<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><rss version="2.0" xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/" xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/" xmlns:slash="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/" > <channel> <title>JHoyt &#8211; New Historian</title> <atom:link href="https://www.newhistorian.com/author/jhoyt/feed/" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" /> <link>https://www.newhistorian.com</link> <description>Just another WordPress site</description> <lastBuildDate>Wed, 13 Feb 2019 07:05:09 +0000</lastBuildDate> <language>en-US</language> <sy:updatePeriod> hourly </sy:updatePeriod> <sy:updateFrequency> 1 </sy:updateFrequency> <generator>https://wordpress.org/?v=5.3.12</generator> <item> <title>Hildegard of Bingen: A Renaissance Woman Before Her Time</title> <link>https://www.newhistorian.com/2019/02/13/hildegard-of-bingen-a-renaissance-woman-before-her-time/</link> <pubDate>Wed, 13 Feb 2019 07:05:09 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator><![CDATA[JHoyt]]></dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[News]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.newhistorian.com/?p=8909</guid> <description><![CDATA[<p> <![CDATA[]]> </p> <p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.newhistorian.com/2019/02/13/hildegard-of-bingen-a-renaissance-woman-before-her-time/">Hildegard of Bingen: A Renaissance Woman Before Her Time</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.newhistorian.com">New Historian</a>.</p> ]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p> <![CDATA[People with a wide range of diverse knowledge and skills are often described as “Renaissance men.”  One of Europe’s great Renaissance men was actually a medieval woman, Hildegard of Bingen. Born in 1098 in Franconia (in what would later become Germany), Hildegard left her mark in mysticism, in music, in medicine and the natural sciences, and in the contentious religious and political questions of her day.  Today she is remembered by music scholars, feminists, natural healers, and also devout Catholics (especially since her canonization in 2012.) <h2>In The Beginning</h2> Hildegard was the tenth child of a wealthy and devout family which gave her ‘as a tithe’ to the church when she was only eight years old, sending her to a Benedictine monastery at Disibodenberg which had just begun to accept nuns. When she entered the monastery Hildegard had already begun to have visions which came to her surrounded by ‘a light so bright that [her] soul trembled.’ She had also figured out that other people didn’t see that light, and had decided to keep her experiences to herself—although she couldn’t conceal the physical sickness which often accompanied or followed them. Under the care of a brilliant and ascetic nun named Jutta, Hildegard learned to read and write, studied a variety of holy texts in Latin, and took holy vows when she was old enough. Jutta became Mother Superior, and on her death she chose Hildegard, who was then thirty-eight, as her successor. <h2></h2> <h2>Coming Out</h2> Hildegard’s administrative duties didn’t stop the visions pressing on her. She tried to keep these secret, but the effort exhausted her and finally made her seriously ill. She confided her visions to a monk who helped her record them.  In the midst of her illness she heard a voice which told her to speak and write of her visions, and she obeyed, recording them as they happened and also writing long commentaries on her interpretations of those visions and the flashes of insight which accompanied them.  These drew some anxious scrutiny from people higher up in the Church, but the examiners eventually decided that her visions were legitimate. The Pope wrote to Hildegard expressing his approval. Hildegard wrote back telling him to work harder to reform the Church. As the record of her visions spread far and wide, many girls and women came to study and live under Hildegard.  The women’s quarters in the monastery became crowded; Hildegard may also have felt the need for more independence from the monastery’s abbot. Hildegard had absorbed her teacher Jutta’s learning, but not her asceticism; she believed in moderation, and seems to have regarded the human body with fascination rather than suspicion. Most importantly, Hildegard believed God was calling her to leave the monastery and found a new convent and church for her nuns. The abbot was very reluctant to let them go, but Hildegard persisted and finally persuaded an archbishop to overrule the abbot. She purchased land and oversaw construction of their new House at Rupertsberg near Bingen on the Rhine. Hildegard paid attention to details of the building (which included water pumped in through pipes, an unusual feature at the time) as well as administration (the nuns were free to elect their own Mother Superior without interference from the Disibodenberg monastery.)  She did send part of the dowry money that had come with the nuns back to Disibodenberg. At last Hildegard had the space and freedom to pursue the physical and spiritual understandings which she prized. <img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-8911" src="https://www.newhistorian.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Liber_scivias_domini_fig_01-1-1.jpg" alt="" width="314" height="400" /> <h2> Works</h2> Hildegard wrote many books explaining the order of the natural world, the cosmos, the human body and the human soul—all of which she saw as naturally and inextricably interrelated.  The dichotomy between science and nature would have been alien to Hildegard. So would the treatment of people as somehow separate from their environment. In her book <em>Scivias (Know The Way)</em> she wrote,” “The soul in the body is like sap in a tree, and the soul’s powers are like the form of a tree … The intellect in the soul is like the greenery of the tree’s branches and leaves, the will like its flowers, the mind like its bursting first fruits, the reason like the perfected mature fruit, and the senses like its size and shape. And so a person’s body is strengthened and sustained by the soul&#8230;.” Elsewhere she described humans as responsible for helping God to redeem, not only all humanity, but also all the living world. Hildegard’s <em>Book of the Subtleties of the Diverse Nature of Creatures</em> combined religion and philosophy with explanations of natural history and practical remedies for all kinds of wounds, infections, poisonings and diseases. She even included a section on veterinary medicine. Some of the herbal remedies she recommended resemble those that are commonly used today—though given the long gap of time, the things we’ve learned since, the vagueness of the dosages and the errors introduced as the book was copied over and over by hand, it’s not recommended to use her book as a practical basis for treatment today. Hildegard’s creativity extended to music as well as writing.  She wrote a compendium of 70 religious songs and also composed musical plays. In her view music allowed humans to join the angels in praising God, and much of her music came to her in visions. Ensembles are still recording her music today—or at least some approximation of her music; musical notation in her day was quite different and somewhat obscure, taking the form of neumes instead of notes. <h2>Influence and Controversies</h2> Hildegard ‘s visions also urged her to instruct other people firmly in God’s will, and she seems to have done this without fear of consequences.  She wrote firm letters admonishing the Holy Roman Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa (the ruler of Germany) for planning to dismiss a bishop of whom she approved; later, when two different Popes were named by different factions of the Church, she opposed the Emperor’s choice and told him so in no uncertain terms. Despite this she was not punished as many others were who dared to challenge the Emperor.  Besides this she wrote letters to many other prominent people and went on preaching journeys even when she was elderly and in ill health. Hildegard was eighty years old when she buried a knight who had been excommunicated by the Church in holy ground. She explained that he had confessed and received the last rites, and he clearly deserved Christian burial. Cathedral authorities ordered her to exhume him. She refused and concealed the grave so no one else could dig him up.  Placed under Interdict, she continued to insist that she was right, and eventually the Church gave way—in time for her to be buried in honor and in peace. To learn more about Hildegard see <a href="https://www.bingen.de/en/tourism-culture/hildegard-of-bingen/her-life">https://www.bingen.de/en/tourism-culture/hildegard-of-bingen/her-life</a>]]&gt; </p> <p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.newhistorian.com/2019/02/13/hildegard-of-bingen-a-renaissance-woman-before-her-time/">Hildegard of Bingen: A Renaissance Woman Before Her Time</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.newhistorian.com">New Historian</a>.</p> ]]></content:encoded> </item> <item> <title>Seeking Refuge: International Refugee Policy and the Holocaust</title> <link>https://www.newhistorian.com/2019/01/30/seeking-refuge/</link> <pubDate>Wed, 30 Jan 2019 18:14:57 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator><![CDATA[JHoyt]]></dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[Breaking News]]></category> <category><![CDATA[News]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.newhistorian.com/?p=9059</guid> <description><![CDATA[<p> <![CDATA[]]> </p> <p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.newhistorian.com/2019/01/30/seeking-refuge/">Seeking Refuge: International Refugee Policy and the Holocaust</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.newhistorian.com">New Historian</a>.</p> ]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[ <![CDATA[ <p>January 27 was international Holocaust Remembrance Day, the 74^th anniversary of the liberation of the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau.  In this time of many refugees and fierce debates about where they can find refuge, it seems timely to remember the Jewish refugees who fled—or tried to flee—Nazi-occupied Europe, and the international debates over who, if anyone, would take them in.</p> <p><strong>Exodus</strong></p> <p>When the Nazis first came to power in Germany they did not prevent Jewish emigration. They claimed to encourage it in their attempt to make Germany, and later Nazi-occupied Europe, <em>judenrein</em>—devoid of Jews. They did make it very difficult for German Jews to transfer their assets outside Germany, and they required Jewish emigrants to get “certificates of harmlessness’ approved by the Gestapo as well as proving that they had turned over their valuables.&nbsp; Nevertheless, more Jews were cleared for departure than ever found refuge in other countries. </p> <p>In theory, other countries were aware of the need. In the summer of 1938, Western countries met at the Evian Conference to discuss the refugee crisis; they made statements of concern, but very few actually offered to take in significant numbers of refugees.&nbsp; Even after the widely reported violent pogroms of Kristallnacht in November 1938 most countries kept their admissions quotas low and refused visa requests. The reasons for this varied depending on the countries, and there were a few exceptions. </p> <p><strong>United States:</strong></p> <p>The US had passed immigration quotas in 1924, strictly limiting the number of immigrants it would accept from places other than England and Northern Europe. &nbsp;&nbsp;These quotas were partly inspired by the report of the government’s Dillingham Commission, which claimed that unassimilated, unassimilable immigrants from southern and Eastern Europe threatened the integrity of the US. The reports also claimed to describe differences in intelligence and moral character between immigrants of different ethnicities. Furthermore, during the economic depression of the early 1930s many native-born Americans viewed immigrants as competitors for jobs that were already too scarce.&nbsp; So at the Evian Conference the US refused to raise its immigration quotas (which allowed 27,000 people a year from Germany and Austria) and admit Jews fleeing the Nazi regime. </p> <p>There was a domestic interfaith effort to raise the quota for humanitarian reasons. In 1939 the Wagner-Rogers Bill, which would have admitted 20,000 Jewish children into the US, was introduced in both houses of Congress—where it failed to pass out of committees for a general vote. Also in 1939 the ship St Louis, which had taken refugees to Cuba and been turned away, sought admission to the US, which also refused them. The ship and its passengers returned to Europe, where more than 250 of its 900 refugee passengers died in the Holocaust.</p> <p>As the war intensified in Europe, refugees were described as national security threats, and administrative directives denied visas to people who might have been admitted under the legislative quotas. &nbsp;In June 1941 US diplomats were told that visas would soon be denied to people who had relatives in German-occupied countries who might be taken hostage and used to blackmail the emigrants into committing espionage or sabotage. In 1942 one man, Herbert Karl Friedrich Bahr, applied to enter as a refugee and was found to be a spy.&nbsp; No other such cases among the many thousands of refugees who sought asylum from the Nazis in America are known to historians, but at the time his case made it much easier to turn genuine refugees away. At the Bermuda Conference of 1943 the US again refused to increase admissions.</p> <p>In 1944 the Treasury Department, whose presiding Secretary was Jewish and deeply concerned by word of the Holocaust, prepared the “Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews,” and the government formed War Refugee Boards.&nbsp; From 1945-48, in the aftermath of the war and the liberation of the concentration camps, the new President Truman’s directives brought nearly 40,000 people displaced by war, many of them Jewish, to the US.</p> <p><strong>Britain:</strong></p> <p>Britain also strictly limited the immigration of adult refugees to its own soil. In 1939 when war broke out it also curtailed the immigration of German Jews to Palestine, which it controlled. But the persistent efforts of children’s aid committees persuaded the government to accept child refugees in the aftermath of Kristallnacht. Under the Kindertransport program, children under seventeen were allowed to immigrate from Germany and German-annexed territories, without their parents or guardians, so long as individuals or NGOs were willing to pay for their care; it was also understood that once the crisis was past they would leave.&nbsp; A few infants were sent through Kindertransport in the care of older children.&nbsp;&nbsp; The first Kindertransport arrived in December 1938, and children continued to arrive into 1940, when the Nazis effectively prevented Jews leaving for Britain. About 10,000 children came to Britain via Kindertransport; about 7,500 of those children were Jewish.</p> <p>In 1939 Britain began interning ‘enemy aliens’ in case they might be spies or saboteurs.&nbsp; About 1,000 teenagers who had arrived via Kindertransport were sent to internment camps.&nbsp; Some of these internees joined the British armed forces once they were of age.</p> <p>After the war it became clear that many of the Kindertransport refugees had been orphaned and could not return home as first envisioned.&nbsp; Many became British citizens or emigrated to Australia or America.</p> <p><strong>Continental Europe:</strong></p> <p>Nearly 100,000 Jewish refugees emigrated from Germany and Austria to other countries in Europe that were then overrun by the Nazis. Most of these died in the Holocaust.</p> <p>&nbsp;About 40,000 entered Spain, whose vague and contradictory policies allowed considerable discretion to local officials; many of these fled further rather than remaining there.</p> <p>Switzerland accepted about 30,000 Jewish refugees, many of whom were kept in camps apart from the main population, and turned nearly the same number away.&nbsp; </p> <p>After the war ended, hundreds of thousands of Jewish Displaced Persons were sheltered in camps run by the Allies in Italy, Germany and Austria.</p> <p><strong>Latin America:</strong></p> <p>Latin American immigration policies were generally growing more restrictive over the 1930s in the wake of economic depression—just as the refugee crisis was growing.&nbsp; About 84,000 Jews were resettled in Latin American nations over the war years. After 1941 this was largely a result of the German ban on emigration, but in earlier years the restrictions came largely from populist and nativist sentiment in the host countries. &nbsp;</p> <p>There were exceptions.&nbsp; Bolivia, thanks in part to a Jewish business leader with ties to their President Germán Busch, welcomed more than 20,000 Jewish refugees; some moved on (without papers) into other Latin American countries, but many stayed. Brazil and Mexico took in significant numbers of refugees from Nazism, and the Mexican consul Gilberto Saldivar, posted to Vichy France, ordered his staff to issue Mexican visas to any refugee who asked for them.&nbsp; </p> <p>The Dominican Republic offered to take any number of Jewish refugees if they had means to ‘contribute to the country’s enrichment’ and would agree to establish an agricultural settlement in an area designated by the government.&nbsp; Some historians see this as an attempt by the Dominican dictator Trujillo to ‘whiten’ the population of his country—or get people to overlook his own history of killing civilians. Fewer than 1,000 Jewish refugees actually settled in the DR, but about 5,000 DR visas were issued, allowing refugees to get out of Germany.</p> <p><strong>Shanghai:</strong></p> <figure class="wp-block-image"><img src="https://www.newhistorian.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Girls_of_the_Shanghai_Ghetto-1-1.png" alt="" class="wp-image-9060" /><figcaption>A Jewish girl and her Chinese friends in the Shanghai Ghetto during WWII, from the collection of the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum, via <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Girls_of_the_Shanghai_Ghetto.png">Wikimedia</a></figcaption></figure> <p>One exit destination that required no visas was the city of Shanghai, some parts of which were controlled by the Chinese (or, after 1937, the Japanese, who were getting the upper hand in the Sino-Japanese War) while other parts were controlled by various foreign powers which traded there. Shanghai was already home to a few thousand Jews who had emigrated either for business or (especially in the case of Russian expatriates) to escape pogroms.&nbsp; Nearly 20,000 Jews emigrated from Nazi-occupied lands to Shanghai’s international quarters. Most of these arrived in late 1938 and early 1939, after Kristallnacht and before the Japanese imposed immigration restrictions.&nbsp; Many of them settled in the very affordable Hongkou neighborhood, which became known as “Little Vienna.”&nbsp; Shanghai was struggling economically as a result of the war, and the international sectors had also become home to Chinese refugees, but locals still welcomed the new refugees.</p> <p>The Japanese occupying forces were less welcoming.&nbsp; Germany urged them to eliminate the Jewish population through heavy forced labor, ration cuts and medical experiments.&nbsp; The Japanese refused to do this, but in 1943 they did require all Jews to be contained within Hongkou, which was already overcrowded. There was little privacy, and too often little food, but still the refugee population survived the war.&nbsp; After the war many returned to Europe, and some others fled the Chinese civil war in 1939.</p> <p>More information about specific sections of this article can be found at the links below:</p> <p><a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-evian-conference"> The Evian Conference</a> </p> <p><a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/us-government-turned-away-thousands-jewish-refugees-fearing-they-were-nazi-spies-180957324/">Two</a> <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/american-response-to-the-holocaust">perspectives</a> on US responses to Jewish refugees </p> <p>The British <a href="https://www.history.com/news/holocaust-child-refugees-kindertransport-britain">Kindertransports</a></p> <p><a href="https://jewishstudies.washington.edu/digital-jewish-studies/mapping-history-ryan-gompertz-spain/">Spain’s</a> ambiguous refugee policy</p> <p><a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/refuge-in-latin-america">Latin America’s</a> reception of refugees</p> <p>Refugees in <a href="https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/shanghais-jewish-quarter-hongkou">Shanghai</a></p> ]]&gt; <p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.newhistorian.com/2019/01/30/seeking-refuge/">Seeking Refuge: International Refugee Policy and the Holocaust</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.newhistorian.com">New Historian</a>.</p> ]]></content:encoded> </item> <item> <title>Lines In The Sand, part 2: The Mexican-American War</title> <link>https://www.newhistorian.com/2019/01/23/lines-in-the-sand-part-2-the-mexican-american-war/</link> <pubDate>Wed, 23 Jan 2019 18:51:34 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator><![CDATA[JHoyt]]></dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[News]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.newhistorian.com/?p=9045</guid> <description><![CDATA[<p> <![CDATA[]]> </p> <p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.newhistorian.com/2019/01/23/lines-in-the-sand-part-2-the-mexican-american-war/">Lines In The Sand, part 2: The Mexican-American War</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.newhistorian.com">New Historian</a>.</p> ]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[ <![CDATA[ <figure class="wp-block-image"><img src="https://www.newhistorian.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Mexican-war-1846-48-2-1-1-1.png" alt="" class="wp-image-9047" /></figure> <h3>This Land Is&#8230;Whose Land?</h3> <p>As described in <a href="https://www.newhistorian.com/lines-in-the-sand-part1-the-texas-revolution/9031/">last week’s article</a>, the Republic of Texas successfully seceded from Mexico in the spring of 1836—“successfully,” that is, insofar as they had captured the Mexican president and general Santa Anna and gotten him to sign an agreement that Texas was to be an independent republic. The Mexican government, however, had deposed Santa Anna and refused to acknowledge Texas, though they no longer conducted an active war against the separatists.</p> <p>&nbsp;To further complicate the picture, there was no agreement about just where Texas’ southern boundary might be. The Republic of Texas claimed that the Rio Grande marked the southern border, while the Mexican government insisted that the border lay about 150 miles north of the Rio Grande along the Nueces River.&nbsp; </p> <p>Some Texans wanted to maintain a separate and independent republic.&nbsp; Others maintained that they would have a better chance of keeping their territory out of the hands of the Mexican government if they were annexed by the US and became a US state.&nbsp; The first Texan elections swept Sam Houston and the annexationists into power, and a delegation was sent to Washington.</p> <h3>Slavery and the Road Not Taken</h3> <p>The United States, in the person of President Martin van Buren, declined to annex Texas. The US was then at peace with Mexico, but the peace was not likely to survive the US annexation of Mexico.&nbsp; Also the US was already deeply divided over the question of slavery, and the addition of new territories, slave or free, was likely to change the balance of power and perhaps alter the direction of the federal government. Texas would have come in as a slave state, having earlier insisted on remaining a slaveholding territory when the rest of Mexico outlawed slavery.&nbsp; Van Buren turned down the fraught offer of annexation, but he did recognize the Republic of Texas. </p> <div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="alignright"><img src="https://www.newhistorian.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Charles_Elliot-1-1.png" alt="" class="wp-image-9048" /><figcaption>Charles Elliot</figcaption></figure></div> <p>So did Great Britain, which sent Charles Elliot as its ambassador to Texas in 1842. Elliot was a seasoned diplomat whose protests against the brutalities of the slave trade had contributed to Britain’s banning slavery in all its territories in 1833. After that he was sent to China, where he was found too conciliatory to the natives and sent to the fledgling republic of Texas—a downward move, in the view of his superiors. But the Texans were delighted to have a real British ambassador, and their view of Elliot warmed further when he helped them out of a diplomatic embarrassment.  Some Texan troops had gone raiding in the disputed territory along the Rio Grande in 1842, and the Mexican government captured two hundred of them.  Elliott negotiated their release in 1843. </p> <p>Elliot hoped to use this leverage to keep Texas as a sovereign republic, and also to get them to outlaw slavery. This appealed both to his conscience and to Britain’s economic interest. Since banning slavery, Britons were increasingly uncomfortable trading in commodities that depended on slave labor; they also saw the potential for a more advantageous trade relationship with a small, separate and grateful Texas than with the US.  Elliot offered a very substantial loan from the British government that would have enabled the Texan government to emancipate all slaves and compensate all former slave owners.  But the slave owners weren’t willing to take up this proposal.  </p> <p>In 1845 Elliot also negotiated and supported a treaty offer from the Mexican government, which was willing to recognize Texas and promise peace if Texas would stay out of the United States. This proposal also was turned down. The US had elected an expansionist President, James Polk, who promised to support Texas’ claim that the Rio Grande was its Southern border if Texas joined the Union.&nbsp; </p> <div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="alignleft is-resized"><img src="https://www.newhistorian.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/James-Polk-1-1.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-9049" width="301" height="401" /><figcaption>James K. Polk</figcaption></figure></div> <p>Polk wasn’t just thinking of Texas.&nbsp; On the day of his inauguration he confided in his Secretary of the Navy that one of his main objectives was to annex California, which was still, as Texas had recently been, Mexican territory with a history of welcoming immigrants from the US—and a more recent rise in tensions with some of the newer immigrants. &nbsp;&nbsp;</p> <p>The President wasn’t the only one with grand ambitions. In 1845 the Washington <em>Union</em>, a Democratic Party paper, had called for “a corps of properly organized volunteers” to “Invade, overrun and occupy Mexico. They would enable us not only to take California, but to keep it.” &nbsp;That same year Polk offered to purchase California and New Mexico, and the Mexican government refused. However, Sam Houston and the Texans took Polk’s offer up, and in December 1845 Texas was admitted to the Union as the 28^th state.</p> <h3>“Ample Cause of War”</h3> <p>In February 1846 President Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor and his troops to take up and defend a position on the banks of the Rio Grande.&nbsp; Taylor obeyed orders, crossing the Nueces River, marching south and arriving at the Rio Grande late in March.&nbsp; Mexican families fled ahead of the army and took refuge in the city of Matamoros just across the Rio Grande, from whence they watched Taylor’s troops setting up fortifications. </p> <p>Later on Ulysses Grant, then a lieutenant in Taylor’s army, later a famous Civil War general and US president, wrote: “The presence of United States troops on the edge of the disputed territory farthest from the Mexican settlements, was not sufficient to provoke hostilities. We were sent to provoke a fight, but it was essential that Mexico should commence it. It was very doubtful whether Congress would declare war; but if Mexico should attack our troops, the Executive could announce, &#8220;Whereas, war exists by the acts of, etc.,&#8221; and prosecute the contest with vigor. Once initiated there were but few public men who would have the courage to oppose it. &#8230;”</p> <p>Mexico declared a ‘defensive” war against Taylor’s advancing troops late in April. Early in May, according to President Polk’s diary, he told his Cabinet that “we had heard of no open act of aggression by the Mexican army, but that the danger was imminent that such acts would be committed. I said that in my opinion we had ample cause of war&#8230;”&nbsp; Not long after that he received dispatches informing him that Taylor’s quartermaster had been found dead, and that a patrol of Taylor’s soldiers had been surrounded and killed or captured by Mexican troops. Polk went before Congress and declared, “Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our territory and shed American blood upon the American soil&#8230;we are called upon by every consideration of duty and patriotism to vindicate with decision the honor, the rights and the interests of our country.”&nbsp; After only one day of debate the declaration of war was authorized by a vote of 40-2. </p> <p>Many members of Congress, and of the general public, supported the war enthusiastically, often framing their support in terms of the US’ manifest destiny of expansion.&nbsp; Thousands of private citizens volunteered to fight in the first excitement, though as the war dragged on the Army struggled with low recruitment and with soldiers abandoning the army on mid-campaign when their terms of enlistment expired.<br /> <br /> A few anti-slavery politicians and public figures opposed the war vehemently—for varied reasons.&nbsp; One antislavery Congressman from Ohio, Joshua Giddings, denounced the war because “In the murder of Mexicans upon their own soil, or in robbing them of their country, I can take no part&#8230;” and also because he saw the war as supporting slave-owners against a nation that had rightly abolished slavery. Another, Columbus Delano, warned that taking over more Mexican territory would encourage Americans to mingle with people who were willing to “embrace all shades of color&#8230;resulting, it is said, in the production of a slothful, ignorant race of beings.” Freed slave and abolitionist orator Frederick Douglass denounced the war vehemently. &nbsp;Henry David Thoreau, hero of many modern tax resisters, refused to pay his poll taxes—and went to prison for that refusal&#8211; because he objected so strongly to the war.</p> <p>Many members of the generally anti-slavery Whig party, while unconvinced by the President’s rationale for war, were unwilling to oppose funding for the war once it had started. Abraham Lincoln, who was not yet in Congress when war was declared, tried to explain the position of the Whig moderates two years later: “If to say ‘the war was unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced by the President’ be opposing the war, then the Whigs have very generally opposed it&#8230;The marching of an army into the midst of a peaceful Mexican settlement, frightening the inhabitants away, leaving their growing crops and other property to destruction, to you may appear a perfectly amiable, peaceful, unprovoking procedure, but it does not seem to us so&#8230;But if, when the war had begun, and had become the cause of our country, the giving of our money and blood, in common with yours, was support of the war, then it is not true that we have always opposed the war.”</p> <h3>“Such ‘Glorious’ Butcheries”</h3> <p>While the politicians weighed their interests and their consciences, the soldiers fought. Anglo-American settlers in California started the “Bear Flag Rebellion” there in summer 1846, and federal troops soon poured in to back them, sweeping through Alta California and New Mexico.&nbsp; Meanwhile Taylor’s forces pressed south.&nbsp; Mexico was at a disadvantage in responding, as its own government was in chaos and plagued by factional infighting.&nbsp; In May, after prolonged fighting, Taylor’s army routed Mexican forces, drove them in disorder across the Rio Grande, and pursued them south into Mexico. </p> <p>The fighting that followed was marked by ruthless conduct on both sides, but given the location of the battles it was Mexican civilians who suffered.&nbsp; Veracruz and Mexico City were besieged and heavily shelled, leading to large numbers of civilian casualties.&nbsp; More direct cruelty was also an issue.&nbsp; General Taylor complained that the Texas Rangers had committed “shameful atrocities” and declined to renew their terms of enlistment.&nbsp; Lieutenant Grant wrote bitterly—in a letter, not in his memoirs&#8211; “Some of the volunteers and about all the Texans seem to think it right to impose upon the people of a conquered city to any extent, and even to murder them where the act can be covered by dark.” Rape also was widely reported. Some of these crimes were reported at home and may have damped public support for the war.&nbsp; One anonymous letter-writer in Massachusetts informed the paper’s readers that he did not intend to enlist in or otherwise support the Mexican war, explaining “I have no wish to participate in such “glorious’ butcheries of women and children as were displayed at the capture of Monterey etc.” </p> <p>Soon after the US army occupied Mexico City, the Mexican government gave up the fight.&nbsp; The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed in 1848, ceded the territories of Alta California, Nuevo Mexico and Texas—about half of Mexico’s land&#8211; to the United States in exchange for fifteen million dollars.&nbsp; The treaty also stipulated that individual landholdings were to be preserved if former Mexican citizens wished to remain on their land and become US citizens. In fact, however, in the postwar years commissions “investigated” land claims and invalidated the title of many formerly Mexican owners. </p> <p>For more information about Charles Elliot, see <a href="https://www.heralddemocrat.com/lifestyle/20180816/charles-elliott-was-only-british-ambassador-to-republic-of-texas">this article</a>.  To read Polk’s speech to the Congress calling for a declaration of war, click <a href="http://www.dmwv.org/mexwar/docs/polk.htm">here</a>. To read Joshua Giddings’ speech opposing the war, click <a href="http://www.john-uebersax.com/plato/giddings.htm">here</a>. </p> ]]&gt; <p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.newhistorian.com/2019/01/23/lines-in-the-sand-part-2-the-mexican-american-war/">Lines In The Sand, part 2: The Mexican-American War</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.newhistorian.com">New Historian</a>.</p> ]]></content:encoded> </item> <item> <title>Lines In The Sand, part 1: The Texas Revolution</title> <link>https://www.newhistorian.com/2019/01/16/lines-in-the-sand-part1-the-texas-revolution/</link> <pubDate>Wed, 16 Jan 2019 18:37:40 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator><![CDATA[JHoyt]]></dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[News]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.newhistorian.com/?p=9031</guid> <description><![CDATA[<p> <![CDATA[]]> </p> <p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.newhistorian.com/2019/01/16/lines-in-the-sand-part1-the-texas-revolution/">Lines In The Sand, part 1: The Texas Revolution</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.newhistorian.com">New Historian</a>.</p> ]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[ <![CDATA[ <p>Today the US government is shut down due to debates over building a wall on the border between Mexico and the US.&nbsp; This isn’t the first fierce political controversy over the border.&nbsp; Two hundred years ago all the territory where the wall might be built clearly belonged to Mexico.&nbsp; How did that change? The answer involves questions of sovereignty, slavery, illegal immigration, and accusations of ‘fake news.’ Today&#8217;s post describes the first part of that process.</p> <h3><strong>Questions of Freedom</strong></h3> <p>In 1820 New Spain opened some northern territories to Anglo-American settlers. Those territories, which jointly comprise today’s states of Texas, California, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and parts of Colorado, Oklahoma, Kansas and Wyoming, were mainly inhabited by First Nations people; Spain wanted to ‘civilize’ the land and remove or forcefully assimilate its original inhabitants.&nbsp; When New Spain won independence in 1821 and became Mexico, it encouraged immigrants and allowed <em>empresarios</em> to claim large tracts of land in exchange for bringing in large numbers of colonists “of good character” to settle on them.&nbsp; </p> <p>One Anglo-American <em>empresario</em> was Stephen Austin, for whom the capital of the US state of Texas was later named.&nbsp; Austin was a skilled political operator who talked the new Mexican government into continuing the grant New Spain had given his family, together with tax and tariff privileges designed to encourage settlers. He preserved those privileges through the resignation of the Mexican Emperor and the subsequent political upheaval in 1823.&nbsp; He was far less diplomatic in his approach to the Karankawa tribe who inhabited parts of the land that had been designated as his; in 1825 he ordered Karankawas to be pursued and killed on sight.&nbsp; By that time 300 formerly American families had settled on the land he controlled in the combined territory of Texas/Coahuila, and had begun growing sugarcane and cotton with slave labor.&nbsp; </p> <div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="alignleft"><img src="https://www.newhistorian.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Stephen-Austin-2-1-1-1.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-9034" /></figure></div> <p>In 1829 Mexico outlawed slavery in all its territories.&nbsp; Austin had sometimes declared that he disapproved of slavery (in large part because he feared that slave rebellions could endanger white people), but he also knew that the economy of his colony ran on slave labor, and he wasn’t willing to lose that revenue. He lobbied successfully to get Texas exempted from the anti-slavery laws.&nbsp; But the Mexican government was beginning to be concerned about the influx of Protestant Anglo slaveholding immigrants who didn’t seem particularly interested in assimilating into their new country. In 1830 it banned further immigration from the US and imposed taxes and tariffs.&nbsp; A small group of Mexican soldiers were dispatched to prevent smuggling and illegal immigration.&nbsp; The American Texans, armed and irritable, didn’t take this well; at the end of the skirmishes of the 1832 Anahuac Disturbance, the Mexican army withdrew from most of its Texan garrisons, and immigrants continued to enter in large numbers. Texans began to demand separation from Coahuila and greater autonomy.</p> <h3>“<strong>With His Rifle, With Passports Or No Passport</strong>s”</h3> <p>The Mexican government had more to worry about than Texas. General Santa Anna was actively rebelling against Mexico’s President.&nbsp; In 1833 Santa Anna took power. That same year the Texans held a Constitutional Convention, chaired by Sam Houston, a protégé of expansionist American president Andrew Jackson.&nbsp; That convention called for Texan separation from the territory of Coahuila, freedom from tariffs, and a repeal of the American immigration ban. Austin took the convention’s demands to Santa Anna, who repealed the immigration ban but refused the other requests. His agents intercepted Austin’s letter telling the Texans to disregard the Mexican government’s rulings, and Austin was imprisoned for eighteen months. Sam Houston left Texas and traveled through the US; some historians report that he encouraged militant immigrants to go to Texas with the view of preparing to help separate Texas from Mexico by force. </p> <p>When Austin was released from prison on 1835 he wrote a letter calling for Anglo-Americans to immigrate to Texas en masse, “each man with his rifle, with passports or no passports,” and proclaimed that war was inevitable. Some historians see this as a reluctant acceptance of facts; others say he was spoiling for a fight. </p> <p>At the same time, Santa Anna was moving to consolidate his power, rewrite the Mexican constitution and assert federal control over the territories.&nbsp; In 1835 he violently put down an insurrection in Zacatecas and prepared to assert his control in Texas. He sent 500 soldiers to Gonzalez, TX to repossess a cannon which had earlier been given to the Texans to help in their campaign against indigenous peoples. The Texans gathered in arms and refused to turn the cannon over. On October 2 they attacked the soldiers, drove them back to San Antonio and besieged them there; late in December the soldiers surrendered and were allowed to leave. </p> <h3>Remember the Alamo!</h3> <p>Santa Anna mounted a counterattack in early 1836, bringing about seven thousand troops to quell what he saw as a criminal insurrection.&nbsp; The Texans fortified the Alamo mission and sent out urgent appeals for other Anglos to join them. Very few came, and those who did were killed by the federal troops.&nbsp; Militarily, the Alamo was an unqualified defeat; but the dramatic story of the deaths of its defenders became a rallying cry for Texans.&nbsp; The same could be said of the capture of Texan commander James Fannin’s retreating forces and the later execution of four hundred prisoners.&nbsp; To these stories was added an appeal to race prejudices: Austin wrote that the inevitable conflict between a “mongrel Spanish-Indian and negro race” and “civilization and the Anglo-American race” could have only one outcome.</p> <p>In March 1836 Texans formally declared their independence, and Sam Houston was put in charge of the Texan army. On April 21 his troops caught Mexican forces under Santa Anna’s command unawares, resting on the road between forts, and killed six hundred men—many of whom, according to contemporary reports, were trying to surrender. Some prisoners were taken, including Santa Anna, who signed a treaty from prison in which re recognized Texas and called off the war.&nbsp; The Mexican government deposed him in his absence and refused to recognize his treaty, but Texas declared victory.</p> <p>Where, exactly, were the new boundaries of the Republic of Texas, and what should its relationship to the United States be? Those questions, and the lingering tensions between the Mexican government and the Texan republic, would be settled in another ten years, with complex repercussions for both the countries Texas bordered.  That story will be told in <a href="https://www.newhistorian.com/lines-in-the-sand-part-2-the-mexican-american-war/9045/">next week’s column</a> on the Mexican-American War.</p> ]]&gt; <p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.newhistorian.com/2019/01/16/lines-in-the-sand-part1-the-texas-revolution/">Lines In The Sand, part 1: The Texas Revolution</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.newhistorian.com">New Historian</a>.</p> ]]></content:encoded> </item> <item> <title>Planting Seeds of Hope: Wangari Maathai, part 2</title> <link>https://www.newhistorian.com/2019/01/09/planting-seeds-of-hope-wangari-maathai-part-2/</link> <pubDate>Wed, 09 Jan 2019 22:50:17 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator><![CDATA[JHoyt]]></dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[News]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.newhistorian.com/?p=9009</guid> <description><![CDATA[<p> <![CDATA[]]> </p> <p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.newhistorian.com/2019/01/09/planting-seeds-of-hope-wangari-maathai-part-2/">Planting Seeds of Hope: Wangari Maathai, part 2</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.newhistorian.com">New Historian</a>.</p> ]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p> <![CDATA[<a href="https://www.newhistorian.com/planting-seeds-of-hope-wangari-maathai-part-1/8995/">Last week’s article</a> described the education and formative years of biologist, activist, planter and educator Wangari Maathai and her founding of the Green Belt movement for ecological and cultural restoration. This article describes a few of the struggles and triumphs that grew out of that movement. <h2>Trials</h2> By the late 1970s the Green Belt initiative was growing rapidly, as women in small rural communities across Kenya organized to start tree nurseries and reforest barren lands. Wangari Mathai was coordinating this effort while also working as a senior lecturer in veterinary medicine and raising their three children. The work was satisfying, but it came at a great personal cost. Part of that cost was simple exhaustion. The other part was more complicated. In 1977 her Parliamentarian husband Mwangi Mathai left her and her children; in 1979 he filed for divorce. No-fault divorce was not an option. Mwangi Mathai accused his wife of adultery, cruelty, and raising his blood pressure. She pled innocent. The 3-week trial that followed was widely publicized. Press reports said Mwangi Mathai was divorcing his wife for being “too educated, too strong, too successful, too stubborn, and too hard to control.” Some people saw those as admirable qualities. The judge did not; he found in Mwangi Mathai’s favor, and agreed with him that she needed to stop using his surname. Since she was becoming well known by then, she made the smallest change possible, becoming Wangari Maathai instead of Wangari Mathai. Maathai also told the press that the judge was either incompetent or corrupt. For this she was convicted of contempt of court and sentenced to six weeks in prison, but the public outcry was so great that she was released after only three days. The divorce was a harrowing ordeal for Maathai, and later on her political enemies used it against her. But it also taught Maathai something about the power of public opinion against unjust laws. In later years she used that lesson and that power to great effect. Maathai’s public life became more difficult under Kenya’s new president, Daniel arap Moi, who disapproved of Maathai as an uppity woman (and perhaps also as a Kikuyu; politics were taking on a distinctly tribal edge) and tried to force her out of her leadership position on the National Council of Women in Kenya. When the majority of women sided with Maathai, Moi persuaded some influential members of the Council to withdraw their participation and their backing. Maathai served as chair of the council for the next seven years. In 1982 Maathai decided to run for Parliament and was disqualified on a very dubious technicality. When she tried to resume her university job (which she had resigned, as required by law, to declare her candidacy) the university refused to rehire her. Other employers were reluctant to hire a woman who had clearly made enemies in high places. President Moi was then consolidating his power; he officially declared Kenya a one-party state, and his critics tended to disappear. <h2>Green Belt Growing</h2> Maathai put all her time and energy into the Green Belt. Timely financial assistance from the Norwegian Forest Service and the UN allowed her to hire ‘monitors’ to visit remote sites, support women in the field and learn more about what they needed. Maathai and the monitors wanted to understand the root causes of the poverty and pollution that the Green Belt movement was designed to cure. When they asked local people about the roots of the problem they heard a consistent answer: <em>It’s the government. They’re corrupt. They don’t care. We have no chance</em>. Maathai knew that the government had exploited public natural resources for private gain, but she encouraged people to look at the ways in which their own lives contributed to the problem—or the solution. They couldn’t control government policy, but they could grow their own food instead of relying on cash crops and purchased foods, and they could plant trees. Green Belt meetings were always held in local languages. This helped to break down barriers between poorer people and people who had been able to afford British schooling. It also affirmed the dignity and wisdom of local traditions. In the late 1980s and early 1990s the Green Belt began offering civic and environmental seminars which reminded people of the value of local traditions that had protected ecosystems and communities. Maathai wrote in her article <em>The Cracked Mirror </em>about how British missionaries had dismissed local traditions about the sacredness of Mount Kenya, asserting instead that God was in heaven. Many Kenyans had willingly turned their backs on their own sacred traditions. But Maathai countered, “Heaven is not above us: it is right here, right now&#8230;If believing that God is on Mount Kenya is what helps people conserve their mountain, I say that’s okay. If people still believed this, they would not have allowed illegal logging or clear-cutting of the forests&#8230;. Communities without their own culture, who are already disinherited, cannot protect their environment from immediate destruction or preserve it for future generations. Since they are disinherited, they have nothing to pass on.” The Green Belt meetings helped people to remember the value of their culture and their land. The message spread quickly. By the mid-1980s there were nearly two thousand Green Belt women’s groups in Kenya, and more than one thousand green belts being tended by schoolchildren. People from nearby countries were visiting to learn how to reforest their own land. The view from the grassroots was encouraging. But the economic and political structures were still stacked against preservation. <h2>Protests and Prison</h2> In 1989 an informant told the Green Belt that President Moi’s government planned to develop a substantial part of Nairobi’s largest public green space, Uhuru Park, into a sixty-story complex housing ruling party offices and high-end businesses. Maathai wrote letters to newspapers and government officials protesting that the city needed a natural space open to all more than it needed extra luxury properties for the wealthy. Getting no response, she wrote to foreign project investors to ask them to withdraw. Some Members of Parliament denounced Maathai for appealing to colonial powers and undermining Kenyan independence, but the denunciation only raised more publicity about the park. Many Kenyans wrote to the newspapers denouncing the planned tower. The Green Belt was evicted from its headquarters and forced to move into Maathai’s house, but investors backed out and the planned tower was canceled. The Green Belt had won the battle, but the war was just beginning. In 1991 Maathai joined the Forum for the Restoration of Democracy (FORD) in peaceful protests calling for open elections and a free press. In 1992 multi-party elections were promised, but in January of that year, as more of Moi’s opponents were found dead in mysterious circumstances, FORD heard rumors that Moi’s government planned to have the army seize control, cancel the elections, and assassinate Maathai and other opposition figures. Ten FORD members held a press conference warning about this possibility. After the conference broke up, most speakers were arrested. Maathai barricaded herself inside her home for three days (though she attempted to lower tensions by making tea for the policemen on cold nights and handing it out a window). On the third day she was arrested and charged with treason, a capital offence. She spent that night in a cold wet cell; her arthritis flared up, and she had to be carried into court the next morning as protestors in the streets shouted, “What have you done to her?” Public opinion was strongly on Maathai’s side; she was released to the hospital on bail, and in time the charges were dropped. Mothers of other political prisoners began reaching out to Maathai, telling her that they feared for their sons who had been detained for supporting opposition parties. There were very ugly rumors about prison conditions—and anyhow, since opposition parties were no longer outlawed, why shouldn’t their former supporters be freed? Maathai agreed to accompany five mothers to the attorney general as a translator and advocate, on one condition. She didn’t expect the attorney general to listen to them, but if public opinion could be mobilized she hoped something might change. The women agreed to fast and demonstrate in Uhuru Park for three days if their sons weren’t released in that time. The AG was noncommittal, and the women went to the park with signs explaining what they were doing. Fifty more mothers joined them that day. On the following day ex-prisoners joined the group and began to speak about the torture and abuse they had suffered in prison. Journalists spread their stories. On the third day the police attacked the camp, beating anyone who didn’t leave immediately. Maathai was knocked unconscious and taken back to the hospital. When she had recovered she went back to the vigil, which had moved into an Anglican church across the street where the police were not willing to break in. That vigil continued for a year; at the end of that time, the prisoners were released. <h2>Seeds of Peace</h2> By then the elections had been held, and Moi and his party had triumphed over a fragmented (and sometimes intimidated) opposition. The prisoners came out into an angry and polarized society. Intertribal violence—fueled, Maathai believed, by a government that preferred to keep people divided—spread rapidly in early 1993. Maathai toured the Rift Valley, where some of the worst fighting had taken place. She listened to grieving survivors and held seminars urging people to rebuild and reconcile rather than retaliating. She suggested making this concrete by starting tree nurseries and giving trees to people from apparently hostile tribal groups. Sometimes Maathai planted trees alongside multi-ethnic delegations from war-torn communities. When the government forbade her to enter conflict zones Maathai traveled incognito for a time. As the year wore on the fighting slackened, and Maathai noted that women from warring groups did actually accept trees from one another. In 1997 Maathai ran for Parliament and lost. In 1998 she became a co-chair of the Jubilee Africa campaign, appealing for the forgiveness of loans that crippled African economies. Often those loans had been made to dictators, but their cost fell most heavily on people who had no choice in the incurring of the debt. And mounting inflation made the debts seem hopeless. Maathai noted, “Between 1970 and 2002, African countries obtained about $540 billion (US) in loans and paid back $550 billion. However, because of interest on that debt, by the end of 2002 the debtor countries still owed the lending agencies nearly $300 billion.” Then another struggle over land use called her attention back to matters close at hand. The government was privatizing and developing a large part of the 2500-acre Karura forest preserve. The Karura, located near Nairobi, served as ‘lungs’ and a windbreak for the city, and also as home to rare species including mihugu trees, Sykes monkeys, bush pigs, and hundreds of varieties of birds. Maathai wrote to officials and newspapers to protest. She also led delegations into the forest to plant trees on land that had been cleared, and appealed directly to construction workers to stop destroying the forest. After one of these speeches workers set fire to the construction equipment and then fled. The police began blocking her from entering the park. Once when the gates were barred by armed guards, Maathai snuck in through the marshes to tend her seedlings. On another occasion she went openly to the gate and planted a tree outside it, accompanied by reporters and members of Parliament. She and her group were attacked and beaten by a group of un-uniformed men. One early-bird reporter had taken photos of uniformed police talking to the assailants, and there was plenty of footage of Maathai and other protestors who’d been beaten bloody. Students from the University of Nairobi took up the cause, ramming the gate and then fleeing into a UN compound where they were pursued and beaten by police. The UN and international dignitaries began to lodge protests and complaints, and riots broke out across Nairobi. Once again the development project was quietly dropped, although some illegal logging continued until the 2002 elections swept a newly unified opposition into power. Maathai was part of that new government, a Member of Parliament<a href="https://www.newhistorian.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wangari-Maathai-at-UN-1-1.jpg"><img class="wp-image-9010 alignleft" src="https://www.newhistorian.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wangari-Maathai-at-UN-1-1.jpg" alt="" width="484" height="322" /></a> and assistant in the Ministry of Environmental Resources. Two years later, in 2004, she received the Nobel Peace Prize and spoke to an international audience about the necessary connection between democracy/human rights, sustainable and equitable development, and a culture of peace. In 2007 she lost her parliamentary seat, but her national and international advocacy continued until her death from cancer in 2011. And the Green Belt movement she founded is still planting trees and working for the causes she championed. To learn more about Wangari Maathai’s life, work and legacy, read her memoir “Unbowed,” or read her biography and selected works at <a href="http://www.greenbeltmovement.org/wangari-maathai">http://www.greenbeltmovement.org/wangari-maathai</a> &nbsp;]]&gt; </p> <p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.newhistorian.com/2019/01/09/planting-seeds-of-hope-wangari-maathai-part-2/">Planting Seeds of Hope: Wangari Maathai, part 2</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.newhistorian.com">New Historian</a>.</p> ]]></content:encoded> </item> <item> <title>Planting Seeds of Hope: Wangari Maathai, part 1</title> <link>https://www.newhistorian.com/2019/01/02/planting-seeds-of-hope-wangari-maathai-part-1/</link> <pubDate>Wed, 02 Jan 2019 11:24:20 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator><![CDATA[JHoyt]]></dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[News]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.newhistorian.com/?p=8995</guid> <description><![CDATA[<p> <![CDATA[]]> </p> <p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.newhistorian.com/2019/01/02/planting-seeds-of-hope-wangari-maathai-part-1/">Planting Seeds of Hope: Wangari Maathai, part 1</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.newhistorian.com">New Historian</a>.</p> ]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p> <![CDATA[“You can make a lot of speeches, but the real thing is when you dig a hole, plant a tree, give it water, and make it survive. That’s what makes the difference.” Those are the words of Wangari Maathai of Kenya, biologist, activist, planter and educator. Her work for reforestation, human rights and cultural restoration led to the planting of more than 30 million trees, to the release of political prisoners, to her own beating, arrest and public denunciation, and to honors including the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize. This article traces the development of her vision and the beginnings of the Green Belt movement. Part II, posted next week, will describe how the Green Belt’s work expanded into campaigns for democracy, transparency, civil rights, and a new approach to post-colonial culture. <h2>A Changing Culture</h2> Miriam Wangari, later Wangari Maathai, was born on April 1940 into a country undergoing deep cultural change. When the colonial powers divided up their spheres of influence in 1885, the newly designated country of Kenya, which incorporated parts of the ancestral lands of many different ethnic groups, was assigned to Britain. The British established station posts there, initially promising some tribal groups that their lands and possessions would not be taken over. Those promises weren’t kept. Some groups cooperated with the British; others resisted and were violently put down. Britain sent missionaries who taught literacy to those who converted to Christianity (in the Kikuyu language converts were called “athomi,” literally “people who read.”) It also sent colonists who took possession of much of the best agricultural land, while black Kenyans were moved onto “native reserves.” When the colonial government introduced taxes that had to be paid in British currency, men from the native reserves had to leave their families for months at a time and work for white families in order to obtain money. Wangari was born to a Christian family of the Kikuyu tribe on the native reserve of Ihithe. The land there was fertile and well forested, and rain, food and firewood were abundant. Wangari helped with farming and food and wood gathering from a very early age; she was told that fig trees must never be cut for firewood or otherwise disturbed, because those were the trees of God. (This was a traditional Kenyan teaching, not one brought by the missionaries.) <h2>Education and Independence</h2> Wangari’s oldest brother urged her parents to send her to the British Presbyterian school when she was eight, and they agreed. She excelled there, and at age eleven she went on to a Catholic boarding school. Later on Wangari praised the education she received and the dedication of the nuns, commented matter-of-factly on the weevil-infested food and the constant work and schoolwork which allowed very little free time, and lamented the fact that children were punished for speaking in their native languages rather than English of Kiswahili. But at the time it seems she was uncritically grateful. She converted to Catholicism, changed her name to Mary Josephine Wangari, and joined a Catholic volunteer organization. Wangari was still in school when the Mau Mau uprising erupted in the early 1950s. As an adult Wangari described the uprising as the result of ongoing theft of land from black Kenyans; as a teenager she believed the nuns who told her that the Mau Mau were terrorists and urged her to pray for their defeat. Her father also took the British side, and her brothers were conscripted into the Home Guard. Despite this, Wangari was arrested by the British as she traveled to visit family friends on a school holiday. She spent two days in a crowded, dirty prison camp on very scanty rations; then she was identified as her father’s daughter and released. It was her first, but not her last, experience of imprisonment. Many thousands of black Kenyans died in prison camps during that war. The British prevailed militarily but realized that their occupation was growing unsustainable. In 1957 black Kenyans were given the right to vote; in 1959, when Wangari was nineteen, negotiations for Kenyan independence began. Both sides saw a need for more Kenyans to complete higher education so they could take over posts vacated by the British. Wangari, who had just graduated at the top of her class, was one of six hundred Kenyans awarded airfare and scholarships to attend universities in the United States. <h2>Travels and Questions</h2> Wangari attended a Catholic college in Kentucky, where she majored in biology and minored in chemistry and German. She was startled to find that the US, the reputed “land of the free,” still enforced racial segregation, and she watched the struggle for civil rights with fascination, seeing parallels to her own country. During the summer she assisted a black technician at a hospital, and he urged her to attend a meeting of the Nation of Islam. Wangari was shocked by their assertion that Jesus was black, argued with them, and indignantly confronted the technician afterward. He asked her, “Why do you think everything you’ve been taught is true?” The question took root in her mind. Around this time she changed her name from Mary Jo Wangari—her English baptismal name and African given name—to Wangari Muta, reclaiming her father’s last name as her own. Wangari completed her master’s degree in 1966, three years after Kenya gained independence. She accepted a job as a research assistant at the University of Nairobi and flew home, eager to help shape her country’s free future. Riding home from the airport, she listened to President Kenyatta urging Kenyans to reclaim their land and their future and thought of words she’d heard in the US from Martin Luther King: “Free at last!” But it wasn’t quite that simple. Upon arrival, she learned that the job promised to her had been given to somebody else, a man of the same ethnic group as the professor she had expected to assist. Instead she found work in the university’s school of veterinary medicine. After a year she traveled to Germany to get her doctorate. Returning home in 1969, she married Mwangi Mathai, helped him run for Parliament (he lost), and kept up her doctoral studies. In 1971 she became the first woman in East Africa to receive a doctorate. The university promoted her to senior lecturer but still denied her pension benefits and a housing allowance because she was a married woman. Wangari protested and filed a court case. Since the university’s chancellor was none other than President Kenyatta, the case was promptly dismissed, but Wangari’s persistence finally got the university to declare her an honorary male professor with full benefits. <h2>The Root of the Problem</h2> In the early 1970s Kenya was East Africa’s largest livestock producer, but there were concerns about poor herd health. Wangari set out to study a tick-borne disease. As she collected samples she noticed thin cattle, poor pastures, and shallow, silty rivers. She decided that the main problem for cattle was not parasitism but environmental degradation. Wangari went back to Ihithe, which she remembered as a clean and fertile place. The fig trees were no longer regarded as ‘trees of God’—that was seen as backward thinking—and many had been felled. Wangari knew that the fig trees’ deep root systems had held soil together and split rock so that streams could rise. In the absence of the trees, the streams were shallower and dirtier, the hillsides more eroded,and the soil poorer. Other native trees had been cut en masse and replaced by faster-growing imported timber trees or tea and coffee plantations. Returning to Nairobi, and to meetings of the National Council of Women of Kenya, Wangari heard of other changes for the worse. Cash-crop plantings had replaced subsistence farms in many places, and there more children suffered from sicknesses related to malnutrition as families relied on purchased refined foods that lacked necessary vitamins and proteins. <h2>Planting Seeds</h2> Wangari decided that tree planting would solve several problems at one. The root systems would hold soil, reduce erosion and protect waterways; the trees could also clean waterways as well as providing shade for cattle, fruit for human consumption, firewood and fence posts. First she started a small business hiring low-income women to do tree-based landscaping for richer people and also to start tree nurseries. She wasn’t able to make the business pay, but other NGO members agreed with the need for tree planting. In 1977 Wangari and other women from the Council celebrated World Environment Day with public tree plantings. Soon afterward they were invited to do a large-scale tree planting on a farm owned by a women’s collective. As those stories were publicized, women from other parts of the country reached out to Wangari to ask about starting their own planting projects. First she thought that foresters in their areas could help them, but many foresters refused, saying that forestry should be left to professionals. Wangari disagreed. “You don’t need a diploma to plant trees,” she said. She reminded the women that most of them were used to farming, and they could learn tree-growing too. She provided tree seedlings, until her supply was soon exhausted. The government forest service offered to supply seedlings and then backed out as requests poured in. <a href="https://www.newhistorian.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/green-belt-tree-planting-1-1.jpeg"><img class="size-full wp-image-8997 alignleft" src="https://www.newhistorian.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/green-belt-tree-planting-1-1.jpeg" alt="" width="474" height="339" /></a>Wangari urged women to collect their own seed from local native trees, paid them for every seedling they raised and successfully transplanted, and encouraged successful tree-growers to tell women in nearby villages about their successes and failures. Soon tree nurseries and ‘green belts’ of trees planted by local women were spreading throughout Kenya, offering the ecological benefits Wangari had hoped for, offering empowerment for women and poor people&#8230; and also leading to challenges Wangari had not foreseen. We’ll look at those challenges in <a href="https://www.newhistorian.com/planting-seeds-of-hope-wangari-maathai-part-2/9009/">part 2</a>.]]&gt; </p> <p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.newhistorian.com/2019/01/02/planting-seeds-of-hope-wangari-maathai-part-1/">Planting Seeds of Hope: Wangari Maathai, part 1</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.newhistorian.com">New Historian</a>.</p> ]]></content:encoded> </item> <item> <title>From Time to Time: a short history of calendars</title> <link>https://www.newhistorian.com/2018/12/26/from-time-to-time-a-short-history-of-calendars/</link> <pubDate>Wed, 26 Dec 2018 16:53:04 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator><![CDATA[JHoyt]]></dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[News]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.newhistorian.com/?p=8983</guid> <description><![CDATA[<p> <![CDATA[]]> </p> <p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.newhistorian.com/2018/12/26/from-time-to-time-a-short-history-of-calendars/">From Time to Time: a short history of calendars</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.newhistorian.com">New Historian</a>.</p> ]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p> <![CDATA[In the Jewish creation story, the sun and moon are created to ‘serve as signs for the set times—the days and the years.” Humans have been puzzling over the best way to measure time by the heavenly lights for many millennia. This is complicated because the sun and moon move in cycles of different lengths. The first records of time measurement show an interest in the changing phases of the moon. Portable pieces of bone from 32000 BC are marked with what some researchers believe are images of the full night-by-night range of moon changes. Cave paintings in Lascaux, from about 13000 BC, also show the moon-cycle. Observing the length of the lunar cycle is straightforward. Tying it in with the solar cycle is harder. Lunar cycles average about 29.5 days. Twelve lunar months are completed in 354 days, while the solar cycle (the earth’s completion of one full orbit round the sun) takes slightly more than 365 days. Different ancient civilizations chose to emphasize the sun or the moon, or sought ways to harmonize the two ways of measuring years. <h2>Egypt</h2> Around 4000 BC the Egyptians transitioned from a straight lunar calendar to a sun- and star-based calendar. Their New Year happened in high summer (in July by the current Gregorian calendar) on the day when Sirius rose above the eastern horizon again after staying below the horizon for seventy days. This was significant for religious reasons; Sirius was associated with the earth-goddess Isis, and was also said to be the source of spiritual energy, as the sun was of physical energy. That date was also important for agricultural reasons: on or shortly after Sirius’ reappearance the Nile began to flood. The Egyptian calendar year was divided into three four-month-long seasons: flood season, emergence season, and low water. Each month was divided into three ten-day ‘decans’, and the last two days of each decan were kept as holidays. Each year also contained 5 days that were not assigned to any month; on those days the birthdays of gods were celebrated. <h2>Sumer</h2> The ancient Sumerians also began with a strictly lunar calendar. A new month began whenever a new crescent moon rose. By 2400 BC the Sumerians began experimenting with a lunisolar calendar. This calendar had alternating 29-day and 30-day months, so that each day of the month remained correlated to a given moon phase. There were twelve lunar months in a year. Whenever the lunar year got too far out of sync with the solar year, an additional month was added to the year’s end. Initially each city decided independently when or whether to add new months. Around 380 BC the Persians, who were then ruling the Sumerian empire, worked out a standardized cycle for every city to use: a 19-year cycle where the 3^rd, 6^th, 8^th, 11^th, 14^th, 17^th and 19^th years had thirteen months while the rest had twelve. This kept the lunar and solar years more or less in harmony. <h2>China</h2> Between 2000 and 1000 BC the Chinese developed a detailed solar calendar. The solstices and equinoxes were given fixed dates, and seasons were held to begin halfway between them (summer, for instance, began halfway between the vernal equinox and the summer solstice.) A total of twenty-four ‘node days’ evenly divided the year. The Chinese also observed alternating 29-day and 30-day lunar months, and used the same cycle as the Sumerians for adding extra months to years so that the lunar and solar years mostly kept pace with each other. The date of the New Year was changed for political reasons by successive dynasties until it was finally settled as the second (or sometimes, in a thirteen-month year, the third) new moon after the winter solstice. <h2>South America</h2> The Mayans and some other pre-Columbian peoples used two distinct calendars. The Haab, the basis for the agricultural year, was a solar calendar with eighteen twenty-day months and one five-day month. In some cultures the five-day month was a sacred time. Others kept festivals on other dates set by the Haab calendar. <a href="https://www.newhistorian.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Aztec-calendar-stone-1-1.jpg"><img class="wp-image-8984 alignleft" src="https://www.newhistorian.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Aztec-calendar-stone-1-1.jpg" alt="" width="359" height="307" /></a>There was another calendar, the Tzolk’in, which seems to have been mostly used to set ceremonial dates. The Tzolk’in is divided into twenty periods of thirteen days. New Year’s Day was celebrated at the beginning of each Tzolk’in cycle. The two calendars were combined to produce the Calendar Round, which gave dates according to their Haab and Tzolk’in reckoning. A given Haab and Tzolk’in combination would recur every 52 years. Some Mayans believed that a person attained the wisdom of an elder after living through one full Calendar Round cycle. Finally, there was the “Long Count’ calendar which measured each day’s position relative to what was believed to be the 7,885 years which spanned from the beginning of the world to its destruction and rebirth. European guesses about the origin point of the Long Count calendar led to the popular rumors that the world would end in 2012. <h2>Islamic Calendar</h2> The Islamic calendar, like the Tzolk’in, is not tied to the solar year. It is strictly measured in lunar months based, not on a count of days, but on the actual observation of the new crescent moon. It begins from the date of the Hegira, the prophet Mohammed’s journey from Mecca to Medina (July 15, 622 by the Gregorian calendar.) Each year is made up of twelve lunar months. Saudi Arabia and some other Middle Eastern countries use the Islamic calendar for their official calendar. <h2>Roman, Julian, and Gregorian Calendars</h2> The Roman Republic in the 500s BC used a solar calendar with four 31-day months, seven 29-day months, and one 28-day month. This totaled 355 days; a leap month was added every 2 or 3 years to keep the calendar year in sync with the seasons. The Pontifex Maximus, or high priest, was responsible for declaring leap months. But since the priest’s term of authority was tied to the calendar year, there was some concern about priests adding unnecessary leap months in order to extend their terms. Under Julius Caesar the leap month was eliminated, regular months were lengthened, and a leap day was added to February once every four years. This nearly approximated the actual solar year, but the leap years occurred a little too often, leaving a calendar 4-year period a little longer than a solar 4-year period. In 1582 AD Pope Gregory announced a new calendar formulation with slightly less frequent leap years, and also ordered an abrupt change in date to bring the dates back in line with the seasons. Those countries which adopted the change immediately dropped 10 days. But the adoption of the calendar was slow in some parts of the world. The United Kingdom and its colonies changed over in 1752, dropping 11 days; Turkey changed over in 1926, dropping 13 days. Read more about early calendars at the links below: Ancient lunar calendars: <a href="https://sservi.nasa.gov/articles/oldest-lunar-calendars/">https://sservi.nasa.gov/articles/oldest-lunar-calendars/</a> Egyptian and Sumerian calendars: <a href="http://www.webexhibits.org/calendars/calendar-ancient.html#anchor-babylonian">http://www.webexhibits.org/calendars/calendar-ancient.html#anchor-babylonian</a> Chinese calendar: <a href="http://www.math.nus.edu.sg/aslaksen/gem-projects/hm/Chinese_Calendar.pdf">http://www.math.nus.edu.sg/aslaksen/gem-projects/hm/Chinese_Calendar.pdf</a> Mayan calendar: <a href="https://maya.nmai.si.edu/calendar/calendar-system">https://maya.nmai.si.edu/calendar/calendar-system</a> Roman calendar: <a href="https://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/roman-calendar.html">https://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/roman-calendar.html</a> Julian/Gregorian: <a href="https://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/julian-gregorian-switch.html">https://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/julian-gregorian-switch.html</a> &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;]]&gt; </p> <p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.newhistorian.com/2018/12/26/from-time-to-time-a-short-history-of-calendars/">From Time to Time: a short history of calendars</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.newhistorian.com">New Historian</a>.</p> ]]></content:encoded> </item> <item> <title>The Real Christmas Wars</title> <link>https://www.newhistorian.com/2018/12/19/the-real-christmas-wars/</link> <pubDate>Wed, 19 Dec 2018 10:59:18 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator><![CDATA[JHoyt]]></dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[News]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.newhistorian.com/?p=8977</guid> <description><![CDATA[<p> <![CDATA[]]> </p> <p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.newhistorian.com/2018/12/19/the-real-christmas-wars/">The Real Christmas Wars</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.newhistorian.com">New Historian</a>.</p> ]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p> <![CDATA[Some contemporary commentators in the US, Canada and the UK lament what they call the “War on Christmas,” which seems to consist of people acknowledging other winter holidays and not assuming that Christmas will be universally celebrated. Once there really was a government-backed ‘war on Christmas,” leading to legal penalties and sometimes to actual fighting. This ‘war’ was largely carried out by devout Christians. In Boston in 1621 William Bradford, the governor of the newly formed Massachusetts Bay Colony, instructed people to work on Christmas Day. His fellow Puritans complied, but some others said their consciences forbade them. The Governor reported later that he<em> “told them that if they made it mater of conscience, he would spare them till they were better informed. … [Later] he found them in the street at play, openly; some pitching the barr and some at stoole-ball, and such like sports. So he went to them, and took away their implements, and told them that was against </em>his<em> conscience, that they should play and others work. If they made the keeping of it mater of devotion, let them keep their houses, but there should be no gaming or revelling in the streets. Since which time nothing hath been attempted that way, at least openly.” </em>Apparently open attempts resumed soon thereafter; in 1659, the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed a law strictly forbidding Christmas observance, saying the law was necessary “for preventing disorders” associated with “such festivals as were superstitiously kept in other countries.” The Puritan Mayor of Canterbury attempted to enforce a similar ban in 1647 when the Puritan Parliament was governing England, ordering shopkeepers to open for business as usual on Christmas Day. When many shopkeepers disobeyed, the Mayor set out to rebuke them, flanked by soldiers. He got as far as threatening one defiant shopkeeper with the stocks before an angry crowd knocked him down, vandalized the shops which had opened, and began a very rough game of football up and down the streets. Officials and Puritan preachers who tried to stop them were pelted with anything that came to hand; most wisely retreated indoors. Attempts to legally punish the leaders of the so-called “Plum Pudding Riots” were met with furious demonstrations in favor of Anglicanism and the King. Why did some Christians object so fervently to Christmas? As with most questions of history and religion, the answers are complicated. <h2><a href="https://www.newhistorian.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Old_Christmas_Illustrated_London_News_24_Dec_1842-1-1.jpg"><img class=" wp-image-8979 alignleft" src="https://www.newhistorian.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Old_Christmas_Illustrated_London_News_24_Dec_1842-1-1.jpg" alt="" width="431" height="533" /></a>“Mad Mirth”</h2> The Puritans objected to the way in which people observed Christmas. Some (like Governor Bradford) saw it as an excuse for idleness. Others were concerned about just how that idleness was used. New England Puritan minister Increase Mather lamented that people who celebrated Christmas were &#8220;consumed in&#8230; revellings,in excess of wine, in mad mirth.” Christmas celebrations often featured heavy drinking and gambling, which the Puritans understandably saw as unwholesome. There was also controversy over the tradition of wassailing, in which poorer people banded together and went to the homes of the rich, where they sang or put on pantomimes and expected to be given food and drink. Sometimes this seems to have been a pleasant and friendly interchange all round; but fights sometimes developed when the rich folk were unwilling to play host. Puritans were also unhappy with mummers who tramped the streets and visited houses in elaborate costumes, often cross-dressing and sometimes engaging in highly bawdy antics. <h2>Paganism and Power</h2> There was also some actual religious controversy around the holiday itself. Some reform-minded Christians pointed out that the Bible said nothing about Christ’s birth date. They saw Christmas as a thinly disguised pagan revel, given that it fell at the same time as the earlier Roman Saturnalia, which also featured costumes, feasting, bawdy revelry and gift-giving, as well as incorporating other Pagan traditions such as the burning of the Yule log, the setting up of Christmas trees and the hanging of mistletoe. But their objection may have been to certain Christian groups as much as to Pagans.   The battle for Christmas arose in the context of English civil wars with a heavy religious component. England had broken with Catholicism and established the Anglican Church in 1533 under King Henry VIII. Depending on which historians you believe, this was a cynical move prompted entirely by Henry’s wish to divorce wives as often as he liked until he got get one who’d bear him a son, this was a principled protest against the Catholic Church’s own cynical political moves and repression of freethinkers, or this was some combination of the two. After Henry’s death his Catholic daughter Mary took the throne and attempted to forcibly reimpose Catholicism; after Mary’s death her Anglican sister Elizabeth attempted to forcibly quash Catholicism, which she saw as linked to rebellion; religion and politics were entangled in a way that did no good to either. Under Queen Elizabeth I people began to speak derisively of “Puritans,” hard-line Protestant reformers who wanted to move the Anglican Church further from Catholicism. Many of the Puritans were “middling sort of people,” yeomen and artisans from the cities eager for a less hierarchical version of politics and religion; some were people of high position, and many found their way into the English Parliament. King Charles I and the Parliament clashed bitterly over issues of religion, economics and politics, and another bloody civil war followed. As in any civil war, all the cultural differences between groups became occasions for violent animosity. This was the backdrop of the Canterbury Christmas Riot, which took place while Parliament was ruling and the King out of power; it was also the backdrop for the emigration of many Puritans to America after the monarchy and the rule of the Anglican Church were restored. <h2>Peace On Earth?</h2> The battles over Christmas didn’t end in one deliberate truce; they seem to have fizzled out over time as the larger wars which had spawned them faded into the past. Nineteenth-century Books like Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”and (in the US) Washington Irving’s “The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon” are widely credited with giving Christmas a newer, tamer image as a pleasant domestic holiday and an occasion for charity. For a vivid account of the Canterbury Christmas riot, see <a href="http://www.vaguelyinteresting.co.uk/canterburys-cancelled-christmas-and-the-plum-pudding-riots/">http://www.vaguelyinteresting.co.uk/canterburys-cancelled-christmas-and-the-plum-pudding-riots/</a> For a closer look at the pagan roots of some Christmas traditions, see <a href="https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-yule-2562997">https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-yule-2562997</a> For a glimpse of the history of Christmas controversy in the early US, see <a href="http://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/wont-go-get-new-england-colonial-christmas-traditions/">http://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/wont-go-get-new-england-colonial-christmas-traditions/</a> For a brief look at the history of the Puritans, see <a href="http://bcw-project.org/church-and-state/sects-and-factions/puritans">http://bcw-project.org/church-and-state/sects-and-factions/puritans</a>]]&gt; </p> <p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.newhistorian.com/2018/12/19/the-real-christmas-wars/">The Real Christmas Wars</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.newhistorian.com">New Historian</a>.</p> ]]></content:encoded> </item> <item> <title>The Immigrant Invasion That Wasn’t</title> <link>https://www.newhistorian.com/2018/12/12/the-immigrant-invasion-that-wasnt/</link> <pubDate>Wed, 12 Dec 2018 18:38:57 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator><![CDATA[JHoyt]]></dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[News]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.newhistorian.com/?p=8968</guid> <description><![CDATA[<p> <![CDATA[]]> </p> <p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.newhistorian.com/2018/12/12/the-immigrant-invasion-that-wasnt/">The Immigrant Invasion That Wasn’t</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.newhistorian.com">New Historian</a>.</p> ]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p> <![CDATA[A clergyman named A. Cleveland Coxe took to mass media to warn his fellow citizens that the United States was in danger of losing its national greatness due to an invasion of immigrants. Some people, he said, refused to call the immigrants invaders because they were unarmed. Those people were ignoring the fact that the immigrants were undermining his fair country with their vices, corruptions and superstitions, their terrorist tendencies, their lingering allegiance to the evil country they had fled (as evinced by their still waving its flag), and their loyalty to a religion that was completely incompatible with freedom. Coxe said that the invaders had already taken over the government of one city and subjected it to alien religious law. If people persisted in allowing the invaders to enter, and to become citizens and voters, they would soon control the entire country; there was reason to doubt that the Constitution would survive another century... Coxe wasn’t a contemporary figure warning about asylum seekers from Latin America or refugees from the Middle East. His essay was published in 1889, and the ‘invaders’ he so dreaded were Irish Catholics. His concerns may seem laughable now, when Irish Catholics have become part of the American cultural mainstream and have furnished some of America’s great authors, activists and statesmen. But in the 1800s many US-born Anglo-Protestant Americans shared Coxe’s concerns. <h2>Reasons for Leaving</h2> Many of the Irish immigrants in the 1800s were no more eager to leave their land for the US than Coxe and his ilk were to receive them. But living conditions in Ireland had become untenable. This was the result of a process that started long before the infamous potato famine. In the late 1100s Norman-English soldiers arrived in Ireland to help one side in a civil war and stayed on uninvited. Soon after, England’s King Henry II sent further troops and laid claim to Ireland. Over the centuries that followed, Irish laws were changed and Irish lands confiscated. By the 1700s, only 14% of Irish land was owned by Irish people. A considerably larger portion was worked by Irish farm laborers who grew food for export, sometimes going hungry themselves. In the early 1800s, Anglo-Irish landlords found it more profitable to raise livestock than crops for export. Tenant farmers were evicted in order to make room for larger pastures. Some of the evictees found day labor at other jobs. Some managed to get small plots of land and grow enough potatoes to keep themselves alive. Others, unable to make a living in their native land, emigrated to America. In the mid-1840s the fungal disease called late blight swept the country, rotting the potato crop in the field. In 1845 forty per cent of the crop was lost. Families who had been barely getting by began to starve. By 1855 one million people had died of hunger and disease (as food continued to be exported from Ireland to England). Many more emigrated to the United States. As smallholders fled, their land was bought up and enclosed for pastureland; even after the blight subsided in the 1850s, the problem of dispossession remained. <h2>In the New World</h2> The immigrants found work in the New World—often difficult work that offered little pay and less respect. Most of the women, who made up more than half of the exodus, became domestic servants or factory workers; most of the men found work building roads, railroads and canals or mining. Some US employers spoke quite frankly of hiring Irish laborers for jobs so dangerous that native-born workers wouldn’t take them. Some native-born workers complained that the Irish were impoverishing them by competing for jobs, driving down wages and taking charity. Certainly the landscape was changing fast. In the mid-1850s the majority of New York’s residents were immigrants, and the majority of recorded charity recipients were Irish. Some writers and speakers explained that this showed that the “Hibernian race” was naturally inferior to the Anglo-Saxon—conveniently overlooking the role played by Anglo-Saxons in displacing and impoverishing Irish emigrants. Irish immigrants were also the subject of wild conspiracy theories, often focused on their religion. Many writers alleged that the Catholics owed their true loyalty to the Pope rather than to any democratic government, and once sufficient numbers had arrived they would rise up violently, overthrow the Constitution, and subject Americans to a new Inquisition. Some went so far as to claim that a new Vatican would be founded in Ohio. In 1836 Maria Monk wrote what claimed to be a memoir about her life as a nun, in which priests were accused of lurid sexual misbehavior and routine child-murder; it was pointed out that she had actually never been a nun and the ‘memoir’ was actually a novel, but that didn’t hinder book sales. Sometimes anti-Catholic hostility led to apparently spontaneous rioting and violence, as in Philadelphia’s 1844 “Bible Riot,” over whether Catholic children should be allowed Catholic Bibles in school, left twenty people dead and three Catholic churches burned. In the 1850s anti-Catholicism found organized political expression in what was formally known as “The American Party.” <a href="https://www.newhistorian.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/KnowNothingFlag-1-1.jpg"><img class="wp-image-8970 alignleft" src="https://www.newhistorian.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/KnowNothingFlag-1-1.jpg" alt="" width="379" height="228" /></a>The American Party appealed to “native Americans”—by which it meant US-born whites, not American Indians—to pledge “eternal hostility to foreign and Roman Catholic influence.” It sought to deport “foreign beggars and criminals,” bar Catholics from public office, and make immigrants wait 21 years for naturalization. This party successfully elected more than one hundred US Congressmen as well as gaining control of several state legislatures. The party began as a secret society whose members were instructed to answer any questions about outsiders with “I know nothing,” and the American Party was also known as the Know Nothing Party, the name by which they are mostly remembered today. <h2>Race Questions</h2> The American Party’s rise to power was checked, not by a sudden outbreak of sanity and ethnic solidarity, but by the rise of an even more explosive conflict: the Civil War. While the Know Nothings agreed on suspecting immigrants, they didn’t agree on the question of slavery, and those questions tore the party apart. Many Irish-Americans also had ambivalent attitudes about slavery, liberty and black Americans. 19^th-century Irish immigrants were stigmatized not only for their religion but also for their ethnicity; some writers lumped them in with black Americans as members of irresponsible and inferior races, and some cartoonists portrayed both Irish and black Americans as simian. This led some Irish-Americans to speak against race prejudice, others to differentiate themselves from black Americans by emphasizing their own whiteness. Irish and black Americans sometimes competed for jobs that native-born whites wouldn’t do. During the war one Irish paper in Massachusetts warned its readers, “The North is becoming black with refugee Negroes from the South. These wretches crowd our cities and, by overstocking the market of labor, do incalculable injury to white hands&#8230;” And in 1863, when a law was passed saying that rich people could escape the military draft by paying the government $300 to hire a substitute, Irish-led protests in New York City against this unequal treatment of rich and poor devolved into violent attacks against black Americans, whom rioters blamed for the war. <h2>Rising Acceptance</h2> After the war ended Irish-American immigrants still faced prejudice—witness Coxe’s jeremiad and the ferocious cartoons of Thomas Nast and others—but they had also established a foothold in their new land, and their children were advancing quickly. Many first-generation immigrants had had little chance for education, but they saw to it that their children attended schools. By the turn of the century a higher proportion of Irish Catholics than of Protestants attended college. Some Anglo-Saxon Protestant Harvard students were skeptical of their new schoolmates, but Harvard’s President, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, stressed that education would help to assimilate the Irish and teach them to share “our prosperity and our sentiments,” since they—unlike non-white people and Jews—were clearly assimilable and worthy of “universal political equality.” By 1910 20% of Northern schoolteachers—and 33% of Chicago schoolteachers—were Irish women, while Irish men composed 30% of municipal workers in New York City, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco. Irish-Americans formed a powerful voting bloc, and they also took leadership in trade unions. While some unions were strongly nativist, some prominent Irish-American labor leaders, including Terence Vincent Powderly of the Knights of Labor and Mike Boyle of the International Brotherhood of Electric Workers, recruited black workers as well as Europeans of different ethnicities. Perhaps they remembered their own family stories of struggling against discrimination. By 1960, while vestiges of anti-Irish prejudice remains, Americans elected an Irish Catholic President. Many of today’s Supreme Court Justices are also Catholics who have spent their professional lives interpreting and defending the Constitution which Coxe thought their people could not value. Coxe’s essay can be read here: <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=LchZAAAAYAAJ&amp;pg=PA597&amp;lpg=PA597&amp;dq=a+cleveland+coxe+government+by+aliens&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=whGjicbA5B&amp;sig=qp05rZGrmUZOLz2_PU3FtTPfqNM&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=2ahUKEwiT487Uu5DfAhVo7oMKHZ4BDYQQ6AEwA3oECAYQAQ#v=onepage&amp;q=a%20cleveland%20c">https://books.google.com/books?id=LchZAAAAYAAJ&amp;pg=PA597&amp;lpg=PA597&amp;dq=a+cleveland+coxe+government+by+aliens&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=whGjicbA5B&amp;sig=qp05rZGrmUZOLz2_PU3FtTPfqNM&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=2ahUKEwiT487Uu5DfAhVo7oMKHZ4BDYQQ6AEwA3oECAYQAQ#v=onepage&amp;q=a%20cleveland%20coxe%20government%20by%20aliens&amp;f=false</a> &nbsp; A thoughtful discussion of the causes of Irish emigration, the process of Irish-American assimilation and the complex relationship between Irish Americans and Black Americans in the 1800s can be found in chapter 7 of Ronald Takaki’s book “A Different Mirror: A Multicultural History of America.” &nbsp; More information on the Know Nothings can be found at <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/immigrants-conspiracies-and-secret-society-launched-american-nativism-180961915/">https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/immigrants-conspiracies-and-secret-society-launched-american-nativism-180961915/</a>]]&gt; </p> <p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.newhistorian.com/2018/12/12/the-immigrant-invasion-that-wasnt/">The Immigrant Invasion That Wasn’t</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.newhistorian.com">New Historian</a>.</p> ]]></content:encoded> </item> <item> <title>Ibn Sina, Medieval Father of Modern Medicine</title> <link>https://www.newhistorian.com/2018/12/05/ibn-sina-medieval-father-of-modern-medicine/</link> <pubDate>Wed, 05 Dec 2018 18:18:31 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator><![CDATA[JHoyt]]></dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[News]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.newhistorian.com/?p=8957</guid> <description><![CDATA[<p> <![CDATA[]]> </p> <p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.newhistorian.com/2018/12/05/ibn-sina-medieval-father-of-modern-medicine/">Ibn Sina, Medieval Father of Modern Medicine</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.newhistorian.com">New Historian</a>.</p> ]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p> <![CDATA[by Joanna Michal Hoyt Certain prominent political figures and commentators today speak of a tension between the Muslim worldview and the Western worldview, as if those were two separate and incompatible. This overlooks the many ways in which what is now called "Western civilization” nourished and was nourished by Muslims as far back as the Middle Ages. One great exemplar of this cooperation was the philosopher and physician Abu ʿAli al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAbd Allah ibn Sina, more commonly known simply as Ibn Sina, or (in the Latinized version) Avicenna, or “the father of modern medicine.” <h2>Origins</h2> Ibn Sina was born around 980 CE to a scholarly family near Bukhara (which was then in Iran and is now in Uzbekistan.) By the age of ten he had memorized the Quran. In the following years he continued to reflect on the Quran’s meaning and to study Islamic jurisprudence. He also studied logic and read the works of the Greek philosophers, mathematicians and metaphysicians, first under a tutor and then on his own. At the age of sixteen, Ibn Sina gave his attention to medicine—reading up on theory and also taking every opportunity for direct observation. Before turning twenty he undertook to treat the ailing Sultan of Bukhara, whose court physicians had failed to diagnose or treat his malady. Ibn Sina succeeded where the rest had failed. Unfortunately we don’t know what the diagnosis or the treatment were, only that the Sultan healed and, in his gratitude, opened the royal library to Ibn Sina, who was delighted to have access to many new works of science and philosophy. <h2>Writings</h2> Soon after this Ibn Sina himself began writing books setting forth the nature of the universe.   This included broad theoretical explorations of philosophy, theology and metaphysics, observations on astronomy, mathematics, music and poetry, and practical advice on politics, household management, personal ethics, and medicine. His book “The Cure” seeks to draw the different branches of knowledge together and show them in their proper relation to each other, while many of his other works focus on specific branches of knowledge which had attracted his wide-ranging curiosity. Ibn Sina saw all knowledge as necessarily connected and made no sharp distinction between the academic and the practical. “Every science,” he observed, “has a theoretical and a practical side.” He added, “It is established in the sciences that no knowledge is acquired save through the study of its causes and beginnings, if it has had causes and beginnings; nor completed except by knowledge of its accidents and accompanying essentials.” This holistic view was particularly important in Ibn Sina’s theory and practice of medicine. <h2>Medicine</h2> <a href="https://www.newhistorian.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/avicenna-canon-of-medicine-viscera-illustration-1-1.jpeg"><img class="size-full wp-image-8959 alignleft" src="https://www.newhistorian.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/avicenna-canon-of-medicine-viscera-illustration-1-1.jpeg" alt="" width="184" height="273" /></a>Today Ibn Sina is best known for his “Canon of Medicine,” a comprehensive guide to medical treatment. In this book he wrote about the ancient physicians—Chinese, Persian and Greek—whose works he had read, and about the fundamental similarities which undergirded their rather different approaches to medicine. He also realized that the classical authors hadn’t known all that was necessary, that medical knowledge still had a long way to go. So Ibn Sina included a detailed record of his own medical observations, and advised other physicians on how to record and evaluate their own observations. He wrote about the importance of starting drug treatments at a low dosage and increasing the dose gradually; he also wrote about what type of consistent results were required in order to be sure of the effects of any particular drug.   Michael McVaugh and other historians have described Ibn Sina as the first proponent of what we now call evidence-based medicine. He had a very optimistic view of what medical knowledge could eventually encompass: he wrote, “There are no incurable diseases, only lack of will; there are no useless herbs, only lack of knowledge.” While Ibn Sina paid considerable attention to details of particular medical conditions (he may have been the first to recognize the distinctive sweet smell of the urine of diabetics), he also emphasized the importance of understanding the mental and physical health of the whole patient. He wrote, “Medicine is the science by which we learn the various states of the human body in health and when not in health, and the means by which health is likely to be lost and, when lost, is likely to be restored back to health&#8230;.” He recognized that lack of health in one area of the patient’s life might show up in other areas—for instance, that apparent urinary tract problems might result from blood infections (a recognition which is said to have originated with him) or psychological disturbances. And he gave his attention to methods of preventing diseases as well as curing them, emphasizing diet and environmental factors. He studied how contagious diseases spread, not only though direct contact between people, but also through soil and water. <h2>Travels and Travails</h2> Ibn Sina’s brilliance, and his success in curing the Sultan, won him the favor of important people, and he held important positions in more than one royal court. Given the feuding and the shifting politics of the time, this was not entirely safe for him. His autobiography repeatedly describes his leaving courts “because of necessity,” usually left vague; he traveled frequently, and at one point he was jailed amidst a political struggle. While his location and his patrons varied, his commitment to learning and teaching remained unwavering. Other people’s accounts of him paint varied pictures, some admiring his brilliance, others criticizing what they saw as his arrogance (expressed in his authoritative and sometimes unconventional statements) or impiety (shown by a tendency to drink alcohol and have affairs). It appears that in his last illness he was unlucky enough to have attendants who thought ill of him and added toxic ingredients to the medicines he had prescribed for himself. He died at the age of fifty-seven. <h2>Influence</h2> Ibn Sina’s philosophical writings were studied, and in some cases admired, by European Christian scholastic theologians including Thomas Aquinas. His medical fame and influence were even more widespread. The Canon of Medicine was translated into Latin in the 1100s CE and became a standard European medical textbook, reprinted and revised frequently in the 1400s. Ibn Sina is still remembered and studied by homeopaths, naturopaths and holistic healers. For more information on Ibn Sina’s philosophy, which there wasn’t room to cover in this article, see <a href="https://www.iep.utm.edu/avicenna/#H3">https://www.iep.utm.edu/avicenna/#H3</a> For more on The Canon of Medicine, see Evelyn B. Kelly’s article “The Significance of Ibn Sina&#8217;s <em>Canon of Medicine</em> in the Arab and Western worlds” at <a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/significance-ibn-sinas-canon-medicine-arab-and-western-worlds">https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/significance-ibn-sinas-canon-medicine-arab-and-western-worlds</a> &nbsp; &nbsp;]]&gt; </p> <p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.newhistorian.com/2018/12/05/ibn-sina-medieval-father-of-modern-medicine/">Ibn Sina, Medieval Father of Modern Medicine</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.newhistorian.com">New Historian</a>.</p> ]]></content:encoded> </item> </channel> </rss> <!-- Performance optimized by W3 Total Cache. 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