as a loss feels bad, and the good feeling doesn't last as long as the bad. Not even close. ...

"In 1992, however, [life] suddenly becomes more complicated. ... People appear from nowhere, requesting my picture, demanding my autograph, seeking my attention or opinion. Wimbledon has made me famous. I thought I was famous long ago - I signed my first autograph when I was six - but now I discover that I was actually infamous. Wimbledon has legitimized me, broadened and deepened my appeal, at least according to the agents and managers and marketing experts with whom I now regularly meet. People want to get closer to me; they feel they have that right. I understand that there's a tax on everything in America. Now I discover that this is the tax on success in sports - fifteen seconds of time for every fan. I can accept this, intellectually. ...

"Fame is a force. It's unstoppable. You shut your windows to fame and it slides under the door. I turn around one day and discover that I have dozens of famous friends, and I don't know how I met half of them. I'm invited to parties and VIP rooms, events and galas where the famous gather, and many ask for my phone number, or press their numbers on me. In the same way that my win at Wimbledon automatically made me a lifetime member of the All England Club, it also admitted me to this nebulous Famous People's Club. My circle of acquaintances now includes Kenny G, Kevin Costner, and Barbra Streisand. I'm invited to spend the night at the White House, to eat dinner with President George Bush before his summit with Mikhail Gorbachev. I sleep in the Lincoln
Bedroom.

"I find it surreal, then perfectly normal. I'm struck by how fast the surreal becomes the norm. I marvel at how unexciting it is to be famous, how mundane famous people are. They're confused, uncertain, insecure, and often hate what they do. It's something we always hear - like that old adage that money can't buy happiness - but we never believe it until we see it for ourselves. Seeing it in 1992 brings me a new measure of confidence."

Author: Andre Agassi
Title: Open
Publisher: Vintage
Date: Copyright 2009 by AKA Publishing, LLC
Pages: 167-168

delanceyplace.com 9/17/10 - making mistakes is normal

2010-09-17T03:36:00.002-04:00

In today's excerpt - error is normal, and making mistakes is a necessary part of learning. In Teach Like a Champion, Doug Lemov's brilliant distillation of forty-nine techniques for teachers to use to improve student performance, he writes that teachers should normalize error and avoid chastening students for getting it wrong. (Lemov's book has application far beyond the classroom):

"Error followed by correction and instruction is the fundamental process of schooling. You get it wrong, and then you get it right. If getting it wrong and then getting it right is normal, teachers should Normalize Error and respond to both parts of this sequence as if they were totally and completely normal. After all, they are.

WRONG ANSWERS: DON'T CHASTEN; DON'T EXCUSE

"Avoid chastening wrong answers, for example, 'No, we already talked about
this. You have to flip the sign, Ruben.' And do not make excuses for students
who get answers wrong: 'Oh, that's okay, Charlise. That was a really hard one.'
In fact, if wrong answers are truly a normal and healthy part of the learning
process, they don't need much narration at all.

"It's better, in fact, to avoid spending a lot of time talking about wrongness
and get down to the work of fixing it as quickly as possible. Although many
teachers feel obligated to name every answer as right or wrong, spending time
making that judgment is usually a step you can skip entirely before getting to
work. For example, you could respond to a wrong answer by a student named
Noah by saying, 'Let's try that again, Noah. What's the first thing we have
to do?' or even, 'What's the first thing we have to do in solving this kind
of problem, Noah?' This second situation is particularly interesting because it
remains ambiguous to Noah and his classmates whether the answer was right or wrong as they start reworking the problem. There's a bit of suspense, and they will have to figure it out for themselves. When and if you do name an answer as wrong, do so quickly and simply ('not quite') and keep moving. Again, since getting it wrong is normal, you don't have to feel badly about it. In fact, if all students are getting all questions right, the work you're giving them isn't hard enough.

RIGHT ANSWERS: DON'T FLATTER; DON'T FUSS

"Praising right answers can have one of two perverse effects on students. If you make too much of fuss, you suggest to students - unless it's patently obvious that an answer really is exceptional -that you're surprised that they got the answer right. And as a variety of social science research has recently documented, praising students for being 'smart' perversely incents them not to take risks (apparently they worry about no longer looking smart if they get things wrong), in contrast to praising students for working hard, which incents them to take risks and take on challenges.

"Thus, in most cases when a student gets an answer correct, acknowledge
that the student has done the work correctly or has worked hard; then move on: 'That's right, Noah. Nice work.' Champion teachers show their students they expect both right and wrong to happen by not making too big a deal of either. Of course, there will be times when you want to sprinkle in stronger praise ('Such an insightful answer, Carla. Awesome'). Just do so carefully so that such praise isn't diluted by overuse."

[Editor's note: We were reminded of this principle recently when touring the Franklin Institute's nationally recognized Science Leadership Academy and finding that the powerful learning mantra of the engineering department was "fail early, fail often."]

Author: Doug Lemov
Title: Teach Like a Champion
Publisher: Jossey-Bass
Date: Copyright 2010 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Pages: 221-223

delanceyplace.com 9/16/10 - our bloody english heritage

2010-09-16T03:36:00.001-04:00

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In today's encore excerpt - William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, crossed the English Channel from France in 1066 and conquered the English, thus starting what historians consider the true beginnings of modern Britain. William, who had known blood, fear and treachery since his earliest childhood, built a fighting force considered the fiercest in Europe, and his horse-mounted army decisively bested the horseless soldiers of England's King Harald. After the conquest, he tried to include English lords as partners in his new regime, but their treachery led to a need to use savage methods to break the entire kingdom:

"[The child] William was inured to the spectacle of slaughter: two of his guardians were hacked down in quick succession; his tutor as well; and a steward, on one particularly alarming occasion, murdered in the very room in which the young duke lay asleep. Yet even as blood from the victim's slit throat spilled across the flagstones, William could feel relief as well as horror: for he at least had been spared. ...

"[Years later], in 1066, there could be no doubting that William ranked as a truly deadly foe. His apprenticeship was long since over. Seasoned in all the arts of war and lordship, and with a reputation fit to intimidate even the princes of Flanders and Anjou, even the King of France himself, his prime had turned out a fearsome one. So too had that of his duchy. Quite as greedy for land and spoils as any Viking sea king, the great lords of Normandy, men who had grown up by their duke's side and shared all his ambitions, had emerged as an elite of warriors superior, in both their discipline and training, to any in Christendom. ...

"[After defeating the England's King Harald at the Battle of Hastings], what was left of the English turned at last and fled into the gathering darkness, to be hunted throughout the night by William's exultant cavalry, and it was the reek of blood and emptied bowels, together with the moans and sobs of the wounded, that bore prime witness to the butchery. Come the morning, however, and daylight unveiled a spectacle of carnage so appalling that even the victors were moved to pity. 'Far and wide the earth was covered with the flower of the English nobility and youth, drenched in gore.' ...

"[After the victory] William's coronation oath, which stated that he would uphold the laws and customs of his new subjects, had been sworn with all due solemnity - and sure enough, for the first few years of his reign, he did indeed attempt to include them as partners within his new regime. But the English earls could never quite forgo a taste for revolt - with the result that, soon enough, an infuriated William was brought to abandon the whole experiment. In its place, he instituted a far more primal and brutal policy. Just as his ancestors had cleansed what would become Normandy of its Frankish aristocracy, so now did William set about the systematic elimination from England of its entire ruling class. ...

"The task of the Norman lords, set as they were amid a sullen and fractious people, [became] no different in kind to that of the most upstart castellan in France. In England, however, it was not just scattered hamlets and villages that needed to be broken, but a whole kingdom. In the winter of 1069, when the inveterately rebellious Northumbrians sought to throw off their new king's rule, William's response was to harry the entire earldom. Methods of devastation familiar to the peasantry of France were unleashed across the north of England: granaries were burned, oxen slaughtered, ploughs destroyed. Rotting corpses were left to litter the road. The scattered survivors were reduced to selling themselves into slavery, or else, if reports are to be believed, to cannibalism."

Author: Tom Holland
Title: The Forge of Christendom: The End of Days and the Epic Rise of the West
Publisher: Doubleday
Date: Copyright 2008 by Tom Holland
Pages: 289, 316, 325, 327-8.

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Delanceyplace is a brief daily email with an excerpt or quote we view as interesting or noteworthy, offered with commentary to provide context. There is no theme, except that most excerpts will come from a non-fiction work, mainly works of history, and we hope will have a more universal relevance than simply the subject of the book from which they came.

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delanceyplace.com 9/15/10 - cahokia

2010-09-15T03:36:00.002-04:00

In today's excerpt - Cahokia, the largest settlement in North America until Philadelphia, which stood in Illinois near modern day St. Louis, and in which stood Monks Mound, a structure larger than the Great Pyramid of Giza. Part of a four-thousand-year-old Native American tradition of mound-building, it was built by people who came to be known as Mississippians:

"There was one remarkable community north of the Rio Grande, a city that by 1150 CE had become the largest urban center north of Mexico, a record that would stand until Philadelphia surpassed it in the late 1700s. It is difficult to
imagine a city covering more than six square miles flourishing in the Mississippi Valley some 350 years before Columbus reached the New World, a city, which at its zenith in about 1150 contained a population estimated by some experts to have been as high as thirty thousand, more inhabitants than any contemporary European city, including London. Its people constructed enormous pyramid-shaped earthen mounds (the largest, Monks Mound, has a base larger than that of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt), designed and built solar observatories, and carried out a far-flung trade. Its name was Cahokia. ...

"The city of Cahokia was physically dominated by the Monks Mound, named for French Trappist monks who lived in a monastery nearby in the early 1800s and gardened on the mound. Cahokia was built in a dozen or more phases beginning in about 900 CE, a time described by archeologists as the 'Big Bang,' a period in which, for still unknown reasons, thousands of Native Americans from surrounding regions poured into Cahokia and the city experienced as much as a tenfold increase in its population.

"Covering an area of fourteen acres, making it larger than the Great Pyramid of Giza, the clay stab that serves as the base of Monks Mound is about 954 feet long and 774 feet wide. The enormous structure stretches 100 feet from its base to its top. ...

"Most archaeologists who have worked the site are in agreement that the temple or palace atop Monks Mound was the focal point from which Cahokia's rulers carried out various political and religious rituals, including prayers for favorable weather to nurture the acres of maize that stretched out from the city as far as the eye could see. Excavations have also revealed that at some point in the mound's various phases of construction a low platform was extended out from one of its sides, creating a stage from which priests could perform ceremonies in full view of the public.

"What is perhaps most intriguing of all is the question of how Monks Mound was constructed. Archaeologists calculate that the structure contains twenty-two million cubic feet of earth, which was dug with stone tools and carried out in baskets on people's backs to the ever- growing mound.

"Sally A. Kitt Chappell provided a graphic calculation of the enormous effort that went into building Monks Mound: This pharaonic enterprise required carrying 14,666,666 baskets, each filled with 1.5 cubic feet, of dirt weighing about fifty-five pounds each, for a total of 22 million cubic feet. For comparison, an average pickup truck holds 96 cubic feet, so it would take 229,166 pickup loads to bring the dirt to the site. If thirty people each carried eight baskets of earth a day, the job would take 167 years. ...

"[The complexity implies] the presence of individuals with specialized knowledge of soils and earthen construction. Despite the instability of the materials they had on hand and the fact that they built their enormous structure on a floodplain, these ancient engineers achieved nothing less than the largest prehistoric construction in the Americas, and there it has stood for more than one thousand years."

Author: Martin W. Sandler
Title: Lost to Time
Publisher: Sterling
Date: Copyright 2010 by Martin W. Sandler
Pages: 20-27

delanceyplace.com 9/14/10 - study habits

2010-09-14T03:36:00.002-04:00

In today's excerpt - researchers have identified better ways for students to study, yet they often contradict received wisdom and have been ignored by the education system:

" 'We have known these principles [for improved study] for some time, and it's intriguing that schools don't pick them up, or that people don't learn them by trial and error,' said Robert A. Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. 'Instead, we walk around with all sorts of unexamined beliefs about what works that are mistaken.'

"Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are 'visual learners' and others are auditory; some are "left-brain" students, others "right-brain." In a recent review of the relevant research, published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a team of psychologists found almost zero support for such ideas. ...

"Psychologists have discovered that some of the most hallowed advice on study habits is flat wrong. For instance, many study skills courses insist that students find a specific place, a study room or a quiet corner of the library, to take their work. The research finds just the opposite. In one classic 1978 experiment, psychologists found that college students who studied a list of 40 vocabulary words in two different rooms - one windowless and cluttered, the other modern, with a view on a courtyard - did far better on a test than students who studied the words twice, in the same room. Later studies have confirmed the finding, for a variety of topics. ...

"Varying the type of material studied in a single sitting - alternating, for example, among vocabulary, reading and speaking in a new language - seems to leave a deeper impression on the brain than does concentrating on just one skill at a time. Musicians have known this for years, and their practice sessions often include a mix of scales, musical pieces and rhythmic work. Many athletes, too, routinely mix their workouts with strength, speed and skill drills. ...

"In a study recently posted online by the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology, Doug Rohrer and Kelli Taylor of the University of South Florida taught a group of fourth graders four equations, each to calculate a different dimension of a prism. Half of the children learned by studying repeated examples of one equation, say, calculating the number of prism faces when given the number of sides at the base, then moving on to the next type of calculation, studying repeated examples of that. The other half studied mixed problem sets, which included examples of all four types of calculations grouped together. Both groups solved sample problems along the way, as they studied. A day later, the researchers gave all of the students a test on the material, presenting new problems of the same type. The children who had studied mixed sets did twice as well as the others, outscoring them 77 percent to 38 percent. The researchers have found the same in experiments involving adults and younger children.

"This finding undermines the common assumption that intensive immersion is the best way to really master a particular genre, or type of creative work, said Nate Kornell, a psychologist at Williams College and the lead author of the study. 'What seems to be happening in this case is that the brain is picking up deeper patterns when seeing assortments of paintings; it's picking up what's similar and what's different about them,' often subconsciously.

"Cognitive scientists do not deny that honest-to-goodness cramming can lead to a better grade on a given exam. But hurriedly jam-packing a brain is akin to speed-packing a cheap suitcase, as most students quickly learn - it holds its new load for a while, then most everything falls out. ... [In contrast] an hour of study tonight, an hour on the weekend, another session a week from now - so-called spacing - improves later recall without requiring students to put in more overall study effort or pay more attention, dozens of studies have found."

Author: Benedict Carey
Title: "Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits"
Publisher: The New York Times
Date: September 6, 2010

delanceyplace.com 9/13/10 - the highest paid athlete in history

2010-09-13T03:35:00.002-04:00

In today's excerpt - Gaius Appuleius Diocles, the highest paid athlete in history:

"Last fall, Forbes magazine was all atwitter as Tiger Woods closed in on becoming 'the first athlete to earn over $1 billion' in the course of his career. Presumably his fortunes will now start to droop, but Forbes missed the mark-taking the long view, Tiger was never all that well paid to begin with when compared with the charioteers of ancient Rome.

"The modern sporting spectacles we manage to stage - and on occasion be appalled by - pale by comparison to the common entertainments of Rome. The Circus Maximus, the beating heart at the center of the empire, accommodated a quarter million people for weekly chariot races. These outdrew stage plays (to the deep chagrin of the playwrights), the disemboweling of slaves and exotic carnivores in the gladiatorial combats of the Coliseum, and even the naval battles emperors staged within the city limits - real war ships with casts of thousands - on acres of man-made lakes they had dug out and drained the Tiber to fill.

"For the races, spectators arrived the evening before to stake out good seats. They ate and drank to excess, and fights were common under the influence of furor circensis, the Romans' name for the mass hysteria the spectacles induced. Ovid recommended the reserve seating as a good place to pick up aristocratic women, and he advised letting your hand linger as you fluff her seat cushion.

"Drivers were drawn from the lower orders of society.They affiliated with teams supported by large businesses that invested heavily in training and upkeep of the horses and equipment. The colors of the team jerseys provided them with names, and fans would often hurl violent enthusiasms, as well as lead curse amulets punctured with nails, at the Reds, Blues, Whites, and Greens.

"The equipment consisted of a leather helmet, shin guards, chest protector, a jersey, whip, and a curved knife-handy for cutting opponents who got too close or to cut themselves loose from entangling reins in case of a fall. They adopted a Greek style of long curly hair protruding from under their helmets and festooned their horses' manes with ribbons and jewels. Races started when the emperor dropped his napkin and a hapless referee would try to keep order from horseback. After seven savage laps, those who managed not to be upended or killed and finish in the top three took home prizes.

"The best drivers were made legends by poets who sung their exploits and graffiti artists who scrawled crude renderings of their faces on walls around the Mediterranean. They could also be made extraordinarily wealthy.

"The very best paid of these - in fact, the best paid athlete of all time - was a Lusitanian Spaniard named Gaius Appuleius Diocles, who had short stints with the Whites and Greens, before settling in for a long career with the Reds. Twenty-four years of winnings brought Diocles - likely an illiterate man whose signature move was the strong final dash - the staggering sum of 35,863,120 sesterces in prize money. The figure is recorded in a monumental inscription erected in Rome by his fellow charioteers and admirers in 146, which hails him fulsomely on his retirement at the age of '42 years, 7 months, and 23 days' as 'champion of all charioteers.'

"His total take home amounted to five times the earnings of the highest paid provincial governors over a similar period-enough to provide grain for the entire city of Rome for one year, or to pay all the ordinary soldiers of the Roman Army at the height of its imperial reach for a fifth of a year. By today's standards that last figure, assuming the apt comparison is what it takes to pay the wages of the American armed forces for the same period, would cash out to about $15 billion. Even without his dalliances, it is doubtful Tiger could have matched it."

[Editor's note: Comparisons of monetary value over significant spans of time are notoriously difficult, and other methodologies would yield different results than that shown above.]

Authors: Peter Struck
Title: "Greatest of All Time"
Publisher: Lapham's Quarterly Roundtable Blog
Date: August 2, 2010

delanceyplace.com 9/10/10 - perfection

2010-09-10T03:36:00.002-04:00

In today's excerpt - in 1994, Andre Agassi found himself at a crossroads. He was young, one of the brightest stars in tennis, but had underachieved in his career. So Agassi and his manager approached Brad Gilbert, a fiery, veteran tennis player of good ability known as an overachiever, to offer him the job as Agassi's coach. But first, they wanted to hear Brad's assessment of Agassi's abilities:

"When Brad is finally settled, half a cold Bud Ice down his gullet, [my manager] starts.

"So, listen, Brad, one reason we wanted to meet with you is, we want to
get your take on Andre's game.

"Say what?

"Andre's game. We'd like you to tell us what you think.

"What I think?

"Yes.

"You want to know what I think of his game?

"That's right.

"You want me to be honest?

"Please.

"Brutally honest?

"Don't hold back.

"He takes an enormous swallow of beer and commences a careful, thorough, brutal-as-advertised summary of my flaws as a tennis player.

"It's not rocket science, he says. If I were you, with your skills, your talent, your return and footwork, I'd dominate. But you've lost the fire you had when you were sixteen. That kid, taking the ball early, being aggressive, what the hell happened to that kid?

"Brad says my overall problem, the problem that threatens to end my career prematurely - the problem that feels like my father's legacy - is perfectionism.

"You always try to be perfect, he says, and you always fall short, and it f**ks with your head. Your confidence is shot, and perfectionism is the reason. You try to hit a winner on every ball, when just being steady, consistent, meat and potatoes, would be enough to win ninety percent of the time.

"He talks a mile a minute, a constant drone, not unlike a mosquito. He builds his argument with sports metaphors, from all sports, indiscriminately. He's an avid sports fan, and an equally avid metaphor fan.

"Quit going for the knockout, he says. Stop swinging for the fences. All you have to be is solid. Singles, doubles, move the chains forward. Stop thinking about yourself, and your own game, and remember that the guy on the other side of the net has weaknesses. Attack his weaknesses. You don't have to be the best in the world every time you go out there. You just have to be better than one guy. Instead of you succeeding, make him fail. Better yet, let him fail. It's all about odds and percentages. You're from Vegas, you should have an appreciation of odds and percentages. The house always wins, right? Why? Because the odds are stacked in the house's favor. So? Be the house! Get the odds in your favor.

"Right now, by trying for a perfect shot with every ball, you're stacking the odds against yourself. You're assuming too much risk. You don't need to assume so much risk. F**k that. Just keep the ball moving. Back and forth. Nice and easy. Solid. Be like gravity, man, just like motherf**king gravity. When you chase perfection, when you make perfection the ultimate goal, do you know what you're doing? You're chasing something that doesn't exist. You're making everyone around you miserable. You're making yourself miserable. Perfection? There's about five times a year you wake up perfect, when you can't lose to anybody, but it's not those five times a year that make a tennis player. Or a human being, for that matter. It's the other times. It's all about your head, man. With your talent, if you're fifty percent game-wise, but ninety-five percent head-wise, you're going to win. But if you're ninety-five percent game-wise and fifty percent head-wise, you're going to lose, lose, lose."

Author: Andre Agassi
Title: Open
Publisher: Vintage
Date: Copyright 2009 by AKA Publishing, LLC
Pages: 186-187

delanceyplace.com 9/9/10 - immigration and prosperity

2010-09-09T03:35:00.001-04:00

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In today's encore excerpt - beginning in 1840, the largest human migration in history brought over 30 million immigrants to America. This period of massive immigration brought with it unprecedented prosperity, and by the time it was interrupted in 1914 by World War I, America stood as the most prosperous nation on earth:

"The reasons for the largest human migration in history had been long in coming.

"One of the main factors was the enormous increase in the European population that took place in less than a century - from 140 million people in 1750 to 250 million in the 1840s. As the numbers increased, peasant families were constricted into increasingly smaller plots of land by powerful landlords who were anxious to reap profits by creating larger farms to feed the growing cities. Soon alarming numbers of peasants found themselves unable to subsist. They were joined in their plight by legions of artisans whose special skills - passed on from father to son and mother to daughter for generations - had earned them both a livelihood and a respected place in society. Now, however, scores of the goods they had so expertly handcrafted were being produced by the machinery of the Industrial Revolution. Thousands of these artisans found themselves out of work, forced to move to the cities and work in factories, where low wages, drudgery, and the loss of their personal independence resulted in a sadly diminished quality of life.

"Devastating as they were, none of these problems compared to the series of famines that, beginning in the 1840s, descended upon various European nations. Nowhere was the situation more desperate than in Ireland where, in 1845, a fungus destroyed the potato crop, the single food staple upon which the poorer classes of the country depended for survival. By the time the disease began to abate in 1849, more than a million Irish men, women, and children had starved to death. ...

"It was not only in Ireland that famine struck. ... A quote from the archives of the Iowa State Historical Society by a Polish youngster put it more personally, 'We lived through a famine,' he explained, '[so] we came to America. Mother said she wanted to see a loaf of bread on the table and then she was ready to die.'

"There were other important reasons for the mass exodus as well. Despite the notions of liberty and equality that both the American and French revolutions had spawned, oppressive governments in countries such as Russia, Germany and Turkey had denied freedom of religion, freedom of speech, or other rights and had brutally put down rebellions aimed at bringing about reform. In Russia and Poland, massacres called pogroms erupted. Designed to eliminate minority groups who lived within their borders - particularly Jews - some of these pogroms were carried out by the governments of these two countries; others were unofficially endorsed by them. ...

"They came in waves; ... more than five million of them arrived between 1840 and 1880, an influx slightly greater than the entire population of the United States in 1790. Most emigrated from northern and western Europe - Scandinavians who settled in the American Midwest; Germans who established enclaves in New York, Baltimore, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Milwaukee; and British and Irish who poured into Boston, New York, and other northeastern communities.

"Beginning in 1880 a great shift occurred when an even larger flood of newcomers came from eastern, central, and southern Europe - Russians, Poles, Austro-Hungarians, Greeks, Ukrainians, and Italians. In 1880 less than twenty percent of the 250,000 Jews living in New York had come from Eastern Europe. In the next forty years the number grew to 1,400,000. That was one-fourth of the city's entire population. In the first quarter of the 1900s, more than two million Italians arrived. By the time the human tide was interrupted in 1914 by World War I, some thirty-three million people had fled their native lands, risking all to start life anew across the ocean."

Author: Martin W. Sandler,
Title: Atlantic Ocean
Publisher: Sterling
Date: Copyright 2008 by Martin W. Sandler
Pages: 356-364

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Delanceyplace is a brief daily email with an excerpt or quote we view as interesting or noteworthy, offered with commentary to provide context. There is no theme, except that most excerpts will come from a non-fiction work, mainly works of history, and we hope will have a more universal relevance than simply the subject of the book from which they came.

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delanceyplace.com 9/8/10 - women in confucian china

2010-09-08T03:35:00.002-04:00

In today's excerpt - in Confucian China, women were little more than slaves, a status that remained true through the turn of the twentieth century:

"Nowhere were women treated with greater contempt than in a Confucian state. Chinese ideographs that include the character for 'woman' mean: evil, slave, anger, jealousy, avarice, hatred, suspicion, obstruction, demon, witch, bewitching, fornication, and seduction. Confucius warned gentlemen against being 'too familiar with the lower orders or with women.' As the poet Fu Xuan wrote in the third century:

How sad it is to be a woman!
Nothing on earth is held so cheap.
Boys stand leaning at the door
Like gods fallen out of heaven.

"Marriage in China was less of a union between man and woman than a contract of indentured servitude between a girl and her mother-in-law. A wedding was arranged by parents in an effort to advance themselves socially, politically, or financially. In traditional Chinese society a girl married into her husband's family and gave up all contact with her own parents. A bride was subservient to everyone in the new household but especially to her husband's mother, for whom she toiled without rest. Wife and mother-in-law were jealous rivals for the affection of the husband/son. Publicly a husband and wife were indifferent toward each other, never openly acknowledging the existence of the other. In private the wife would have to struggle to win her husband's respect, and only through her grown sons did she have any real hope of security. No
wonder she then exhibited little affection toward her son's bride, and the cycle repeated itself.

"A concubine was a serious and usually permanent member of a household. She was brought in to bear a son, after the first wife had failed, then remained as an assistant wife, with all the responsibilities and few of the privileges. Once the man lost interest, she was just another servant. In most cases she was purchased from her parents, so in fact she was a slave, though she could not be discarded without arriving at a settlement with her family."

Author: Sterling Seagrave
Title: Dragon Lady
Publisher: Vintage
Date: Copyright 1992 by Scribbler's Ltd
Pages: 29-30

delanceyplace.com 9/7/10 - spartans and helots

2010-09-07T03:07:00.003-04:00

In today's excerpt - Spartans and helots. The legendary and often celebrated Spartan culture of rigor and militancy was as much needed to control its own underclass, the helots, as it was to combat Athens and other Greek neighbors:

"Spartans, ... the Dorian invaders who conquered the southern Greek city of Messenia in the eighth century BCE, set up a rigid class system separating a tiny group of 'citizens' from a giant population of native 'helots' who worked in slavery-like conditions. The system became even more brutal after the helots tried to revolt in the seventh century BCE. By the fifth century BCE, there were about ten thousand citizens versus perhaps two hundred thousand helots. The Spartan hierarchy was incredibly strict: helots had no political rights or freedom of movement, and gave up half of every harvest to the Spartan overlords.

"The Spartans were equally hard on themselves, creating a military society with one goal: training invincible soldiers to control the helots. Spartan life centered on military preparation. Weak and deformed newborn children were exposed to the elements and left to die by order of the state. Boys entered military school at the age of seven, where their first task was to weave a mat of coarse river reeds they would sleep on for the rest of their lives. They were forced to run for miles while older boys flogged them, sometimes during of exhaustion, and were encouraged to kill helots as part of a rite of passage. At age twenty, after thirteen years of training, the surviving young men finally became soldiers. They served in the Spartan army until age sixty, living in communal barracks, where they shared meals and bunked together.

"They were allowed to marry bur rarely saw their wives until they 'graduated' to 'equals,' at age thirty. Ironically, this gender separation helped Spartan women accumulate property and power. Women are believed to have owned about 40 percent of Sparta's agricultural land and were at least sometimes responsible for managing the labor of helots, making them far more 'liberated' than other Greek women.

"The Spartans created one of history's more unusual governments. Somewhat like in Athens, all male citizens age thirty and up formed an assembly. But that's where the similarities ended. In Sparta, the assembly picked a council of twenty-eight nobles, all over the age of sixty, to advise not one but two kings. This dual-kingship was hereditary, but if the rulers were incompetent, they, could be deposed by the real bosses of Sparta - a group of five powerful men called ephors, who were elected annually by the assembly, leading it in wartime, when the kings were away"

Authors: Erik Sass and Steve Wiegand
Title: Mental Floss History of the World
Publisher: Harper
Date: Copyright 2008 by Mental Floss LLC
Pages: 41-43

delanceyplace.com 9/3/10 - andre agassi

2010-09-03T03:35:00.002-04:00

In today's excerpt - tennis champion Andre Agassi. In this passage from his stunningly insightful autobiography, Agassi writes about the final tournament of his life and the preparation for a match that may be last of his career. And about the loneliness of tennis:

"Now I can take a nap. At thirty-six, the only way I can play a late match, which could go past midnight, is if I get a nap beforehand. Also, now that I know roughly who I am, I want to close my eyes and hide from it. When I open my eyes, one hour has passed. I say aloud, It's time. No more hiding. I step into the shower again, but this shower is different from the morning shower. The afternoon shower is always longer - twenty-two minutes, give or take - and it's not for waking up or getting clean. The afternoon shower is for encouraging myself, coaching myself.

"Tennis is the sport in which you talk to yourself. No athletes talk to themselves like tennis players. Pitchers, golfers, goalkeepers, they mutter to themselves, of course, but tennis players talk to themselves - and answer. In the heat of a match, tennis players look like lunatics in a public square, ranting and swearing and conducting Lincoln-Douglas debates with their alter egos. Why? Because tennis is so damned lonely. Only boxers can understand the loneliness of tennis players - and yet boxers have their corner men and managers. Even a boxer's opponent provides a kind of companionship, someone he can grapple with and grunt at.

"In tennis you stand face-to-face with the enemy, trade blows with him, but never touch him or talk to him, or anyone else. The rules forbid a tennis player from even talking to his coach while on the court. People sometimes mention the track-and-field runner as a comparably lonely figure, but I have to laugh. At least the runner can feel and smell his opponents. They're inches away. In tennis you're on an island. Of all the games men and women play, tennis is the closest to solitary confinement, which inevitably leads to self-talk, and for me the self-talk starts here in the afternoon shower. This is when I begin to say things to myself, crazy things, over and over, until I believe them. For instance, that a quasi-cripple [me] can compete at the U.S. Open. That a thirty six-year-old man can beat an opponent just entering his prime. I've won 869 matches in my career, fifth on the all-time list, and many were won during the afternoon shower.

"With the water roaring in my ears - a sound not unlike twenty thousand fans - I recall particular wins. Not wins the fans would remember, but wins that still wake me at night, Squillari in Paris. Blake in New York. Pete in Australia. Then I recall a few losses. I shake my head at the disappointments. I tell myself that tonight will be an exam for which I've been studying twenty-nine years. Whatever happens tonight, I've already been through it at least once before. If it's a physical test, if it's mental, it's nothing new.

"Please let this be over.

"I don't want it to be over.

"I start to cry. I lean against the wall of the shower and let go."

Author: Andre Agassi
Title: Open
Publisher: Vintage
Date: Copyright 2009 by AKA Publishing, LLC
Pages: 8-9

delanceyplace.com 9/2/10 - the new world and new food

2010-09-02T03:36:00.002-04:00

n today's encore excerpt - Columbus's discovery of America brought new foods, including tomatoes, potatoes, corn, squash, and sugar, that transformed the European diet:

"Before Columbus, the diet of Europeans had remained basically unchanged for tens of thousands of years, based mainly on oats, barley, and wheat. Within a quarter century of his first voyage, the European diet became richer, more varied, and more nutritious. As Roger Schlesinger wrote in his book, In the Wake of Columbus: 'As far as dietary habits are concerned, no other series of events in all world history brought as much significant change as did [the discovery of the Americas].' The list of foods that made their way into Europe is extensive and includes maize, squash, pumpkin, avocado, papaya, cassava, vanilla, tomatoes, potatoes, sweet potatoes (yams), strawberries, and beans of almost every variety.

"The potato was one of the first American foods to be transported to Europe. Valued by the conquistadores, they made it a key item in the diet of their sailors. The potato then spread to England and Scotland, and to Ireland where it became the staple of the Irish diet.

"It was also the Spanish who discovered the tomato, first distributing it throughout their Caribbean possessions and then bringing it to Europe. In both Italy and Great Britain, the tomato was first thought to be poisonous, and it was not until the 1700s that the fruit became widely eaten. As was the case with sweet potatoes, which were regarded by some Europeans as having aphrodisiac-like qualities, the tomato was also viewed in some circles as having medicinal value. ... Actually, some of these claims may not have been as farfetched as they seem, since many Old World ailments were caused by the lack of fresh fruits and vegetables. ...

"Tapioca, made from cassava root, eventually became a European delicacy, as did a drink made from the cocoa plant. By the time that Hernan Cortes and his men witnessed Aztecs drinking chocolatl, South and Central American natives had been consuming the beverage for hundreds of years. ...

"As diet transforming as all these newly introduced foods became, sugar, perhaps, had the greatest impact of all. As ever-increasing amounts of sugar were transported from New World plantations to Europe, the types of foods that were eaten, and just as significantly, the ways in which they were cooked, were changed forever. Before the early 1500s, sugar was sold in European apothecary shops where, because of its scarcity, only the rich could afford it. But as sugar-laden ships arrived in Old World ports, prices tumbled and sugar became an important foodstuff for the masses. At the time, honey was both expensive and in short supply, but even if that had not been the case, most people found sugar to be a much more desirable sweetener. As a result, tea and coffee drinking gained a popularity that would never diminish.

"Even more important, the availability of sugar led to the proliferation of confections and jams that soon graced tables throughout Europe. ...

"Sugar's impact on the European diet went way beyond jams and confections and the sweetening of tea, coffee, and other beverages. Such leftover foods as rice and bread could now be given new life and a whole new taste when sprinkled with sugar and reheated. Fruits and vegetables could be inexpensively preserved when immersed in a sugary syrup. Sugar's popularity also led to the introduction of a host of new cooking utensils and accoutrements, including new types of saucepans, pie plates, cookie molds, sugar pots, sugar spoons, and tongs."

Author: Martin W. Sandler
Title: Atlantic Ocean
Publisher: Sterling
Date: Copyright 2008 by Martin W. Sandler
Pages: 92-100

delanceyplace.com 9/1/10 - levees and floods

2010-09-01T03:36:00.003-04:00

In today's excerpt - part of an article from the September, 1927 edition of The National Geographic Magazine describing the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 - the most destructive river flood in the history of the United States. Rains fell for months over 31 States and two Canadian provinces drained by the Mississippi River, comprising an area of 1,240,000 square miles, causing nearly 60 cubic miles of excess water to reach the Gulf. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover's handling of flood relief operations propelled him into the national spotlight and set the stage for his election to the Presidency. The poor treatment of African-Americans in refugee camps was one factor in their subsequent "Great Migration" to northern cities. The flood resulted in a cultural outpouring as well - Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie's "When the Levee Breaks" was reworked by Led Zeppelin, and became one of that group's most famous songs. In this flood, there was a foreshadowing of both Katrina and today's Indus River catastrophe in Pakistan where six million are now homeless:

"Since time began, the fact that water runs downhill has warped the fate of men and nations. In Babylonia kingdoms fell with floods and the famines that followed. Some say a Hebrew prophet could foretell the Seven Lean Years because he knew the habits of the Nile. The Mongols, cutting the Tigris levees, conquered Baghdad. In China more men drown than die in battle. One Yellow River flood claimed more than a million who drowned or starved. So, through the ages, man's fiercest fight has been to save his land from flood and famine-a fiercer fight by far than war ever waged against a hostile kingdom.

"Along the Rhine and Danube, the Volga and Yellow; along the Tigris, Indus, and Euphrates; along our own cruel Colorado and marauding Mississippi, man has long matched his wits against the powers of Nature. When white men founded New Orleans, 200 years ago, they had to throw up dirt banks to bar the river from their rude camp. From that day to this, with men, mules, machines, and money, the towns and planters along the river, aided in more recent years by the Government, have fought a losing fight against the floods.

"It is a stupendous struggle. Its battle front is flung from the Ohio to the Gulf. In heat, mud, and miasma, slaving men and sweating animals, toiling through the years, have thrown up 2,500 miles of huge, fortlike levees. Higher and higher they build them, hoping always that some day, somehow, they may achieve perfect flood control.

"But hydraulic principles are stubborn. They will not compromise with man's puny plans. The levees, as built, have turned once vast, empty swamps into rich, thickly inhabited areas and added hugely to our national wealth. Five years out of six they may hold; to that extent they are successful; but when the river rises high enough it breaks them. In the great floods of the eighties the levee system broke in 712 places. It had often broken before. It has often broken since.

"Now, as I write this, it is breaking again. Today the most destructive flood in all the annals of this rapacious river is rolling from Cairo to the sea. Parts of seven States are under water. Nearly 800,000 people have been driven from their homes or rescued from housetops, trees, levees, and railway embankments. To save New Orleans, levees are blown up [upstream to lower the river]. Tons and tons of dynamite are used, throwing masses of mud and driftwood high into the air, repicturing in a way the shell-torn fields of France in war times. ...

"The whole Nation, at first amazed and appalled, quickly and magnificently rallies with millions in money, with trainloads of clothing and food to comfort hungry, helpless victims of the worst American flood of all time. 'It is the greatest peace-time disaster in our history,' said Herbert Hoover. 'We are humble before such an outburst of the forces of Nature and the futility
of man in their control.' "

Author: Frederick Simpich
Title: "The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927"
Publisher: The National Geographic Magazine
Date: September, 1927
Pages: 243-245

delanceyplace.com 8/31/10 - masturbation, musicals, and urinals

2010-08-31T03:35:00.002-04:00

In today's excerpt - physicians in the 19th and early 20th centuries warned against masturbation (including nocturnal emissions) which they counseled must be avoided because it could lead to "not only impotence, but blindness, heart trouble, insanity, stupidity, clammy hands, suppurating pustules on the face, acrid belches, a flow of fetid matter from the fundament, tongue coatings, stooped shoulders, flabby muscles, under-eye circles, and a draggy gait." How to prevent?

"On the simple side, there was the Penile Pricking Ring. Invented in the 1850s, this was an adjustable, expandable metal ring slipped onto the penis at bedtime. If the sleeper's penis begins to expand, it forces the ring open wider, exposing metal spikes. ...

"Many of these devices included an option for daytime use, along with a lock-and-key mechanism. For the true target customer was not the penitent masturbator, but the worried parent and, even more so, the insane asylum caretaker. ...

"Happily, parents of K-through-8 masturbators were encouraged to try less drastic preventive measures. Little hands were tied to headboards, and trousers fashioned without pockets. Hobbyhorses were taken away, and climbing ropes removed from school gymnasiums. One of the biggest spoilsports in the antimasturbation crusade was American physician William Robinson. His 1916 Practical Treatise on the Causes, Symptoms, and Treatment of Sexual Impotence and Other Sexual Disorders in Men and Women includes a long chapter on preventing the premature awakening of the sexual instinct in children. 'I strongly urge parents to keep their boys away from sensuous musical comedies and obscene vaudeville acts,' tutted Robinson, ... 'Many of my patients told me that their first masturbatory act took place while witnessing some musical show.' ...

"In Masturbation: The History of a Great Terror, ... a Dr. Crommelinck ... advocated memorizing difficult passages on philosophy or history when overcome by the desire to masturbate.

"Truly it seemed that any activity undertaken - sleeping, thinking, eating spiced food, taking in a matinee of Mame - led the heedless male down the path to self-pollution. A man couldn't even relieve himself without having to worry. Crommelinck urged gentlemen to avoid touching their genitals at all times, lest they inadvertently arouse themselves - even at the urinal. 'Urinate quickly, do not shake your penis, even if means having several drops of urine drip into your pants.'

"Those who could not manage to curb their impulses with philosophical tracts and antimasturbation gadgetry faced a withering assortment of brutal treatments. Robinson casually states that in two or three cases he applied 'a red hotwire' to a child's genitals.

"The bitter irony here is that regularly spilling one's seed serves a valuable biological function. Sex physiologist Roy Levin explained to me that sperm which sit around the factory a week or more start to develop abnormalities."

Author: Mary Roach
Title: Bonk
Publisher: Norton
Date: Copyright 2008 by Mary Roach
Pages: 145-149

delanceyplace.com 8/30/10 - freemasonry, americans, and openness

2010-08-30T03:36:00.003-04:00

In today's excerpt - Early Americans quickly began to view themselves as exceptional, different and better than Europeans. Part of that exceptionalism was equality, which brought with it openness to strangers. Despite its later reputation for exclusivity, Freemasonry - which was born in the widespread emergence of a middle class, and grew rapidly to fill the human need to belong in a country where high mobility was breaking apart traditional social bonds - was an agent for breaking down class barriers and aiding this new openness. Freemasonry repudiated the monarchical hierarchy of family and favoritism and helped create a new republican order that rested on 'real Worth and personal Merit':

"Intense local attachments were common to peasants and backward peoples, but educated gentlemen were supposed to be at home anywhere in the world. Indeed, to be free of local prejudices and parochial ties was what defined a liberally educated person. One's humanity was measured by one's ability to relate to strangers, and Americans prided themselves on their hospitality and their treatment of strangers, thus further contributing to the developing myth of their exceptionalism. Indeed, as Crevecoeur pointed out, in America the concept of 'stranger' scarcely seemed to exist: ' A traveler in Europe becomes a stranger as soon as he quits his own kingdom; but it is otherwise here. We know, properly speaking, no strangers; this is every person's country; the variety of our soils, situations, climates, governments, and produce hath something which must please everyone.' 'In what part of the globe,' asked Benjamin Rush, 'was the 'great family of mankind' given as a toast before it was given in the republican states of America?'

"The institution that many Americans believed best embodied these cosmopolitan ideals of fraternity was Freemasonry. Not only did Masonry create enduring national icons (like the pyramid and the all-seeing eye of Providence on the Great Seal of the United States), but it brought people together in new ways and helped fulfill the republican dream of reorganizing social relationships. It was a major means by which thousands of Americans could think of themselves as especially enlightened. ... Many of the Revolutionary leaders, including Washington, Franklin, Samuel Adams, James Otis, Richard Henry Lee, and Hamilton, were members of the fraternity.

"Freemasonry was a surrogate religion for enlightened men suspicious
of traditional Christianity. It offered ritual, mystery, and communality without the enthusiasm and sectarian bigotry of organized religion. But Masonry was not only an enlightened institution; with the Revolution, it became a republican one as well. As George Washington said, it was 'a lodge for the virtues.' The Masonic lodges had always been places where men who differed in everyday affairs - politically, socially, even religiously - could 'all meet amicably, and converse sociably together.' There in the lodges, the Masons told themselves, 'we discover no estrangement of behavior, nor alienation of affection.' Masonry had always sought and harmony in a society increasingly diverse and fragmented. ...

"In the decades following the Revolution Masonry exploded in numbers, fed by hosts of new recruits from middling levels of the society. There were twenty-one lodges in Massachusetts by 1779; in the next twenty years fifty new ones were created, reaching out to embrace even small isolated communities on the frontiers of the state. Everywhere the same expansion took place. Masonry transformed the social landscape of the early Republic.

"Masonry began emphasizing its role in spreading republican virtue and civilization. It was, declared some New York Masons in 1795, designed to wipe 'away those narrow and contracted Prejudices which are born in Darkness, and fostered in the Lap of ignorance.' Freemasonry repudiated the monarchical hierarchy of family and favoritism and created a new republican order that rested on 'real Worth and personal Merit' and 'brotherly affection and sincerity.' At the same time, Masonry offered some measure of familiarity and personal relationships to a society that was experiencing greater mobility and increasing numbers of immigrants. It created an 'artificial consanguinity,' declared DeWitt Clinton of New York in 1793, that operated 'with as much force and effect, as the natural relationship of blood.'

"Despite its later reputation for exclusivity, Freemasonry became a way for American males of diverse origins and ranks to be brought together in republican fraternity, including, at least in Boston, free blacks."

Author: Gordon S. Wood
Title: Empire of Liberty
Publisher: Oxford
Date: Copyright 2009 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
Pages: 50-52

delanceyplace.com 8/27/10 - the holy city of moscow

2010-08-27T03:37:00.002-04:00

In today's excerpt - Moscow, circa 1685, at the time of the completion of the palace at Versailles in France and the inception of the Salem witch trials in America:

"From a distance, Moscow struck one Western traveler as the most 'beautiful city in the world,' an urban feast topped by hundreds of gold-crusted domes and a sea of glistening crosses that surmounted the treetops. Unlike the stone and marble of its European counterparts, Moscow was a city hewn from wood; even the streets themselves were planked with timber, not trampled down or paved with stone. Also unlike anything in the Western world was the somber medieval citadel of Russian power, the Kremlin, which imbued the city with an exotic mystery. ...

"With its massive red walls jutting from the bank of the Moscow River, the Kremlin was not a single building but an entire walled city - Kreml literally means 'fortress' in Russian - ringed by two rivers and a deep moat. Inside this mighty citadel rose gorgeous cathedrals (three), an astonishing number of chapels (sixteen hundred) and hundreds of houses, as well as government offices, law courts, barracks, bakeries, laundries, stables, and a mighty whitewashed-brick bell tower ... And Moscow had a spiritual dimension rivaled only by Jerusalem and the Vatican: It was the 'Third Rome,' the center of Orthodox faith. ...

"The bazaars of Moscow were frequented by Persians, Afghans, Kirghiz, Indians, and Chinese, while traders and artisans peddled an eclectic slice of the Asiatic world: silks, brass and copper goods, tooled leather and bronze, and innumerable objects of hand-carved wood. The city itself was peopled with tattered, itinerant holy men and bearded priests, as well as ruddy peasants in cloth leggings and soldiers in voluminous caftans. ... Russian customs were uncommonly coarse - basic things like cutlery and toothpicks were unheard of; and drunkenness was so rampant that on feast days, travelers were stunned to see naked men, passed out, who had sold their clothing for drink. Dwarfs and fools, increasingly out of fashion in the West, still amused the tsar and his retainers. ...

"Muscovites were an intensely religious people, and most of the city, rich and poor alike, fell under the church's spell. Few had a hold on the Russian mind or imagination as did the starets - the man of God. but the true master who loomed over this ancient land was ultimately the tsar, the very portrait of absolute monarchy. ... From infancy, Russians were taught to regard him as a godlike creature ('Only God and the tsar know,' went one ancient proverb). ... Russian noblemen did not simply bow, they flattened themselves before the tsar, touching the ground with their foreheads ('we humbly beseech you, we your slaves ...')."

Author: Jay Winik
Title: The Great Upheaval
Publisher: Harper Collins
Date: Copyright 2007 by Jay Winik
Pages: 12-14

delanceyplace.com 8/26/10 - babar the elephant

2010-08-26T03:36:00.002-04:00

In today's encore excerpt - the beloved children's book, French author Jean de Brunhoff's "The Story of Babar," published in 1931 in the days of French colonies and the global French Empire:

"[In the book], an elephant, lost in the city, does not trumpet with rage but rides a department-store elevator up and down, until gently discouraged by the elevator boy. A Haussmann-style city rises in the middle of the barbarian jungle. Once seen, Babar the Frenchified elephant is not forgotten. ...

"Every children's story that works at all begins with a simple opposition of good and evil, of straightforward innocence and envious corruption. ...[In this story], Babar's mother, with her little elephant on her back, is murdered, with casual brutality, by a squat white hunter. ... (Maurice Sendak, in a lovely appraisal of Babar, recalls thinking that the act of violence that sets Babar off is not sufficiently analyzed - that the trauma is left unhealed and even untreated.) ...

"Babar, [some] interpreters have insisted, is an allegory of French colonization, as seen by the complacent colonizers: the naked African natives, represented by the 'good' elephants, are brought to the imperial capital, acculturated, and then sent back to their homeland on a civilizing mission. The elephants that have assimilated to the ways of the metropolis dominate those which have not. The true condition of the animals--to be naked, on all fours, in the jungle-is made shameful to them, while to become an imitation human, dressed and upright, is to be given the right to rule. The animals that resist - the rhinoceroses - are defeated. The Europeanized elephants are, as in the colonial mechanism of indirect rule, then made trustees of the system, consuls for the colonial power. To be made French is to be made human and to be made superior. ...

"Yet those who would [so interpret] 'Babar' miss the true subject of the books. The de Brunhoffs' saga is not an unconscious expression of the French colonial imagination; it is a self-conscious comedy about the French colonial imagination. ... The gist of the classic early books of the nineteen-thirties - 'The Story of Babar' and 'Babar the King,' particularly - is explicit and intelligent: the lure of the city, of civilization, of style and order and bourgeois living is real, for elephants as for humans. The costs of those things are real, too, in the perpetual care, the sobriety of effort, they demand. The happy effect that Babar has on us, and our imaginations, comes from this knowledge - from the child's strong sense that, while it is a very good thing to be an elephant, still, the life of an elephant is dangerous, wild, and painful. It is therefore a safer thing to be an elephant in a house near a park. ...

"All children's books take as their subject disorder and order and their proper relation, beginning in order and ending there, but with disorder given its due. ... Disorder is the normal mess of life, what rhinos like. Order is what elephants (that is, Frenchmen) achieve at a cost and with effort. To stray from built order is to confront the man with a gun. ... Fables for children work not by pointing to a moral but by complicating the moral of a point. The child does not dutifully take in the lesson that salvation lies in civilization, but, in good Freudian fashion, takes in the lesson that the pleasures of civilization come with discontent at its constraints: you ride the elevator, dress up in the green suit, and go to live in Celesteville, but an animal you remain - the dangerous humans and rhinoceroses are there to remind you of that - and you delight in being so. There is allure in escaping from the constraints that button you up and hold you; there is also allure in the constraints and the buttons. We would all love to be free, untrammeled elephants, but we long, too, for a green suit."

Author: Adam Gopnik
Title: "Freeing the Elephants"
Publisher: The New Yorker
Date: September 22, 2008
Pges: 46-50

delanceyplace.com 8/25/10 - psychopaths

2010-08-25T03:37:00.002-04:00

In today's excerpt - the bizarre world of psychopaths, and the equally bizarre world of psychopathy treatment. Some researchers have estimated that as many as 500,000 psychopaths inhabit the U.S. prison system, and there may be another 250,000 more living freely - perhaps not committing serious crimes, but still taking advantage of those around them. Psychopathy is caused in large part by differences in biology. Images of psychopaths' brains made by Kent A. Kiehl show a pronounced thinning and underdevelopment of the paralimbic tissue, and area which includes the orbitofrontal cortex, the amygdala, the anterior cingulate cortex and the insula:

"Between the two of us [authors], we have interviewed hundreds of prison inmates to assess their mental health. We are trained in spotting psychopaths, but even so, coming face to face with the real article can be electrifying, if also unsettling. One of the most striking peculiarities of psychopaths is that they lack empathy; they are able to shake off as mere tinsel the most universal social obligations. They lie and manipulate yet feel no compunction or regrets - in fact, they don't feel particularly deeply about anything at all. ...

"Psychopaths are curiously oblivious to emotional cues. In 2002 James Blair of the NIMH showed that they are not good at detecting emotions, especially fear, in another person's voice. They also have trouble identifying fearful facial expressions. ...

"Psychopaths often cover up their deficiencies with a ready and engaging charm, so it can take time to realize what you are dealing with. Kent A. Kiehl used to ask inexperienced graduate students to interview a particularly appealing inmate before acquainting themselves with his criminal history. These budding psychologists would emerge quite certain that such a well-spoken, trustworthy person must have been wrongly imprisoned. Until, that is, they read his file - pimping, drug dealing, fraud, robbery, and on and on - and went back to reinterview him, at which point he would say offhandedly, 'Oh, yeah, I didn't want to tell you about all that stuff. That's the old me.' ...

"A man we will call Brad was in prison for a particularly heinous crime. In an interview he described how he had kidnapped a young woman, tied her to a tree, [abused] her for two days, then slit her throat and left her for dead. He told the story, then concluded with an unforgettable non sequitur. 'Do you have a girl?' he asked. 'Because I think it's really important to practice the three C's-caring, communication and compassion. That's the secret to a good relationship. I try to practice the three C's in all my relationships.' He spoke without hesitation, clearly unaware how bizarre this selfhelp platitude sounded after his awful confession....

"Thanks to technology that captures brain activity in real time, experts are no longer limited to examining psychopaths' aberrant behavior. We can investigate what is happening inside them as they think, make decisions and react to the world around them. And what we find is that far from being merely selfish, psychopaths suffer from a serious biological defect. Their brains process information differently from those of other people. It's as if they have a learning disability that impairs emotional development. ...

"Kiehl has launched an ambitious multimillion-dollar project to gather genetic information, brain images and case histories from 1,000 psychopaths and compile it all into a searchable database. ... Between 15 and 35 percent of U.S. prisoners are psychopaths. Psychopaths offend earlier, more frequently and more violently than others, and they are four to eight times more likely to commit new crimes on release. In fact, there is a direct correlation between how high people score on the 40-point screening test for psychopathy and how likely they are to violate parole. Kiehl recently estimated that the expense of prosecuting and incarcerating psychopaths, combined with the costs of the havoc they wreak in others' lives, totals $250 billion to $400 billion a year. No other mental health problem of this size is being so willfully ignored.

"Billions of research dollars have been spent on depression; probably less than a million has been spent to find treatments for psychopathy. ... There is room for optimism: a new treatment for intractable juvenile offenders with psychopathic tendencies has had tremendous success. Michael Caldwell, a psychologist at the Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center in Madison, Wis., uses intensive one-on-one therapy known as decompression aimed at ending the vicious cycle in which punishment for bad behavior inspires more bad behavior, which is in turn punished. Over time, the incarcerated youths in Caldwell's program act out less frequently and become able to participate in standard rehabilitation services. A group of more than 150 youths treated by Caldwell were 50 percent less likely to engage in violent crime afterward than a comparable group who were treated at regular juvenile corrections facilities. The young people in the regular system killed 16 people in the first four years after their release; those in Caldwell's program killed no one."

Authors: Kent A. Kiehl and Joshua W. Buckholtz
Title: "Inside the Mind of a Psychopath"
Publisher: Scientific American Mind
Date: September/October 2010
Pages: 22-29

delanceyplace.com 8/24/10 - second city

2010-08-24T03:36:00.002-04:00

In today's excerpt - the 1959 opening in Chicago of Second City theater, which made ensemble comedy magic by combining very high standards with a willingness to let its actors fail, and which became the training ground for such comic and theater luminaries as Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Tina Fey, Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, Mike Myers, John Candy, Chris Farley, Gilda Radner, Alan Arkin, Bonnie Hunt, Bill Murray, Martin Short, Catherine O'Hara, Amy Sedaris and many more:

"America was in the midst of a comedy revolution when Bernard Sahlins, Howard Alk, and Paul Sills conspired in 1959 to open a bohemian coffeehouse for recreational smoking, erudite discourse, and satirical theater. Considering the times, it seemed destined for success - or miserable failure. ... In addition to sharing a vision for what would become the Second City, another thing all three had in common was a diploma from the elite University of Chicago. ...

"Little did they know that the result of their labors would become an instant hit. Sahlins, who'd produced plays in 1956 at the handsome and historic Studebaker Theatre on South Michigan Avenue, initially invested six thousand dollars, and the new organization's defiant handle was reportedly conjured by Alk in ironic response to a snotty 1952 New Yorker magazine feature-turned-book by A. J. Liebling (Chicago: The Second City). ... While tough times ahead would continue to cause concern, the beginning was more auspicious than anyone had imagined. From night one, even as the budget carpet was still being installed, there were crowds in the lobby and lines out the door to witness the birth of a sensation. ...

SHELDON PATINKIN, former manager and director and current artistic consultant:

There was more of a willingness to fail then, because we all knew that was
the only way you were going to find the good stuff. That's true of Chicago
theater. You can fail in Chicago and still get work.

ALAN ARKIN, cast member:

First and most important, Second City gave me a place to go; it gave me a
place to function. That was the main thing. And the second most important thing, which was very, very close to the first, was that it gave us a place
to fail. Which doesn't exist in this civilization anymore. There is no place to
fail anymore. And failing at something is crucial. You don't learn from any-
thing unless you fail. And we were not only allowed to fail, but almost en-
couraged to take chances every night onstage. We knew that twenty, thirty,
sometimes forty percent of what we were doing wasn't going to work, and
Sills never said anything about it, Bernie never said anything about it, and
the audience didn't mind. They knew that two things would fail and the
next thing would be glorious.

BOB DISHY, cast member:

[Director Paul Sills] felt a moral responsibility to the choices that you make in an improv. Now, of course, that's not on a day-to-day basis. He was also pragmatic, and he knew he had to do shows. But he was pained, physically pained, by what he considered cheap laughs. I mean, they would drive him up the wall. He'd come backstage and yell, "Stop it! What are you doing?!" Because he had these high standards, which was great. I found it so enlightening.

BONNIE HUNT, cast member:

It definitely humbles you, because there are times when you go out there
and you fail and you've got to brush yourself off and start all over again. It's
kind of like being a Cubs fan. I think what I learned at Second City was that
it was okay to take risks, to fall flat on my face and get back up and learn
about myself. And I definitely learned to embrace the honesty of my own
vulnerability.

TINA FEY, cast member:

Being in that company, in some ways you lose your fear of failure. Because
there are always nights in that set when you're developing a show where
everything tanks, or where you're just bombing, and you come out the
other side of it, and you survive it. And that's such a great thing to get rid
of - that fear of failure.

BILL MURRAY, cast member:

It's given many great performers their start, but more importantly, it's
killed thousands of barely talented people and it's put them to death, and
they're now doing the jobs they're built for. It's because they couldn't meet
the rugged standards."

Author: Mike Thomas
Title: Second City Unscripted
Publisher: Villard
Date: Copyright 2009 by Mike Thomas
Pages: 3-5, 11-12, 16, xi

delanceyplace.com 8/23/10 - water

2010-08-23T03:36:00.002-04:00

In today's excerpt - only the tiniest fraction of all the earth's water is available to us as fresh liquid water, and control of rivers, more than oceans or lakes, has been the key to the advance of civilization:

"Despite Earth's superabundance of total water, nature endowed to mankind a surprisingly minuscule amount of accessible fresh liquid water that is indispensable to planetary life and human civilization. Only 2.5 percent of Earth's water is fresh. But two-thirds of that is locked away from man's use in ice caps and glaciers. All but a few drops of the remaining one-third is also inaccessible, or prohibitively expensive to extract, because it lies in rocky, underground aquifers - in effect, isolated underground lakes - many a half mile or more deep inside Earth's bowels. Such aquifers hold up to an estimated 100 times more liquid freshwater than exists on the surface. In all, less than three-tenths of 1 percent of total freshwater is in liquid form on the surface. The remainder is in permafrost and soil moisture, in the body of plants and animals, and in the air as vapor.

"One of the most striking facts about the world's freshwater is that the most widely accessed source by societies throughout history-rivers and streams-hold just six-thousandths of 1 percent of the total. Some societies have been built around the edges of lakes, which cumulatively hold some 40 times more than rivers. Yet lake water has been a far less useful direct resource to large civilizations because its accessible perimeters are so much smaller than riversides. Moreover, many are located in inhospitable frozen regions or mountain highlands, and three-fourths are concentrated in just three lake systems: Siberia's remote, deep Lake Baikal, North America's Great Lakes, and East Africa's mountainous rift lakes, chiefly Tanganyika and Nyasa. ...

"The minuscule, less than 1 percent total stock of accessible freshwater, however, is not the actual amount available to mankind since rivers, lakes, and shallow groundwater are constantly being replenished through Earth's desalinating water cycle of evaporation and precipitation - at any given moment in time, four-hundredths of 1 percent of Earth's water is in the process of being recycled through the atmosphere. Most of the evaporated water comes from the oceans and falls back into them as rain or snow. But a small, net positive amount of desalted, cleansed ocean water precipitates over land to renew its freshwater ecosystems before running off to the sea. Of that amount, civilizations since the dawn of history have had practical access only to a fraction, since two-thirds was rapidly lost in floods, evaporation, and directly in soil absorption, while a lot of the rest ran off in regions like the tropics or frozen lands too remote from large populations to be captured and utilized. Indeed, the dispersion of available freshwater on Earth is strikingly uneven. Globally, one-third of all streamflow occurs in Brazil, Russia, Canada, and the United States, with a combined one-tenth of the world's population. Semiarid lands with one-third of world population, by contrast, get just 8 percent of renewable supply. Due to the extreme difficulty of managing such a heavy liquid -weighing 8.34 pounds per gallon, or over 20 percent more than oil - societies' fates throughout history have rested heavily on their capacity to increase supply and command over their local water resources. ...

"Almost everywhere civilization has taken root, man-made deforestation, water diversion, and irrigation schemes have produced greater desiccation, soil erosion, and the ruination of Earth's natural fertility to sustain plant life.

"How societies respond to the challenges presented by the changing hydraulic conditions of its environment using the technological and organizational tools of its times is, quite simply, one of the central motive forces of history. ... Throughout history, wherever water resources have been increased and made most manageable, navigable, and potable, societies have generally been robust and long enduring. ... In every age, whoever gained control of the world's main sea-lanes or the watersheds of great rivers commanded the gateways of imperial power."

Author: Steven Solomon
Title: Water
Publisher: Harper
Date: Copyright 2010 by Steven Solomon
Pages: 12-16

delanceyplace.com 8/20/10 - ancient floods

2010-08-20T03:37:00.002-04:00

In today's excerpt - ancient floods:

"Most cultures ... have stories about a 'great flood' sent by angry gods to destroy mankind in the distant past. In Western civilization the most well known example is the story of Noah in the Bible. When God got fed up with mankind's disobedience and wickedness, he chose Noah and his family to perform a special mission: to build a huge boat (an ark) to hold breeding pairs of every animal to repopulate the world after the deluge.

"In the Sumerian version, the god Enki warns the king of Shuruppak, Ziusudra, that the gods have decided to destroy the world with a flood. Enki tells Ziusudra to build a large boat, where the king rides out the week-long flood. He prays to the gods, makes sacrifices, and is finally given immortality. According to Sumerian histories, the first Sumerian dynasty was founded by King Etana of Kish after this flood.

"Aboard ship take thou the seed of all living things.
That ship thou shall build;
Her dimensions shall be to measure.
-Sumerian flood myth

"According to the ancient Greeks, the mythical demigod Prometheus warned his son, Deucalion, that a great flood was coming, and instructed him to build a giant waterproof chest to hold himself and his wife, Pyrrha. The rest of humanity was drowned, but Deucalion and Pyrrha rode out the nine days of rain and flooding in their chest. As the flood subsided, they washed up on Mount Othrys, in northern Greece. Zeus told Deucalion and his wife to throw stones over their shoulders, which became men and women to repopulate
the world.

"Finally, Hindu mythology tells of a priest named Manu, who served one of India's first kings. Washing his hands in a river one day, Manu saved a tiny fish, who begged him for help. The grateful fish warned Manu that a giant flood was coming, so Manu built a ship on which he brought the 'seeds of life' to plant again after the flood. The fish - actually a disguise for the chief god, Vishnu - then towed the vessel to a mountaintop sticking up above the water. Sound familiar?

"Though it's impossible to know if these stories refer to the same actual event, a couple of historical events are plausible candidates. [One potential] explanation is the huge rise in sea levels that occurred at the end of the last Ice Age, beginning about twelve thousand years ago (10,000 BCE). The melting of the polar ice caps raised sea levels almost four hundred feet around the world - which must have made quite an impression."

Author: Erik Sass and Steve Wiegand with Will Pearson and Mangesh Hattikudur
Title: The Mental Floss History of the World
Publisher: Harper
Date: Copyright 2008 by Mental Floss LLC
Pages: 21-22

delanceyplace.com 8/19/10 - robin williams

2010-08-19T03:35:00.001-04:00

In today's encore excerpt - the comedian Robin Williams gets his start:

"Robin Williams was an acting student in the early 1970s at New York's prestigious Juilliard School, where his classmates were Christopher Reeve and William Hurt. As producer George Schlatter recalls, 'He didn't graduate because they asked him to leave after his junior year. They said, 'No, Robin, there's just nothing more we can teach you. So you should go out and work.' ' Williams himself remembers the conversation with the school's founder, the esteemed director and actor John Houseman, a bit differently: 'Mr. Williams, the theater needs you. I'm going off to sell Volvos.' ...

"Robin Williams was born in Chicago in 1952 and was raised in a well-to-do suburb outside of Detroit, Michigan, where his father was a busy senior executive with the Ford Motor Company. Neglected by his family, Williams grew up in a thirty-room mansion, where he had the entire third floor to himself. To entertain himself, he created an array of imaginary playmates. ...

"When Williams turned sixteen, his father took early retirement and moved the family to Marin County, just north of San Francisco. 'It was mellow times,' he recalled. 'That's where I found out about drugs and happiness. I saw the best brains of my time turned to mud.' Williams returned there after leaving Juilliard and soon ventured to Los Angeles, where he did the stand-up rounds. Budd Friedman recalls, 'I put him on every time he'd walk in and people would say, 'Why are you putting him on? He ain't got no act.' Trust me, he's got an act. And Robin became a favorite so quickly.' George Schlatter [observed], 'He came out in overalls, with a straw hat on, barefoot - it was Jonny Winters squared, you know? And he had a pole, and he put it out over the audience, and he says, 'I'm fishing for assholes.' The moment you saw him, you said, 'This is gonna be an important force. Not just a talent, but an important force in show business.' ' Williams made his featured debut [on the short-lived revival of Laugh-In] in late 1977; his first line was 'Ladies and gentlemen, tonight I'm here to talk to you about the very serious problem of schizophrenia - No, he isn't! - SHUT UP, LET HIM SPEAK!' ...

"Over at the soundstages at ABC, there was a hit number one sitcom called Happy Days. Producer Garry Marshall, on a whim suggested by his seven-year-old son, decided to drop an alien from space down on Fonzie and his friends. Finding the right actor would be crucial, and Marshall called on his sister, Ronnie, who was his casting director. Marshall recalled: 'Get me Jonathan Winters, get me John Byner, get me one of those crazy guys - Don Knotts, I'll take.' 'No, we got a guy, Robin Williams,' my sister Ronnie said. 'What he's done, Robin Williams?' 'He stands on a street corner and he does funny things and mimes and he passes the hat. That's his credit.' This is who I'm gonna see over the people I want to see? 'Yes, you gotta see him.' And I said, 'But why?' And I remember my sister said very clearly, 'You should see him - it's an awful full hat.'

"Williams's debut as Mork from Ork whipped the studio audience into pandemonium; in the days of sitcom spin-offs, a vehicle was not far behind. Mork and Mindy was hastily arranged for the following fall. ...

"On the first day of shooting, Marshall had to contend with the fact that his star was out of orbit: He was all set to go, I said, 'All right, Robin, we have three cameramen.' Three cameras for Mork and Mindy, and the average age of the cameramen is seventy-nine, eighty. And so I said, 'Okay, Robin, ready, action.' And he ran around, he did a very funny thing, he ad-libbed a little, he said the lines, he was all over the place, and I yell, 'Cut! Great!' And to Sam, my oldest cameraman, I said, 'Did you get that, Sam?' And Sam said, 'Never came by here.' I said, 'You gotta move the camera, Sam. The man's a genius.' And Sam said, 'If he's such a genius, he could hit that mark right over there and he'll be on camera.' So we hired a fourth camera, just to follow Robin."

Author: Michael Kantor and Laurence Maslon
Title: Make 'Em Laugh: The Funny Business of America
Publisher: Twelve, Hachette Book Group
Date: Copyright 2008 by Michael Kantor and Laurence Maslon
Pages: Kindle Loc. 5003-44.

delanceyplace.com 8/18/10 - battlefield graveyards

2010-08-18T06:55:00.000-04:00

In today's excerpt - with the millions of deaths in World War I, the British and French governments decided to bury dead soldiers in mass graves at the battlefield instead of returning them home. This left tens of millions of grieving relatives with no sense of closure and an overwhelming desire for one last moment with those that had died:

"Spiritualist societies, already popular before the war, doubled in number. The relaying of comforting messages of reassurance from loved ones reaching out to their families from beyond the grave were seized on in particular by the middle and upper classes who could afford the expensive connections to the spirit world. 'Mysticism' became a household word in salons of grand houses. But as in the Ancient Greek kingdom of death, the Hades of Homer's poetry, the spirits had no substance and a reaching out to their elusive nothingness simply increased the hopelessness of the mourner. ...

"If tangible evidence of the presence of the dead was difficult to find, reminders of their existence became important. One young woman would sprinkle Ajax, a man's hairwash, on to her pillow each night. Another dressed a tailor's dummy in the full uniform of her dead Grenadier Guards husband and slept with it every night beside her bed. The clothes carried his smell and for a brief waking moment she could imagine her husband had returned. The widowed Lady Ailesbury would only allow herself to be kissed on the left cheek, the other remaining 'sacred to the memory of my dear Lord Ailesbury'....

"There were other ways to raise oneself from the stupor induced by the ending of the war. Long before the war was over an urgent need had developed to establish the precise manner and exact place of death of those lost on the battlefields of France. Many wished to see these alien, other-worldly sights before they were covered over. Personal columns ran advertisements offering photographs of individual war graves in France and Flanders costing thirty shillings for three prints. Enterprising companies accepted commissions for placing flowers and wreaths on graves. The French Government announced that widows, children and parents of French soldiers who had given their life for their country would be offered a day's free excursion to visit the graves of those they loved. Pilgrimage trains left Paris each morning for Albert, Arras and Rheims.

"In England newspapers carried advertisements for guided tours to the battlefields much as pre-war tourists had been enticed by special deals to seaside towns. Prices for package trips to the 'Devastated Areas' included hotels and cars and even an officer guide, if so desired, promoting an eerie holiday atmosphere. Visitors were recommended to bring their own food and to ensure they were dressed for the cold, while ammunition boxes that lay discarded everywhere conveniently suggested themselves as picnic tables, upended and laid with sandwiches, in the middle of this silent wasteland. ...

"There were almost daily casualties among the visitors from unexploded bombs as if the ghostly enemy was taking revenge from beneath the soil. ... While unexploded shells made it a dangerous place to be, unburied
bodies made it a distressing place to visit even for the ghoulish. ...

"Women searching for a trace of comfort in the devastated landscape were seen plunging their bare hands into the earth and rummaging in the soil looking for any little token of evidence, however macabre. Raymond Asquith had described the sight of 'limbs and bowels resting in hedges'. But flesh had rotted over the months and another visitor, William Ewart's sister, who had lost her husband, failed to find him in the mud at Bapaume. However, the experience of looking at the precise landscape, the very trees and mounds of
mud that her husband had seen in his last moments, brought her an unexpected and welcome relief. William Ewart reported that his sister left that place transfigured and that she 'went laughing into the world again ... nor has the dancing light ever left her gay blue eyes. Her ear responds, she laughs, she lives.' "

Author: Juliet Nicolson
Title: The Great Silence
Publisher: Grove
Date: Copyright 2009 by Juliet Nicolson
Pages: 96-101

delanceyplace.com 8/17/10 - the indignity of death

2010-08-17T07:50:00.000-04:00

In today's excerpt - the work of morticians and the indignity of death. We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget:

"An eye cap is a simple ten-cent piece of plastic. It is slightly larger than a contact lens, less flexible, and considerably less comfortable. The plastic is repeatedly lanced through, so that small, sharp spurs stick up from its surface. The eyelid will come down over an eye cap, but, once closed, will not easily open back up. Eye caps were invented by a mortician to help dead people keep their eyes shut. ...

"Presiding at the embalming table today are Theo Martinez and Nicole D'Ambrogio. ... Before the embalming begins, the exterior of the corpse is cleaned and groomed. Nicole swabs the mouth and eyes with disinfectant, then rinses both with a jet of water. Though I know the man to be dead, I expect to see him flinch when the cotton swab hits his eye, to cough and sputter when the water hits the back of his throat. His stillness, his deadness, is surreal. The students move purposefully. Nicole is looking in the man's mouth. Her hand rests sweetly on his chest. Concerned, she calls Theo over to look. They talk quietly and then he turns to me. 'There's material sitting in the mouth,' he says. ... 'What happened is that whatever was in the stomach found its way into the mouth.' Gases created by bacterial decay build up and put pressure on the stomach, squeezing its contents back up the esophagus and into the mouth. The situation appears not to bother Theo and Nicole, though purge is a relatively infrequent visitor to the embalming room. Theo explains that he is going to use an aspirator [to remove it]. ...

"Next Theo coats the face with what I assume to be some sort of disinfecting lotion, which looks a lot like shaving cream. The reason that it looks a lot like shaving cream, it turns out, is that it is. Theo slides a new blade into a razor. 'When you shave a decedent, it's really different. ... The skin isn't able to heal, so you have to be really careful about nicks. One shave per razor, and then you throw it away.' ...

" 'Now we're going to set the features,' says Theo. He lifts one of the man's eyelids and packs tufts of cotton underneath to fill out the lid the way the man's eyeballs once did. ... On top of the cotton go a pair of eye caps. 'People would find it disturbing to find the eyes open,' explains Theo, and then he slides down the lids. ...

" 'Did you already go in the nose?' Nicole is holding aloft tiny chrome scissors. Theo says no. She goes in, first to trim the hair, then with the disinfectant. 'It gives the decedent some dignity,' she says, plunging wadded cotton into and out of his left nostril.

"The last feature to be posed is the mouth, which will hang open if not held shut. Theo is narrating for Nicole, who is using a curved needle and heavy-duty string to suture the jaws together. 'The goal is to reenter through the same hole and come in behind the teeth,' says Theo. 'Now she's coming out one of the nostrils, across the septum, and then she's going to reenter the mouth. There are a variety of ways of closing the mouth' he adds, and then he begins talking about something called a needle injector. ...

"Drops of sweat bead the inside surface of Nicole's splash shield. We've been here more than an hour. It's almost over. Theo asks, 'Will we be suturing the anus?' He turns to me. 'Otherwise leakage can wick into the funeral clothing and it's an awful mess.' I don't mind Theo's matter-of-factness. Life contains these things: leakage and wickage and discharge, pus and snot and slime and gleet. We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget."

Author: Mary Roach
Title: Stiff
Publisher: Norton
Date: Copyright 2003 by Mary Roach
Pages: 72-84

delanceyplace.com 8/16/10 - not guilty by reason of insanity

2010-08-16T06:51:00.001-04:00

In today's excerpt - not guilty by reason of insanity, first introduced in Britain in 1843 - and the perils of attempting to define insanity. This became manifest especially in the desperate poverty and social disruption of early Victorian England:

"Many illegitimate babies were killed by poor and desperate women in Victorian England: in 1860, child murders were reported in the newspapers almost daily. Usually the victims were newborns, and the assailants were their mothers. In the spring of 1860, Sarah Gough, a housekeeper and cook at Upper Seymour Street, a mile or so from Upper Harley Street, killed her illegitimate child, parcelled it up and sent it by train from Paddington to a convent near Windsor. She was easily traced: in the package was a paper bearing the name of her employer.

"Juries showed compassion to women such as Sarah Gough, preferring to find them deranged than depraved. They were helped in this by new legal and medical ideas. In the law courts the 'McNaghten rule' had since 1843 allowed 'temporary insanity' to be used as a defense. (In January 1843 a Scottish
woodturner, Daniel McNaghten, had fatally shot Sir Robert Peel's secretary, mistaking him for the Prime Minister.) Alienists detailed the kinds of madness to which the apparently and usually sane could fall victim: a woman might suffer from puerperal mania just before or after giving birth; any woman might be overcome by hysteria, and anyone might be struck by monomania, a form of madness that left the intellect intact - the sufferer could be emotionally deranged yet show cold cunning. By these criteria, any unusually violent crime could be understood as evidence of insanity. The Times put the dilemma neatly in an editorial of 1853:

"Nothing can be more slightly defined than the line of demarcation between sanity and insanity ... Make the definition too narrow, it becomes meaningless; make it too wide, and the whole human race becomes involved in the dragnet. In strictness we are all mad when we give way to passion, to prejudice, to vice, to vanity; but if all the passionate, prejudiced and vain people were to be locked up as lunatics, who is to keep the key to the asylum?"

Author: Kate Summerscale
Title: The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher
Publisher: Walker
Date: Copyright 2008 by Kate Summerscale
Page: 136

delanceyplace.com 8/13/10 - the heartbreaks of cynthia ann parker

2010-08-13T03:34:00.002-04:00

In today's excerpt - the heartbreaks of Cynthia Ann Parker. In 1836, when she was nine years old, she was captured in a murderous raid by Comanches on her frontier family. The story, and the resulting search for her, became famous throughout the country. However, she then became the wife of a Comanche chief of that tribe, bore two sons and a daughter, and seemed a content wife and proud mother. She was finally "rescued" by the U.S. Army twenty-four years later in a battle that saw her husband killed, her two young sons run away to save their lives, and both she and her young daughter taken into captivity:

"There was the virtually universal belief among Texans at the time that Sul Ross, the hero of the battle and the future Texas governor, had saved the poor, unfortunate Cynthia Ann Parker from an ugly fate. That belief would color the histories for a long, long time.

"We will never know how Cynthia Ann Parker felt in the weeks and months after her capture by Sul Ross. There are so few comparable events in American history. But it was painfully apparent from the earliest days that the real tragedy in her life was not her first captivity but her second. White men never quite grasped this. The event that destroyed her life was not the raid at Parker's Fort in 1836 but her miraculous and much-celebrated 'rescue' at Mule Creek in 1860. The latter killed her husband, separated her forever from her beloved sons, and deposited her in a culture where she was more a true captive than she had ever been with the Comanches. ...

"Texans could not get enough of her. There were many newspaper accounts of her return, all of which were uniformly obsessed with the idea that a pretty little nine-year-old white girl from a devout Baptist family had been transformed into a pagan savage who had mated with a redskin and borne his children and forgotten her mother tongue. And all the stories assumed that everything she had done had been forced upon her. That she had suffered grievous mistreatment, had been whipped and beaten and had led a lonely and desperate existence. People simply did not believe that a Christian white woman had gone along with it voluntarily. One paper, the Clarksville Northern Standard, observed later that 'her body and arms bear the marks of having been cruelly treated.' Yet there is nothing to suggest that she was cruelly treated after the first few days of her captivity, as her cousin Rachel Plummer had described them. She was the ward of a chief, later his wife. The scars may have resulted from the practice among Comanche women of cutting themselves in mourning, often on the arms and breasts. ...

"[Once she had been 'rescued'], it is not clear exactly what [her relatives] thought they were going to accomplish with Cynthia Ann and her daughter. Perhaps they saw themselves as her deliverer, imagining the day when Cynthia Ann, grateful and weeping, would embrace Jesus and forsake her savage ways. Nothing of the sort happened. Cynthia Ann's repatriation was in fact a disaster. She was not only unrepentant. She was actively, and incessantly hostile to her captors. She tried repeatedly to escape with her daughter, sometimes making it far into the woods and requiring a search party to find her. She was so intent on leaving that [her relatives] had to lock her in the house when they were away. ...

"She would sit for hours and hours on the wide porch of [her uncle] Isaac's house weeping and nursing her daughter Prairie Flower. She refused to stop her pagan devotions. One of her relatives described her ritual of worship:

" 'She went out to a smooth place on the ground, cleaned it off very nicely and
made a circle and a cross. On the cross she built a fire, burned some tobacco,
and then cut a place on her breast and let the blood drop onto the fire.' ...

"Cynthia Ann kept trying to escape, walking off down the road with her daughter in her arms whenever she was left alone. (She said she was 'going home, just going home.') She often slashed her arms and breasts with a knife, drawing blood. This was probably an act of mourning for the death of her husband. Or it could have been a simple expression of misery. [She once added] 'I want to go back to my two boys.' "

Author: S.C. Gwynne
Title: Empire of the Summer Moon
Publisher: Scribner
Date: Copyright 2010 by S.C. Gwynne
Pages: 181, 183, 184, 188, 190

delanceyplace.com 8/12/10 - dopamine

2010-08-12T03:35:00.002-04:00

In today's encore excerpt - dopamine, pleasure, and too much pleasure:

"The importance of dopamine was discovered by accident. In 1954, James Olds and Peter Milner, two neuroscientists at McGill University, decided to implant an electrode deep into the center of a rat's brain. The precise placement of the electrode was largely happenstance; at the time, the geography of the mind remained a mystery. But Olds and Milner got lucky. They inserted the needle right next to the nucleus accumbens (NAcc), a part of the brain that generates pleasurable feelings. Whenever you eat a piece of chocolate cake, or listen to a favorite pop song, or watch your favorite team win the World Series, it is your NAcc that helps you feel so happy.

"But Olds and Milner quickly discovered that too much pleasure can be fatal. They placed the electrodes in several rodents' brains and then ran a small current into each wire, making the NAccs continually excited. The scientists noticed that the rodents lost interest in everything. They stopped eating and drinking. All courtship behavior ceased. The rats would just huddle in the corners of their cages, transfixed by their bliss. Within days, all of the animals had perished. They died of thirst.

"It took several decades of painstaking research, but neuroscientists eventually discovered that the rats had been suffering from an excess of dopamine. The stimulation of the NAcc triggered a massive release of the neurotransmitter, which overwhelmed the rodents with ecstasy. In humans, addictive drugs work the same way: a crack addict who has just gotten a fix is no different than a rat in an electrical rapture. The brains of both creatures have been blinded by pleasure. This, then, became the dopaminergic cliche; it was the chemical explanation for sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

"But happiness isn't the only feeling that dopamine produces. Scientists now know that this neurotransmitter helps to regulate all of our emotions, from the first stirrings of love to the most visceral forms of disgust. It is the common neural currency of the mind, the molecule that helps us decide among alternatives. By looking at how dopamine works inside the brain, we can see why feelings are capable of providing deep insights. While Plato disparaged emotions as irrational and untrustworthy - the wild horses of the soul - they actually reflect an enormous amount of invisible analysis."

Author: Jonah Lehrer
Title: How We Decide
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Date: Copyright 2009 by Jonah Lehrer
Pages: Kindle Loc. 463-538.

delanceyplace.com 8/11/10 - war, loneliness, and sex

2010-08-11T03:34:00.002-04:00

In today's excerpt - the carnage of World War I, and the prostitutes that emerged as a moment of relief from that carnage. World War I, the Great War, had no precedent in its bloodshed - the mere boys who marched to war as soldiers from Britain and elsewhere were witness to twenty-three million casualties:

"The [British] Government's morale-boosting propaganda had contributed in large part to the ignorance at home of the true state of affairs [in the war] abroad. Positive stories written by journalists who feared if they told the truth were designed to put the best possible slant on the news. Soldiers who longed to describe the dreadful reality of warfare had their letters censored. ...

"How were soldiers to find a way to describe to their isolated, sometimes disbelieving families what happened out there? ... Loneliness was constant. Men missed women. ...

"Just behind the battle lines only a mile or two from the front, girls waited to 'comfort' men, irrespective of whether they were German, British or French, waiting for them in abandoned chateaux, village houses, hay barns, caravans, farm buildings and the upper floors of inns. Different coloured lanterns indicated the rank of clientele allowed entry. Blue denoted a place reserved for officers, the light sometimes swinging from a pole that stood next to a sign declaring 'No Admittance for Dogs and Soldiers'. Common soldiers were directed towards the red light establishments. Sometimes the queues outside these places could number a hundred men or more, with three worn-out French women waiting inside. The price per slot varied from two and a half to ten francs or two to eight shillings, although a bartering system involving bread and sausages was also prevalent. One innocent young officer, hearing his turn called, made his way to room number six where in the bitter-sweet, dirt-smelling near darkness he could see the outline of a female figure who, turning towards him, hiked up her black nightdress to her waist and fell backwards on the edge of the bed. He realised that the highly anticipated delights of seduction were already over. She was ready.

"These women estimated that operating a strict schedule of ten minutes per man, they could service an entire battalion every seven days, a production rate that most were usually able to sustain for only three weeks before retiring exhausted, and invariably unwell, but proud of their staying power. This experience had been, for many of the prospectively syphilitic young men, their introduction to the 'joy' of physical love. Even the virginal Prince of Wales went in 1916 with some fellow officers to watch naked girls performing erotic poses in a brothel in Calais, concluding from his own 'first insight into such things' that it was a 'perfectly filthy and revolting sight'. ...

"The threat of venereal disease sometimes led soldiers to seek sexual relief with each other. The Field Almanac issued to Lieutenant Skelton cautioned men not to 'ease themselves promiscuously', although the detailed instructions on the necessity for cleanliness of the body at all times were impossible to implement in the filthy conditions of the camps. George V, hearing of the extent of homosexual activity in the army some two decades after the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde, had been heard to mutter: 'I thought men like that shot themselves.' There was also a belief that homosexuality might be infectious and Scotland Yard kept a register of known homosexuals. Recovery from prosecution was at best rare and in reality unknown. Two hundred and seventy soldiers and twenty officers were court-martialled for 'acts of gross indecency with another male person according to the Guidance notes in the Manual of Military Law'."

Author: Juliet Nicolson
Title: The Great Silence
Publisher: Grove
Date: Copyright 2009 by Juliet Nicolson
Pages: 19-25

delanceyplace.com 8/10/10 - new orleans, mexico, and texas

2010-08-10T03:34:00.002-04:00

In today's excerpt - in the early to mid-1800s, it was not clear whether the United States or Mexico would emerge as the dominant power in North America. The U.S. had a sliver of land on the east coast and a vulnerable, export-dependent economy. Control of New Orleans was key to a new economic foundation:

"Until the Mexican-American War, it was not clear whether the dominant power in North America would have its capital in Washington or Mexico City. Mexico was the older society with a substantially larger military. The United States, having been founded east of the Appalachian Mountains, had been a weak and vulnerable country. At its founding, it lacked strategic depth and adequate north-south transportation routes. The ability of one colony to support another in the event of war was limited. More important, the United States had the most vulnerable of economies: It was heavily dependent on maritime exports and lacked a navy able to protect its sea-lanes against more powerful European powers like England and Spain. The War of 1812 showed the deep weakness of the United States. By contrast, Mexico had greater strategic depth and less dependence on exports.

"The American solution to this strategic weakness was to expand the United States west of the Appalachians, first into the Northwest Territory ceded to the United States by the United Kingdom and then into the Louisiana Purchase, which Thomas Jefferson ordered bought from France. These two territories gave the United States both strategic depth and a new economic foundation. The regions could support agriculture that produced more than the farmers could consume. Using the Ohio-Missouri-Mississippi river system, products could be shipped south to New Orleans. New Orleans was the farthest point south to which flat-bottomed barges from the north could go, and the farthest inland that oceangoing ships could travel. New Orleans became the single most strategic point in North America. Whoever controlled it controlled the agricultural system developing between the Appalachians and the Rockies. During the War of 1812, the British tried to seize New Orleans, but forces led by Andrew Jackson defeated them in a battle fought after the war itself was completed.

"Jackson understood the importance of New Orleans to the United States. He also understood that the main threat to New Orleans came from Mexico. The U.S.-Mexican border then stood on the Sabine River, which divides today's Texas from Louisiana. It was about 200 miles from that border to New Orleans and, at its narrowest point, a little more than 100 miles from the Sabine to the Mississippi.

"Mexico therefore represented a fundamental threat to the United States. In response, Jackson authorized a covert operation under Sam Houston to foment an uprising among American settlers in the Mexican department of Texas with the aim of pushing Mexico farther west. With its larger army, a Mexican thrust to the Mississippi was not impossible - nor something the Mexicans would necessarily avoid, as the rising United States threatened Mexican national security.

"Mexico's strategic problem was the geography south of the Rio Grande (known in Mexico as the Rio Bravo). This territory consisted of desert and mountains. Settling this area with large populations was impossible. Moving through it was difficult. As a result, Texas was very lightly settled with Mexicans, prompting Mexico initially to encourage Americans to settle there (in part, as a buffer against the Comanches, ed.) Once a rising was fomented among the Americans, it took time and enormous effort to send a Mexican army into Texas. When it arrived, it was weary from the journey and short of supplies. The insurgents were defeated at the Alamo and Goliad, but as the Mexicans pushed their line east toward the Mississippi, they were defeated at San Jacinto, near present-day Houston.

"The creation of an independent Texas served American interests, relieving the threat to New Orleans and weakening Mexico. The final blow was delivered under President James K. Polk during the Mexican-American War, which (after the Gadsden Purchase) resulted in the modern U.S.-Mexican border. That war severely weakened both the Mexican army and Mexico City, which spent roughly the rest of the century stabilizing Mexico's original political order."

Author: George Friedman
Title: "Arizona, Borderlands and U.S.-Mexican Relations"
Publisher: Stratfor Global Intelligence
Date: August 3, 2010

delanceyplace.com 8/9/10 - why sex?

2010-08-09T03:34:00.002-04:00

In today's excerpt - is sex really necessary? After all, if the evolutionary goal of each individual is to get as many genes into the next generation as possible, wouldn't it have been simpler and easier for the early organisms to have just replicated or made clones? The likeliest explanation is that the genetic shuffling and resulting variation that occurs from sex-based reproduction keeps enough diversity in the species to minimize risk from bacteria, viruses and other parasites. And since we're on the subject, after sex, why does the male stay involved? From the stand point of biology, males have more or less nothing to do after copulation:

"Approximately two billion years ago a pair of single-celled organisms made a terrible mistake-they had sex. We're still living with the consequences. Sexual reproduction is the preferred method for an overwhelming portion of the planet's species, and yet from the standpoint of evolution it leaves much to be desired. Finding and wooing a prospective mate takes time and energy that could be better spent directly on one's offspring. And having sex is not necessarily the best way for a species to attain Darwinian fitness. If the evolutionary goal of each individual is to get as many genes into the next generation as possible, it would be simpler and easier to just make a clone.

"The truth is, nobody really knows why people - and other animals, plants and fungi - prefer sex to, say, budding. Stephen C. Stearns, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University, says scientists now actively discuss more than 40 different theories on why sex is so popular. Each has its shortcomings, but the current front-runner seems to be the Red Queen hypothesis. It gets its name from a race in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass. Just as Alice has to keep running to stay in the same place, organisms have to keep changing their genetic makeup to stay one step ahead of parasites. Sexual reproduction allows them to shuffle their genetic deck with each generation. That's not to say that sex is forever. When it comes to reproduction, evolution is a two-way street. When resources and mates are scarce, almost all types of animals have been known to revert to reproducing asexually. ...

"What persuaded the male hominid to stick around after mating? From the standpoint of biology, males have nothing to do after copulation. 'It's literally wham-bam thank-you-ma'am,' says Kermyt G. Anderson, an anthropologist at the University of Oklahoma-Norman and co-author of Fatherhood: Evolution and Human Paternal Behavior. What made the first father stick around afterward? He was needed. At some point in the six million years since the human lineage split from chimpanzees, babies got to be too expensive, in terms of care, for a single mother to raise. A chimp can feed itself at age four, but humans come out of the womb essentially premature and remain dependent on their parents for many years longer. Hunters in Amazonian tribes cannot survive on their own until age 18, according to anthropologist Hillard Kaplan of the University of New Mexico-Albuquerque. Their skills peak in their 30s - not unlike income profiles of modern men and women.

"Oddly enough, bird families also tend to have stay-at-home dads. In more than 90 percent of bird species, both parents share the care of their young. This arrangement probably began, at least for most birds, when males started staying around the nests to protect helpless babies from predators. 'A flightless bird sitting on a nest is a very vulnerable creature,' explains evolutionary biologist Richard O. Prum of Yale University. Some birds, though, might have inherited their particular form of fatherhood from dinosaurs. Male theropods, a close relative of birds, seem to have done all the nest building, just as male ostriches do today. That doesn't mean everything was on the up and up. A female ostrich will lay an egg in the nest of her mate, but usually a different male fertilizes it. 'There's a loose relationship,' Prum says, 'between paternal care and paternity.' "

Author: Brendan Borrell
Title: "Origins"
Publisher: Scientific American
Date: August 2010
Pages: 47-49

delanceyplace.com 8/6/10 - children and lying

2010-08-06T03:34:00.002-04:00

In today's excerpt - a controversial suggestion regarding children and lying:

"Researchers have found that the ability to tell fibs at the age of two is a sign of a fast developing brain and means they are more likely to have successful lives. They found that the more plausible the lie, the more quick witted they will be in later years and the better their ability to think on their feet. It also means that they have developed 'executive function' - the ability to invent a convincing lie by keeping the truth at the back of their mind.

" 'Parents should not be alarmed if their child tells a fib,' said Dr Kang Lee, director of the Institute of Child Study at Toronto University who carried out the research. 'Almost all children lie. Those who have better cognitive development lie better because they can cover up their tracks. They may make bankers in later life.' Lying involves multiple brain processes, such as integrating sources of information and manipulating the data to their advantage. It is linked to the development of brain regions that allow 'executive functioning' and use higher order thinking and reasoning.

"Dr Lee and his team tested 1,200 children aged two to 16 years old. A majority of the volunteers told lies but it is the children with better cognitive abilities who can tell the best lies. At the age of two, 20 per cent of children will lie. This rises to 50 per cent by three and almost 90 per cent at four. The most deceitful age, they discovered, was 12, when almost every child tells lies. The tendency starts to fall away by the age of 16, when it is 70 per cent. As adulthood approaches, young people learn instead to use the less harmful 'white lies' that everyone tells to avoid hurting people's feelings.

"Researchers say there is no link between telling fibs in childhood and any tendency to cheat in exams or to become a fraudster later in life. Nor does strict parenting or a religious upbringing have any impact. Dr Lee said that catching your children lying was not a bad thing but should be exploited as a 'teachable moment'. 'You shouldn't smack or scream at your child but you should talk about the importance of honesty and the negativity of lying,' he told the Sunday Times. 'After the age of eight the opportunities are going to be very rare.'

"The research team invited younger children - one at a time - to sit in a room with hidden cameras. A soft toy was placed behind them. When the researcher briefly left the room, the children were told not to look. In nine out of ten cases cameras caught them peeking. But when asked if they had looked, they almost always said no. They tripped themselves up when asked what they thought the toy might be. One little girl asked to place her hand underneath a blanket that was over the toy before she answered the question. After feeling the toy but not seeing it, she said: 'It feels purple so it must be Barney.' Dr Lee, who caught his son Nathan, three, looking at the toy, said: 'We even had cameras trained on their knees because we thought their legs would fidget if they were telling a lie, but it isn't true.'

"Older children were set a test paper but were told they must not look at the answers printed on the back. Some of the questions were easy, such as who lives in the White House. But the children who looked at the back gave the printed answer 'Presidius Akeman' to the bogus question 'Who discovered Tunisia?' When asked how they knew this, some said they learned it in a history class."

Author: Richard Alleyne
Title: "Lying children will grow up to be successful citizens"
Publication: Telegraph.co.uk
Date: August 3, 2010
Pages: Home Section, Science

delanceyplace.com 8/5/10 - detroit and motown

2010-08-05T03:35:00.002-04:00

In today's encore excerpt - Detroit and Motown:

"Motown would become the first successful black-owned record company and eventually the nation's largest black-owned enterprise of any sort.

"Without Detroit, there could have been no Motown. The company was an outgrowth of the car industry, specifically of the black immigration spurred by the industry's swift rise and seemingly endless demand for labor. Industrial migration swelled the black population of most northern cities, but none more quickly than Detroit. Between 1910 and 1930, the number of African Americans nearly tripled in Philadelphia and New York, and quintupled in Chicago. But in Detroit it went up by more than twenty times, from just under 6,000 to over 120,000.

"The main draw was Henry Ford's factory, which, in 1914, put out the word that it was paying assembly-line workers five dollars a day. In response, blacks moved from the South to Detroit at the rate of 1,000 per month; by 1922, the figure rose to 3,500 per month. If Ford's lines were full, a strong worker could find a job at some other factory. By 1925, there were three thousand major manufacturing plants in Detroit; thirty-seven of them were building cars. At the start of World War II, Detroit became the arsenal of America's military machine, and the demand for workers soared further. A half million more migrated to Detroit in the wars first two years.

"There was little assimilation of the black families that poured into Detroit in the early waves of this migration; most of them were crammed into dilapidated tenements on the city's south side. During the even larger influx brought on by World War II, things got ugly. Most of these new migrants were black, as before, but there were also many Polish immigrants and white Appalachians, all competing for the same jobs. A quarter of the city's 185 war plants refused to hire blacks. Many car factories, even after all these years, would not mix black and white workers on the same assembly line. In 1943, the NAACP and the United Auto Workers staged an 'equal opportunity' rally, with over ten thousand black men attending. When, as a result, three black workers were promoted to skilled slots at a Packard plant, twenty-six thousand white workers walked out.

"That summer, race riots erupted. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had to send in six thousand federal troops to quell the violence, which left thirty-four people dead (twenty-five of them black), hundreds injured, and $2 million worth of property damage. The city planners responded with the Detroit Plan, which demolished hundreds of buildings and displaced thousands of black families, inspiring the observation that 'urban renewal' was a euphemism for 'Negro removal.'

"Amid this de facto segregation, the African Americans in Detroit created their own culture and institutions - and, because of the decent-paying jobs at Ford and other factories, they had enough money to sustain the effort."

Author: Fred Kaplan
Title: 1959
Publisher: Wiley
Date: Copyright 2009 by Fred Kaplan
Pages: 213-215

delanceyplace.com 8/4/10 - the destruction of smyrna

2010-08-04T03:34:00.002-04:00

In today's excerpt - the 1922 destruction of Smyrna, a beautiful city located on the Aegean coast of what is now Turkey with twice the Greek population of Athens itself. In a century of global ethnic cleansing, the razing of Smyrna was on a scale that the world had never before seen - and was a harbinger of much that came after. Perhaps the most cosmopolitan and ethnically tolerant city in the world in the early twentieth century, it fell victim to the nascent Turkish nationalist movement after misguided foreign policy moves - some say the blunders of British Prime Minister David Lloyd George - inflamed the centuries-old enmity between Turkey and Greece. Essentially all of its 700,000 inhabitants were killed, captured or fled as refugees before the Turkish National Army:

"The city [of Smyrna] was one in which fig-laden camels nudged their way past the latest Newton Bennett motor car; in which the strange new vogue of the cinema was embraced as early as 1908. There were seventeen companies dealing exclusively in imported Parisian luxuries. And if [a person] cared to read a daily newspaper, he had quite a choice: eleven Greek, seven Turkish, five Armenian, four French and five Hebrew, not to mention the ones shipped in from every capital city in Europe. ...

"Amidst the grandeur there was intense human activity. Hawkers and street traders peddled their wares along the mile-long quayside. Water sellers jangled their brass bowls; hodjas - Muslim holy men - mumbled prayers in the hope of earning a copper or two. And impecunious legal clerks. often Italian, would proffer language lessons at knock-down prices. 'You saw all sorts . . .' recalled the French journalist, Gaston Deschamps. 'Swiss hoteliers, German traders, Austrian tailors, English mill owners, Dutch fig merchants, Italian brokers, Hungarian bureaucrats, Armenian agents and Greek bankers.'

"The waterfront was lined with lively bars, brasseries and shaded cafe gardens, each of which tempted the palate with a series of enticing scents. The odour of roasted cinnamon would herald an Armenian patisserie; apple smoke spilled forth from hookahs in the Turkish cafes. Coffee and olives, crushed mint and armagnac: each smell was distinctive and revealed the presence of more than three dozen culinary traditions. Caucasian pastries, boeuf a la mode, Greek game pies and Yorkshire pudding could all be found in the quayside restaurants of Smyrna. ...

"What happened over the two weeks [following September 9, 1922] must surely rank as one of the most compelling human dramas of the twentieth century. Innocent civilians - men, women and children from scores of different nationalities - were caught in a humanitarian disaster on a scale that the world had never before seen. The entire population of the city became the victim of a reckless foreign policy that had gone hopelessly, disastrously wrong. ...

"The total death toll is hard to compute with any certainty. According to Edward Hale Bierstadt - executive of the United States Emergency Committee - approximately 100,000 people were killed and another 160,000 deported into the interior. 'It is a picture too large and too fearful to be painted,' he wrote in his 1924 study of the disaster, The Great Betrayal, although he did his best, interviewing numerous eyewitnesses and collecting their testimonies. Other estimates were more conservative, claiming that 190,000 souls were unaccounted for by the end of September. It is unclear how many of these had been killed and how many deported, although Greek sources suggest that at least 100,000 Christians were marched into the interior of the country. Most of these were never seen again. ...

"The exodus from Asia Minor was on a [massive] scale and it was to continue for many months. To [rescue worker] Esther Lovejoy's eyes, it was 'the greatest migration in the history of mankind.' The migration was eventually enshrined in law in 1923, when [Turkish leader] Mustafa Kemal put his signature to the Treaty of Lausanne. All of Turkey's remaining 1.2 million Orthodox Christians were to be uprooted from their ancestral homes and moved to Greece. And the 400,000 Muslims living in Greece were to be removed from their houses and transported to Turkey. It was ethnic cleansing without parallel."

Author: Giles Milton
Title: Paradise Lost
Publisher: Sceptre
Date: Copyright 2008 by Giles Milton
Pages: 6-8, 372, 382

delanceyplace.com 8/3/10 - london police

2010-08-03T03:34:00.002-04:00

In today's excerpt - the first modern police force. With the Industrial Revolution came the beginnings of immense social and economic changes and the large scale movement of the population to the towns. The parish constable and "watch" systems that had previously been in place failed completely and the impotence of the law-enforcement machinery was a serious menace. Conditions became intolerable and led to the formation of the "New Police." Jack Whicher, who later became a famed detective, was among the first of these new policemen:

"On 18 September,1837, Jack Whicher became a police constable. The Metropolitan Police, the first such force in the country, was eight years old. London had got so big, so fluid, so mysterious to itself that in 1829 its inhabitants had, reluctantly, accepted the need for a disciplined body of men to patrol the streets. The 3,500 policemen were known as 'bobbles' and 'peelers' (after their founder, Sir Robert Peel), as 'coppers' (they caught, or copped, villains), as 'crushers' (they crushed liberty), as 'Jenny Darbies' (from gendarmes), and as pigs (a term of abuse since the sixteenth century).

"Whicher was issued with dark-blue trousers and a dark-blue long-tailed coat, its bright metal buttons imprinted with a crown and the word POLICE. ... Whicher shared a dormitory with about sixteen other men in the Hunter Place station house, in Hunter Street, just south of King's Cross. All single men were expected to lodge in the station house, and to be in their quarters by midnight....

"In the daytime, a constable covered a seven-and-a-half-mile beat at two-and-a-half miles an hour for two four-hour stints: from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m., say, and from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. He familiarised himself with every house on his beat, and strove to clear the roads of beggars, tramps, costermongers, drunks and prostitutes. He was subject to spot checks by a sergeant or an inspector, and the rules were strict: no leaning or sitting while on the beat, no swearing, no consorting with servant girls. The police were instructed to treat everyone with respect - the drivers of hansom cabs, for instance, were not to be referred to as 'cabbies' - and to avoid the use of force. These standards were to be observed off-duty, too. If found drunk at any time, a constable was issued with a warning, and if the offence was repeated he was dismissed from the force. In the early 1830s four out of five dismissals, of a total of three thousand, were for drunkenness. ...

"The circuit was much shorter at night - two miles - and Whicher was expected to pass each point on his beat every hour. Though this shift could be miserable in winter, it had its perks: tips for waking up market traders or labourers before dawn, and sometimes a 'toothful' of beer or brandy from each publican on the route. ...

"[Whicher's district] teemed with tricksters, and the police had to be expert in identifying them. A new vocabulary evolved to catalogue the various deceits. The police watched out for 'magsmen' (conmen, such as card sharps) who 'gammoned' (fooled) 'flats' (dupes) with the help of 'buttoners' or 'bonnets'(accomplices who drew people in by seeming to win money from the magsmen). A 'screever' (drafter of documents) might sell a 'fakement' to a vagrant 'on the blob' (telling hard-luck stories) - in 1837, fifty Londoners were arrested for producing such documents and eighty-six for bearing them. To 'work the kinchin lay),' was to trick children out of their cash or clothing. To 'work the shallow' was to excite compassion by begging half-naked. To 'shake lurk' was to beg in the guise of a shipwrecked sailor. In November 1837 a magistrate noted that some thieves in the Holborn area were acting as decoys, feigning drunkenness in order to distract police constables while their friends burgled houses."

Author: Kate Summerscale
Title: The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher
Publisher: Walker
Date: Copyright 2008 by Kate Summerscale
Pages: 45-49

delanceyplace.com 8/2/10 - new amsterdam

2010-08-02T03:33:00.002-04:00

In today's excerpt - Anglo-centric American historians have typically featured Jamestown (founded in 1607) and Plymouth (founded in 1620) to tell the founding story of America, at the expense of the Dutch colony centered in Manhattan (founded in 1614 as Fort Amsterdam and the designated New Amsterdam), which was more economically and culturally dominant in the earliest years of American history, and which is arguably more representative of America today:

"We are used to thinking of American beginnings as involving thirteen English colonies - to thinking of American history as an English root onto which, over time, the cultures of many other nations were grafted to create a new species of society that has become a multiethnic model for progressive societies around the world. But that isn't true. To talk of the thirteen original English colonies is to ignore another European colony, the one centered on Manhattan, which predated New York and whose history was all but erased when the English took it over (in 1664).

"The settlement in question occupied the area between the newly forming
English territories of Virginia and New England. It extended roughly from
present-day Albany, New York, in the north to Delaware Bay in the south,
comprising all or parts of what became New York, New Jersey, Connecticut,
Pennsylvania, and Delaware. It was founded by the Dutch, who called it New Netherland, but half of its residents were from elsewhere. Its capital was a tiny collection of rough buildings perched on the edge of a limitless wilderness, but its muddy lanes and waterfront were prowled by a Babel of peoples - Norwegians, Germans, Italians, Jews, Africans (slaves and free), Walloons, Bohemians, Munsees, Montauks, Mohawks, and many others - all living on the rim of empire, struggling to find a way of being together, searching for a balance between chaos and order, liberty and oppression. Pirates, prostitutes, smugglers, and business sharks held sway in it. It was Manhattan, in other words, right from the start: a place unlike any other, either in the North American colonies or anywhere else.

"Because of its geography, its population, and the fact that it was under the
control of the Dutch (even then its parent city, Amsterdam, was the most liberal in Europe), this island city would become the first multiethnic, upwardly mobile society on America's shores, a prototype of the kind of society that would be duplicated throughout the country and around the world. ... If what made America great was its ingenious openness to different cultures, then the small triangle of land at the southern tip of Manhattan Island is the New World birthplace of that idea, the spot where it first took shape. Many people - whether they live in the heartland or on Fifth Avenue - like to think of New York City as so wild and extreme in its cultural fusion that it's an anomaly in the United States, almost a foreign entity. This book offers an alternative view: that beneath the level of myth and politics and high ideals, down where real people live and interact, Manhattan is where America began.

"The original European colony centered on Manhattan came to an end when England took it over in 1664, renaming it New York after James, the Duke of York, brother of King Charles II, and folding it into its other American colonies. As far as the earliest American historians were concerned, that date marked the true beginning of the history of the region. The Dutch-led colony was almost immediately considered inconsequential. When the time came to memorialize national origins, the English Pilgrims and Puritans of New England provided a better model. The Pilgrims' story was simpler, less messy, and had fewer pirates and prostitutes to explain away. It was easy enough to overlook the fact that the Puritans' flight to American shores to escape religious persecution led them, once established, to institute a brutally intolerant regime, a grim theocratic monoculture about as far removed as one can imagine from what the country was to become."

Author: Russell Shorto
Title: The Island at the Center of the World
Publisher: Doubleday
Date: Copyright 2004 by Russell Shorto
Pages: 2-3

delanceyplace.com 7/30/10 - bacteria

2010-07-30T03:35:00.002-04:00

In today's excerpt - bacteria:

"It's probably not a good idea to take too personal an interest in your microbes. Louis Pasteur, the great French chemist and bacteriologist, became so preoccupied with them that he took to peering critically at every dish placed before him with a magnifying glass, a habit that presumaby did not win him many repeat invitations to dinner.

"In fact, there is no point in trying to hide from your bacteria, for they are on and around you always, in numbers you can't conceive. If you are in good health and averagely diligent about hygiene, you will have a herd about one trillion bacteria grazing on your fleshy plains - about a hundred thousand of them on every square centimeter of skin. They are there to dine off the ten billion or so flakes of skin you shed every day, plus all the tasty oils and fortifying minerals that seep out from every pore and fissure. You are for them the ultimate food court, with the convenience of warmth and constant mobility thrown in. By way of thanks, they give you B.O.

"And those are just the bacteria that inhabit your skin. There are trillions more tucked away in your gut and nasal passages, clinging to you hair and eyelashes, swimming over the surface of your eyes, drilling through the enamel of your teeth. Your digestive system alone is host to more than a hundred trillion microbes, of at least four hundred types. Some deal with sugars, some with starches, some attack other bacteria. A surprising number, like the ubiquitous intestinal spirochetes, have no detectable function at all. They just seem to like to be with you. Every human body consists of about 10 quadrillion cells, but about 100 quadrillion bacterial cells. They are, in short, a big part of us. From the bacteria's point of view, of course, we are a rather small part of them.

"Because we humans are big and clever enough to produce and utilize antibiotics and disinfectants, it is easy to convince ourselves that we have banished bacteria to the fringes of existence. Don't you believe it. Bacteria may not build cities or have interesting social lives, but they will be here when the Sun explodes. This is their planet, and we are on it only because they allow us to be.

"Bacteria, never forget, got along for billions of years without us. We couldn't survive a day without them. ... And they are amazingly prolific. The more frantic among them can yield a new generation in less than ten minutes; Clostridium perfringens, the disagreeable little organism that causes gangrene, can reproduce in nine minutes. At such a rate, a single bacterium could theoretically produce more offspring in two days than there are protons in the universe. 'Given an adequate supply of nutrients, a single bacterial cell can generate 280,000 billion individuals in a single day,' according to the Belgian biochemist and Nobel laureate Christian de Duve. In the same period, a human cell can just about manage a single division."

Author: Bill Bryson
Title: A Short History of Nearly Everything
Publisher: Broadway
Date: Copyright 2003 by Bill Bryson
Pages: 302-304

delanceyplace.com 7/29/10 - the oil curse

2010-07-29T03:34:00.003-04:00

In today's excerpt - the curse of abundant oil resources in developing countries - in this example, Venezuela. Developing countries with oil grow only one-fourth as fast as those without, and are far more likely to be militarized and devolve into civil war. In fact, oil and mineral-exporting countries have a 23 percent likelihood of civil war within five years, compared to less than 1 percent for nondependent countries.:

"[With its oil wealth], Venezuela began to import more and more and produce less, a typical symptom of Dutch disease, where resource-rich countries see other parts of their economics wither. (Venezuela actually had Dutch disease before the Dutch, but that term wouldn't be invented until the natural gas boom in the Netherlands in the 1960s torpedoed the country's economy. The condition should be called the Caracas cramp.)

"[After the discovery of oil in Venezuela in 1921], nobody paid taxes. If you're an oil state, it's far more efficient to ask oil buyers for more money than to collect taxes from your population, which requires a vast network of tax collectors, a bureaucracy, laws that are fair, and a justice system to administer them. Collecting oil money, by contrast, requires a small cadre of intellectuals to set policy and diplomats to make it happen. ... The political, economic, and psychological ramifications of this ... are profound.

" 'Systematically the government went after oil money rather than raising taxes,' says economist Francisco Monaldi. 'There is no taxation and therefore no representation here. The state here is extremely autonomous.' Whether it's a dictatorship, a democracy, or something in between, the state's only patron is the oil industry, and all of its attention is focused outward. What's more, the state owes nothing more than promises to the people of Venezuela, because they have so little leverage on the state's income.

"When a state develops the ability to collect taxes, the bureaucracy and mechanisms it creates are expensive. They perpetuate their existence by diligently collecting as much money as possible and encouraging the growth of a private economy to collect taxes from. A strong private economy, so the thinking goes, creates a strong civil society, fostering other centers of power that keep the state in check. Like other intellectuals I talk with in other oil states, Monaldi finds taxes more interesting and more useful than abstract ideas about democracy and ballot boxes. Taxes aren't democracy, but they seem to connect taxpayers and government in a way that has democratizing effects. Studies by Michael L. Ross at UCLA found that taxes alone don't foster accountability, but the relationship of taxes to government services creates a struggle for value between the state and citizens, which is some kind of accountability. ...

"Abdoulaye Djonouma, president of Chad's Chamber of Commerce, says oil brought about economic and agricultural collapse in Nigeria and Gabon. For Chad, which has fewer resources, he fears worse: militarization. He ticks off all the former French colonies that have become militarized. Virtually all. (One study found that oil-exporting countries spend between two and ten times more on their militaries than other developing countries.) ...

"At Stanford, Terry Lynn Karl's analysis of Venezuela's economy during the 1970s and '80s shows that countries whose economy is dominated by oil exports tend to experience shrinking standards of living - something that Chad can hardly afford. Oil has opportunity costs: A study by Jeffrey Sachs and Andres Warner showed that of ninety-seven developing countries, those without oil grew four times as much as those with oil. At UCLA, Michael L. Ross did regression studies showing that governments that export oil tend to become less democratic over time. At Oxford, Paul Collier's regression studies show that oil, and

Author: Lisa Margonelli
Title: Oil on the Brain
Publisher: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday
Date: Copyright 2007 by Lisa Margonelli
Pages: 146-147, 174-176

delanceyplace.com 7/28/10 - buffalo

2010-07-28T03:34:00.003-04:00

In today's excerpt - the tragedy that ensured the doom of the North American Plains Indian was the unprecedented slaughter of the American buffalo since they had become almost completely dependent on the buffalo for identity, sustenance and supplies:

"The greatest threat of all to the [North American Plains Indian] identity, and to the very idea of a nomadic hunter in North America, appeared on the plains in the late 1860s. These were the buffalo men. Between 1868 and 1881 they would kill thirty-one million buffalo, stripping the plains almost entirely of the huge, lumbering creatures and destroying any last small hope that any horse tribe could ever be restored to its traditional life. There was no such thing as a horse Indian without a buffalo herd. Such an Indian had no identity at all.

"The first large-scale slaughter of buffalo by white men with high-powered rifles took place in the years 1871 and 1872. There had been a limited market for buffalo products before that. Even as far back as 1825, several hundred thousand Indian-tanned robes had made it to markets in New Orleans. There had been demand for buffalo meat to feed the railway workers building the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s, spawning the fame and legend of hunters like Buffalo Bill Cody. But there was no real market for buffalo hides until 1870, when a new tanning technology allowed them to be turned into high-grade leather. That, combined with a new railhead in Dodge City, Kansas, meant that the skins could be shipped commercially.

"For hunters, the economics of the new business was miraculous, all the more so since the animals were so stupefyingly easy to kill. If a buffalo saw the animal next to it drop dead it would not flee unless it could see the source of the danger. Thus one shooter with a long-range rifle could drop an entire stand of the creatures without moving. A hunter named Tom Nixon once shot 120 animals in 40 minutes. In 1873 he killed 3,200 in 35 days, making Cody's once outlandish-sounding claim of killing 4,280 in 18 months seem paltry by comparison. Behind the hunters stood the stinking, sweating skinners, covered head to toe in blood and grease and the animals' parasites. Legendary hunter Brick Bond, who killed 250 animals a day, employed 15 such men. Covered wagons waited at [the trading post of] Adobe Walls to take the stacked skins to Dodge City. Except for the tongues, which were salted and shipped as a delicacy, the carcasses were left to rot on the plains. The profits, like the mass killing itself, were obscene. In the winter of 1871-72 a single hide fetched $3.50.

"Within two years these hunters, working mainly the Kansas plains close to Dodge City, had killed five million buffalo. Almost immediately, they were victims of their own success. By the spring of 1874 the herds on the middle plains had been decimated. The economics of hunting became a good deal less miraculous. As one scout traveling from Dodge City to the Indian territory put it: 'In 1872 we were never out of sight of the buffalo. In the following autumn, while traveling over the same district, the whole country was whitened with bleached and bleaching bones.' Thus the hunters were forced to move farther from the railheads in search of prey. ...

"Surprisingly, only a few voices cried out against the slaughter of the buffalo, which had no precedent in human history. Mostly people didn't trouble themselves about the consequences. It was simply capitalism working itself out, the exploitation of another natural resource. There was another, better explanation for the lack of protest, articulated best by General Phil Sheridan, then commander of the Military Division of the Missouri. 'These men [hunters] have done in the last two years ... more to settle the vexed Indian question than the entire regular army has done in the last thirty years,' he said. 'They are destroying the Indians' commissary ... For the sake of a lasting peace, let them kill, skin and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated. Then your prairies can be covered with speckled cattle and the festive cowboy.' Killing the Indians' food was not just an accident of commerce; it was a deliberate political act."

Author: S.C. Gwynne
Title: Empire of the Summer Moon
Publisher: Scribner
Date: Copyright 2010 by S.C. Gwynne
Pages: 259-262

delanceyplace.com 7/27/10 - phonograph-records

2010-07-27T03:34:00.002-04:00

In today's excerpt - when commercial radio first appeared in 1920, the sales of phonograph-records began to collapse. The unlikely savior of the phonograph-record companies was a little-known genre of music from the South that came to be called country music:

"The first shot in the media revolution occurred on November 2, 1920, when the first commercially licensed radio station, KDKA in Pittsburgh, made its debut broadcast by announcing the results of the Harding-Cox presidential election. Within months, new commercial stations were popping up around the country like dandelions after a spring rain. Some were a little bizarre - an early Washington, D.C., station was licensed to a priest and boasted the call letters WJSV, 'Will Jesus Save Virginia.' Others went to big commercial enterprises, like Chicago's WLS, owned by Sears and standing for 'World's Largest Store.' Still others were licensed to insurance companies, like Nashville's WSM - standing for 'We Shield Millions,' the slogan of the owners, the National Life and Accident Insurance Company. By 1922 and 1923, most major cities could boast of a radio station, and in the uncluttered airwaves of the time, people routinely picked up signals from hundreds of miles away.

"One effect of the popularity of the new radios had was to knock the bottom out of phonograph-record sales. The flat 78 rpm records had been around since the turn of the century, but record companies saw them as playthings for well-to-do families of the time; they featured a lot of light opera, pieces by Sousa's Band, vocal solos by Caruso, and barbershop harmonies by the Peerless Quartet. Now, suddenly, people found they could hear music free on the radio; why buy records for seventy-five cents apiece? Desperate to maintain sales, the record companies began casting about for new markets. They stumbled upon one in 1920, when the Okeh label released a song called 'Crazy Blues' by a vaudeville singer named Mamie Smith. It was the first blues record by an African-American artist, and it became a bestseller by appealing to a hitherto untapped record market - black Americans.

"In June 1923, the same man who had recorded Mamie Smith - Ralph Peer, a thirty- one-year-old, moon-faced A&R (artists & repertoire) chief who had been born in Kansas City, Missouri, but now worked out of New York - found himself in Atlanta looking for talent. A local dealer promised to buy five hundred copies if Peer would record the town character - Fiddlin' John Carson - a fifty-five-year-old former millworker who had won fame at the Municipal Auditorium's annual fiddling contest. Peer agreed and in a temporary studio recorded Carson playing the fiddle unaccompanied and singing 'The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane.' 'I thought his singing was pluperfect awful,' Peer admitted years later. But he released the record - and was surprised to see it become a modest hit.

"Within months, the race was on as the major record companies scrambled to tap into this new market of working-class southerners. At first they didn't even know what to call the music: Some ads mentioned 'oldtime southern tunes,' others 'hill country music,' others 'oldtime music.' Victor called its series 'Native American Melodies.' In 1924, a Texan singer working in New York, Vernon Dalhart, actually had a nationwide hit with a train-wreck ballad called 'The Wreck of the Old '97.' He followed this up in 1925 with a topical 'broadside' ballad called 'The Death of Floyd Collins,' about the miner who attracted widespread attention when he was trapped in a Kentucky sand cave; this record sold more than three hundred thousand copies, and if any of the record companies had lingering doubts about the marketability of southern music, these reservations were put to rest.

"Following Ralph Peer's lead, the companies began sending talent scouts into the South to hunt up and record on-location fiddlers, singers, banjo players, and gospel quartets. In the summer of 1927, Peer hit pay dirt once again. In an old hat factory doubling as a temporary studio, in the Virginia-Tennessee border town of Bristol, he discovered the two acts that were to dominate country music's first decade: a singing trio called the Carter Family and a former railroad brakeman named Jimmie Rodgers."

Author: Edited by Robert Santelli, Holly George-Warren, and Jim Brown
Title: American Roots Music
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
Date: Copyright 2001 by Ginger Group Productions Inc. and Rolling Stone Press
Page: 20

delanceyplace.com 7/26/10 - coco chanel

2010-07-26T03:35:00.002-04:00

In today's excerpt - Coco Chanel. The flamboyance and frills of Paris fashion were lost in the liberation of European and American women during World War I. The leader of the new fashion revolution was Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel:

"Ornate styles were obsolete by the 1920s. Emancipated during World War I, females were now working in factories, offices and shops; riding subways, buses and bicycles; and, in some instances, driving cars. They had neither the time nor the patience for fastidious trimmings, and the designer who intuitively sensed this transition was Gabrielle Chanel - 'Coco.' Conceiving le genre pauvre, she put women into men's shaggy sweaters, sailors' tricots, carpenters' coarse corduroys, ditchdiggers' grainy denims, waitresses' bleached aprons, soccer players' striped jerseys, students' sturdy gabardines.

"Nothing was too banal for her - sandals, bandannas, berets. Slender and athletic, with the lissome gait of a racehorse, Chanel made the kinds of clothes that she herself liked to wear. Her gamine creations presaged unisex, yet essential chic in her mind was a prosaic dress drenched in diamonds, rubies and sapphires. Fashion, she asserted, ought to appeal to the masses rather than be restricted to a precious few. When a coalition of couturiers petitioned the government to enact tough legislation to prevent piracy, she dissented, maintaining that fraudulent copies earned them popularity. The conceits of her confreres, she said, were preposterous. 'We are furnishers, not artists. At first art seems ugly and then becomes beautiful; at first fashion seems beautiful and then becomes ugly.'

"The daughter of an Auvergne wine dealer, she was reared on a farm by two maiden aunts and, at the age of seventeen, fled to Paris to escape the boredom of the provinces. After a stint as a milliner, she opened a dress shop adjacent to the Ritz, and it remained her headquarters. She would turn on her charm to induce boulevardiers to escort her to trendy spots like Maxim's, Fouquet's and the Pre Catalan, where she could parade her own raiment before the crème de la crème. Her styles clicked, and, by the 1930s, she was raking in an estimated four million dollars a year - and reportedly had assets of ten million. 'Under her glossy facade,' commented a Paris banker, 'she is a shrewd, calculating peasant.' Her penchant for the common touch notwithstanding, Chanel rattled around in a mansion on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore and consorted with snooty cronies at their chateaux and ski chalets, or aboard their yachts in the Mediterranean. Yet she fiercely protected her individuality. When the Duke of Westminster asked her to marry him, she demurred, saying, 'There have been several duchesses of Westminster; there is only one Chanel.' "

Author: Stanley Karnow
Title: Paris in the Fifties
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
Date: Copyright 1997, 1999 by Stanley Karnow
Pages: 272-273