Steve Goddard's History Wire

Book Alert / The Door of No Return

The Door of No Return -- The History of Cape Coast Castle and the Atlantic Slave Trade by William St. Clair, $24.95, 288 pages, ISBN #1933346051. Index, bibliographical notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

For three million people, the "last look" at their African homeland in the 17th century came from Ghana's Cape Coast Castle, before they embarked by shipboard to new lives as slaves. Aptly titled The Door of No Return, St. Clair's biography of this monumental building is timed to coincide with the bicentennial of Great Britain's abolition of slavery.

Cape Coast Castle served as the African headquarters of the British slave trade for 150 years, ending in 1807. St. Clair's compelling saga describes the capture and shipment of slaves to such destinations as the West Indies, South America and North America and observes that those slaves' descendants now number in many millions.

In this prodigiously-researched book, the author plumbs long-ignored public records and personal correspondence, sales and purchase invoices, and governors' logs. He brings alive the bustle of the Castle in its busiest years as it teemed with questing merchants, frightened slaves, and local tribespeople. St. Clair's work is a window into the British mindset and mores of the 17th century.

Book Alert / The Great Pyramid -- Ancient Egypt Revisited

The Great Pyramid -- Ancient Egypt Revisited by John Romer, Cambridge UP '07, 564 pages, ISBN #0-521-87166-2. Index, bibliography, source notes, b&w images sprinkled through text, which is all on glossy paper.

"Modern Egyptologists have largely given up on the pyramids," concludes archaeologist John Romer in this paean to the planning, construction and use of these magnificent desert structures. In fact, he finds that the most accurate descriptions of pyramids are more than 100 years old. He hopes to set things straight in his new book.

It was while living in the Valley of the Kings that Romer began comparing the layout of one Egyptian tomb with its predecessors and successors, using overlays of tracing paper. Therein, he learned that each tomb-builder stood on the shoulders of those who came before, refining the essential structure over time but hewing to a set of constant rules.

One of Romer's chief contributions is to see the pyramids from a human, rather than simply architectural, point of view: "You could see ancient people making living choices. Walking through the tombs that they had made," Romer says, "was like taking a trip back into part of the ancient mind." The scope of his work is admirable, covering the builders themselves, the materials used (desert copper, Aswan granite, Tura limestone), the Giza Pyramid, and the details of pyramid construction, the burial chamber and the rites of death.

Catholics: Coming Soon To A Church Near You -- The Old Latin Mass

New York Times:

"A senior Vatican official has confirmed that sometime soon Pope Benedict XVI will expand permission for use of what’s popularly known as the Latin Mass, the service that was standard before the Second Vatican Council. Though some details remain vague, one point seems all too clear: When the decision officially comes down, its importance will be hyped beyond all recognition, because doing so serves the purposes of both conservatives and liberals within the church, as well as the press.

"Pope Benedict’s intent, according to Vatican authorities, is to make the pre-1960s Mass optional, leaving Catholics free to choose which Mass they want to attend. Because the older Tridentine Mass, named for the 16th-century Council of Trent, has come to symbolize deep tensions in Catholicism, the pope’s decision is sure to trigger an avalanche of commentary.

"Many on the Catholic right will hail the move as a death knell for the liturgical reforms of Vatican II, such as use of the vernacular languages and modern music, and participation by the laity, most of which conservatives have long derided as misplaced efforts to make the church “relevant.” The older Mass, many argue, has such beauty and elicits such a sense of awe that, over time, it will triumph, leaving the changes of the last 40 years as a failed experiment.

"That argument fails the smell test of contact with reality. For one thing, Catholics old enough to remember the pre-Vatican II Mass know that it’s as capable of being celebrated in drab, uninspiring fashion as any other rite. Moreover, four decades after Vatican II, many Catholic priests don’t even know the old Mass. Given the other demands they face in light of a priest shortage, a good number won’t take the time to learn it."

Fatcats Spending Big Bucks To Meet Historians -- Can That Be?

Reuters:

"New York- In a high-tech age of instant communication, old-fashioned history is enjoying a renaissance in U.S. popular culture. History tomes crowd best-seller lists. Historical documentaries fill the airwaves. And people pay thousands of dollars to spend whole weekends with noted historians, much the way rock-n-roll or baseball fans attend fantasy camps with their heroes.

"'At all levels of American society there is this hunger to understand the past and relate it to the present,' historian David Nasaw said at one such event. 'The people who are fascinated reach from the top income bracket to ordinary folk.' Nasaw, who won the 2007 American History Book Prize for his biography of Andrew Carnegie, was a star attraction at a weekend fundraiser for the New York Historical Society, which raised more than $1.5 million from patrons who donated at least $5,000.

"Others holding court were Richard Brookhiser, known for his biographies of the U.S. founders; Josiah Bunting, a biographer of Ulysses Grant; Civil War historian Eric Foner; Jill Lepore, author of a book about the King Philip's War between American Indians and English colonists; and Sean Wilentz, who questioned in a 2006 Rolling Stone article whether George W. Bush was the worst president ever."

"You're sitting next to people who have written the great books in history," said Michael Weisberg, a fund manager with ING Group who attended the event.

Sandra Day O'Connor, Meet Margaret Sanger

Nashua (N.H.) Telegraph:

"For a short time, juniors at Merrimack High School embodied pioneers in American civil rights.
A special project at the high school last week called for 120 juniors in upper-level American history classes to spend time researching important historical figures, designing a poster, developing a speech and raiding their parents’ closets for suitable costumes. Those students then brought the work to life in what teacher David DeLisle called a 'live museum of the 20th century.'

"The students donned their costumes and transformed into their historical muses, enough to fill two classrooms at the high school. Then, other classes filtered through to meet Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, labor activist Caesar Chavez, birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger and many others.

"Resurrected for the first time in five years, the 'live museum' may expand across an entire wing of the school in the future, DeLisle said. 'It’s something a little different, rather than just talking heads,' DeLisle said, referring to traditional lecture format. The students 'find people . . . who may be obscure to the average person, but were a key person to the movement.'”

Book Alert / The Clash Within

The Clash Within -- Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future by Martha C. Nussbaum, Belknap/Harvard '07, $29.95, 403 pages, ISBN #0-674-02482-6. Index, source notes, glossary, chronology, no bibliography or illustrations.

America values India strategically for many reasons, not the least of which is its Democratic traditions, particularly when juxtaposed against nearby and still-communist China. But, as a University of Chicago professor of law and ethics argues, a democratic future for India shouldn't be taken for granted.

A threat to the nation's political future, argues Martha Nussbaum, comes from the Hindu right. In the 2002 Gujarat riots, for example, extremists annihilated nearly 2,000 Muslims. And while their leaders, the Bharatiya Janata Party, was defeated in recent elections, this shouldn't signal that pluralism will continue to prevail on the subcontinent. And she warns that if the Hindu rightists should prevail, they won't be content with sharing power but aim at domination of this secular democracy and subjugation of other religious groups.

The greatest threat Nussbaum sees is not "from a clash between civilizations, as some believe, but from a clash within each of us, as we oscillate, between self-protective aggression and the ability to live in the world with others."

Book Alert / Brave New War

Brave New War -- The Next Stage of Terrorism And The End of Globalization by John Robb, Foreward by James Fallows. Wiley '07, $24.95, 208 pages, ISBN #978-0-471-78079-3. Index, further reading, source notes, unillustrated.

The Tom Friedmans of the world have preached the gospel of globalization over the past decade or so as foreshadowing a world in which we all leverage off each other's strengths to achieve a more productive, mutually supportive world. But former Air Force officer John Robb argues that globalization has a shadowy dark side. For if interconnectedness can help the good guys, it can surely aid the bad guys too.

To be effective, globalization must achieve and maintain effective delivery systems in nations' economies, cultures and communications networks. Robb worries that each such technological reality presents an opportunity for terrorists, his chief concern, to undermine operations. The more the world is interconnected, the more vulnerable it is to the effects of having a link in one of its global chains severed, with far-ranging results. Accordingly, the greatest threat lying ahead may not be one that kills us but that disrupts our way of life.

Robb's solution? Decentralizing our economies and communications and becoming more self-reliant. "Taking steps to combat the shutdown of  the world's oil, high-tech and financial markets," Robb says, "could cost us the thing we've come to value the most: worldwide economic and cultural integration." James Fallows, one of today's most perceptive commentators, has written a foreward for the book and calls it "far more sophisticated than just about anything else the public is used to hearing about the nature of the challenges it faces."

Book Alert / Dirt -- The Erosion of Civilizations

Dirt -- The Erosion of Civilizations by David R. Montgomery, UCal. Press '07, 285 pages, ISBN #0-520-24870-8. Index, bibliography, source notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

We worry aplenty about running out of oil and of shortages of water. But have you lost any sleep in angst over our not having enough dirt? David R. Montgomery, University of Washington Professor of Earth and Space Sciences, says we should. Wasteful development of civilizations, he contends, has removed protective vegetation, exposing soil to erosion by wind and rain.

It's not happening overnight, Montgomery concedes, but neither did global warming. Yet should we reach a point at which there's not enough fertile soil to sustain necessary plant growth, the implications seem obvious. His book is not only a wake-up call on the basic problem but prescriptive in its call for such solutions as no-till and organic farming.

Montgomery's book covers a broad historical sweep, from Mesopotamia and Ancient Greece forward through the Roman Empire, European colonialism and America's westward expansion. His colorful chapter headings include "Skin of the Earth," "Graveyard of Empires," "Let Them Eat Colonies," and "Westward Hoe."

Remembering Charles Nelson Reilly: Forerunner of TV's Bitchy Gay Men

Time Magazine:

"Charles Nelson Reilly, who introduced schoolchildren of a certain age to the art of the brilliant double entendre on Match Game, died Friday. In the lull between his death and my re-opening the blog for business post-holiday, the comments on my Price Is Right post became a sort of impromptu shrine to Reilly, and commenter LB offered Reilly and the '70s daytime game show a better memorial than I could hope to top:

"I was too young to get some of the jokes and double entendres they threw around, but half the fun was the physical humor of watching them (and various other inanimate objects) being thrown. Hollywood Squares of course is a cultural icon, but Match Game had its own cachet. Before Comedy Central, before VH1 and its various celebrity combo 'reality' shows, we basically got to sit in on a daily happy hour / roast with the likes of Brett Somers, Charles Nelson Reilly, Betty White, Richard Dawson, Fannie Flagg, and various others just trying to keep up -- while Gene Rayburn prowled the stage with his foot-long microphone and acted as our vaudevillian host when he could take a break from leering at the pretty women.

"Seconded. There really was something distinctly '70s about Match Game, with its rakish, racy, not-quite-a-key-party air of adults testing the era's new licentiousness in language just safe enough for the kids. And Reilly, bookended with Paul Lynde on Hollywood Squares, was to many kids of my generation our first experience of brilliantly bitchy gay men sending bon-mot missives from within the celluloid closet--even if we had no idea at the time."

Rachel Carson's Centennial Observed. She "Changed The World By Describing It"

The Nation:

"Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring and a seminal figure for the modern environmental movement, would have turned one hundred this past Sunday. 'Carson's book altered the nature of environmentalism,' is how the Washington Post described her legacy. 'Previously, it had been mainly about preserving and appreciating parks and other beautiful places. But Carson's message was that all of nature should be protected, for its own sake and because people eventually would suffer if it was degraded.'

"'What she said was, the Earth itself needs an advocate,' said Patricia M. DeMarco, Executive Director of the Rachel Carson Homestead Association.

"But when Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland – where Carson was a longtime resident – tried to honor her with a Senate resolution it was blocked by Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma. 'Rachel Carson has been an inspiration to a generation of environmentalists, scientists and biologists who made a difference and changed the irresponsible use of pesticides,' Cardin said. 'Honoring her 100th birthday should not be controversial. I wanted to share that with our country.'

"Indeed, Elizabeth Kolbert describes the magnitude of Carson's impact in The New Yorker, 'As much as any book can, ‘Silent Spring' changed the world by describing it. An immediate best-seller, the book launched the modern environmental movement, which, in turn, led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the passage of the Clean Air, the Clean Water, and the Endangered Species Acts, and the banning of a long list of pesticides, including dieldrin.'"