Minor Thoughts from me to you

Fellow White people! Lend me your ears! Mekka Okereke, a Google engineer and a bonafide Black man, has been incredibly generous with his time and has explained some of our history to us. Throughout the month of February, “Black History Month”, he took a timeout from Black history to talk about White American history instead. He posted threads almost every day, tackling one topic at a time.

These post threads are for White folks who don’t know their own history. White folks like me. I learned a lot from Mekka last month. I’ve collected all 22 threads and I’m making them easy to find for all of my pasty compatriots who missed them the first time around. Come and learn.

Here’s how Mekka kicked things off, on February 1.

Happy #BlackHistoryMonth !

You know the drill by now. I don't like talking about Black history. Americans know Black history. I want to talk about white American history. In other words, racism, and the erasure of both positive achievements of, and injustices suffered by, non-white people. That's what people don't know.

I'm not ready to talk about Black history. I want to talk about white US history.

Here we go.

February 1:

Try this: Ask your white US friends what the statue of liberty celebrates.

Now ask your Black friends. Or French folk of any color.

February 02

Q: "Why don't Black people build any generational wealth? Newer immigrant groups seem to be doing just fine? Must be a lazy and shiftless people!"

A: Because for most of US history, white folk have intentionally destroyed the wealthiest Black neighborhoods in the US and stolen all the wealth.

Greenwood. Allentown. Seneca Village. Rosewood. Freedmen's town.

February 03

Q: Why do Black people see racism in everything?

A: A few years ago, European tech entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky asked some very good questions in good faith. He asked why San Francisco and Madrid were different in so many confusing and awful ways. I answered each of his questions. Please verify each and every answer with a skeptic's keen eye.

Here we go...

February 04

Do you know that in the US, a Black 11 year old is 10 times more likely to die by drowning, than a white child?

In a nation that ignores racism, folk believe that this is because Black folk "Don't swim well."🤦🏿‍♂️

It's 2023, and there are still folk that believe Black kids drown due to race, not racism.

February 05

Q: Why do so many Black folk call Abraham Lincoln a white supremacist? He freed the slaves! Why don't Black folk have pictures of Lincoln up in their house? Are they ungrateful?

A: Because Abraham Lincoln was a white supremacist, and one of the worst kinds. He was an "I know Black folk aren't inferior, but hey man, it's an 'us or them' thing, and I choose us to be in the superior position."

February 06

The US loves soldiers and veterans! Virtuous! Service! 🇺🇲🦅

The US hates homeless people. Lazy! Dirty! Want a handout!

But... ~1 in every 20 US homeless folk is a Black or hispanic veteran. 🤷🏿‍♂️

In the USA, the phrase "support our troops!" is a euphemism that does mean military jingoism, but doesn't mean supporting all of our troops.

February 07

Q: Why are Black neighborhoods so often high crime neighborhoods? Must be a lawless people! Violent! Thieves! Predators!

A: There is no such thing as a "high crime neighborhood." The whole concept is entirely made up based on our notion of what we consider a crime.

You may be thinking:🤔 Wait... What?! Not true! A high crime neighborhood has more drug use and sales, theft, and even murder!

February 08

Q: Why do so many Black people refuse to sing the US national anthem? I'm sorry, but that seems unpatriotic to me. Plus, the Whitney Houston version is amazing! Why don't you like Whitney Houston? Whitney!

A: Because more Black folk know the true history of the anthem, and some can't get past the racism.

February 09

Q: Why do Black kids not do well in school? Is it because their dads are uninvolved and uncaring parents? Bill Cosby and Herschel Walker told me that, and they are good and wise men that we should listen to! It's Black dads' fault! Boo Black men!

A: No. Black kids only do poorly in school in extremely racist countries.

February 10

Q: Why are Black people in the US so much more likely to die in traffic accidents than white people? Are Black folk more likely to drive under the influence of alcohol or drugs (DUI)? Is it street racing? Are y'all just bad drivers?

A: Hmm. I'm stumped! No one knows the answer to why this happens! Just kidding. It's racism. It's always racism.

February 11

Q: Why do Black folk commit more crime? I hear you on "wage theft should be a crime too" and all that... but if we look at convictions for murder, sexual assault, and drug possession, Black folk just commit way more crime! Those are facts!

A: Black folk are convicted more. Black folk are many times more likely to be wrongfully convicted. Because racism.

February 12

Q: Why are so many Black folk early adopters of tech like Uber and Amazon? Sometimes this willingness to try new tech early backfires on y'all, like the whole crypto scam. Tech companies don't always love you back. So... why so eager? Is it because of Deltron 3030 and André 3000? 🤔You're... you're going to say racism aren't you?

A: Yep! Racism. And go ahead and add Sears to that list of "technology" companies.

February 13

Q: Why don't Black folk like things like rodeos, country music, and cowboys! But why are so many Black folk Dallas Cowboys fans? Could we use the Dallas Cowboys to introduce Black people to country culture?

A: You might mean "re-introduce." 1 in 5 wild west cowboys was Black. Almost all of the original cowboys were Black.

(Texans all like "I know this one! I'm getting an "A" today! Finally! Our time!"🤣)

February 15

Q: Why do Black folk get so upset when people ask them if they live in this neighborhood? I saw a Black stranger in my building and I just asked him if he lived here and can I see 3 forms of government ID, and now I'm the racist? How? I voted for Obama! Twice! Why are Black folk so sensitive about this?

A: Racism. This is a legacy of slavery and ethnic cleansing. Seriously.

February 16

Q: Why do Black folk just assume that many supporters of Trump, Reagan, Nixon, etc are racist? That doesn't seem fair. Why do 90% of Black folk vote democrat? Why aren't more Black people "free thinkers?"

A: Racism. Black US folk know about the "Southern Strategy," and what Reagan, Nixon and their advisers said about us. They know the origins of the Alt-right. Many white US folk don't.

February 17

Q: Why is it OK for Black folk to like the Black Panthers, but white folk can't like the klan? Black supremacy is just as bad as white supremacy! Why the double standard?

A: Black folk know white US history, so they know that the Black Panthers were not Black supremacists.

(At this point, half of the Black folk reading this just involuntarily said "COINTELPRO!" out loud).

February 18

Q: Why does it seem like so much of the anti-Asian hate that I see on TV and in newspapers is done by Black people? It seems like Asian folk should be legitimately afraid of Black people! Why does it seem that way?

A: Racism. Most Asian hate attacks are done by white folk. Asian folk are significantly safer from Asian hate, when they are around Black folk.🙂🙃

Newspapers lied on us.

February 19

Q: Why is so much Black music about violence and misogyny? I'm not racist, but I think Black culture is just more violent. Why does it seem that way?

A: Racism. Rap, trap, and drill, are only the most popular genres of Black music listened to by white people. The most popular among Black folk is R&B, almost 2X as popular. Violent rap is mostly for y'all.🤷🏿‍♂️

https://www.statista.com/statistics/945163/leading-music-genres-african-american/

February 20

Q: Why were Black folk so happy when OJ was acquitted? To be honest, it feels disgusting. Why does it seem like you're happy he got away with murderer?

A: Racism. Black folk did not like OJ that much. In fact, many Black people think he did it. Black folk didn't "celebrate OJ." Black folk celebrated the hope that a brutally unjust, evil, and racist system, could be defeated at all.

February 21

Q: Enough about racism for a second. Take a break! I'm worried about gender issues in the US too. For example, why is the gender pay gap in the US so large? It's one of the worst in the OECD!

A: You know why. Racism! In the US, the pay gap between white men and white women, is smaller than the pay gap between white women and Black and Latinx women.

Earnings and wages - Gender wage gap - OECD Data

February 23

Q: Not everything is racism! E.g. Black folk die young because of high BMI from their bad diets! That's on y'all! Don't hate on Lululemon leggings or khaki pants! Hate yourself! We're only trying to help you! How is this racism?

A: Black people in the UK have higher BMI than white people, and live longer than white people.🙂🙃

BMI is racist, and used to justify racism.

February 25

Q: Why does it seem like Black folk don't contribute much to society or science or history? Most inventions are from Europeans? Why does it seem this way? Don't cancel me!

A: Racism. The lie of white supremacy requires that we pretend that white men are the only people that ever invented anything or contributed to society.

America is a dream given form. It was built by men who only saw the dream through a glass darkly. They couldn’t see that it would one day apply to someone other than White men with a certain level of wealth. They couldn’t see that it would one day apply to their wives and daughters. Or to the “merciless Indian Savages” that they battled on the frontier. Or even—horrific thought—to their slaves, their slaves’ wives, their slaves’ daughters.

America is a dream given form. It was never a perfect realization of the dream. And we never can fully realize the dream, unless we’re willing to acknowledge the yawning chasm between the dream and the actual nation that the Founders built.

I can celebrate the red, white, and blue knowing of America’s flawed past. That doesn’t sap my fervor. But I can’t join in waving the flag and chanting “U-S-A”, when those with the biggest displays and the most fervor are the ones doing the most to deny the reality behind the myth.

“Making America Great Again” will take us back to a time when we were further away from realizing the dream than we are now. I cannot join their celebrations when doing so endorses their limitations for the country that I love.

When I celebrate Independence Day, I celebrate by both looking back and looking forward. I see America as it was, and I mourn for all of the mistakes that we’ve made. I see America as it could be, fully realized, welcoming and respecting everyone who shares the dream of liberty, equality, and opportunity, regardless of wealth, culture, religion, sexuality, national origin, or education. The dirt-poor, gay Guatemalan who just arrived, given as much preference as the White, middle class Christian, whose family has been here for 200 years.

For this Independence Day, I turn to the poem that’s come to signify patriotism to me. Let America be America again—the land that never has been yet—and yet must be.

Let America Be America Again
by Langston Hughes

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free. (America never was America to me.) Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above. (It never was America to me.) O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe. (There’s never been equality for me, Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”) _Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?_
_And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?_ I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak. I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed! I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years. Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.” The free? Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that's almost dead today. O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where _every_ man is free.
The land that's mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again. Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America! O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be! Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!

Apocalypse and Allegiance: Worship, Politics and Devotion in the Book of Revelation
by J. Nelson Kraybill
$13.49 on Kindle

This is another book that I learned about while reading one of Slacktivist's posts about the Left Behind novels.

John of Patmos was writing to seven actual churches, some of which had lost members of their communities to Roman persecution. John is reassuring his readers that “their fellow servants and their brethren” were at peace with God, and that the Empire would one day face divine justice on account of their deaths. He’s also warning those readers that the persecution may not be over — that the Empire isn’t yet done with its beastly work.

…

You’ll notice that we’ve skipped over Revelation 7 here. That’s a worship scene. John’s vision in Revelation is repeatedly interrupted with these interludes of heavenly worship with saints and angels bowing down before the throne of God, singing songs of praise. Such interludes don’t interest LaHaye. Like most “Bible prophecy” enthusiasts, he’s only interested in the wrath-y bits with the fiery hail and earthquakes and such. He skips over these “tangential” scenes of worship the way a lazy student skips past all the whaling-manual chapters in Moby Dick.

(Let me again commend J. Nelson Kraybill’s Apocalypse and Allegiance: Worship, Politics and Devotion in the Book of Revelation for its excellent discussion of the vital, central importance of these worship scenes for John’s original readers. In the context of Empire, worship — worship of anything other than Empire — is a politically subversive and empowering act.)

A History of Judaism
by Martin Goodman
$25.17 on Kindle

What I've been reading

Imagine a scholarly history of Judaism, told from the points of view of the time, rather than treating so many events as lead-ups to later anti-Semitism: “My attempt to provide an objective version of Judaism may strike some readers as naive.” I found the book to be a useful mood affiliation jiu jitsu, plus it has plenty of information that competing sources don’t, most of all about the immediate post-Temple period. Recommended.

Adam called me out on my respect for Robert E. Lee, after I posted "Dominance Displays Over Statues". He argued that Robert E. Lee, as a man, wasn't worthy of my respect. As proof, he pointed me towards "The Myth of the Kindly General Lee", published in The Atlantic.

I should have blogged about this then, but didn't. Recent events have forced me to do now, what I didn't do then. A city councilor from Charlottesville, VA wants to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee. That brought out the alt-right to stage an ugly demonstration supporting the statue — and Robert E. Lee.

I'm going on the record now: Adam was right and I was wrong. Robert E. Lee is not worth supporting and I oppose both the actions of the alt-right in Charlottesville and the cause that they're agitating for.

This is the history that I wasn't taught in Southern schools and that I didn't bother to research on my own.

The strangest part about the continued personality cult of Robert E. Lee is how few of the qualities his admirers profess to see in him he actually possessed.

​> …

The myth of Lee goes something like this: He was a brilliant strategist and devoted Christian man who abhorred slavery and labored tirelessly after the war to bring the country back together.

There is little truth in this. Lee was a devout Christian, and historians regard him as an accomplished tactician. But despite his ability to win individual battles, his decision to fight a conventional war against the more densely populated and industrialized North is considered by many historians to have been a fatal strategic error.

But even if one conceded Lee’s military prowess, he would still be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans in defense of the South’s authority to own millions of human beings as property because they are black. Lee’s elevation is a key part of a 150-year-old propaganda campaign designed to erase slavery as the cause of the war and whitewash the Confederate cause as a noble one. That ideology is known as the Lost Cause, and as historian David Blight writes, it provided a “foundation on which Southerners built the Jim Crow system.”

What was Lee, himself, like?​

White supremacy does not “violate” Lee’s “most fundamental convictions.” White supremacy was one of Lee’s most fundamental convictions.

Describing an 1856 letter from Robert E. Lee, Adam Serwer writes:

The argument here is that slavery is bad for white people, good for black people, and most importantly, it is better than abolitionism; emancipation must wait for divine intervention. That black people might not want to be slaves does not enter into the equation; their opinion on the subject of their own bondage is not even an afterthought to Lee.

And Lee treated slaves horribly:​

Lee’s cruelty as a slavemaster was not confined to physical punishment. In Reading the Man, the historian Elizabeth Brown Pryor’s portrait of Lee through his writings, Pryor writes that “Lee ruptured the Washington and Custis tradition of respecting slave families,” by hiring them off to other plantations, and that “by 1860 he had broken up every family but one on the estate, some of whom had been together since Mount Vernon days.” The separation of slave families was one of the most unfathomably devastating aspects of slavery, and Pryor wrote that Lee’s slaves regarded him as “the worst man I ever see.”

…

Lee’s heavy hand on the Arlington plantation, Pryor writes, nearly led to a slave revolt, in part because the enslaved had been expected to be freed upon their previous master’s death, and Lee had engaged in a dubious legal interpretation of his will in order to keep them as his property, one that lasted until a Virginia court forced him to free them.

When two of his slaves escaped and were recaptured, Lee either beat them himself or ordered the overseer to "lay it on well." Wesley Norris, one of the slaves who was whipped, recalled that “not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh, Gen. Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine, which was done.”

​It wasn't just slaves. Lee treated free blacks horribly as well.

During his invasion of Pennsylvania, Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia enslaved free blacks and brought them back to the South as property. Pryor writes that “evidence links virtually every infantry and cavalry unit in Lee’s army” with the abduction of free black Americans, “with the activity under the supervision of senior officers.”

​Lee even sounds like a modern, alt-right, white supremacist.

Nor did Lee’s defeat lead to an embrace of racial egalitarianism. The war was not about slavery, Lee insisted later, but if it was about slavery, it was only out of Christian devotion that white southerners fought to keep blacks enslaved. Lee told a New York Herald reporter, in the midst of arguing in favor of somehow removing blacks from the South (“disposed of,” in his words), “that unless some humane course is adopted, based on wisdom and Christian principles you do a gross wrong and injustice to the whole negro race in setting them free. And it is only this consideration that has led the wisdom, intelligence and Christianity of the South to support and defend the institution up to this time.”

Lee had beaten or ordered his own slaves to be beaten for the crime of wanting to be free, he fought for the preservation of slavery, his army kidnapped free blacks at gunpoint and made them unfree—but all of this, he insisted, had occurred only because of the great Christian love the South held for blacks. Here we truly understand Frederick Douglass’s admonition that "between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference."

Privately, according to the correspondence collected by his own family, Lee counseled others to hire white labor instead of the freedmen, observing “that wherever you find the negro, everything is going down around him, and wherever you find a white man, you see everything around him improving.”

​And he tacitly encouraged abominable behavior by others.

Lee is not remembered as an educator, but his life as president of Washington College (later Washington and Lee) is tainted as well. According to Pryor, students at Washington formed their own chapter of the KKK, and were known by the local Freedmen’s Bureau to attempt to abduct and rape black schoolgirls from the nearby black schools.

There were at least two attempted lynchings by Washington students during Lee’s tenure, and Pryor writes that “the number of accusations against Washington College boys indicates that he either punished the racial harassment more laxly than other misdemeanors, or turned a blind eye to it,” adding that he “did not exercise the near imperial control he had at the school, as he did for more trivial matters, such as when the boys threatened to take unofficial Christmas holidays.” In short, Lee was as indifferent to crimes of violence toward blacks carried out by his students as he was when they were carried out by his soldiers.

​

Dan McLaughlin wrote this, at the end of a blog post for National Review. And I'm quoting it, because I particularly liked the sentence that I bolded.

Lee was no hero; he fought for an unjust cause, and he lost. Unlike the Founding Fathers (even the slaveholders among them), he failed the basic test of history: leaving the world better and freer than he found it. And while he was not responsible for the South’s strategic failures, his lack of strategic vision places him below Grant, Sherman and Winfield Scott in any assessment of the war’s greatest generals. We should not be building new monuments to him, but if we fail to understand why the men of his day revered him, we are likelier to fail to understand who people revere today, and why. And tearing down statues of Lee today is less about understanding the past than it is a contest to divide the people of today’s America, and see who holds more power. That’s no better an attitude today than it was in Lee’s day.

Much of today's political fighting is cloaked in the language of justice, morality, and virtue. But it often feels more like gleeful displays of dominance than it does sober exercises in judgment. The end result may be good — removing statues that honor seriously flawed heroes — but the process can create bitterness and resentment rather than healing and unity.

For the past several months, I've had trouble sleeping the entire way through the night. I fall asleep easily and sleep well until sometime between 2–4am. Then I wake up and can't fall back to sleep until about 90 minutes later. I've been thinking there's something wrong with me. There's not. I'm just reverting to medieval sleep patterns.

In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a seminal paper, drawn from 16 years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks.

His book At Day's Close: Night in Times Past, published four years later, unearths more than 500 references to a segmented sleeping pattern - in diaries, court records, medical books and literature, from Homer's Odyssey to an anthropological account of modern tribes in Nigeria.

Much like the experience of Wehr's subjects, these references describe a first sleep which began about two hours after dusk, followed by waking period of one or two hours and then a second sleep.

"It's not just the number of references - it is the way they refer to it, as if it was common knowledge," Ekirch says.

During this waking period people were quite active. They often got up, went to the toilet or smoked tobacco and some even visited neighbours. Most people stayed in bed, read, wrote and often prayed. Countless prayer manuals from the late 15th Century offered special prayers for the hours in between sleeps.

And these hours weren't entirely solitary - people often chatted to bed-fellows or had sex.

A doctor's manual from 16th Century France even advised couples that the best time to conceive was not at the end of a long day's labour but "after the first sleep", when "they have more enjoyment" and "do it better".

​And this isn't just a difference between older humans and more modern humans.

In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted an experiment in which a group of people were plunged into darkness for 14 hours every day for a month.

It took some time for their sleep to regulate but by the fourth week the subjects had settled into a very distinct sleeping pattern. They slept first for four hours, then woke for one or two hours before falling into a second four-hour sleep.

My problem — waking up and being unable to fall back to sleep right away ​— even has a name: sleep maintenance insomnia.

Today, most people seem to have adapted quite well to the eight-hour sleep, but Ekirch believes many sleeping problems may have roots in the human body's natural preference for segmented sleep as well as the ubiquity of artificial light.

This could be the root of a condition called sleep maintenance insomnia, where people wake during the night and have trouble getting back to sleep, he suggests.

The condition first appears in literature at the end of the 19th Century, at the same time as accounts of segmented sleep disappear.

"For most of evolution we slept a certain way," says sleep psychologist Gregg Jacobs. "Waking up during the night is part of normal human physiology."

​Maybe I should try sleeping from 8pm–midnight, reading or working on a project from midnight–2am and then sleeping again from 2–6am. It might just be good scientific practice.

∞

What a great story.

The contest between Beethoven and Steibelt

As the challenger, Steibelt was to play first. He walked to the piano, tossing a piece of his own music on the side, and played. Steibelt was renowned for conjuring up a "storm" on the piano, and this he did to great effect, the "thunder" growling in the bass.

He rose to great applause, and all eyes turned to Beethoven, who took a deep breath, slowly exhaled, and reluctantly - to the collective relief of everyone present - trudged to the piano.

Beethoven's turn to play

When he got there he picked up the piece of music Steibelt had tossed on the side, looked at it, showed it the audience ..... and turned it upside down!

He sat at the piano and played the four notes in the opening bar of Steibelt's music. He began to vary them, embellish them ..... improvise on them.

He played on, imitated a Steibelt "storm", unpicked Steibelt's playing and put it together again, parodied it and mocked it.

Steibelt makes a dramatic exit…

Steibelt, realising he was not only being comprehensively outplayed but humiliated, strode out of the room. Prince Lobkowitz hurried after him, returning a few moments later to say Steibelt had said he would never again set foot in Vienna as long as Beethoven lived there.

Beethoven lived in Vienna for the rest of his life, and Steibelt kept his promise - he never returned.

∞

Fascinating.

Today I learned that the washing machine is more than 250 years old.

After reading the lead article in this morning's Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper, I briefly thought it was exactly 250 years old. This purported Feb. 23 anniversary is being celebrated all over the German news media this week, but it can't be right, given that there's a full copy online of the book in which German pastor and professor Jacob Christian Schaeffer made his invention known, and it's dated Oct. 16, 1766.

Not only that, but Schaeffer also writes in the book's foreword that he got the idea from a magazine article about an English washing machine that some guy in Copenhagen had successfully reconstructed.

​And yet…

It was only with the invention of the electric washing machine by Alva Fisher in Chicago in 1907 that something dramatically better than the washboard came along, and even then it took decades more for the machines to become cheap and reliable enough to change how people cleaned their clothes (and of course in much of the world, washboards still rule). In the U.S., according to a 2013 paper by Benjamin Bridgman of the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the big gains in household productivity enabled by the washing machine, dishwasher and other such devices occurred between about 1948 and 1977.

∞

Hero of the Empire
by Candice Millard
$13.99 on Kindle

Robert Costa Tweet

@costareports: Book recommendation: "Hero of the Empire" by Candice Millard. Terrific insights on political ambition, the media and a young Churchill.

So what's it about?

Churchill arrived in South Africa in 1899, valet and crates of vintage wine in tow, there to cover the brutal colonial war the British were fighting with Boer rebels. But just two weeks after his arrival, the soldiers he was accompanying on an armored train were ambushed, and Churchill was taken prisoner. Remarkably, he pulled off a daring escape--but then had to traverse hundreds of miles of enemy territory, alone, with nothing but a crumpled wad of cash, four slabs of chocolate, and his wits to guide him.

The story of his escape is incredible enough, but then Churchill enlisted, returned to South Africa, fought in several battles, and ultimately liberated the men with whom he had been imprisoned.

All of that plus an analysis of political ambition and the media? Sounds right up my alley.

All the Shah's Men
by Stephen Kinzer
$8.28 on Kindle

I discovered this book after David Henderson wrote about it.

Kinzer tells the story, in great detail, of how Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of TR and an employee of the CIA, set in motion the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh, the prime minister of Iran in the early 1950s. It's fascinating and disturbing: I found Roosevelt even more evil than I had expected.

I remember that when the Iran radicals had taken over the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in November 1979, they chanted and had signs about the CIA. Shortly after November 1979, I learned the connection with the 1953 events, but I had just assumed that they were angry about the CIA's role in 1953. Kinzer suggests an even more direct connection. He writes:

The hostage-takers remembered that when the Shah fled into exile in 1953, CIA agents working at the American embassy had returned him to his throne. Iranians feared that history was about to repeat itself.

In the back of everybody's mind hung the suspicion that, with the admission of the Shah to the United States, the countdown for another coup d-etat had begun," one of the hostage-takers explained years later. "Such was to be our fate again, we were convinced, and it would be irreversible. We now had to reverse the irreversible."

The whole story is tragic. Iran was a fledgling democracy stopped in its tracks by the U.S. government at the behest of the British government. When the Iranians finally overthrew the Shah, they got, not another liberal democracy, but a vicious theocracy.

The motivation for the coup was to get back the oil company that Mossadegh had nationalized. I don't defend nationalization, but overthrowing a government to reverse it is too extreme. I think Americans would be justly upset if, in response to the U.S. government's nationalization of an Iranian firm, Iran's government fomented a coup against the U.S. government. Moreover, as British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, of the Labour government, had said at the time: "What argument can I advance against anyone claiming the right to nationalize the resources of their country? We are doing the same thing here with our power in the shape of coal, electricity, railways, transport and steel."

This would pair well with reading The Fall of Heaven.

The Death of Caesar
by Barry S. Strauss
$12.99 on Kindle

I've had this book written down for a while now. I think Goodreads recommended it to me, based on my reading history. I've always been interested in Roman history, so this intrigued me right away.

Goodreads

The exciting, dramatic story of one of history’s most famous events—the death of Julius Caesar—now placed in full context of Rome’s civil wars by eminent historian Barry Strauss.

Thanks to William Shakespeare, the death of Julius Caesar is the most famous assassination in history. But what actually happened on March 15, 44 BC is even more gripping than Shakespeare’s play. In this thrilling new book, Barry Strauss tells the real story.

Shakespeare shows Caesar’s assassination to be an amateur and idealistic affair. The real killing, however, was a carefully planned paramilitary operation, a generals’ plot, put together by Caesar’s disaffected officers and designed with precision. There were even gladiators on hand to protect the assassins from vengeance by Caesar’s friends. Brutus and Cassius were indeed key players, as Shakespeare has it, but they had the help of a third man—Decimus. He was the mole in Caesar’s entourage, one of Caesar’s leading generals, and a lifelong friend. It was he, not Brutus, who truly betrayed Caesar.

Caesar’s assassins saw him as a military dictator who wanted to be king. He threatened a permanent change in the Roman way of life and in the power of senators. The assassins rallied support among the common people, but they underestimated Caesar’s soldiers, who flooded Rome. The assassins were vanquished; their beloved Republic became the Roman Empire.

The Last Lion
by William Manchester
$50 on [Kindle][kindle]

I discovered this biography while listening to Russ Roberts talk to Ryan Holiday, on the July 18 episode of EconTalk.

So, let's take the flip side of that character trait, and let's look at Winston Churchill. And Winston Churchill, you talk about in the book. But he had, it appears, an enormous ego that sustained him through all kinds of failure. He was blamed politically in the first World War. And in the run-up to WWII, he's considered a crazy lunatic who is worried about Nazi Germany. And ultimately his reputation is redeemed and he's considered one of the greatest figures of the 20th century, like top five. So, his ego--and by the way, you quote, I think, the Manchester biography, Volume 2, Alone. Well, in Volume 1, one of the moments that's legendary in my household because my kids loved it so much--you know, he escapes from a prison in the Boer War, walks a huge distance, I forget how far, and presents himself in the middle of the night at the British Embassy and pounds on the door and someone opens a window upstairs and says, 'What's going on?' And he yells up something like, 'It's Winston Bloody Churchill. Open this door.' And so, here's a man who is totally full of himself, as far as I can tell. And he's a great success. So, why is ego the enemy?

Guest: I'm fascinated that you would ask this, because — and for our listeners, we did not plan this — I am actually in, I have like 10 pages left, in Volume 2. And I read Volume 1 in the last couple of weeks. So, I've been reading about Churchill, and he's fascinating. And the Manchester biography is so great, because he looks at that ego; and he says over and over again, basically Hitler and Churchill were opposite sides of the same coin. And he says — it's interesting, maybe the only reason that Churchill saw through Hitler was that he saw a bit of that megalomania in himself.

That sounded interesting enough to check out. The full biography is three volumes, all available on Kindle.

1. Visions of Glory, 1874 – 1932, $14.99
2. Alone, 1932 – 1940, $14.99
3. Defender of the Realm, 1940 – 1965, $19.99

The first two volumes were written by William Manchester alone. The third volume was written by Paul Reid, whom Manchester brought in after Manchester developed writer's block. Paul Reid was supposed to actually co-write the last volume with Manchester, but Manchester died before the project got fully off of the ground. Reid ended up having to mostly research and write the last book himself.

The Fall of Heaven
by Andrew Scott Cooper
$19.99 on Kindle

While expensive, this book comes with a strong endorsement from Tyler Cowen. I've been reading a lot about the 60's and 70's over the past couple of years. This would fit right into that pattern.

The Fall of Heaven - Marginal REVOLUTION

I loved this book, the author is Andrew Scott Cooper, and the subtitle is The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran.  It is the best book I know for understanding the Iranian revolution, and it is compulsively readable throughout.  Did you know for instance that the Ayatollahs were deeply disturbed by the presence of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and also Rhoda on Iranian TV?

…

I would describe this book as relatively sympathetic to the Shah, and also arguing that the oppressions and tortures of Savak are sometimes overstated.

This one makes my best non-fiction of the year list, and it will be in the top tier of that list.

Hidden Figures
by Margot Lee Shetterly
$10.99 on Kindle

I was interested in this story when I first saw it as a movie trailer. Then I found out that it was based on a book and now I'm interested in reading the book.

Publisher's description

Before John Glenn orbited the earth, or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of dedicated female mathematicians known as “human computers” used pencils, slide rules and adding machines to calculate the numbers that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space.

Among these problem-solvers were a group of exceptionally talented African American women, some of the brightest minds of their generation. Originally relegated to teaching math in the South’s segregated public schools, they were called into service during the labor shortages of World War II, when America’s aeronautics industry was in dire need of anyone who had the right stuff. Suddenly, these overlooked math whizzes had a shot at jobs worthy of their skills, and they answered Uncle Sam’s call, moving to Hampton, Virginia and the fascinating, high-energy world of the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory.

Even as Virginia’s Jim Crow laws required them to be segregated from their white counterparts, the women of Langley’s all-black “West Computing” group helped America achieve one of the things it desired most: a decisive victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and complete domination of the heavens.

Starting in World War II and moving through to the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement and the Space Race, Hidden Figures follows the interwoven accounts of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson and Christine Darden, four African American women who participated in some of NASA’s greatest successes. It chronicles their careers over nearly three decades they faced challenges, forged alliances and used their intellect to change their own lives, and their country’s future.

Into The Lion’s Mouth
by Larry Loftis
$13.99 on Kindle

I've been a long-time fan of the Bond movie franchise. I've even read a book or two. I've always thought that Bond was obviously fictionalized, that no real spy would come anywhere close to what Bond routinely does. According to Loftis, one man did. I first heard about his book on an episode of The Art of Manliness Podcast.

The Real Life James Bond

Bond is so damn manly, it’d be easy to think that he was purely the creation of author Ian Fleming’s imagination. But in fact, Bond was inspired by a real-life WWII spy, and his life and career was even more Bond-like than James Bond himself.

My guest today has written a biography of the real-life inspiration for James Bond. His name is Larry Loftis and he’s the author of the book Into The Lion’s Mouth: The True Story of Dusko Popov: World War II Spy, Patriot, and the Real-Life Inspiration for James Bond. Today on the show we talk about Dusko Popov and his career as a double agent during WWII. Larry and I discuss how Dusko got involved with spying, the insanely dangerous missions he went on, and the real-life encounter between him and Ian Fleming that inspired one of popular culture’s most iconic characters.

Remembering Abraham
by Ronald Hendel
$57.95 on Kindle

Robert Alter mentions this book in his introduction to The Five Books of Moses, as he talks about the historical origins of the Five Books.

Scholarship for more than two centuries has agreed that the Five Books are drawn together from different literary sources, though there have been shifting debates about the particular identification of sources in the text and fierce differences of opinion about the dating of the sundry sources. Some extremists in recent decades have contended that the entire Torah was composed in the Persian period, beginning the late sixth century B.C.E., or even later, in Hellenistic times, but there is abundant evidence that argues against that view. Perhaps the most decisive consideration is that the Hebrew language visibly evolves over the nine centuries of biblical literary activity, with many demonstrable differences between the language current in the First Commonwealth—approximately 1000 B.C.E. to 586 B.C.E.—and the language as it was written in the Persian and Hellenistic periods. There is very little in the Hebrew of the Torah that could have been written in this later era. (Ronald Hendel provides a concise and trenchant marshaling of the linguistic evidence against late dating in the appendix to his Remembering Abraham.) A recent revisionist approach, purportedly based on archeological evidence, places the composition of our texts as well as most of the Former Prophets in the seventh century B.C.E., during the reign of King Josiah, the period when, according to scholarly consensus, most of Deuteronomy was written. This contention, however, flatly ignores the philological evidence that Deuteronomy was responding to, and revising, a long-standing written legal tradition, and that the editors of the so-called Deuteronomistic History (the national chronicle that runs from Deuteronomy to the end of 2 Kings) were manifestly incorporating much older texts often strikingly different from their own writing both in style and in outlook.

I looked up the book and the description caught my eye.

According to an old tradition preserved in the Palestinian Targums, the Hebrew Bible is "the Book of Memories." The sacred past recalled in the Bible serves as a model and wellspring for the present. The remembered past, says Ronald Hendel, is the material with which biblical Israel constructed its identity as a people, a religion, and a culture. It is a mixture of history, collective memory, folklore, and literary brilliance, and is often colored by political and religious interests.

In Israel's formative years, these memories circulated orally in the context of family and tribe. Over time they came to be crystallized in various written texts. The Hebrew Bible is a vast compendium of writings, spanning a thousand-year period from roughly the twelfth to the second century BCE, and representing perhaps a small slice of the writings of that period. The texts are often overwritten by later texts, creating a complex pastiche of text, reinterpretation, and commentary. The religion and culture of ancient Israel are expressed by these texts, and in no small part also created by them, as they formulate new or altered conceptions of the sacred past. Remembering Abraham explores the interplay of culture, history, and memory in the Hebrew Bible. Hendel examines the Hebrew Bible's portrayal of Israel and its history, and correlates the biblical past with our own sense of the past. He addresses the ways that culture, memory, and history interweave in the self-fashioning of Israel's identity, and in the biblical portrayals of the patriarchs, the Exodus, and King Solomon. A concluding chapter explores the broad horizons of the biblical sense of the past.

This accessibly written book represents the mature thought of one of our leading scholars of the Hebrew Bible.

It's a lot pricier than my normal reads (by at least a factor of four), but it sounds interesting nonetheless. It's not on my immediate list of things to find and read, but I wanted to remember it for future research and reading.

A Mad Catastrophe
by Geoffrey Wawro
$11.99 on Kindle

I can be persuaded that a book is interesting on the slimmest of recommendations, sometimes. For instance, this offhand comment by Warren Meyer.

Back in the depths of WWI, the Germans woke up one day and found that their erstwhile ally Austria-Hungary, to whom they had given that famous blank check in the madness that led up to the war, was completely incompetent. Worse than incompetent, in fact, because Germany had to keep sending troops to bail them out of various military fixes, an oddly similar situation to what Hitler found himself doing with Italy in the next war. ([A Mad Catastrophe] is a really interesting book if you have any doubts about how dysfunctional the Hapsburg Empire was in its waning days).

And that's pretty much how Amazon describes the book too.

A prizewinning military historian explores a critical but overlooked cause for World War I: the staggering decrepitude of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

What a great story, from Popular Mechanics.

The microwave is beloved for its speed and ease of use. But what you might not know about your indispensable kitchen appliance is that it was invented utterly by accident one fateful day 70 years ago, when a Raytheon engineer named Percy Spencer was testing a military-grade magnetron and suddenly realized his snack had melted.

​> …

Spencer earned several patents while working on more efficient and effective ways to mass-produce radar magnetrons. A radar magnetron is a sort of electric whistle that instead of creating vibrating sound creates vibrating electromagnetic waves. According to Michalak, at the time Spencer was trying to improve the power level of the magnetron tubes to be used in radar sets. On that fateful day in 1946, Spencer was testing one of his magnetrons when he stuck his hand in his pocket, preparing for the lunch break, when he made a shocking discovery: The peanut cluster bar had melted. Says Spencer, "It was a gooey, sticky mess."

…

​> Understandably curious just what the heck had happened, Spencer ran another test with the magnetron. This time he put an egg underneath the tube. Moments later, it exploded, covering his face in egg. "I always thought that this was the origin of the expression 'egg in your face'," Rod Spencer laughs. The following day, Percy Spencer brought in corn kernels, popped them with his new invention, and shared some popcorn with the entire office. The microwave oven was born.

​

∞

$9.99 on Kindle

How much do you know about the notorious Scopes trial? Glenn Reynolds says that whatever it is, it's probably wrong.

TODAY IS THE 90TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE SCOPES TRIAL. Let me just note that what you think you know about it is probably wrong — especially if what you think you know about it comes from watching Inherit The Wind. I highly recommend Ed Larson’s excellent treatment, A Summer For The Gods.

What's the book about?

If you haven't seen the film version of Inherit the Wind, you might have read it in high school. And even people who have never heard of either the movie or the play probably know something about the events that inspired them: The 1925 Scopes "monkey trial," during which Darwin's theory of evolution was essentially put on trial before the nation. Inherit the Wind paints a romantic picture of John Scopes as a principled biology teacher driven to present scientific theory to his students, even in the teeth of a Tennessee state law prohibiting the teaching of anything other than creationism. The truth, it turns out, was something quite different.

In his fascinating history of the Scopes trial, Summer for the Gods, Edward J. Larson makes it abundantly clear that Truth and the Purity of Science had very little to do with the Scopes case. Tennessee had passed a law prohibiting the teaching of evolution, and the American Civil Liberties Union responded by advertising statewide for a high-school teacher willing to defy the law. Communities all across Tennessee saw an opportunity to put themselves on the map by hosting such a controversial trial, but it was the town of Dayton that came up with a sacrificial victim: John Scopes, a man who knew little about evolution and wasn't even the class's regular teacher. Chosen by the city fathers, Scopes obligingly broke the law and was carted off to jail to await trial.

What happened next was a bizarre mix of theatrics and law, enacted by William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution and Clarence Darrow for the defense. Though Darrow lost the trial, he made his point--and his career--by calling Bryan, a noted Bible expert, as a witness for the defense. Summer for the Gods is a remarkable retelling of the trial and the events leading up to it, proof positive that truth is stranger than science.