the greycat blog

The most-read essay on greycat.org over the last week has been ‘Dresden: the making of a baroque city’. Aristotle remains popular, and for the first time Rousseau has featured in the top three, but Dresden was the clear people’s choice.

The single most important factor in the architectural development of Dresden during the late seventeenth and early- to mid-eighteenth centuries was its role as capital of the Electorate of Saxony, and the location there of the Saxon court. From 1694 to 1733, the ruler of Saxony was Frederick Augustus I, known as ‘Augustus the Strong’, whose ambitions for himself and his state determined the development of his capital; in particular, his acquisition of the crown of Poland in 1696 was the spur to a large-scale programme of architectural improvements in Dresden which were intended to express the power prestige and glory of Saxony and her ruler. … In order to become King of Poland, Augustus I converted to Catholicism, and the presence in the capital of Protestant Saxony of a Catholic court provides an important context for the prolonged flourishing in Dresden of the baroque style.

To read more from this essay, which includes illustrations and maps, pay a visit to ‘Dresden: the making of a baroque city’.

Picture: Portrait of Augustus the Strong by Louis de Silvestre. [Source]

The latest (November 2007) issue of All The Rage is out, and the theme this month is ‘puzzles and mysteries’. Particularly recommended: Rob Jones’s artful Mystery on the District Railway and Tim Warriner’s guide to the best way to remember playing cards (’requires a good understanding of hexadecimal and binary and the ability to convert from one to the other quickly’). But, of course, it’s all good. My contribution is an article exploring that classic mystery of the sea, the case of the brig Mary Celeste:

The tale of the Mary Celeste is one of the sea’s most enduring mysteries, a puzzle with no apparent solution: a vessel found drifting on the open sea, dry and in perfect condition, sails set, boats intact, no sign of storm or violence, food served out on the table, cargo in perfect order, and no living soul aboard … Many solutions have been suggested over the years: mutiny, insurance fraud, alien abduction, mass religious frenzy, and an attack by sharks during an impromptu swiming competition; but the enigma remains. Yet the Mary Celeste of this enduring mystery is quite different from the real Mary Celeste …

… as you will discover if you read ‘The Mary Celeste: fact, fiction and mystery’ in the new issue of All The Rage. Here is a direct link to that very issue (PDF).

Picture: Engraving of the Mary Celeste as found in December 1872. [Source]

The unhinged ravings of the 9/11 conspiracy theorists may be contemptible by any standard of rational and moral human conduct, but they nonetheless constitute a serious and disturbing phenomenon and need serious study. Dr Richard Landes, eminent historian of millennialism, has made a start.

9-11 Conspiracy constitutes the most powerful conspiracy theory in the brief history of the internet age. Within hours of the attacks, accusations that the Israeli Mossad had planned and executed the attacks while “4000 Jews stayed at home,” appeared, particularly in the Arab world, a textbook case of internet conspiracy mongering. In the Muslim world these theories became the dominant public voice. There, traditional conspiracy operated: We are innocent, our enemies are guilty.

[…]

Many Americans still prefer not to even discuss this matter: the owl’s first line of defense is to ignore the roosters. The necessary disproofs, including a new, peer-reviewed Journal of Debunking 911 Conspiracy Theories (2006-) — are available online for all to consult; what more need be said? That, as in so many cases of conspiracism, reasoning takes a back seat to desire? That people can visit a site with good evidence for a plane crash, and still believe the conspiracy. That the consequences of not thinking clearly about this may be very serious?

An excellent piece of work. Read the whole thing at Professor Landes’s blog, Augean Stables.

[Found via Screw Loose Change.]

Thanks to the Victorian Peeper I’ve been reading about the exhibition ‘Impressed by Light: British Photographs from Paper Negatives, 1840-1860′, which is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, from 25 September until 31 December 2007. The Peeper’s article, with photographs, is excellent and I’m not going to try to duplicate it here; I’ll just say that this looks to be a fascinating exhibition. Apparently it is not visiting Britain, but will be at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris next year, so perhaps I’ll get to see it there.

The New York Times review of the exhibition is well-written and informative, but includes this assertion:

The bulk of the photographs here feel remarkably sedate, almost anesthetized. This is partly because moving things couldn’t be recorded in early photographs. But in his catalog essay Roger Taylor argues something else: that the peace and harmony in British calotypes mask the deep anxiety of the Victorian age, in which the life expectancy at birth for professional men was about 45, and for laborers 22.

Good grief, I’m sure Professor Taylor doesn’t say anything quite so fatuous. If an image is full of violence and angst, it’s expressing the deep anxiety of the age. If it’s peaceful and harmonious, it’s masking the deep anxiety of the age. Your classic one-size-fits-all cultural/historical critique.

It’s now just over three years since the death of Professor Conrad Russell, at the early age of 67, on 13 October 2004. I had the great privilege of being taught by him while an undergraduate at King’s College London in the early 1990s, in his little room overlooking The Strand, with the pilasters and windows of St Mary-le-Strand outside the window as a backdrop and a slight haze of cigarette smoke as an invariable accompaniment. He was a great historian and a great teacher; he was entirely committed to his students, invariably open-handed with his time and his ideas, a great listener (how rare that is), a dazzling talker, and a courteous, generous man.

I still have the essays I wrote for his course on early modern England at King’s. He read them as carefully as he would read the writings of the most eminent scholars, and the comments he left as he read were models of their kind - concise, clear (in terms of content at least, if not handwriting), relevant, provocative. I particularly value his comments on an essay I wrote on ‘Constitutional theories in Early Stuart England’. I began, as historians will when they can’t think how to start an essay, with a quote. It came from Christopher Hill’s Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution: ‘A great revolution cannot take place without ideas. Most men have to believe quite strongly in some ideal before they will kill or be killed’. Beneath this Conrad Russell wrote ‘Fear of being killed may be enough’. That one sentence encapsulates the difference between the traditional Marxism of Hill and the then radical revisionism of Russell and his followers. I didn’t entirely accept Russell’s view then, and I don’t entirely accept it now, but there it is in that seven-word sentence, thrown like a stone into the pool of ideas, sending ripples across its entire surface and distorting everything you thought you could see there. At the end he wrote ‘An excellent essay: it makes me want to argue with it at every turn’. I can’t imagine a compliment I would value more.

For Conrad Russell, to subject an issue to serious argument was the ultimate compliment. Ideas were there to be engaged with, and they had to be substantial enough to stand up to the rigours of analysis and argument (he could be ruthless - although always courteously ruthless - with those that weren’t). His first question when confronted with an idea, a theory, an explanation, no matter how elegant or superficially appealing, would be ‘Where is your evidence?’

He knew historical conclusions can only ever be provisional, and saw the writing of history, whether in weighty books or flimsy essays, as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. That end was understanding, and in a sense that was his view of history as a whole; a never ending engagement with the evidence, a never-ending attempt to understand the world of the past, and thus to enrich and inform the way in which we try to understand the worlds of the present and future.

More on Conrad Russell:

The best obituary is from The Times, 15 October 2004.
Obituary from The Daily Telegraph, 14 October 2004.
Nick Clegg, ‘A legendary Liberal’, The Guardian, 19 October 2004.
King’s College London: Conrad Russell obituary, 14 October 2004.
This search of the Royal Historical Society bibliography brings up Conrad Russell’s publications.

[Note: the quote from Christopher Hill with which I unimaginatively began my undergraduate essay can be found on page 1 of his The Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965).]

The BBC’s definition of what constitutes ‘news’ is never more elastic than when issues of self-promotion are concerned. This morning’s Today programme news bulletin featured a report about ‘three families [leaving] behind all mod cons to experience life in the South Wales valleys in the 1920s … as part of a BBC living history experiment’. They’ll be living ’without electricity, hot water, heating or [gosh] broadband’ in a terrace of restored miners’ cottages in Blaenavon, Monmouthshire, with the men and boys going to work in a mine and the women running the house on the pittance they earn. And camera crews following them everywhere. Read all about it on (where else) the BBC News website.

This is not a news story. This is yet another piece of BBC self-publicity, a trailer for Coal House, the latest in fatuous reality TV shows (’BBC living history experiment’ sounds much better, of course). I don’t know what is worse, the unashamed prostitution of the BBC’s news values represented by the featuring of this ’story’ in the national headlines or the sheer stupidity of the idea that this contrived and superficial exercise has anything serious to teach anyone about the past.

Coal House is not history. It is a debased form of Big Brother, debased because whereas Big Brother exploited only those who freely agreed to take part in the wretched thing, Coal House exploits those whose lives really were spent in that world of want and deprivation sixty years ago, who must now have their daily, endless struggle to survive and live in dignity sanitized and served up as titillating entertainment. Coal House is, in fact, poverty-porn. The executive producer of this crass nonsense declares that the families involved ‘will effectively enter a time-travel bubble, going back in time and stepping into a real life history’. Well, if the children start dying of tuberculosis and diptheria, the men lose a limb or two in colliery accidents and have their long-term health ruined by pneumoconiosis, and at least one of the families ends up unable to pay the rent for their house and gets thrown out into the street with nothing but charity to live on, I’ll believe that this is ‘real life history’.

My grandparents lived in Blaenavon throughout the 1920s and 30s, in a terraced cottage with no electricity or hot water; my father was born in that house in 1930. The experience of three modern families, healthy, wealthy and well-educated beyond the dreams of the inter-war South Wales working class, taking a subsidised four-week televised adventure holiday with all the benefits of twenty-first century life available to them just off-camera at every moment will, I suspect, convey little about the real life my father and my grandparents knew.

In the current (October 2007) issue of the online magazine All The Rage you will find, among other fascinating things, an article of mine about Victorian and Edwardian science fiction: ‘Steam sci-fi: how the Victorians invented the future’. An enticing excerpt that will leave you breathless with excitement and saying I simply must read on follows.

The French had a particular genius for these imaginative but uncanny visions of futurity. In his Le Vingtième Siècle of 1882, Albert Robida (1848-1926) depicted the people of 1952 watching the news on television, catching flights from the central airship station built upon the towers of Notre Dame, having husband-and-wife arguments over the téléphonoscope, and taking pleasure cruises in submarines. In a nicely Gallic touch, he observes that if twentieth-century women are to ride upon flying machines their dresses will have to be shorter than those of their nineteenth-century predecessors.

I simply must read on, you say? Then here is a direct link to the issue containing the article (PDF).

Picture: Illustration from Albert Robida, Le Vingtième Siècle (1882). Author’s collection.

The grasp of history shown by 9/11 conspiracy idiots is every bit as firm as their grasp of, say, rational debate or the laws of physics. While browsing all the dreadful 9/11 stuff that is sold through CafePress I came across a range of shirts making use of the ‘World Trade Center was Bush’s Reichstag’ motif. Brilliantly, they illustrate this idea with a design in which President Bush’s face is superimposed onto a picture of … Benito Mussolini.

I keenly await the next design in the series, in which the attack on the Pentagon is likened to Adolf Hitler’s surprise assault on Pearl Harbor.