The Personal Navigator

Wednesday, September 30, 2020

History of Pandemics

History Book Club

Wednesday, September 30, 2020

History of Pandemics

Spanish Flu Victim, St. Louis, 1918

Wednesday, September 30, 2020. History of Pandemics. A pandemic (from Greek πᾶν, pan, "all" and δῆμος, demos, "people") is an epidemic of an infectious disease that has spread across a large region, for instance multiple continents or worldwide, affecting a substantial number of people. Throughout human history, there have been a number of pandemics of diseases such as smallpox and tuberculosis. The most fatal pandemic in recorded history was the Black Death (also known as The Plague), which killed an estimated 75–200 million people in the 14th century. Other notable pandemics include the 1918 influenza pandemic (Spanish flu). Current pandemics include COVID-19 and HIV/AIDs. [Proposed by Sam Coulbourn].

William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, New York: Anchor Books, 1976, 1998

How did the Spanish Conquistadores, with a few hundred men, conquer the Aztecs and Incas—developed civilizations numbering in the millions? How did Cortez overcome Montezuma and the Aztecs in Mexico? How did Pizarro conquer the Incas of Peru?

How did the religions of the Indians of South America disappear so rapidly, and why did millions accept Christianity?

The lopsided impact of infectious diseases upon the Indians of South America offered a key to the military and cultural conquest, and that is the key that McNeill uses to examine the whole course of human history. This is the story of what happens when people who have grown immune to a disease contact a population that has never been exposed to that disease. The consequences can be disastrous.

This book aims to bring the history of exposure to infectious disease into the realm of historical explanation by showing how patterns of disease have affected human affairs.

McNeill begins with a few key concepts, and the first is disease and parasites. We are parasites, and host for parasites.

We host microparasites—viruses, bacteria and multi-celled creatures. Some make us sick and can kill us; some are combatted and consumed by our white blood cells; and others just hang around in our bodies, not causing much or any trouble, but perhaps waiting for the opportunity to jump to another organism where their effect can be much more dangerous.

We are also subject to macroparasites. Once we might have had to worry about being eaten by wolves or lions, and later, the conqueror would allow us to live and produce food, and we’d be allowed to keep enough to sustain ourselves, but he would get the rest. You can see we still have macroparasites.

In England in the 18^th century many cattle and sheep had been fenced into separate fields, so that there was much less exchange of diseases with other herds. Not only did this produce healthier livestock, but it greatly reduced diseases transmitted from livestock to humans. At this time farmers were learning of more productive farming techniques, including growing alfalfa for livestock. This resulted in greatly improved food production, and humans were eating more protein, which led to production of more protein antibodies to fight disease more effectively.

Because French farmers had not yet learned to fence off herds, these results did not appear there until the 19^th century.

McNeill shows us how, as men were able to move more swiftly across the globe, how easy it was to spread germs. Marching armies were especially effective at spreading disease. So were the millions making the annual hajj pilgrimage from all over the Moslem world to Mecca, and back again.

Disease often killed many thousands of an invading army. When Alexander the Great’s army reached India it was disease, not opposing troops, who stopped his world conquest.

Bubonic Plague symptoms

Bubonic plague has been a killer over many centuries, but it was not until 1894 when doctors discovered the connection between burrowing rodents, fleas and humans, transmitting Pasturella pestis, that eradication could become effective. The disease spread time and again by Mongol horsemen raiding in China and Europe, carrying a few infected rats in their saddlebags.

Chinese records show several times in the middle ages when 90% of a province would be wiped out by the plague. At some periods in history there were centuries without outbreaks of the disease, as it traveled within colonies of burrowing rodents—squirrels, rats, marmots and the like.

Napoleon sent troops to suppress an uprising in Santo Domingo in 1802, but yellow fever and other tropical diseases destroyed a force of 33,000 men and led him to give up his visions of empire in America and sell the Louisiana Purchase to America.

Until the 19^th century, McNeill writes, cities were too polluted to sustain themselves. As city-dwellers died, they were replaced by healthy people from the countryside. Only in the 1800s did the balance shift, so that city-dwellers, who had become immune to diseases, made the populations of cities self-sustaining.

Cholera is an interesting story. This disease is spread by people drinking the same water that others have used for their sewage, and as cities began to build sewers that transported wastewater to areas where it would not affect the drinking water supply, cholera began to become less of a threat.

Note that many huge cities in Africa and South America today lack sanitary facilities for millions who live in shantytowns around the central city, and cholera is only one of the diseases always threatening them.

McNeill’s description of efforts to control smallpox leaves one’s head spinning, because it starts in the middle and works forward and then backward.

To simplify, a wandering wise man from India taught the Chinese a method for inoculation against smallpox in the 11^th century. Inoculation began in England in 1721, and the royal family were inoculated the next year. This involved inserting a small bit of the disease under the skin, and usually created a slight dose of the disease, but then immunized the patient.

In 1798 an alert English country doctor, Edward Jenner, noticed that milkmaids, who worked around cattle and were exposed to cowpox, attained immunity to smallpox. Cowpox, much less harmful to humans, was provided as an inoculation, and this began the virtual elimination of the disease.

This book, initially published in 1976, includes a new, 1998 forward which discusses the then newest epidemic, that of AIDS.

McNeill’s view of the human situation isn’t all that encouraging. We face microparasites within and macroparasites above, around and beyond. As soon as we become immune to smallpox or clean up our lives to protect against cholera, along comes AIDS, Ebola, or Zika; or a new macroparasite like a new tax, or a higher rent, or some other problem.

What do you think McNeill would have said about the Covid19 pandemic, and the way nations handled it?

Author: William Hardy McNeill (October 31, 1917 – July 8, 2016) was a historian and author, noted for his argument that contact and exchange among civilizations is what drives human history forward, first postulated in The Rise of the West (1963). He served in U.S. Army 1941-45. He was the Robert A. Millikan Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1947 until his retirement in 1987.

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HISTORY BOOK CLUB TOPICS FOR 2020-2021

The Chicago Tribune thought Dewey would win in 1948

Wednesday, October 28, 2020. Unique Elections in American History. The forthcoming election may seem the most unique, but this month we will look back at past elections. Select any that you find interesting. For instance: Election of 1828: Andrew Jackson vs. John Quincy Adams; Election of 1840: William Henry Harrison vs. Martin Van Buren; Election of 1860: Abraham Lincoln vs. Stephen Douglas vs. John C. Breckinridge vs. John Bell; Election of 1864 : Abraham Lincoln vs. George B. McClellan; Election of 1884: Grover Cleveland vs. James G. Blaine; Election of 1912: Woodrow Wilson vs. William Howard Taft vs. Theodore Roosevelt vs. Eugene V. Debs; Election of 1948: Harry Truman vs. Thomas E. Dewey vs. Strom Thurmond vs. Henry Wallace. [Proposed by Sam Coulbourn]

Gloucester Dorymen

Wednesday, November 25, 2020. Gloucester and the Sea. euser]

Gloucester has throughout four centuries cast its lot with the North Atlantic, remaining a maritime port for better or worse. The maritime culture of Cape Ann is the mix of a noble maritime heritage; ubiquitous sea influences that reach as far as the quarries behind Rockport and into the haunted tracks of Dogtown Common; seductive but capricious natural splendors; and untidy independence that repels some but converts other visitors into lifetime devotees. Read any book about the maritime history of Gloucester and Cape Ann. [Suggested by Richard Verrengia]

There will be no meeting in December

2021

Augustus Caesar (09-23-63BC-08-19AD)

Wednesday, January 27, 2021. The Empire of “United” Rome. Over the years and then the centuries, much of Rome's population came from outside Italy -- this even included some of the later emperors, such as Hadrian, who was Spanish, and writers like Columella, Seneca, and Martial, also Spanish-born. Celts, Arabs, Jews, and Greeks, among others, were included under the wide umbrella of Romanitas. This was the inevitable result of an imperial system that constantly expanded and frequently accepted the peoples of conquered countries as Roman citizens. Not until the end of the first century B.C.E., with the reign of Augustus, do we begin to see signs of a distinctively 'Roman' art, an identifiably 'Roman' cultural ideal. Read any book on the origin or life of Rome, from Romulus and Remus to Augustus. [Proposed by Sam Coulbourn]

Wednesday, February 24, 2021. Send us your suggestion!

Monday, August 31, 2020

China from 1900 to Today

History Book Club

China from 1900 to Today

Wednesday, August 26, 2020

Forbidden City, Beijing

Wednesday, August 26, 2020. China from 1900 to today. China has traveled a long way from the Boxer Rebellion of 1899-1901 when western nations felt free to wander all over the vast country. Sun-Yat-Sen and the last Qing emperor…Military wardlordism ..Chiang Kai-Shek…War against Japan… Mao Zedong and the Communist Revolution, founding of the People’s Republic…”Great Leap Forward” and The Cultural Revolution…World’s No. 2 Economy, on the verge of becoming No. 1. [Proposed by Jason Shaw]

Chang, Iris, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. 1997. New York, NY: Basic Books. 290 pp.

My family and I lived for three years in Japan. Actually, we lived in the home that had once been occupied by the commander of the Imperial Japanese naval base in a city near Nagasaki. I never, not one time, ever caught even a tiny glimpse of the characteristic of the Japanese military that led them to do the horrible things that they did countless times during World War II.

The Rape of Nanking is the story of how the Japanese army in December 1937 systematically raped hundreds of thousands of women, then killed them; in mass killings they murdered men, women and children, shooting them, bayoneting them, whacking off their heads by sword, then dumped hundreds of thousands of corpses into the Yangtze river, until the river ran red with their blood.

The author of this book, Iris Chang, was a young Chinese American woman, and she received many awards for this book, and for others she wrote. Her grandparents barely escaped death in Nanking.

This book appears to be well researched. She went through hundreds of drawers of files to find the story of how the Imperial Japanese Army attacked Shanghai, then marched overland to seize the capital city of Nanking (Nanjing). The Japanese Army promised Chinese army troops humane treatment, then bound their hands, and marched them off to be machine-gunned and bayoneted, hundreds at a time. This horror took place over six weeks in the city of Nanking. The Japanese murdered some 300,000 civilians during this time.

The Japanese Army committed atrocities in many other places in their invasion of China. They are quoted in numerous records of saying that they did not look upon the Chinese as humans, but rather like pigs, “except you could eat pigs.”

Ms. Chang writes about a few Americans and Europeans living in Nanking who were responsible for creating a safety zone in the city that saved hundreds of thousands. One particularly helpful person was a German named John Rabe. He was a member of the Nazi party, and used his swastika armband to intervene when Japanese were about to kill Chinese. While the Japanese sometimes ignored the pleas of other foreigners, the sight of that Nazi armband usually did the trick. Ms. Chang called him the “Oskar Schindler of Nanking.” (Schindler was the Nazi who saved some 100,000 Jews from the Holocaust in Europe.) She tells stories of an American woman, Minnie Vautrin, and a Nanking-born American surgeon named Robert Wilson, who risked their lives countless times to save many thousands of Chinese.

Ms. Chang writes about “A Second Rape” in noting how American schoolchildren learn about Hitler’s gas chambers, about the diary of Ann Frank, and about our bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but they know nothing about Nanking in 1937. In Japan, there is a “soothing perception” of history that either ignores the Japanese massacre at Nanking, or puts a decidedly Japanese spin on the actions of the military. Japanese ultranationalists have threatened everything from lawsuits to death, even assassination, to opponents who suggest that these textbooks are not telling the next generation the real story. And it is not just the ultranationalists in Japan who have tried to airbrush this part of their history.

In her epilogue, Ms. Chang sets down three lessons from Nanking:

1. Civilization itself is tissue-thin. Japan’s behavior during World War II was less a product of dangerous people than of a dangerous government. The Japanese Army for years had created a Samurai culture of unspeakable cruelty to each other, for starters.

2. The role of power in genocide. Those who have studied the patterns of large-scale killings throughout history have noted that the sheer concentration of power in government is lethal.

3. The third lesson, one that is perhaps most distressing of all, lies in the frightening ease with which the mind can accept genocide, turning us all into passive spectators to the unthinkable. The Rape of Nanking was front-page news across the world, and yet most of the world stood by and did nothing while an entire city was butchered. The international response to Nanking was eerily akin to the more recent response to the atrocities in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda. And, since publication of this book, the massive killing now in Syria.

Ms. Chang’s book has received harsh criticism from some quarters, particularly in suggesting that the Japanese have tried to soft pedal or suppress this part of their history. She was hounded and criticized harshly and became very depressed.

In November, 2004 Iris Chang took her own life… perhaps one more victim of The Rape of Nanking.

Hessler, Peter, Country Driving: A Journey Through China From Farm to Factory, 2010, New York: HarperCollins, 438 pp. Cloth on board.

Country Driving is a wonderful, funny look at the Chinese people by a former Peace Corps volunteer who was Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker for seven years.

He obviously has a very good grasp of Mandarin Chinese, because in mid-autumn he rents a large vehicle, fills it full of bottled water, Dove?? bars and Oreo cookies, and strikes out to visit the villages along the Great Wall of China. He drives to Inner Mongolia. Well over 1000 miles before he is stopped and ordered to go back where he came from.

All these years after the Cultural Revolution, China is going through tremendous change. More and more people are becoming wealthy enough to buy a car, and thousands of cars get added to city streets every day. They are building nice expressways all across China, but Hessler notes that these roads, and all the little roads between them, are empty, and so are the towns and villages of the north. Only the old people and children remain, as the young have all traveled south where there is work and money to be earned.

He wants to continue exploring the Great Wall, so in the spring he starts out again, and is able to find various local historians and wise old men to show him obscure bits of information about the Great Wall, which is really not one wall, but many, built at different places, and closer or farther from borders, starting in 200 B.C. Most of the wall was built in the 1500s in the Ming Dynasty. Most of it consists of earthworks, not brick or stone like the elaborate walls near Beijing.

Hessler drops into Genghis Khan’s Mausoleum in a little Mongolian village, and finds that a whole load of cadres, driving in black Volkswagen Santanas with tinted windshields, have arrived before him. These low level communist bureaucrats, most of them Mongolian, have just had a nice lunch, and are all royally drunk.

A Mongolian woman tour guide takes him to see the sights and tells him the building is all a load of crap. Genghis Khan is not buried here—all the coffins on display are empty. It turns out she is also drunk. But she is telling the truth.

As a foreigner, and a journalist, he is required to file a request to travel, but he knows enough about Chinese bureaucracy to know that it is better to ask for forgiveness after you have gotten caught.

Hessler runs into two traffic cops near a village on the Tibetan Plateau, and they surmise that since he can speak Chinese so well, and is not Chinese, he must be a spy. They both have a good laugh about that and send him on his way. It’s rare to see traffic cops, since the government usually chooses to erect clay statues painted to look like policemen on the roads in these deserted parts of China. [Which explains the photo on the book cover.]

He stops in a Mongolian-Kazakh village (Subei) that is cut right into the Great Wall. It is so close that many homes are imbedded in the wall, and so are the pens for their sheep. Most homes have no water, and their outdoor toilets stink to high heaven.

He visits a public toilet, but when he comes out, there is a little Mongolian cop waiting for him. “Identification?” he asks.

The cop takes him to the Subei police station, where a woman cop and the Mongolian cop start looking through file cabinets for the right forms to fill out. Hessler has broken the law, and it looks bad for him.

Then the two start to ask him questions, as they fill out all these forms.

Hessler notes that this is a strange way to interrogate. Finally, the woman states that he has broken the national law regarding aliens, and he will have to be punished.

The punishment is a fine of 500 yuan. However, since this is your first offense, we’ll make it 100. This is about US$12, so he pulls out a bill and puts it down.

“Oh no!” she refuses the money, because of all the fear of corruption. It’s Sunday, but they go across the street to the Agricultural Bank of China and get a clerk to open up. Hessler gives the clerk 100 rmb and fills out several forms. The clerk promises that the cop will receive the order for 100 rmb in two days.

Hessler then tells about life in a village north of Beijing, and Factory life in southeast China.

Hessler must have spent quite a lot of time in a factory in one of many towns being built from the ground up to handle the tremendous growth of manufacturing. He tells the story of this factory; from the moment the prospective owners lay out the “design” for the factory. They plan to make little plastic covered rings that are used to make brassieres, and it all starts with these men buying a huge machine that will cut and plastic coat these rings. Hessler gets to know some key employees, and describes how they come together, how they live and work, as they all try to figure out how to make a success out of this somewhat hare-brained venture.

Culturally, the Chinese who come together in this factory are very, very unsophisticated, but they are eager to learn and to succeed.

This is a very entertaining book, and I feel that I have learned a lot about China that I had never thought to ask about. They can and will learn much from Americans, and we can learn much from them. Instead of being afraid that they will eat our lunch, we need to work out ways that we can combine our efforts and expertise to succeed together.

S.W. Coulbourn

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HISTORY BOOK CLUB TOPICS FOR 2020

Spanish Flu Victim, St. Louis, 1918

The Chicago Tribune thought Dewey would win in 1948

Gloucester Dorymen

Wednesday, November 25, 2020. Gloucester and the Sea. euser]

Tuesday, July 28, 2020

History of Alcohol

History Book Club

History of Alcohol

Wednesday, July 29, 2020

Bacchus at a Bacchanalia

Wednesday, July 29, 2020. A History of Alcohol. Men have been fermenting fruit and grain and honey for many thousands of years. The Babylonians, Greeks and Romans had gods and goddesses and there have been marvelous Bacchanalian feasts and tales of the dreadful effects of too much alcohol. There have been anti-alcohol drives, temperance marches, Prohibition. Cultural and health effects of alcohol usage. [Proposed by Janos Posfai]

Iain Gately, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol, New York; Gotham Books, 2008.

Iain Gately gives us a tour of alcohol, from drunken orgies of kings and pharaohs 10,000 years ago to bar room drunken disasters during Prohibition. From elegant, world famous artists drinking absinthe in Paris, and some dying from it, to the crusading figure of Carry Nation, at the turn of the Twentieth century.

It’s been a quest for the pleasure of drinking alcoholic beverages, the conviviality, the fun, the wildness, the hangovers, the deaths, and it has been the stories of fighters to abolish the sale and consumption of alcohol.

Ten thousand years ago Chinese people were fermenting rice, honey, grapes, and berries to make beverages that delighted their customers.

In Uruk, Sumer, on the banks the Euphrates, was the largest city in the world, in 2500 BCE. This city of some 80,000 was in what is now southern Iraq. They brewed eight styles of beer, which they called kash. The Sumerians designated the goddess Ninkasi as the goddess of brewing, and associated women with production and distribution of beer.

Sumerians had formal drinking sessions, drinking the kash through yard-long straws, out of a keg-like container. Archeologists have found some of these straws, made of gold and silver, buried with their owners. A Sumerian poem, Gilgamesh, ca. 2000 BCE, shows that Sumerians knew about drunkenness. In the poem the wild man, Enkidu, meets a harlot who explains the ways of men: “He had never drunken beer. He drank the beer—seven jugs—and became very expansive and sang with joy.”

In ancient Egypt, beer was called “hqt” and the workers building the pyramids were given generous amounts, so it appears the pyramids were built by an army of drunks.

The French and Indian War (1754-1763) ended with severe restriction on wine and rum shipped to the colonies, and created more grievances leading up to America’s revolution, beginning in 1775. Most of the meetings to plot against the British were held in pubs, and a lot of drinking was going on. John Hancock, the richest man in the colonies, had made his fortune shipping alcohol, and Sam Adams was a malt merchant. The men dressed as Indians to conduct the “Boston Tea Party” fortified themselves with quaffs from a huge silver punch bowl. When Paul Revere made his historic ride on April 19, 1775, the captain of the Medford Minutemen gave him a drink of rum that “would have made a rabbit bite a bulldog.”

Both sides fought in the American revolution with the aid of alcohol. Washington’s first victory, at Trenton, in 1776 was assisted by the drunken condition of the Hessians when the Americans attacked. In a skirmish later at Eutaw Springs, SC rebel troops captured a British camp and began to consume their rum ration when the British counterattacked. The battle ended with 500 rebels killed and 700 British.

A few years later the British began sending thousands of prisoners to Australia, along with a Royal Marine regiment and its band. And thousands of gallons of liquor and wine. The voyage took eight months, and the Marines acquired more liquor in South America enroute so that the new colony, established in what became Sydney, NSW, was in no danger of thirst. After the Marines and the male prisoners were offloaded, and a rough camp established, the female prisoners were delivered ashore. Drinks were delivered and a night of wild, drunken celebration followed. That led to the start of native-born non aborigine Aussies.

In the mid-1800s, phylloxera wiped out French vineyards. Then it turned out that the “fix” was to take cuttings from American vines and graft them to French vines. That hurt French pride, but it worked. At the same time, with French wines slowly disappearing, some drinkers took to absinthe, a super bitter liquor made from wormwood. This became a real hit in the Paris literary and artistic community. Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, and Edouard Manet, to name a few, did some serious damage to themselves drinking huge quantities of the Green Fairy, as they called it. Some exceptionally talented artists ended up in insane asylums or died early.

During most of the nineteenth century temperance movements took on many supporters. Most Rockporters know the story of Hannah Jumper, a seamstress and a spinster, who gathered up local preachers and angry housewives and marched through town on July 8^th, 1856, smashing kegs and ripping small pubs and bars apart in a reign of terror that sent scores of men running for cover. Soon after, the Town passed an ordinance that forbade the selling and serving of alcoholic beverages, which lasted until 2005.

Author Gately writes about a more famous character who terrorized Kansas some forty years later. Carry Nation had a hard life. Daughter of a Kentucky slave owner and a mother on the edge of insanity, she was born in 1846. She developed a debilitating bowel ailment in childhood. She spent her teen years caring for her mother who thought she was Queen Victoria. Carry married a man who became a drunkard. Shortly after the birth of their only child, her husband died of delirium tremens. Her child, a daughter, was born with a disfiguring abscess—her cheek fell off.

Carry remarried, this time to a preacher and ardent temperance leader. Carry began her temperance career in 1899 when she gathered WCTU women and stormed a saloon in Medicine Lodge, KS on a quiet Sunday afternoon. She smashed up the saloon and went on to smash others in town during the next few days. Kansas was supposedly dry, and so all the saloons she was raiding technically weren’t in existence. She moved to other Kansas towns, and then on to other states and eventually her fame took her to England. On the steamship taking her to England, she demolished the saloon onboard.

Carry must have been a sight—six feet tall, weighing 180 pounds, she had a face like a bulldog and a shrill voice, and false teeth. She was arrested over 25 times, was attacked, pistol whipped and beaten, had her false teeth knocked down her throat. Carry died in 1911 at age 64.

The object of Carry’s life-long dream, and that of many others, prohibition, crept up on America. When soldiers returned from World War I they found that half the states had gone “dry” and in January 1919 the 18^th Amendment was passed. Accompanied by the Volstead Act later that year, Prohibition began in the whole country in 1920. What a bad idea that turned out to be! Law-abiding people began to figure all kinds of ways to break the law to drink, and it became the Golden Age for criminals. Bootlegging was everywhere and moonshine production, adding all manner of often poisonous substances to alcohol, went into high gear. The amendment was repealed in December 1933, nearly 14 years after it became law.

World War II was started by a teetotaler named Hitler. When Nazi troops overran France and occupied it, they began confiscating French wine, 900,000 bottles a day, to send back to the Reich. Stalin said that his generals did better when they were drunk on vodka, and Russian troops were well supplied.

As the Soviet Union edged toward capitalism, Premier Gorbachev sought to control widespread drunkenness by tightening control over vodka sales. This helped end communism, and created a wild distribution of samogon, moonshine, high-alcohol-content with all kinds of other ingredients, killing tens of thousands of Russians each year.

Next in Russia came Boris Yeltsin, who stayed drunk much of the time, and the breakup of the USSR. President Clinton said of him, “at least he’s not a mean drunk.”

Gately ends his book with discussion of studies that state that some moderate drinking can promote good health and longevity, as well as continuing efforts to limit or eliminate drinking. He ends with: Salud, kan pei, chin-chin, prost, yum sing, skål, slainte, a votre santé, na zdrowie, or cheers!

S.W. Coulbourn

HISTORY BOOK CLUB TOPICS FOR 2020