The Personal Navigator

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

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]

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].

Truman holds "fake" news in Chicago Tribune

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

Wednesday, March 25, 2020

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

ROCKPORT HISTORY BOOK CLUB

Wednesday, March 25, 2020.

Israel, its History and its Prospects

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

فلسطين ישראל

Wednesday, March 25, 2020. Israel, its History and its Prospects. Since its beginning with the proclamation of nationhood by David Ben Gurion in 1948, followed immediately by the recognition of the new state by President Harry S. Truman, Israel's history has been filled with continual opposition by the Arab nations which surround it, and the Palestinians who were displaced, as well as those who still live there. Britain, which had held a colonial over former Palestine, objected to nationhood, recognizing that this would stir up a hornet's nest. Israel, in between fighting wars with its neighbors, has turned desert land into fertile orchards, and created a modern state with a population of over 8 million, mostly Jewish, gathered in the ancient Jewish homeland from all over the world. [Suggested by Jason Shaw]

This meeting will be held via GoToMeeting.com

Morris, Benny, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict, 2009, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 240 pp.

            Americans have followed the drama of Israel since its creation in 1948, and Benny Morris does a good job of filling in some of the blank spots, at least in this reader’s understanding.

            Although Morris wants us to get an impartial view, this Professor of History at Ben Gurion University in Israel does not give us anything which might approximate the Arab point of view. I have had Arabs and friends of Arabs try to give me their point of view before, and I was unable to take it on board. I found that the whole matter of deciding upon a place for a home for the Jews was one that was doomed to cause conflict no matter where it ended up.

            Arabs don’t agree, but the Jews have a pretty solid prior claim to the Land of Milk and Honey, going back over 6000 years.

            Morris tells about the first gathering of Zionists in 1882, which began the drive to find a national homeland. The assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 set off a wave of pogroms in Russia and led to the idea of a Zionist organization. Alexander had been a very liberal tsar, freeing the serfs and allowing Jewish merchants in certain areas (that is the “Pale of Settlement”) to join guilds, and some Jewish children could attend schools.

   Alexander was assassinated by an anarchist, atheistic group called “The People’s Will”, but one of the assassins had Jewish heritage.

            After centuries of being abused and murdered, with large and small pogroms, the Jews were fed up with always being a minority in any setting.

            The Arabs in Palestine first developed a national consciousness as Palestinians in the early 1920s. Up to then, the Arabs who lived in Palestine were simply Arabs. They were the majority in a land with a significant minority of Jews (800,000 to 160,000 in 1928).

            The extermination of some 6,000,000 Jews by Hitler in World War II created an international impetus to find a home for the Jews. Britain, which had captured Palestine in World War I, had been leaning toward Palestine as a national home for the Jews since then. The final decision to bring Jews displaced from Europe fell to President Harry Truman, with agreement of Great Britain, and approval of the United Nations.

            The central question in this book is whether the area between the Jordan and the Mediterranean which was set aside for the Jews and the Palestinian Arabs would be One Nation or Two, whether there should be a Jewish nation alongside a Palestinian nation, or one nation, partitioned.

            That is the question that has swirled about since 1948. The Jews knew what it was like to be the minority. They had done that for ages, and they would not permit that.

Being a Jewish minority with a majority of Arabs? They would be exterminated.

            The Arabs bitterly resented having the Jews land in Palestine, and they fought it, resisted it, hated it, in every way, from the start until now.

            Could there be a Palestinian state existing in the West Bank and Gaza, as well as Israel? Palestinians have bitterly objected, and have never relented in their demand for ejection of the Jews and “the Right of Return” to the homes from which they had been removed when the Jews arrived.

            Morris details the many discussions and agreements, or semi-agreements or non-agreements that have tossed around various peace arrangements. There was the United Nations General Assembly partitioning of November 1947;

The Six-day War of 1967 which resulted in huge loss of territory by the Arabs;

The Allon Plan of 1967-68 giving back some land to the Arabs, but retaining a strip along the Jordan;

            And there was the infuriating meeting hosted by President Clinton at Camp David in July 2000, that ended with Yasser Arafat not agreeing to anything.

            The Palestinians have steadfastly opposed any plan that gives them land, including part of Jerusalem, most of the West Bank, etc., etc. as long as the Jews are still around.

            I was reading about the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in Siberia that Stalin created in 1934. The administrative center is the town of Birobidzhan, population 176,000 in 2010. Of all those, only a little over one percent are Jews. Some prominent anti-Semites have suggested petitioning Putin of Russia to accept resettlement of all the Israeli Jews there.

            The British and Americans did a heroic thing in making the way for Jews to build Israel. I’m sure all Muslims, especially Arabs, think that move was Satanic. Some Americans think it was, as well.

            As I finished this book, I asked myself: What will it take to have peace between Palestinians and Israelis?

Sam Coulbourn

Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 Metropolitan Books, 2020.

Rashid Khalidi was born to write The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017, as well as his many other books and articles on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. On his father's side he has a long mutigenerational Palestinian lineage. His great, great, great uncle, Yusuf Diya, sought and obtained a European education. Later, Yusuf filled various roles as an Ottoman government official, including serving as mayor of Jerusalem. Yusuf Diya was also an accomplished scholar whose books and letters are in the Khalidi Family Library in Jerusalem.

That Rashid Khalidi comes from an historically influential Palestinian family with strong roots in Jerusalem casts a particularly interesting perspective on the Palestinian people and their roots in the Middle East.. Khalidi himself grew up and was educated in the United States while his father worked at the United Nations. His university degrees are from Yale and Oxford. Thereafter, he began to establish a career as a university professor in Middle Eastern studies. In 1976 he moved to Beirut and taught for seven years at American University where he became a strong supporter of the Palestine Liberation Organization during a time of intense conflict between Palestinians and Israelis. During these years which encompassed Israel's invasion and occupation of southern Lebanon, Khalidi served as an off-the-record source of information about the PLO and its activities for Western journalists.

Khalildi returned to the United States in 1983 where his teaching and scholarship remained entwined with Palestinian politics and especially the future of the Palestinian people in their ever more difficult relationship with Israel. His most important book is Palestinian Identity: the Construction of Modern National Consciousness which he published in 1997. In 2003 he moved to Columbia University where he is the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies and director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia.. He is a strong partisan of the Palestinian cause who has been an extraordinarily prolific scholar and author.

The Hundred Years' War on Palestine was published only a few months ago. Its primary argument is that the modern history of Palestine beginning in 1917 can best be understood as a colonial war waged by the European Zionist movement against an indigenous Palestinian population. The objective was to force the Palestinians to relinquish their homeland to another people against their will. In achieving their objective, Khalildi tells us, the Zionists had powerful allies in the West, most pointedly Great Britain which ruled Palestine with a League of Nations mandate.

Khalidi focuses on six turning points in the struggle over Palestine, beginning in 1917 with the issuance of the Balfour Declaration which decided the fate of Palestine, to Israel's siege of the Gaza Strip and its intermittent wars on Gaza's population in the early 2000s. The most significant event in Khalidi's view was the crushing repression of the Great 1936-39 Arab Revolt against British rule, during which 10 percent of the adult male population was killed, wounded, imprisoned, or exiled. as the British employed a hundred thousand troops and air power to overwhelm Palestinian resistance.

Meanwhile, a massive wave of Jewish immigration as a result of persecution by the Nazi regime in Germany raised the Jewish population in Palestine from just 18 percent of the total in 1932 to over 31 percent in 1939. This provided the demographic critical mass and military manpower that were necessary for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine following World War II in 1948. The expulsion then of over half the Arab population of the country, first by Zionist militias and then by the Israeli army, completed the military and political triumph of Zionism.

Except the Palestinians have not given up. They are an extraordinarily resilient people, Khalidi explains. He is critical, though, of Palestinian leadership from Fatah and Hamas. He says both are ideologically bankrupt. Dynamic new strategy is needed to dislodge the Palestinian cause from its current state of stagnation and retreat. What he is looking for is grassroots political and informational work to make its case to civil society across the world. Especially inside the United States. Also in Europe, Russia, India, China, Brazil, and nonaligned states the Palestinian cause can find support. In the Arab world he says the Palestinians need to resurrect the PLO's former strategy of appealing over the heads of unresponsive regimes to sympathetic Arab public opinion. Finally, he writes that a forgotten but essential element of the Palestinian political agenda is work inside Israel, specifically convincing Israelis that there is an alternative to the ongoing oppression of the Palestinians.

Khalidi ends on a positive note. Perhaps such action will allow Palestinians, together with Israelis and others worldwide who wish for peace and stability with justice in Palestine, to craft a different trajectory than that of oppression of one people by another. Only such a path based on equality and justice is capable of concluding the hundred years' war on Palestine with a lasting peace, one that brings with it the liberation that the Palestinian people deserve.

Richard Heuser

Ari Shavit, My Promised Land: Triumph and Tragedy of Israel 2013

Ari was born in Israel in 1957. He takes us on an historical journey from the beginning of the Zionist movement up to 2013. He does this through interviews with people who made Israeli history. Some are friends, Holocaust survivors, politicians, generals, business leaders, and artistic leaders. The major problem of this book is what parts of the history Ari failed to mention.

Ari begins with his great grandfather, Herbert Bentwich’s 1897 Zionist pilgrimage to Palestine. Ari writes a great travelogue about the territory of Palestine. Usually all of these Zionist pilgrims came from Eastern Europe because the Jewish people were constantly facing pogroms, indiscriminate killing of Jews, from the Christian rulers of the nations of Poland, Russia, or Romania.

Bentwich is a respected gentleman from London. Most of the pilgrims with him are the same. The journal reads like these pilgrims are on a safari to this land of Arabs, deserts, and agricultural products. They arrive in Jaﬀa. This is the only port in Palestine and it is run down and poor.
Ari fails to see these Zionist trips are a cover for the goal of reclaiming the ancient Jewish homeland. Ari never mentions the religious reasons the Zionists want to settle in ancient Israel. He keeps saying that his great grandfather never sees the Gentiles who carry his luggage and tents. He never sees the Arab villages on the mountains.

Ari is setting up the reader to see that religion is the evil reason current Israel is in trouble with the Zealot settlements in the conquered West Bank from 1967. Ari is a clever manipulator of the entire story.

Ari is trying to take the reader away from the religious Zionist reasons. He does tell us the settlers organizing the Jewish refugees to Palestine are told to purchase the land in a proper way and then start a colony to settle the land in a more productive way. These colonies become the socialist, communist Kibbutzim. He goes into great detail how these settlers change the land by draining the swamps and stopping disease. How these settlers make the land more productive.

Ari never tells us about the history surrounding this part of the world. Why Ari omits this history is puzzling to me.

Ari never mentions how the Zionists chose Israel speciﬁcally because the leadership knew they could persuade the British to help them if the allies won the war. Ari mentions how major changes take place with Jewish settlement during World War I.

By 1917 the Zionists receive the Balfour Declaration from the British. Interestingly, it is the year the United States joins the Allied Powers. This declaration promises the Jewish people will have a right to settle in Palestine, part of the Ottoman Empire, and this led to a permanent Jewish homeland.
In the World War I peace treaty, the Ottoman Empire is broken up into sections called mandates. England will rule Palestine until a democratic government can be formed by the inhabitants.
The British Palestine Mandate from 1919-1948 allows thousands of Jewish refugees to enter Palestine and settle into local agricultural communities named Kibbutzim.

From 1919-1930’s a trickle of Jewish refugees arrives. Once Hitler gains power in 1933, this turns into a ﬂood. By the end of World War II, the world learns about the Jewish Holocaust. The Nazis exterminated six million Jews in Europe. Now the Jewish people migrate in the hundreds of thousands.

Ari does a great job of telling us the story of how the Israel Kibbutz settlers formed the Israeli army in 1947 when the partition idea failed and the British army left. He details the Israel Army war crimes of killing innocent Palestinian villagers. Then after, forcibly removed all to the West Bank, Syrian, and Jordanian refugee camps.

Ari fails to talk about how Israeli leaders formed underground terror groups that bombed and killed Arab Palestinian leaders and British soldiers from the 1930’s to 1948. Ari does go into great detail about the Holocaust and how Eastern European and Arab nations' Jews start to ﬁll up Israel. As this happens other Israelis are trying to convince the British to leave Palestine. Before they leave the new United Nations develops a partition plan between Israel and Palestine. This plan redraws the former British Palestine mandate into two parts.

After both sides reject the partition, the ﬁrst of four Arab Israeli wars starts.

By 1948, Israel’s army defeats all Arab armies. The Israelis force all Palestinian Arabs from the state of Israel. In May 1948 the United Nations declares Israel a nation.

After a few years of peace, Egypt seizes the Suez Canal in 1957 with the Sinai desert from the Palestinian Arabs. Israel joins the ﬁght and gains the Sinai territory.

From 1957-1967 Israel enjoys 10 years of peace and growth. Because the Palestinian Arabs are forced to live in refugee camps in Arab countries, the Arab nations with Soviet help grow their armies and plot to attack Israel. This time Israel learns about the attack and strikes ﬁrst. In the 1967 war lasting only six days, Israel defeats the Egyptians, Syrians, Palestinian Arabs, and Jordanians. Israel takes the Golan Heights from Syria, the Gaza strip from Egypt, and the West Bank to include the City of Jerusalem from the Palestinian people.

Ari claims that Israel fundamentally changed as a nation from 1967 to the present. Now Israel became an occupier of the Palestinian Arabs territory. Naturally the Arab nations around Israel’s boarders prepared for another war. By 1973 on a Jewish religious holy day it began. Israel was surprised and lost many killed. Finally United States help gave Israel military equipment and the Israel military won.

After Israel began to colonize the West Bank with the settlement movement. [?] This was led by Jewish religious Zealots. They built permanent homes next to long time Arab towns. This angered the Palestinian Arabs and they turned to local and world wide terrorism led by the PLO. Ari interviews these leaders and finds out the Israel government at ﬁrst stopped the Zealots, but after a new conservative government takes power, they allow these settlements to continue. Ari once again fails to explain the this religious reason. He dismisses this as a major reason why a conservative government supports these settlements.

By the 1990’s these West Bank, Zealot settlements cause the suicide bombings throughout Israel. The answer by Israel is to build walls between the settlements and the Palestinian Arabs. Ari says walls never stop a problem, they just put oﬀ a long term solution. One wonders toward the end of the book what side Ari is on.

Ari says that this constant warfare has made Israel a place that is always at war. To relieve this pressure many young Israelis turned to drugs, sex, and head banging music in the1990’s. The contrast of Ari’s annual reserve military service at a Gaza Israel prison with his contemporaries at wild sex and drug crazed night clubs, makes Israel a changed nation. No longer a beacon for democracy and freedom. Ari never mentions how Arab Israeli citizens are discriminated against in the Israeli courts, schools, and jobs they are allowed to work.

Ari fears that Israel’s future is in jeopardy. He interviews a leader of the Palestinian Arabs. He tells them a two state solution is now impossible unless the Zealot settlements are destroyed. He also tells Ari that the number of Palestinian Israelis is growing faster than the Jewish Israelis. Ari fears this outnumbering more than anything.

After a two year book tour in the United States promoting this book, Ari concludes the liberal American no longer support an occupier Israel. He fears for the future of Israel and goes back to the 1948 war crimes and realizes the Arabs want to expel the Israelis just like Arabs were expelled in 1948.

Ari explains in detail the American Jewish community is now not as religious as before and is in danger of disappearing. Ari fails to tell us the real miracle of Israel is the American and world wide Jewish support that provided the money for the growth of Israel and the military industrial complex that makes Israel exist.

Ari concludes this book by summarizing the factors that need to be changed if Israel is to continue as a democratic state that attracts world wide appeal and continued support from the United States. Without this support from a growing liberal Western world, Israel will become an Arab nation with the minority being Jewish.

My conclusion is that Ari wants us to look at his book as a way to admit your war crimes and pay restitution to the Arabs and all will be good. This forgiveness for past wrongs is unrealistic.
If Israel starts to allow all citizens to vote, equal accesses to education, and true democracy, the future for Israel will not be a tragedy. Interestingly Ari never mentions this solution. He, like the current Israeli leadership, feels the Arabs will never forget, much like the Israelis themselves.

William Tobin

McCann, Colum, Apeirogon: a Novel; New York: Random House, 2020; 463 pp.

            This is a novel, but is so filled with the story of life in Israel and Palestine today, that I came away feeling as if I had just returned from several weeks driving along high-speed Israeli highways, and worrying about being delayed for hours at checkpoints in occupied Palestine.

            You quickly see the two worlds: the clean, tidy world of Israelis and the dirty, ragged world of checkpoints, strip searches and blown-up cisterns of Palestinians.

            It is the story of two men who lost their daughters because of the terrible situation of “The Occupation”.

            Rami Elhanan is an Israeli, whose 13-year-old Smadar was killed by Palestinian suicide bombers in 1997.

            Bassam Aramin is a Palestinian, whose 10-year-old daughter was killed by a rubber bullet fired by an Israeli border guard ten years later, in 2007.

The title is taken from the mathematical term for an object of an “observably infinite number of sides”, a shape that serves as a model for a fresh way of thinking about a conflict that is too often reduced to simple, opposed positions.

Bassam was imprisoned by the Israelis at age 17 for throwing hand grenades at Israeli troops; he spent seven years in prison.

Rami fought as an Israeli soldier in the three wars.

Bassam studied the Holocaust and began to understand the depth and breadth of the Jewish experience; Rami and his wife Nurit are both highly critical of “The Occupation” that treats Palestinians worse or as poorly as blacks were treated in Post-Civil War America[SC1] .

            Apeirogon begins to show its infinite sides when you encounter many of the 1001 “tales” dedicated to the many colorful species of birds who travel through Israel on their world-wide flyways…. Or to historical accounts of exploration of the Jordan River and the Dead Sea…. Or to Mexican bats used by the Americans to drop incendiary bombs on the Japanese in World War II.

            The stories come left and right, high and low, fast and slow. Some are parts of the story of these two men and their families, and of the work they have been doing for years to spread the appeal to create a real peace in their land. The others somehow connect to help to tell this story.

            McCann’s telling of these stories is aimed at untying us from the stereotypes that we may cling to about “Palestinian terrorists” and “persecuted Israelis”. Yes, the Jews have suffered mightily over the centuries, and the Holocaust really did happen.

            But much more needs to be done to right the wrongs that were done in the 1948 War for Israeli Independence, and which continue to be done to the Palestinians.

            Bassam and Rami are at the forefront of this quest for peace in a land that has not known much peace since Jesus walked its roads. They are the featured speakers at gatherings around the world, but here at home they are often reviled as traitors or collaborators.

            This book, as it twists to show the infinite sides to this story, may help to show the world how important it is to help the cause of peace in the Holy Land.

Sam Coulbourn

ROCKPORT HISTORY BOOK CLUB FUTURE TOPICS

Wednesday, April 29, 2020. The Effects of Colonialism in the World. Colonialism

can be about the whole idea of advanced nations landing in less advanced nations and colonizing them, to spread a religion, to allow the colonizing nation to plant colonies of its people where they can thrive, and to mine mineral resources, take advantage of fertile soils and favorable climates to grow crops, etc. Colonizers have often exploited the host land, enslaving its people or exploiting them in other ways. And the "advanced" nation has often brought its diseases to the foreign shores with disastrous results. There have also been very positive results.

When you think of colonizers, remember the Romans, Mongols, Greeks and Arabs, who started this many centuries ago. Romans colonized Britain, Spain and Portugal,

who later colonized the rest of the world.

Wednesday, May 27, 2020. Russia since the end of Communism. Look at the seeds for replacing communism and the prospects for a new order. Oligarchs. Corruption. Democratic movements. Former republics. Russian seizure of Crimea, attacks on Donbas. Georgia and So. Ossetia and Abkhazia. A new superpower?

Wednesday, June 24, 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]

Wednesday, July 29, 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]

Wednesday, August 26, 2020.

Wednesday, September 30, 2020.

[SC1]

Thursday, February 27, 2020

Reconstruction after the Civil War

America in Reconstruction

after the Civil War

History Book Club

Wednesday, February 26, 2020

Wednesday, February 26, 2020. America in Reconstruction after the Civil War. It was a terrible time. Civil war soldiers returned home, some in the south facing freed slaves roaming the streets, plantations emptied of their work force, and fear stoked by troublemakers warning of blacks raping white women and killing white men, and angry whites searching out and killing blacks without cause. The formation of the Ku Klux Klan. Northern leaders sending carpetbaggers to the south to enforce emancipation and protect freedmen.

Mark Wahlgren Summers, A Dangerous Stir: Fear, Paranoia and the Making of Reconstruction; Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009., New York: Random House; 2019

Heather Cox Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1965-1901 (2001)

This is Black History Month and studying Reconstruction after the Civil War is important to help us understand the story of America, which began by using fellow human beings as slaves. As many as 850,000 soldiers were killed or died from injuries or starvation during the Civil War, and after it was over arose these problems:

a. How to include four million new citizens in the life of the country?

b. How to incorporate the seceded states back into the Union?

c. How to create a new Union, mending the animosities, fears, bringing poor and rich, white and black, northerner and southerner together?

Author Summers goes to great effort to describe the fear and discord in America leading up to the Civil War, showing the confusing array of Copperheads, Doughfaces, Know-Nothings, Whigs, Douglas Democrats, Abolitionists, Southern Democrats and Republicans.

Fear ruled the country, and a careful, skillful minority of slaveholders set the stage for secession, so that when it finally happened, in state after state, the majority of whites, mostly not slaveholders, were caught up in the frenzy, with tales of rampaging slaves and invading Northerners.

            Shortly after the November 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln, the rumors of angry mobs breaking into New York banks, and seizing the ports of New York and Brooklyn, the Governor of Virginia leading a “rakehelly” mob over the Potomac into Washington. Actual secession of southern states, after all the rumors, was out in the open, for all to see.

            People complain today that the fear in the country, of immigrants taking our jobs, of Muslims imposing Sharia law and inciting terrorism, of the government taking our guns, and the fear of a president ignoring Congress and hazarding the country by ignoring climate change, and so on. But division today is nowhere as deep and dangerous as that which existed after the Civil War.

            The 1860 election brought secession, Fort Sumter and war. The 1864 election, taking place as the Union saw its way to victory, pitted Lincoln and his Democrat vice presidential candidate Andrew Johnson against former Union General George McClellan, a War Democrat, and George Pendleton. Lincoln won handily, becoming the first president to be reelected since Andrew Jackson in 1832.



            Lincoln was assassinated less than two months into his second term, and succeeded by Andrew Johnson, who then had to deal with Reconstruction.



            After the war, there were continual reports and warnings of rampaging Negro mobs all over the defeated South. The press did much to spread rumors and created continual turmoil. It is a testimony to the times that most reports of rabid, bloodthirsty, heavily armed blacks marching on white towns and wreaking havoc ended with scores of blacks killed and perhaps one or two whites wounded.



            If you’ve followed the national discourse these days you might appreciate the perceptions Americans in 1867 gained, each subject to enormous alteration, depending on whether you were a poor white Southerner, a former plantation owner, a newly freed African-American, a northern Radical Republican, a northern Copperhead, War Democrat or Peace Democrat, or a Lincoln Republican.



            Many northerners understood that it was in the country’s best interest that the former Confederacy was given generous treatment.

            Andrew Johnson was impeached by Congress in a process that began in February 1868 with 11 articles, the most important was a charge of violating the Tenure of Office Act. He was acquitted on that charge and two others, then the Senate dismissed the remaining eight articles without trial. After it was over, it looked so ludicrous, so hollow and cheap. Years later, commentators were still writing: “There has rarely been a more amusing episode…nor a better illustration of the way an incident of really trifling importance can be worked up by the effects of unscrupulous politicians, supported by unscrupulous newspapers, so as to wear the look of irretrievable disaster.” Nation, 1875.

            The national election of 1868 was between Republican Ulysses S. Grant and Democrat Horatio Seymour. Texas, Virginia and Mississippi had not yet re-entered the Union, so their votes were not counted. This was the first election for newly freed slaves. Grant won overwhelmingly.

            Although Democrats continually feared that he would try to become an Emperor, his was a rather slipshod, bungling, ham-handed and corrupt administration for eight years.

The three major amendments that were passed shortly after the Civil War are the reconstruction amendments that were the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments.

The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery within the United States and its territories. It reads: 'Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.' The exception that allows servitude as punishment for a crime allows prisons to use inmate labor. It was ratified on

December 6,1865.

Fourteenth: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. It was ratified on February 3, 1870

Fifteenth: The Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits the federal government and each state from denying a citizen the right to vote based on that citizen's "race, color, or previous condition of servitude." It was ratified on February 3, 1870, as the third and last of the Reconstruction Amendments. It was ratified on July 28,1868.

            Reconstruction was an experiment, and it stirred up hatreds that had been created long before the Civil War, and created new suspicions and fears, mostly in the South. This was the time that the Ku Klux Klan and several other similar organizations got their start, and they were responsible for many lynchings and much terror in the South. Probably many terrorist killings were carried out by angry whites without any organizational affiliation.

            Being born in East Texas 69 years after the war, I grew up in the segregated South. As a child I remember lots of talk about black people and the need to “keep them down.” When I was a teenager, I heard of classmates who would go “nigger knocking”. A car full of drunk white boys would drive through the black part of town and, when they passed a black walking by, they’d whack him with a 2x4.

            Governors in some states organized to wipe out Klan-like raids and killings. In Texas a Southern Unionist, Edmund J. Davis, who had been a Union general in the war, was elected as a “Reconstruction Governor” and served one term, 1870-74. He organized the state police and arrested suspects by the thousands. The Klan in Texas never recovered. [Although now a particularly violent group in Vidor shows up in the news occasionally.] Texas today still has a lot of racism.

            The Reconstruction was poorly done, because of the Vengeance of Radical Republicans; Ignorance of many; Built-in tendency toward racial hatred; A poorly informed electorate; Media often eager to twist the reporting of news in their direction; Greed; Incompetence on many levels of leadership.

            A black man was elected President of the United States in 2008 and governed for eight years. His two terms were seen by many to be honorable and positive, yet many today see otherwise, and these point to his successor with admiration.

            America today has a President who has openly encouraged a following that thrives upon white supremacy, suspicion, fear and hatred of outsiders, particularly non-whites, and particularly would-be immigrants from Latin America and Muslims.

            “Reconstruction” is still a work in progress.

-end-