D.B. Cooper update

Negative evidence from the DNA test on the most recent D.B. Cooper suspect.

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

Book: Bill Bryson, At Home

I read Bill Bryson's book on Australia about a decade ago, shortly after my first visit, and enjoyed it quite a lot. Motivated by that experience I decided to delve into his new book At Home: A Short History of Private Life.

The book is somewhat reminiscent of the old PBS series "Connections". It is well-informed history lite. Nothing is gone into too deeply, but Bryson has done a lot of reading, mostly in secondary sources, and also, perhaps more importantly, actually talked to a lot of academic experts. He also traveled himself to some of the homes he discusses, including George Washington's home at Mount Vernon and (my favorite) Thomas Jefferson's home at Monticello. There are also, on occasion, discussions where Bryson is quite honest about differing interpretations in the literature or simply an absence of evidence on particular questions.

Bryson's interests in architectural history and in the history of language come through strongly. He is not much interested in social science, other than a quite interesting discussion of the dangers of stairs. There were a few bits where I thought he could have done a much better job of indicating whether the particularly bizarre behaviors he was discussing applied only to the rich, or to the rich and the upper middle class, or more broadly. One might call this a lack of nuance and detail in places.

The NYT reviewer seems to want to mock the book for being too much in the way of beach reading for people with multiple NPR totebags, but holds back, probably in light of the fact that this is the same demographic in which the NYT itself specializes. Still, the review gives a clear flavor of the book, and one not dissimilar from my own, as outlined above.

Recommended if you are in the mood for some history lite.

Oh, and the notes are here, rather than at the web page listed in the book (at least, in the Canadian edition of the book).

D. B. Cooper

According to the Daily Mail, the FBI thinks it may have finally found D.B. Cooper, the early 70s hijacker who parachuted out of a Northwest Orient (as they were back then) plane over southern Washington State and was never found.

Cooper became a bit of a folk hero; wikipedia has a whole separate page about his appearances in popular culture. There is even a song, the "Ballad of D.B. Cooper," that received some radio attention, at least in the Pacific Northwest. And, particularly in the wake of 9/11, his antics do have an innocence to them. No one was hurt, he didn't take all that much money, and he was pushing no political or religious agenda other than the enrichment of D.B. Cooper. There are worse things.

I have a very slight personal connection to old D.B. Cooper as my father, who had just been working at the Seattle-Tacoma airport for a year or so at the time of the hijacking, was called out to the airport that night, though as I recall he ended up doing nothing other than standing around and watching the proceedings.

And, what are we to make of the Daily Mail calling it the Tacoma International Airport? Not hardly. At the time, Tacoma was best known locally for the awful smell that emitted from a large smelter.

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

Economists in WW2

Some interesting history of the role that economists played in the US war effort in WW2 from Economic Principals.

And, distantly related, some well justified bashing of Richard Shelby and the rest of the red team for promoting ignorance and incompetence by keeping Peter Diamond off of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.

Book: Fatherland by Robert Harris

I like alternate histories in both fictional (written by novelists) and non-fictional (written by historians) form and was in the mood for some not-too-literary fiction. So I picked up Fatherland by Robert Harris, newly purchased in hard cover for $4 from an antique store in bustling Howell, Michigan, and finished it in two days.

The conceit of the book is that it is 1964 in an alternate world in which the Germans won WW2 by figuring out that the Brits had cracked their codes and by doing a bit better on the eastern front in 1942. They now dominate all of Europe. The US did beat Japan, and so, just like in the real 1964, there is a bipolar world wrapped up in a Cold War, but this time between the US and Germany.

At one level, this is a very conventional detective novel. The characters will be quite familiar even to readers like me who dip into the genre pretty rarely. The plot is not as predictable as the Publisher's Weekly review (available on the amazon page) makes it out to be, but it is not wildly unpredictable either.

What raises this book a bit above the average is that the author, a Cambridge-educated journalist, puts in a lot of effort to make his alternate history credible. Many of the documents that play a role in the story are real, and the true history is carefully followed up to 1942. The author also has done a good job of porting over lessons from the real Cold War, and the real history of the Soviet Union in shaping his imagine of German society in 1964. For example, the revolution has been overtaken by bureaucratization, just as it was in the Soviet Union, and the Germans are fighting a costly war in the Urals against what remains of Russia (assisted covertly by the US), much like the Soviet war in Afghanistan. Harris also does a good job of laying out the Berlin that would have emerged from the grand(iose) plans of Albert Speer.

Perhaps oddly, the thing I will longest remember from the book is the historical document that it excerpts in which the German ambassador to the UK reports on a conversation with Joseph Kennedy. Kennedy is the US president in 1964 in the book's alternate history and was, in fact, US ambassador to the UK in the late 1930s and the father of Ted, John and Robert Kennedy. In the document, Kennedy reveals himself to be both a general anti-semite and, more narrowly, a Nazi sympathizer.

Overall, this book is somewhat recommended if you are into both alternate history and detective stories, but probably not otherwise.

A Mencken story

Regular readers will know I am a big fan of H.L. Mencken.

From the Good S**t blog comes a story I had not read before.

A short history of grading at UM

I would not have guessed that UM was completely pass / fail into the 20th century.

I like this bit about early UM president James Angell:

Over his 38 years as president he argued repeatedly that "broader, heartier, better work" was done by those who studied simply "for the sake of learning" than by those who were merely scrapping for grades. "A collegiate course cannot be wisely shaped with primary reference to driving drones to work," he declared. "It should provide every manly and noble incentive to worthy achievement."

There is no question that it is more fun to teach students who actually care about learning. And the fraction of such students is surprisingly high at Michigan. I suspect those students learn more, and learn more usefully, than their grade-grubbing, future-salary obsessed colleagues.

Board wargaming

This video, which brings back a lot of memories for me, may be the nerdiest thing I have ever seen in my entire life. Board wargaming was my hobby of choice in 8th and 9th grades. I still have a big stack of games in a closet downstairs, the vast majority made by Simulations Publications Inc. (SPI), the company featured in the video. Every Saturday night my very indulgent parents would drive me (and often one or two of my friends) down to Heritage Bookshop in Renton - long since closed - to spend the evening playing these games, with a side trip at some point to Jack in the Box to get some food.

Wasted youth ....

A cable channel I would watch

I think there needs to be an "AP History Channel" for people who do not need everything repeated six times, who like big words, who already know a little history and so do not need to have really basic stuff explained, and who would prefer still photos of actual people to low rent reenactments.

You will correctly infer from this grumbling that I watched the regular History Channel this evening.

History of kitchens

Megan McArdle takes advantage of a rare opportunity to issue stern rebuttals to both Tyler Cowen and Paul Krugman in a single post.

Megan titles her post"The Economics of Kitchens" but the value-added is not the economics, it is the history. Using an old cookbook and memories of her mother and grandmother, she puts the reader in a 1950s kitchen in a way that neither Tyler nor Paul manage to do.

History is really powerful and that includes the social history that conservatives often mock and of which Megan's post is a small example.

Thanksgiving thoughts from Reason

People who don't know history

can easily be made to look like idiots.



Funniest reason video - maybe ever. Perfect!

Can we got over the moralizing now and return to mud-slinging as usual?

Via: the Agitator

Movie: Agora

We say this yesterday at the Main Art theater in Royal Oak. Royal Oak is the hippest of Detroit's many suburbs, a sort of cross between Rush Street in Chicago and Ann Arbor. It is worth an occasional trip outside the Ann Arbor bubble.

This movie raises the question of whether the cause of reason (or science, or feminism, you can have your pick) justifies lying about history. The director (who co-authored the script) wants to tell a moral story about bad fundamentalists and the trouble they cause. In so doing, though, he apparently distorts the history to serve his political goals. Here is a snippet from an excellent blog post on the history:

Over and over again, elements are added to the story that are not in the source material: the destruction of the library, the stoning of the Jews in the theatre, Cyril condemning Hypatia's teaching because she is a woman, the heliocentric "breakthrough" and Hypatia's supposed irreligiousity. And each of these invented elements serves to emphasise the idea that she was a freethinking innovator who was murdered because her learning threatened fundamentalist bigots. The fact that Amenábar [the director] needs to rest this emphasis on things he has made up and mixed into the real story demonstrates how baseless this interpretation is.

I think the answer to the question raised by the movie is "no", so I found it irritating and preachy. A.O. Scott at the NYT, apparently part of the choir being preached to, is much kinder and seems to have appreciated the sermon.

I am no fan of fundamentalisms of any sort, and that includes the fundamentalist versions of atheism and secularism. I am very much a fan of getting the history right as history has much to teach us, most notably that things are rarely as morally obvious as this movie makes them out to be.

Addendum: if anyone can find a discussion of Agora on-line by an actual history professor, I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

Afghanistan's past

Wow ... pictures of Afghanistan (really just Kabul) from the 1950s. Amazing.

When I went to Bath in England a few years ago to see the ruined Roman bath, I wondered a lot about how the people who lived around the bath thought about it after the Romans left and both the social and physical capital that allowed the baths to run crumbled.

This piece addresses that same question after a fashion, and the answer would appear to be sadness and a real sense of loss.

I confess, the pictures make me pretty sad too. Either one of the Soviets dropping by and fundamentalist Islam is a tough challenge for a country. Both .... well, here is the result.

Via the Agitator

Not a good time to be Greek

My friend Nat Wilcox points me to this thoughtful piece that provides some historical context to the current crisis in Greece.

The piece is well worth reading and there is much to like about it. Americans are quite prone to forget, in part because we devote quite a lot of effort to not remembering, that our history of foreign policy interventions is not uniformly pure and good. Moreover, even when our motives our good, or at least partly good, they are often not understood by those who are the subject of our interventions, who see the world in different ways that we do.

On the negative side, I would have liked to see more in the way of a distinction between liberalism and capitalism. They are close cousins, of course, but by no means the same thing. I would have also liked some recognition that there is a crucial distinction between pining for some lost (and often never-existing) pre-capitalist communitarian and equalitarian past and wanting something for nothing and voting over and over again for politicians who promise to provide it. The article gently conflates them but they are quite different.

I also disagree with this bit:

But whatever happens in Greece, we need to remember that its problems are not unique, and the clash between those who like the world that capitalism has made and those who hate it is not going away.

I am more optimistic here. There are not a lot of folks around any more who miss hereditary monarchy (or, for that matter, communism). I think the same will eventually be true of liberalism's other resisters.

Clio Can Congratulations

Congratulations to my (still pretty new) colleague Paul Rhode for winning the "Clio Can" award from the Cliometric society at their annual meeting this year.

The cliometric society is devoted to applying the tools of economic theory and econometrics to the study of historical data.

Being historians, we may have to wait a while for them to update their web page of past Clio Can winners with Paul's picture, but you might enjoy looking at the pictures anyway while you wonder why no history of the somewhat oddly named award - there must be a good story there - is provided on the website.

Hat tip: Martha Bailey

Addendum: A visit to Paul Rhode's office to see the Clio Can in person reveals that it is literally a can of Clio Italian Olive Oil with a wooden base. The base has plaques with the names of the winners. The can comes in a heavy duty carrying case for travel by air.

The ebullient moment

Of all the many public relations offerings that UM produces, I like the bits about the history of the place the best. This one describes a famous Life magazine photo related to UM's marching band.

When words change meaning over time ...

The Canadian history magazine heretofore known as "The Beaver" is changing its name to "Canada's History" so as to avoid internet confusion.

"The Beaver was an impediment online," publisher Deborah Morrison told AFP.

No word yet on whether the student newspaper of the London School of Economics, also called The Beaver, will be following suit.

Hat tips: Charlie Brown and Mike Elsby

Thanksgiving like its 1899

The Thanksgiving 1899 menu from New York's Plaza hotel.

Your choice of four different kinds of duck!

Via: the agitator

Civil War

This website has a lot of great stuff from the civil war era, including scans of Harper's magazine.