This is wonderful

Leading Byzantine Studies journal now open-access

Some videos on some of the background behind the Israeli-Palestinian War

We are always living history, but now more so

The audiobook I'm listening to, The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, by John M. Barry, just spent a chapter on how Woodrow Wilson's contraction of the 1918-1919 pandemic influenza in Paris had terrible effects on the post-World War I talks with Britain and France. Where he'd been set to remove himself from the negotiations, he instead came back from the illness, probably too soon, and gave in to all of France's demands, the very ones that set up the rise of Adolph Hitler and WWII. Since that time we have made connexions between influenza and neurological and disposition changes.

The next chapter is discussing the resurgence of flu the next fall, and how it finally faded over the next few years. But millions had died, many children were orphaned. For many, the effects were lingering, some for a year or more. But through so much of the pandemic, it was downplayed due to the war effort. 'It was only influenza', ignoring the virulence of this strain.

It's also talking about the lack of writing about the pandemic at the time, and how that was like the mediaeval accounts that lack much of any study of the Black Plague. It reminds me that we are living through history. We need to take pictures of grocery stores with their lines. We need to write our stories. I started this blog in 2001 shortly after the attacks on September 11th. It's waxed and waned over the year, but this reminds me that this is an opportunity to put down what we do and how we feel.

It was very nice today

to have someone doing historical research in my library. Most of the collection is medical, specifically paediatric orthopaedic. But an older gentleman has over the years given us the annual proceedings of the fraternal organisation associated with the hospitals, and he occasionally comes and uses them to do research. I found out today that he was born the same year the hospital was opened--1926, meaning that they will both turn 90 this year. I think that's remarkable. He's preparing for a speech at our annual Hospital Day, in May. It's a Sunday (it always is). I usually skip it (I've been to one, the system's 75th anniversary one, when I first started, and the problem with that was the crowds and being surrounded by a bunch of men dressed like clowns--something I'd never really encountered and had not had a problem with previously). I just don't feel comfortable in that setting. It's a big open house, with lots of the fraternity members but also the general public, attending. This will be our last year in this building. Maybe I should go, even if it would mean missing the game. I don't know, I'll think about it. It's going to be a sad year, I suspect. I had someone else excitedly tell me today that the clinic would be getting their own colour copier in the new building and she wouldn't have to bother me anyway. I told her I wasn't sure where the 'main' copiers for the building would be in the next one, as there would be no library. I guess she didn't know I wasn't going. It looks like they'll decentralise some. I didn't mean to make her feel bad or anything, I was just stating the facts. But I will miss my little library (you can see it in the orchid flower pictures, it's not big at all, and I own more books than they have, really, if you don't count the journals). Next year will be 20 years of my life devoted to it, and then, just like that, it'll be over,m and I'll be laid off. So I can't think of the move without feeling sad. :(

This is so incredibly sad

Khaled al-Asaad, The Martyr Of Palmyra

A second ancient temple at Palmyra has been razed, with a satellite image appearing to confirm the destruction of the Temple of Bel, previously one of the best-preserved parts of the ancient city.

The revelation follows the release of images by Islamic State last week showing the Baalshamin temple had been blown up.

IS militants seized control of Palmyra in May, sparking fears for the 2,000-year-old World Heritage site. Ancient ruins are not all that has been lost.

Khaled al-Asaad, the 81-year old former director of the world-renowned archaeological site at Palmyra in Syria, was beheaded in August. His body was hung on a street corner by Islamic State for everyone to see.

Prior to his death, al-Asaad and his son Walid, the current director of antiquities, had been detained for a month. They had been tortured as their captors tried to extract information about where treasures were to be found.

Walid’s fate remains unknown.

You know those things on Facebook that go 'things only children of the (whatever decade) understand'?

Here's the best one of them all....

21 Things Only Kids Who Grew Up In The 1590s Will Understand

Celebrate!

Finally,  the last barricade to marriage equality has fallen.  Our governor,  who was one of the parties defending in the cases,  promptly announced that new forms would be sent immediately to county clerks so that same-sex marriages could get underway. My faith in the justice system,  and the Supreme Court,  was renewed today. And while I'm glad history was made,  my main concern now is what to wear to a wedding.  :)

A couple of things of interest related to the history of public health

Lexington's 1833 cholera epidemic chronicled in new book

The stricken died quickly, sometimes within hours.

Others hung on a few days, but they were so dehydrated they no longer looked like themselves, but rather like skin stretched taut over bones and tendons. Their brains still worked, even as their bodies died all around them.

People passed one another in the street without greeting, fearful that their friends and neighbors would contaminate them. Orphaned children wandered the streets, seeking food and shelter from strangers. Those with means fled to the countryside.

Ebola in 2014?

No. Cholera in Lexington — in summer 1833.

Terry Foody, a public health nurse who has lectured about cholera for the Kentucky Humanities Council for the past decade, has written a book about the 1833 epidemic in Lexington: The Pie Seller, The Drunk, and The Lady: Heroes of the 1833 Cholera Epidemic in Lexington, Kentucky (Self-published; $18.33).

Terry Foody is signing her book at the Woodford County Public Library, 115 North Main Street, Versailles, KY, from 1-4 pm on Saturday, November 1st. She did a signing recently at the Morris Book Shop, which is an independent bookseller here in Lexington. I'll check with them tomorrow to see if I can get a copy.

Also, today is the 100th anniversary of polio-vaccine pioneer Jonas Salk's birth. Google honoured him with a Doodle, but there was also this, which I think is dead on--with the restrictions we have today (many to protect research subjects) and with the anti-vaccine nuts out there, such a large double-blind trial (of 2,000,000 school children) would not happen today.

Jonas Salk's Polio Vaccine Trials Would Be Hard To Repeat Today

Interesting look at the origins of HIV

How AIDS first spread: Journey into night -- The early history of HIV has now been charted in detail

HIV/AIDS Origins Traced to Kinshasa

A new study finds that HIV/AIDS originated in the 1920s in the central African city of Kinshasa, in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Researchers say "a perfect storm" of factors "primed the HIV pandemic," including rail and river transport in 1960s Congo, a booming sex trade and the use of unsterilized needles in health clinics.

The international research team traced HIV's genetic history using archived samples of the virus's genetic code.

HIV was first recognized in the 1980s. Worldwide, some 75 million people have been infected with it. Around 36 million of them have died.

Lest we forget

The Tragic Futility of World War I: A century on, we're still paying the price.

If you find human behavior discouraging today, consider what happened a century ago. A Martian might have gazed down upon Europe in 1914 and seen a peaceful, prosperous continent with a shared culture. Pretty much everyone had enough to eat. The English listened to Wagner, Germans savored Shakespeare, Russian aristocrats mimicked the French, Mozart and Italian opera were loved by all. Then, Europe imploded.

Ten days before Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on July 28, 1914, prompting the descent into the Great War, “people everywhere were working, resting, eating, sleeping, dreaming of nothing less than of war,” a British political scientist wrote in The Atlantic the following year. “War came upon them like a thunderclap.”

I particularly like this paragraph:

It was a sad, pointless war, for which we’re still paying a price. A hard-hearted peace treaty and a ravaged economy produced a “lost generation” of young Germans and led directly to the rise of Hitler and an even uglier worldwide conflagration. The secret Sykes-Picot Agreement reached by Britain and France in 1916 drew arbitrary boundary lines across the postwar Middle East—around Iraq, for instance—that are returning deadly dividends to this day. The toppling of the Russian monarchy and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire created a balkanized Europe that, as recently as the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over strife-torn Ukraine, pains us still. The world was a nastier place after the war than before it.

100 years since World War I: Could it happen again today?

One hundred years ago today, Emperor Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia in retaliation for the assassination one month earlier of his heir apparent, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, by a Serbian pan-Slavic nationalist. What might otherwise have remained a regional conflict between the dying Hapsburg Empire and one of its former holdings instead became, through a tangle of alliances and a global power imbalance, two world wars that began in 1914 and ended in 1945, with a 21-year intermission for the Jazz Age and the Great Depression. Civilian and military casualties for the two wars approached 100 million – roughly the entire population of the United States as of July 1914.

3 important lessons learned from World War I

The hallowed ground of World War I, then and now uses an interesting technique to show pictures of the time, and swiping to pictures of the same areas now.

World War One: Every Man Remembered database launched

The Royal British Legion has started an online campaign to gather tributes to every Commonwealth serviceman and woman who died in World War One.

A total of 1,117,077 service personnel from what was then the British Empire died in the war, which began in 1914.

The outbreak of the First World War reminds us why we need a peace movement

Today marks one hundred years since Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. And so began four years of hell in Europe. The failure of diplomacy to prevent war and the inability of elites to prophesy its cost was an indictment of absolutism. Austria-Hungary, Germany and Russia – whose combined ambitions in the East largely engineered the war – were monarchies in which too few people of too little calibre enjoyed too much power.

My first thought when I the news of the Malaysian Airlines MH17 broke was of the Lusitania. The thing about being trained as a historian is that you think in patterns, in waves of repetition, and analyse the similarities and difference in historical events. I may not remember what I ate for lunch yesterday, but my historical memory is long, and the things other people forget over time seem very real to me.

I'm not saying we'll be drawn into the Ukrainian conflict like we were into World War I, or that our world is heading for another World War. But there are things that historians hold their breath for when they encounter them in the present, wondering if diplomacy will hold, wondering if we've never quite escaped, as the one piece put it, nations 'in which too few people of too little calibre enjoyed too much power'. There's a general unrest among the have-nots these days, and the haves seem to get fewer and more out of touch from the have-nots. There are fine, noble people using their wealth to better humanity and our world--but increasingly it is less about wealth of individuals and more about corporations. Our food, our water, our very lives, are controlled by corporations that flood our political agendas with money for their own good, engineer our food, frak our resources, market to our children, and in many ways they own our leaders. And so in many ways, today's world has a much scarier potential for conflicts to escalate than we have seen in years. It is, in fact, one of the reasons I remind myself of the good in people, of those who hold to peace. But things that seem to repeat history or which can act as a flashpoint still trouble me greatly.

This is excellent

And a major frustration for those of us with history degrees. That and movies that are based on historical events with CGI and monsters. YKWIA was telling me the other day about how he had to explain to someone that the Persians did not have monsters with them at the Battle of Thermopylae like in the comic and movie, The 300. I think his friend was disappointed.

Sorry, I'm not having much luck finding the original source for attribution. Granted, I haven't spent days looking, just a Google search for about a half hour. It appears to be signed 'Loeb', and definitely looks like an editorial cartoon, or perhaps something from a magazine like The New Yorker. I found it making the rounds on Facebook, and it's on lot of different political websites, the earliest of which seems to be November 2012. My apologies to the cartoonist--if I can find the source, I'll attribute correctly.

I've been up and down all night

and finally decided to stay up at 5 am. It's about 11 degrees outside, and the wind chill is already below zero. I've been monitoring the local news for weather and road conditions. This isn't the worst I've experienced here. There was this:

Windchill Factor Hits 85 Below Zero in Spots : Records Topple as Bitter Cold Grips U.S., where it says: 'The windchill at Lexington, Ky., was calculated at 60 below zero.'

I remember that clearly. It was January, 1985. I was a freshman at the University of Kentucky and managed to make it to class, but of course I was walking from one side of the campus to the other. They were saying more than 10 minutes outside was dangerous, and it took 20 to make the walk. I think I had seven layers of clothes on. The wind was blowing people across an icy Patterson Office Tower Plaza. Brrr...I hope it doesn't get quite that bad.

PS True to form, with all the school closings going on, the University of Kentucky has stated it will remain open and on schedule. :) On, on, U of K, right? Dress in layers, guys.

Something to check out

. . . Congress Disposes: ‘FDR and the Jews,’ by Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman

FDR AND THE JEWS
By Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman
Illustrated. 433 pp. The Belknap Press/Harvard University Press. $29.95.

Franklin Roosevelt enjoyed the overwhelming support of American Jews during his presidency, and the reasons are clear. In his three-plus terms from 1933 to 1945, he led the war against Hitler, supported a Jewish homeland in Palestine, appointed a Jew to the Supreme Court, chose another to be his secretary of the Treasury and surrounded himself with Jewish advisers who helped shape the laws that revolutionized the role of government in American life — what some critics sneeringly called the “Jew Deal.” Then, of course, there was Eleanor Roosevelt, whose concern for minorities fused the bond even tighter. When Roose­velt died in 1945, the Rabbinical Assembly of America described him, almost supernaturally, as an “immortal leader of humanity and a peerless servant of God.”

Born to Protestant wealth and privilege, the Roosevelts were hardly immune to the prejudices of their time. Before entering the White House, Eleanor described the future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter as “an interesting little man but very Jew” and, after attending a function for the Wall Street financier Bernard Baruch, complained: “The Jew party was appalling. I never wish to hear money, jewels and sables mentioned again.” Franklin went even further, using anti-­Semitic banter to charm world leaders like Joseph Stalin who were known to fear and hate Jews. Indeed, it was the ability of the Roosevelts to set aside these prejudices that seemed to distinguish them from so many others of their class. When it mattered most, their nobler instincts took over.

This seems to be a well-researched and balanced look at what FDR did (and did not do) to mitigate the Holocaust, according to The New York Times. The Kindle version is $9.88. I'm considering purchasing it.

A very poignant video of what could be

Very nicely done. It was created by the Anti-Defamation League.

Then there was this

Terry Deary's attack on libraries branded 'ignorant twaddle': Authors, including artistic director of Bath Children's Literature Festival David Almond have criticised Terry Deary's comments that libraries are damaging the book industry

Deary furthered the debate yesterday by telling The Guardian that libraries were 'damaging'.

"Because it's been 150 years [since the Public Libraries Act], we've got this idea that we've got an entitlement to read books for free, at the expense of authors, publishers and council tax payers," he said.

The writer was the seventh most borrowed children's author from UK libraries last year. His books were borrowed more than 500,000 times during 2011/2012.

Under the Public Lending Right scheme, Deary would have received £6,600 – 6.2p per book – through people borrowing his books from a library. The amount he would get if he sold that number of books is £180,000.

But other library supporters have pointed out that families who use libraries are often those who can't afford to buy the books.

Here's a thought: without libraries, many of those 500,000 wouldn't have read his books at all, or told their friends what they thought about them, etc. I haven't read his illustrated series, Horrible Histories, which present unusual and sometimes downright gory scenes from history in a tongue-in-cheek manner, or any of his other books. I believe I shan't (and certainly won't buy them), especially given this, from his Wikipedia article:

Controversy

Deary is an outspoken critic of schools, which he believes serve no function above keeping children off the street. Deary has commented: "I've no interest in schools. They have no relevance in the 21st century. They were a Victorian idea to get kids off the street. Who decided that putting 30 kids with only their age in common in a classroom with one teacher was the best way of educating? At my school there were 52 kids in the class and all I learned was how to pass the 11-plus. Testing is the death of education. Kids should leave school at 11 and go to work. Not down the mines or up chimneys, mind, but working with computers or something relevant. Everything I learned after 11 was a waste of time. Trigonometry, Boyle's law: it's never been of any use to me. They should have been teaching me the life skills I was going to need, such as building relationships, parenting and managing money. I didn't have a clue about any of these things at 18. Schools need to change."

Terry Deary has said of historians: "They are nearly as seedy and devious as politicians..They pick on a particular angle and select the facts to prove their case and make a name for themselves... They don’t write objective history... Eventually you can see through them all. They all come with a twist."

In 2013 Deary spoke out against public libaries as they are unfair to authors and people should not expect things for free. He claims, in contrast to his earlier beliefs on the lack of value in schools, that schooling provides the poor and underpriviledged with sufficent literacy and that he, as a tax-payer, should not subsidise more.

. Wow. No, I see no reason to give him money. In my opinion, he sounds like a complete jerk.

Things to add to my reading list

The Best History Books of 2012, by Maria Popova

Being a librarian, I love odd trivia

Or perhaps, loving odd trivia, I was doomed...um...fated to be a librarian. So I was pleased to see a great post at Gary Corby's blog (author of excellent mysteries set in ancient Greece, The Pericles Commission and The Ionian Sanction:

The most unusual duel in history

(In which two French gentlemen dueled over a lady's affections using balloons and blunderbusses. Corby quite correctly questions the sanity of their seconds.)

One reader found the story, which is true, immortalised on a t-shirt, which is available for sale.

Accounts of the story can be found in The Book Of Days, by Robert Chalmers, published 1863, page 809 of volume 1, and in The Annual Register, or a View of the History, Politics, and Literature for the Year 1806, published 1810, Chronicle section, page 63..

I'm a medical librarian and with a history background

So it's probably no surprise that this interests me:

The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson from Book Videos on Vimeo.

For more, see The Ghost Map: Hard Lessons in Epidemiology from Victorian London by Maria Popova

and here's the book itself:
The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson (which is cheaper than the Kindle edition).

I love this passage

from Elizabeth Peters' Borrower of the Night:

In recent years, students have done a lot of complaining about 'relevance.' No one can quarrel with the basic idea: that education should have something to do with real life and its problems. The trouble comes when you try to define the word. What is relevant? Not history, according to the more radical critics. Who cares what happened in ancient Babylon or medieval England? It's now that counts.

They couldn't be more wrong. Everything has happened before--not once, but over and over again. We may not be able to solve our problems through what are pompously called 'the lessons of history,' but at least we should be able to recognize the issues and perhaps avoid some of the solutions that have failed in the past. And we can take heart in our own dilemma by realizing that other people in other times have survived worse.

Cool site

Came across this blog today:

Morbid Anatomy: Surveying the Interstices of Art and Medicine, Death and Culture

I'm definitely subscribing to it in Google Reader.