This is a riff on a Suzannah Lipscombe column in History Today.

In 1987, Natalie Zemon Davis published Fiction in the Archives (Stanford University Press). It focuses on the made-up (or fictional) elements of royal letters of pardon and remission in 16th Century France. Davis called it fiction because the writers crafted the letters into literary creations that told a version of the truth about their lives and the crimes for which they sought pardon.

Not everything in the archives is “true” like a time machine.

Scholars have to work with absences, erasures, violence, fibs, fabrications, and tabulations in the sources. What we take to be facts can be fictions. In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019), a study of young black women in the US in the early 20th Century, Saidiya Hartman finds that between 1882 and 1925 it was lawful to arrest a “wayward minor” (under the age of 21) who was “willfully disobedient to the reasonable and lawful commands of parent, guardian or other custodian and is morally depraved or is in danger of becoming morally depraved.” This included those who, without ‘just cause’ or parental consent, were absent from their homes. Young women walking home after working late hours, going to parties and drinking, having sex outside of marriage, or suspected of being about to do so were vulnerable to arrest at random and, if found guilty, to a sentence of up to three years at the State Reformatory for Women.

They could face jail time for acting like a mid-20th Century teenager.

In the worldview upheld by the state archive, which social workers, probation officers, journalists, sociologists, and investigators generated, people assumed women of color were susceptible to criminality and deviancy. What remains in the archive justifies the confinement of these women by branding their acts of freedom as “moral depravity”

The official documents made her into ... delinquent, whore, average Negro on a mortuary table, incorrigible child, and disorderly woman.

Saidiya Hartman

Hartman created a “counter-narrative” which presses “at the limits of the case file and the document, speculated about what might have been,” As well as grounding her research in what the archive says, she considers what it does not. Like Davis, she turns to other sources to find a way into the past. She speculates about what might have been but cannot be verified, poses counterfactuals, renders indirect speech into dialogue, and asks searching, imaginative questions. She terms it “critical tabulation” Hartman is one of several scholars attempting to infuse historical writing with narrative strategies and literary techniques borrowed from novelists.

In other words, she made stuff up but told her readers about it.

A founding principle of historical writing is that narratives do not fictionalize, invent or dissemble, or make things up—except some writers do it all the time while they claim to be tethered to the archive. How then should we feel about Hartman’s counter-histories and critical tabulations? Hartman’s stories are histories “written with and against the archive,” filling in gaps and working around them. When there is no other way to enter a story, Hartman makes it up—call it “truthiness.” She defines the edges of established knowledge but envisions the unprovable. She resists the hubris of speaking for her subjects and the temptation to fill in the gaps, but also refuses to let the judgement of the powerful who created the documents in the archives be forever the judgement of posterity.

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

LP Hartley

Hartley’s admonition is important because the archives belong to the past, describing something Saidiya Hartman didn’t always like. She can’t change what’s in the archives, so she wrote a different worldview based on, you guessed it, presentism, that bugbear of historians and pundits alike. While the past is the past, some writers don’t like how it worked, so rather than just report what’s there, they put stuff in that isn’t because they don’t like the attitudes or the results of those in the past.

The only founts of historical truth are faith in the sources and time machines.

John D. Beatty

This is how statues get torn down, flags burned, buildings and institutions get renamed: applying present sensibilities and politics to the past and condemning it for not conforming to what we want to see in the present.

We can’t keep the past from happening, but we can simply report on it.

The Past Not Taken: Three Novellas

Many non-historians regard archives as where “truth” lies. Most historical scholars know what Henry Ford meant when he said, “History is bunk.” He implied that in his time it didn’t explore real people’s lives deeply enough to offer something usable in the present. One budding scholar wanted to change that, but had first to figure out what part of his archives were fakes and what was authentic.

This is how history books are written.

And Finally...

On 16 May:

1943: Operation CHASTISE begins in the Ruhr Valley of Germany. RAF Wing Commander Guy Gibson led 617 Squadron on the raid to destroy the Eder, Möhne and Sorpe (Röhr) dams using novel “bounding” ordnance designed by Barnes Wallace. Other than the flooding caused by the destruction of the Möhne dam, losing its hydroelectric power crippled German industry for months.

1975: Junko Tabei is the first woman to reach the summit of Mouth Everest. A member of an all-female Japanese team, she’d been in an avalanche just days before, but she continued her ascent to reach the 8,848-meter (5.4 mile) peak.

And today is the INTERNATIONAL DAY OF LIGHT, commemorating the demonstration of the first laser (Light Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation) by Theodore H. Maiman at Hughes Research Laboratories, Malibu, California on this day in 1960. Maiman, building on generations of physicists and engineers, used a ruby crystal in his pulsed device. And today, we use one to confuse the hell out of our cats and dogs.

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This is a riff on a Michelle Aroney article in History Today by the same name.

Astrology, originating in the Third Millenium BC in Mesopotamia, where priests used celestial movement observations to interpret divine signs and omens. Originally used for forecasting weather, agriculture, and political events, it developed from mundane Babylonian astrology into the zodiac-based, personal, and horoscopic systems adopted by Hellenistic Greece and Rome. Conflated with astronomy for about two thousand years, the practice spread around the Old World, becoming a major influence on ancient culture, politics, and medicine. Once considered a respected academic discipline closely tied to mathematics, since the 19th Century academia and science have deemed it a recreational pastime, superstition, and pseudoscience.

In the 15th Century, it was a popular parlor game.

Appearing in 1482, the Libro de la Ventura (Book of Fortune) became a staple of Renaissance parties. Translated into many languages, lavishly illustrated, and surviving in many editions, this parlor game became a bestseller across Europe. The point of the game was to divine answers to tricky questions, a series of which players could choose from. Will my upcoming trip go smoothly? Will I recover from this illness? Does my spouse truly love me? After selecting a question, the player rolled three dice and followed prompts through the book until they landed on an answer.

The game’s appeal partly lay in its dry humor.

The creators intended many of the answers about love for amusement, including, “Your husband is cheating on you; go and cheat on him too!” This unseriousness made the game less daunting to play with difficult, anxiety-inducing dilemmas about life, death, and relationships. But the playful could easily slide into the serious. Some owners crossed out dice combinations that led to bad answers, so they could roll again if the dice landed in that inauspicious combination. A similar Italian game, Le sorti (The Fates, 1540), likewise marketed itself as amusement, yet its stock questions were poignant and evergreen: Will I have children and will they be healthy? Am I secretly disliked by others? Will the news I’m waiting for be good or bad? No matter how cynical the player, landing on a bad or uncannily accurate answer to such questions could be deeply unsettling.

The topics in these games struck directly at core anxieties.

The Libro de la Ventura and Le sorti featured timeless questions with answers phrased to apply to anyone, like any horoscope or seer prediction. We know these were questions that people grappled with in the 16th Century because of the evidence provided by the archives of practising diviners. The largest such archive is the case records of the London astrologers Simon Forman (1552-1611) and Richard Napier (1559-1634), which document around 80,000 horoscopic consultations, shedding light on the questions that bothered people around 1600.

The future is not some place we are going, but one we are creating. The paths are not to be found, but made, and the activity of making them changes both the maker and the destination.

John Schaar

The Church had long condemned astrology, and elite culture marginalized it. Physicians, who were also astrologers, looked down on self-taught practitioners like Forman and Napier, dismissing them as quacks. Yet none of this stopped clients from coming in droves to their clinics, asking the astrologers to make known the unknown.

Early modern astrologers were the most general of general practitioners, in that people sought their help with all kinds of fears and anxieties. Forman and Napier’s records are vivid indexes of what bothered early modern people. As with the parlor games, many questions were about love. People wanted to know whether they were courting the ‘right’ person. In 1600 Elizabeth Nichols - Napier’s servant - asked him whether her suitor John Chivoll, whom she did not actually love, was ‘a fit match for her’; her family was putting pressure on her and the dilemma was making her ‘mutch disquieted in mind’. The astrologers did not always record their answers, but in this case Napier noted the outcome was ultimately in Elizabeth’s favor: “Nowe the match is broken off because she is unwilling to have him.” In 1608 Edward Osborn asked whether he would get the love of the woman he sought; that he was still asking the same question two years later probably points to the answer. But he was far from the most anxious romantic. Barrington Mullens consulted Forman about his love life a dozen times in a single year, at first asking for his prospects with Mary Hambden, before setting his sights instead on Elizabeth Southwell, only to double check whether giving up on this new match would finally secure him Mary’s hand later.

Platonic relationships also brought anxieties. Some consulted astrologers to know if they would maintain good relationships with friends or if bitter disputes would ever be resolved. People fretted over whether to reach out. Many asked if they could trust a certain person.

A few questions seemed on the edge of paranoia.

In 1618 William Bouth asked whether he had “an evil enemy intending mischief.” Family dynamics also troubled many. Mothers worried about their children, and children about their parents. Would an absent family member who was traveling or at war be ok?

Career anxieties were also predictably rife.

Margaret Worsape asked whether she should keep working her trade in London or move to the country. William Tillye asked if it was better to stay in his current trade or to change (as his mother was urging him). Employees were curious about the possibility of promotion, while employers were anxious about new hires. Politics, plagues, and invasions also troubled Forman and Napier’s clients. Some were stressed about their health, when they would die and how, and what happened after death. Their mental health, and that of their friends and family, was also a keen cause of stress.

Divination archives teach us about the fears and anxieties of people in the past.

Anxiety and fear are historically contingent, as are ideas of what is and what is not risky. Some of Forman and Napier’s clients asked questions that would not concern (most) of us today (is my neighbor a witch?). Others asked questions that are ageless: Are there better days coming? During the 17th Century, European society increasingly marginalized astrology; universities removed it from their curricula, and mainstream culture pushed its practice to the sidelines. Other specialists—therapists, career and financial advisers, and even insurance agents—gradually took over many of the roles of astrological consulting.

Yet astrology never left us, because the questions astrologers answered without factual information also remain.

Crop Duster: A Novel of WWII

Flying B-17s in Europe in 1943 required a great deal of luck to survive, but the odds were always against the American aircrews. Likewise, the German fighter pilots assigned to kill those Americans relied not just on skill but on Providence to stay alive.

And Finally...

On 9 May:

1386: Portugal and England conclude the Treaty of Windsor at Whitehall, London, England. The oldest active diplomatic alliance in the world established a (so far) permanent pact of mutual defense and friendship between the two countries, sealed by the marriage of two noble families, both of which are now extinct.

1945: Elements of the US 36th Infantry Division capture Hermann Goering in Radstadt, Austria. The former #2 man in Nazi Germany had resigned from all his posts just days before, and was under a sentence of death after the fall of Berlin a week before. The Allies would try him at Nurnberg, sentence him to death, but he would commit suicide before his execution.

And today is the TIME OF REMEMBRANCE AND RECONCILIATION FOR THOSE WHO LOST THEIR LIVES DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR, commemorating this day in 1945 when the Soviet Union declared VE Day. The UN created the day in 2004.

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There were several events and phenomena in Japan’s history that supplied ample fuel to a simmering fire that seemed to have been burning in the minds of much of the military and naval leadership of Japan before 1941. While much of Japan was quietly intent on merely surviving, the dominant social group in the archipelago was constantly trying to either stay in charge or justify having been in charge. This essay is one of several that visit the most important elements of samurai rage against the West and their own subjects, and their constant fear of being overthrown or even contradicted. As shown by the various “insults” and momentous events in Japan over the centuries, the formation of movements and societies and the ensuing incidents happened all too easily. Too, Japan and the Japanese were apparently masters at holding a grudge.

China and Japan over the Centuries

The earliest historical mention of the islands of Japan in any written form is in the 1st Century Chinese Book of Han, or History of the Earlier Han. The brief mention refers to Japan as divided into more than a hundred countries that occasionally paid tribute to the Han dynasty of China (206 BC-AD 220). While this description seems minor, it would remain accurate until the 19th Century. Though Japan's origins remain hotly debated, China, as a trader, undeniably exerted the largest single influence on the structure of Japan’s society and economy up to the 19th Century, something that Japan has acknowledged.

Japan’s geography is unforgiving and not friendly to people. Over 85% mountainous, growing enough food to live has always been a challenge, which has made trade essential for Japan’s survival. Japan and China remained in continual contact through trade regardless of what was going on between politicians, soldiers, and emperors. As poor as Japan appeared to be in foodstuffs, she had rich deposits of gold and silver—some of the largest known before the 19th Century—and her artisans made some of the best steel in the world, albeit in small batches. While Japanese ships before the 1850s had limited range by design, there were many of them, and they could reach the markets of China in most weather.

What central law there was in Japan from about the 8th Century until the 19th was based on Chinese legal codes and traditions, except those affecting the Emperor. While Japan’s pre-Meiji domestic economy was based on rice, the yen used for foreign trade rose and fell on China trade. Chinese social mores and graces, the vague structure of its nobility, and Confucianism and Buddhism (alongside Shinto) thrived in Japan. At the same time, Japan was always suspicious of China’s contacts with the outside world while it tried to insulate itself from outside influences by keeping European traders restricted to enclaves.

China in the 19th Century

Through trade, Japan could see what was going on in China and shuddered at the outcomes of the two Opium Wars (1839-43; 1856-60) and the Taiping Rebellion (1850-64). While trade with Japan survived, Britain—and thus Europe and America—gained almost unfettered access to China’s vast resources while fueling China’s almost insatiable appetite for opium. Turkey may have been India’s biggest opium customer before 1860, but China quickly overtook it despite heavy prohibitions on opium consumption in China.

This sad phenomenon, coupled with the twenty to thirty million dead from the Taiping Rebellion (which had about ten million combatants) weakened the fragmented Qing dynasty’s hold on power, especially because it needed to use American, British and French mercenaries to defeat the rebels. At the west took what they wanted from China—as they did in Japan—the samurai especially looked askance at what China had become: a weak beggary with vast resources.

After Perry and the avalanche of Europeans made unequal treaties with Japan beginning in 1854, treaties that some welcomed but others reviled, Japan’s war of unification—the Boshin War (1868-69)—finally joined the clans of Japan under a central leader who wasn’t one of them. After another civil war or two, Japan had a central government, introduced politics, and still kept trade ties with China. As Western ideas and inventions flooded into Japan, barely paid for because Japan’s silver and gold became scarce, China’s political structure and society still had trouble absorbing modernity. (So did parts of Japanese society, but that’s another story.) Japan thought of China as ripe for the picking. Japan and China went to war in 1894, and Japan cruised to victory but lost her territorial gains in the European Triple Intervention—a political catastrophe that the samurai saw as a grave insult they would not forget. Tottering from the loss, the Qing Dynasty tried economic and social reforms, but the Empress Dowager Cixi imprisoned the Guangxu Emperor in 1898, ending them. Cixi then backed an anti-foreigner revolt known as the Boxer Rebellion that ended in 1900 with vast concessions to the hated foreigners, including Japan, that doomed the dynasty.

China in the early 20th Century

To pay the huge indemnity to Japan, China sold a leasehold to Russia to build a bypass of the Trans-Siberian Railroad through its territory, shortening the transit by at least a week while domestic chaos reigned and revolution brewed, finally breaking out in 1911. While well-intentioned, the civil wars that resulted made matters worse and gave rise to the warlords that fragmented the country, including China’s industrial heartland, Manchuria. While still legally a part of China, Japan had partly occupied Manchuria since 1905, when Russia turned the railroad concessions over to Japan as an indemnity for losing their 1904-05 war with Japan. China sent no troops or warships to fight the Germans in WWI, but she sent tens of thousands of laborers, and Japan captured Germany’s China colonies. Japan’s Twenty-One Demands (reduced to Fifteen) of 1915 stung China while granting Japan nothing more than what she had, but it was the principle of the thing, you see.

The rise of Chaing-Kai Shek’s decidedly anti-communist Nationalists beginning in 1927 marked a stern departure from the chaos of earlier Chinese warlords because Chiang got more warlords to work with him when he threw the foreigners, including the Japanese, out and negated their extraterritoriality. Foreign investment came pouring in while Chiang battled the nascent Reds under Mao Zedong.

Culturally and economically, Japan had grown beyond her China cultural ties, and China had become a semi-stable quasi-modern state by 1931, when Japan took over Manchuria. Emboldened by their success, the samurai took advantage of their firepower in the Shanghai Incident in 1932, burning down a Chinese factory after a riot. But Japan was still a poor, industrialized but essentially agrarian nation dependent on outside sources for petroleum and most metals. The international opprobrium that followed hurt Japan’s economy deeply, while the United States, with its decades-old Open Door outlook, took on China as something of a project. With increased foreign trade and the weapons markets of Germany, the US, and the Soviet Union open to them, China’s armed forces modernized, pushing the Reds into the hills while Japan had to disband divisions to research radios.

Samurai rage boiled.

Roots of Samurai Rage and Fear: The Road to Pearl Harbor

Without China, there likely would have been no Japan. As a trading partner, Japan could have had no substitutes to China’s easy access, but money was becoming tight. Their 1915 gambit to turn China into a vassal failed, so by the 1930s there was just one choice: takeover.

And Finally...

On 2 May:

1945: The Battle of Berlin ends with the surrender of the city to Soviet forces, which had been fighting day and night, block-by-block for just over two weeks. Though casualty figures are still unclear, the human cost was easily 1.25 million German (including Martin Borman on the last day), Soviet and Polish dead. Germany would surrender to the Allied powers seven days later.

1952: The first flight of a commercial jet airliner, a BOAC DeHavilland DH.106 Comet I, took place between London and Johannesburg, with 36 passengers on board, flying in quiet and fast luxury above the weather that other airliners had to fly through. All passengers were first class.

And today is NATIONAL LIFE INSURANCE DAY, marking the day in 1760 when the Presbyterian Corporation of New York sold the first life insurance policies in America. Life insurance salesmen have beset us at dinnertime ever since.

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Imagine a world for just a movement where there was no such thing as a lie and everything everyone said is the truth.

Not hard to do, really…or is it? In this world, there’s no such thing as fiction; there’s no question that could go unanswered because no one makes anything up and, most importantly, no one seeks answers. So there’s no humor, no satire, no religion…yeah, no religion because this world only believes what it sees, feels, knows. Bear with me, Christians and other believers, because I’m trying to make a point.

There’s this movie…

Released in 2009, The Invention of Lying (Ricky Gervais, Dan Lin, Lynda Obst, Oly Obst) and distributed by Warner Brothers is a quirky semi-comedy film in a modern setting. The storyline has the lead character, a "screenwriter," Mark (played by Ricky Gervais), who got fired from his job because nobody wanted to read about the 13th Century’s Black Plague. Since there's no fiction, and someone else has already claimed all the other, better subjects for narrative films, that’s the topic he’s stuck with. There are no actors in this world because no one knows they can impersonate someone else. So movies are just somebody telling unembellished stories of the past. But Mark gets canned for having lousy ratings.

In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

Eric Blair/George Orwell

In a time of truth, can there be revolution?

Mark needs to pay his rent because the landlord knows they fired him. So he goes to the bank and says he needs $800. The teller says he’s only got $300 in his account. Mark says, “but there’s at least $800 in there.” Now, there’s no lying in this world, so the teller says, “oh, our mistake; here,” and hands him the money. Now, he has no name for what he just did because there is no word for “truth,” either. The very concept of falsehood doesn’t exist here, so he just picks up his money, walks away and pays his rent.

Truthiness: the belief that something is true because of preexisting biases, even when directly contradicted by facts

This world is truthiness on steroids.

Only Mark doesn’t know what to call what he did because there’s no opposite. He tests this new concept of not-truth on a woman who passes him in the street (Stephanie March) uttering a mild insult. Mark says, “we have to have sex because the world is ending!” The next scene is in a hot-sheet motel where she’s entirely willing because, after all, the world is ending! Mark fakes a phone call from NASA that tells him the world is not ending, and the woman, relieved, insults him again and leaves. She doesn’t ask how NASA would even know why this random guy on the street would have such information, let alone how they would know where he was at that moment because there is no such thing as a lie in this reality.

The best jokes are dangerous, and dangerous because they are in some way truthful.

Kurt Vonnegut

Getting a job by lying.

Mark comes up with a “manuscript” he discovers about an alien invasion in the 13th Century, brings it to his former boss (Jeffery Tambor) and, naturally, gets his job back based on this lie. Mark declares that his movie will be the greatest story ever told and, of course, everyone nods in agreement because only Mark knows how to lie and becomes quite wealthy because he can just walk into the bank and say he has money there, and voila! He redirects the attention of the croupier at the casino and moves his bets around before he tells the floor boss his slot machine hit but didn’t produce his money and he gets paid off. When his mother was dying, Mark invented Heaven to make her and everyone around her feel better as she passed. This invention becomes widely known and, of course, believed. Mark invents the concepts of good and evil (since everything is true, there can be no good or evil except what someone says is good or evil) and a Man in the Sky who controls everything that he documents in ten rules on two pizza boxes. Really.

It is a comedy, after all, but in its way, it’s also a tragedy.

You can see where this is going. While Mark reads his rules in front of a vast audience and the media, they ask questions like, “how many bad things will keep me out of Heaven?” and “what happens to my mansion in Heaven when I go to live with my loved ones?” We don’t know what all the rules are because the film says it takes two hours to get through them, but we can imagine that coveting and the like is covered somewhere. The film turns into a get-the-girl (Jennifer Garner) romance where the rival (Rob Lowe) loses out at the altar, and we fade into the happy-ever-after and two kids, both of whom can lie, for Mark and his love interest.

What does lying tell us about truth?

The film is entertaining , and it did bank at the box office, but anyone thinking about the implications of this fantasy long enough will see the obvious holes. For one thing, what questions can there be in such a world? When everything is true, ambiguity, spin, explanations, and questions cease to exist. How can there be curiosity without questions? Without curiosity, where did all those inventions come from? Without the concept of sin or modesty, why is everyone clothed fashionably? There can be no art because images are false, and thus no fashions—and forget cameras. The cars, the TVs, the movies…none of it could exist because no one could imagine wanting, needing, or building them.

Can we have a world—a society—without curiosity and questions that are never asked because everything is already true?

Truth is the only safe ground to stand upon.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

While the above may be true, it’s also misleading. The old joke about no naked man ever refusing anything from a naked woman—Adam and Eve—reminds us that truth and fiction are frequently subjective. Genesis tells us that the serpent gave Eve the apple of forbidden knowledge (about everything) after she bit it, who handed it to Adam, who bit it himself. God then banished both from the Garden of Eden for disobedience and for now knowing what God didn’t want them to know. Without those bites of the apple, how would we ever have “known” anything except what the God who made the garden, and the snake, and the apple, and Adam and Eve, wants us to know, which is nothing? How would anyone have ever followed Adam and Eve if they didn’t know the “sin” of procreation?

God in this reading sounds like an earthly dictator who only wanted two subjects.

OK, the creators of the Garden of Eden story had to have a mechanism for their narrative to move along, but that mechanism raises as many questions as it answers. The obvious plot hole in Invention of Lying is that the people still have questions, but they’re all directed at other people, not the natural world or the nature of the historical record, even the “record” Mark “discovers.” The script for the film grew from a skit the writer created about two people on a date who could not lie. Funny, no doubt, but expanded into a film, it has a tendency to reach into the absurd and avoids the nature of technological development and the historical profession.

No technology came about from a continuous string of successes.

Many failures occurred along the way, and documentation exists for them. But inventors need patrons, and in a world where there are no lies, progress has to be absolute. Many inventors sugar-coated their less-than-stellar results (and still do) until they finally succeeded. So did explorers and historians; they still do. Those old maps with monsters in the margins and exotic-looking people in those barely mapped parts; think they’re there? How many legends do we accept as historical fact? It’s not just politicians, pundits, advertisers, journalists, and “spokespersons” who lie; it’s just about everyone who needs to create a narrative to please or placate an audience or benefactor.

Scholars rely on accurate documents.

Great idea, but are they all accurate? In The Invention of Lying, people accept Mark’s “manuscript” as true since no false documents exist in that world. As a movie, it works to entertain. But in real life, do we take treasure troves such as the Epstein files as absolute truth because, well, we want all those people to be discredited? How about the Steele Dossier? Hunter’s Laptop? Are all documents in all archives and attics and drawers, and steamer trunks true just because they’re old? Any archivist or researcher will admit that forgeries abound, and locating them can be a perilous business because reputations are at stake and, sometimes, so is the historical record.

Lying says as much about us as truth does.

The Past Not Taken: Three Novellas

Some lies are defensive; some are offensive; some are just lies. Imagine a prestigious archive potentially half-full of forged documents, some of which can change the nature of the record in radical and dangerous ways, and half-full of helpful and reliable documents. How would a budding scholar, whose life is half-a-lie, work with those documents? This is how history books are written.

And Finally...

On 25 April:

1644: The last Ming Emperor, Chongzhen, hangs himself on the manmade Coal Hill/Jing Mountain outside of Beijing, China. Rebel forces under Li Zicheng had breached the city walls days before, and the Ming coffers were empty. Chongzhen is one of five Chinese emperors (of nearly 2,000) known to have committed suicide.

1953: Francis Crick’s and James Watson’s double helix DNA model is published in Nature Magazine, London, England. The model explained how genetic information stores and copies itself, earning Watson and Crick the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1962.

And today is ANZAC DAY, commemorating the day in 1915 when the Anglo-French-Australian-New Zealand landings began WWI’s ill-fated Gallipoli campaign in Turkey. People Down Under mark the day as a national day of commemoration, and it is best known for the participation of the Australia/New Zealand forces, collectively called ANZACs.

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We have received assurances for decades that the world will end any decade now. Just you wait…here it comes…three…two…one…

No one can deny the impact of the climate crisis anymore. At least I hope they don’t. They must be brain dead if they do. Scientists report that with warming oceans powering more intense rains, storms like Helene are getting stronger and stronger. They’re not going to get less; they’re going to get stronger.

Joe Biden, 2 October 2024

This is from the man who “beat Medicare.” Here’s a couple from another futurist who wasn’t very good at being accurate, either.

The trouble with almost all environmental problems,’ says , the population biologist, ‘is that by the time we have enough evidence to convince people, you’re dead. . . . We must realize that unless we are extremely lucky, everybody will disappear in a cloud of blue steam in 20 years.

Paul R. Ehrlich, The New York Times, 1969

And…

No real action has been taken to save the environment, (Ehrlich) maintains. And it does need saving. Ehrlich predicts that the oceans will be as dead as Lake Erie in less than a decade.

Redlands Daily Facts, 1970

Check your calenders now and see if the oceans are dead; Erlich is and they ain’t. Erlich wrote a great deal about demographics and a “population bomb” that should have exploded some years ago. Last I saw, the population was cratering in most of the industrialized world.

As a teenager, I remember these prognostications of the coming ice age:

Scientist Predicts a New Ice Age by 21st Century: Air pollution may obliterate the sun and cause a new ice age in the first third of the next century . . . (I)f the current rate of increase in electric power generation continues, the demands for cooling water will boil dry the entire flow of the rivers and streams of the continental United States. . . . (B)y the next century ‘the consumption of oxygen in combustion processes, world-wide, will surpass all of the processes which return oxygen to the atmosphere.’

The Boston Globe, 1970

The world could be as little as 50 or 60 years away from a disastrous new ice age, a leading atmospheric scientist predicts. ... In the next 50 years,’ the fine dust man constantly puts into the atmosphere by fossil fuel-burning could screen out so much sunlight that the average temperature could drop by six degrees. If sustained ‘over several years’ — ‘five to 10,’ he estimated — ‘such a temperature decrease could be sufficient to trigger an ice age!’

Washington Post, 1971

And here come the academics:

Dear Mr. President: . . . We feel obliged to inform you on the results of the scientific conference held here recently. . . . The main conclusion of the meeting was that a global deterioration of climate, by order of magnitude larger than any hitherto experienced by civilized mankind, is a very real possibility and indeed may be due very soon. The cooling has natural cause and falls within the rank of processes which produced the last ice age. . . . The present rate of the cooling seems fast enough to bring glacial temperatures in about a century. However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing.

Brown University, Department of Geological Sciences, 1972

Some at the time questioned this orthodoxy, which wasn’t required for journalists yet.

Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age. Telltale signs are everywhere — from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest.

Time Magazine, 1974

But the “experts” reversed themselves just in time.

A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.

Associated Press, 1989

Check those calendars again and see how many nations have vanished because of rising sea levels. And here comes a Nobel Laureate/political hack/“expert” to assure us all is not well yet.

Unless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases are taken within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return.

Al Gore, 2006

And one more “expert:”

The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 2019

And her credentials are impeccable, no doubt, having gone to the same science schools as Gore.

A Common Thread: Time

“Experts” are especially careful to put their ends of the world comfortably in the future or in vague terms. Gore’s “point of no return,” for example, means…what? And if the predictions are closer in time, the predictor is a vague “senior official” who can’t be called on it when it didn’t happen, which brings up another common thread…

Recall, or A Lack Thereof

Few remember the global cooling/coming ice age claims from the ‘70s, and few will recall the earliest, most hysterical claims that said we’d all be dead by now. That’s in part because the predictions are wrong, and because people’s memory for such things is very, very short. While the climate catastrophes pronounced earlier in this century have yet to come to pass (depending on interpretation, of course), many of the draconian mandates are still in place. Germany’s industrial production has practically come to a standstill, and many homes are chilled because their “green energy” programs can’t keep the lights on and the furnaces running. Similar “earth-friendly” diktats mean rolling blackouts in California in the heat of summer.

Cynics win either way: everyone’s relieved when they’re wrong, and they’re regarded as seers when they’re right.

John D Beatty

Sensationalism Sells

The third common thread is how catastrophe becomes popular, often swiftly. Predict the end of the world tomorrow and most people will yawn. Predict it in a century, and some will listen, even start building an ark (figuratively). But predict that it will become inevitable if something doesn’t change in fifty years, and suddenly (nearly) everyone (important) scrambles to change whatever needs changing. We can see this in climate hysteria, and we’ll keep seeing it as long as someone with power gets something out of it. For example, now one of the biggest names in the climate change hysteria has changed his tune.

Although climate change will have serious consequences—particularly for people in the poorest countries—it will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future. Emissions projections have gone down, and with the right policies and investments, innovation will allow us to drive emissions down much further.

Bill Gates, October 2025

But which prognostication do we think will people remember? His earlier pronouncements about the end of the world in line with Broadway Al Gore of St Albans and his bunch, providing we don’t end industrial society, or the later “yeah, it’ll be tough for some, but the sky ain’t falling?”

No one is interested in houses that aren’t on fire. No one is interested in fires that don’t require massive government intervention to extinguish.

Journalistic truisms

The ice age predictions didn’t come with “we can fix this” programs requiring massive state intervention into every aspect of human life, like the global warming/climate change alarums have. Gate’s prediction, too, has nothing politicians and bureaucracies can use in their campaigns to gain more money and power. It’s worth noting that Erlich passed away last month at age 93. Ya gotta wonder if he had anything to say about how wrong he was about, well, pretty much everything he predicted. Most journalistic outlets just announced his demise; few mentioned his erroneous predictions, which is not surprising.

Predicting the end of the world has become nothing more than a power grab.

Why The Samurai Lost Japan: A Study of Miscalculation and Folly

My co-author and I have endured a great deal of criticism about our failure analysis by those who insist that the Japanese leaders who attacked the West in 1941 felt they could dictate terms on the Potomac. Well, no; most only ever felt they might just break even.

Some predictions are more dangerous than others.

And Finally...

On 18 April:

1942: James Doolittle and his eighteen B-25 raiders launch from USS Hornet 250 miles east of their intended launch point. They would reach Japan around noon, catching the Japanese flat-footed. The physical damage they did was negligible; the psychological damage great and lasting.

1943: Betty Tramer and Hudson Beatty were joined in matrimony in a small ceremony in Detroit, Michigan. The groom, on leave from the Army, remained in town for another five days before he was off again to Ft. Bragg, thence to France. Dad would return in 1944.

And today is NATIONAL COLUMNISTS’ DAY, commemorating the death of Ernie Pyle on Ie Jima Island on this day in 1945. A well-known human interest columnist before the war, Pyle won a Pulitzer Prize in 1944 for his reporting on “GI Joe,” the common soldier.

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This is a riff on a Bradford Morrow article of the same name on the Literary Hub from January 2025

Imagine waking up one morning and deciding to become William Shakespeare. You have fantasized about it for years, and now you’re taking the fateful step. Overcome by a heady mixture of zeal, naivete, and hubris, you’re freed from feelings of shame or guilt. Although you live in the late 18th rather than the early 17th Century, time won’t be an impediment for you because you’re gifted, studious, and even visionary in a deranged sort of way. Your father is a renowned collector of the original Shakespeare works, an authority in the field, so this transition is in your blood. Most important, when you present Dad with your handiwork, he will finally come to love you.

William Henry Ireland (1775-1835)

You find some period paper, mix the correct tone of iron gall ink, sharpen your quill. Then, you write a love letter to your wife, “Anne Hatherrewaye” and attach to it a lock of his—well, your—hair bound elegantly with pink and white silk thread you find in your mother’s sewing basket. Next, you scribe some hitherto unknown poems for Anne and, emboldened, fabricate passages of the original manuscripts of Hamlet and King Lear. You produce missives to Queen Elizabeth I. Careful not to create anachronisms, you autograph and annotate the margins of books printed before that other Shakespeare’s death in 1616.

Out of fear that one of the Elizabethan playwright’s legitimate descendants might step forward to lay claim to the growing sheaf of valuable artifacts you’ve so expertly forged, you counterfeit a genealogy that proves the trove is rightfully yours. You draft a legal document, and in it, your alter ego gives him this archive in 1613, because he was grateful to be rescued from the River Thames by one of your imaginary ancestors. You even manufacture a coat of arms that combines your family’s with his.

Your distinguished father is so proud of you for discovering these miraculous long-lost treasures, he publishes a book to memorialize your achievement. To your anxious delight, Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments under the Hand and Seal of William Shakspeare [sic] becomes a bestselling cause célèbre in 1796, the same year Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk appears, a lurid Gothic novel that also relies upon deceits and masked identities. It isn’t long before your worst fears come true, and eagle-eyed critic Edmund Malone accuses you of fraud that same fraught year, destroying your reputation. Soon, you confess. Ireland is one of the more notorious con men in the history of literary forgery, as old as literature itself.

As soon as man set foot on the slopes of Parnassus, the shadow of the forger fell on the path behind him. The first historian records the first literary fraud.

E.K. Chambers, The History and Motives of Literary Forgeries, 1891

Chambers refers to Herodotus—heralded by Cicero as the “Father of History” and excoriated as the “Father of Lies” by Plutarch since he played fast and loose with historical facts, concocting events in his Histories whenever he didn’t have first-hand knowledge and it suited his purposes. The faker of history, however, told the truth when he fingered its first forger.

Onomacritus of Athens (c. 530–480 BC)

For reasons we can only guess, based on the motivations of later forgers, this devious chresmologue (compiler of oracles), started inventing his own prophecies and verses, interleaving them with those of poet-polymath Musaeus of Athens’s originals. Herodotus accurately states that when one Lasus of Hermione, a lyric poet, snitched, they inevitably caught Onomacritus, and exiled him to Persia, where he simply continued his faux-oracular shenanigans, even urging Xerxes the Great to invade Greece, which he did.

Eugene Field II (1887-1944)

The son of the 19th Century author of children’s verse like “Wynkyn, Blynken, and Nod” and “Little Boy Blue,” Field II specialized in faking Abraham Lincoln documents, forging the president’s ownership autograph in books from his uncle’s library. After the president’s assassination in 1865 and well into the next century, members of this cohort of Lincoln “specialists” were busy reinventing honest Abe’s life and work. Today, Field II is part of a large rogues’ gallery of Lincoln forgers.

Henry Woodhouse (1884-1970)

Born in Italy, Mario Terenzio Enrico Casalegno changed his name after being released from prison for manslaughter in upstate New York. Unbowed, he reinvented himself as a credible scientist, aeronautics expert, economist, historian and forger.

Woodhouse—or Colonel Woodhouse, or Dr. Woodhouse, as he styled himself while ascending into higher echelons of society—produced fake Lincoln documents and missives by the signers of the Declaration of Independence. He even forged letters by his newfound friends Teddy Roosevelt, Amelia Earhart, and Alexander Graham Bell, to name a few. At some point Woodhouse positioned his creations side by side with authentic materials—not unlike his ancient predecessor, Onomacritus—though he did so in order to sell them at Gimbels Department Store in Manhattan, not archive them in the repositories of the tyrant Pisistratus in Athens. And while he served time for killing a fellow cook (he was a professional cook, too) and his illicit expertise was sometimes called into question, the good doctor Woodhouse was, astonishingly, never exposed as a forger during his lifetime.

If Abraham Lincoln has the unhappy distinction of being among the most forged of historical figures—maybe the most frequently forged of all—at least he attracted the best of the worst. Others famous for their first-rate simulacra of Lincoln documents are Harry D. Sickles (Field II’s partner-in-crime), John Laffite (or Laflin—names are fluid in the forgers’ subculture), and the masterly if careless Charles Weisberg, who died in Lewisburg Prison in Pennsylvania, serving one of several sentences after being convicted on fraud charges. The ink he used in supposed Civil War documents was wrong for the era. He wrote lengthy Lincoln letters, though Lincoln himself tended toward brevity. His last gaffe was to write an authorial inscription in Katherine Mansfield’s posthumously published The Dove’s Nest. You can, as a wise man once said, always get it right most of the time.

Joseph Cosey (1887-1950)

Born Martin Coneely, Cosey ran away from home and led a solitary, shady existence as a small-time crook, living hand to mouth as he developed a taste for alcohol and phony Lincoln letters. Cosey produced many thousands of unsurpassed forgeries of Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Edgar Allan Poe with legendary ease. If you bought him a drink at a bar, he would knock out a masterful forgery for you on the spot; buy him another, get another. An unknown but likely considerable number of his forgeries remain unidentified to this day, reposing in private collections and temperature-controlled archives of institutions around the world. Scholars even cited some of them unwittingly in biographies of Poe and others, perverting our knowledge of influential writers and historical figures, revising American history itself. The mere mention of Cosey can provoke an apoplectic response from otherwise refined, mannerly collectors of 19th-century Americana.

We can appreciate the exasperation of being deceived by Cosey even decades after his mysterious disappearance and probable death in 1950. To buy unknowingly an immaculate fake for the same money that an original fetches, only to learn later that it’s by Cosey, not Jefferson or Twain, must be a vexing and expensive misstep. Forgers less skilled than Cosey have tricked even the most experienced collectors.

Thomas J. Wise (1859-1937)

Equal in skill to Cosey, but with an antithetical lifestyle and approach to forgery, Wise was the well-liked, esteemed dean of book collecting in his day and an illustrious bibliographer—president of the Bibliographical Society, no less. His Ashley Library was among England’s finest in private hands, subsidized by his shrewd dealings as a behind-the-scenes bookseller. He also covertly printed severely limited editions of pamphlets by the likes of Tennyson, Kipling, Rossetti, and Swinburne, editing them together from genuine published texts, then falsely dating them earlier than their first editions. Any serious, completist collector of one of his counterfeited writers really had to add these manufactured rarities to their holdings.

Given Wise’s impeccable reputation, together with the fact that he catalogued his fakes alongside genuine first editions in his erudite, elegant bibliographies, the scheme was, for a long time, a failsafe. Offering them a “newly discovered” Browning, Shelley, or Ruskin satisfied prospective buyers, and Wise usually received money. The British Museum was happy to pay the then-strong price of three guineas for a copy of his George Eliot pamphlet, Brother and Sister Sonnets, by Marian Lewes.

An intrepid pair of young rare book dealers, John W. Carter and Henry Graham Pollard, who published their shocking landmark bibliographic investigation, An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets, ran Wise to ground in 1934, three years before Wise died. While the authors never explicitly accused him of wrongdoing, controversy swirled around him, and he went to his grave denying any involvement.

Given what a precision craft forgery is, it’s intriguing that pride, precociousness, diffidence, depression, alcoholism, and a tendency to suicide feature in the lives of many of its finest practitioners.

While some are gregarious, like Wise, and others reclusive, like Cosey, most major forgers possessed the intellect, creativity, and energy to have pursued legitimate careers as historians, poets, professors, and the like, socially negotiable but for one countermanding trait. All forgers—even those who create fakes to make ends meet—share a compulsion to outwit experts and outmaneuver authorities.

The elite among them try to transcend accepted reality, nudge their bizarre way into the known, and be a player in history from a skewed and illegal angle. The forger’s own genius temporarily subsumes the genius of an authentic writer, which dovetails with it. With a defiant, willful, and full flowering of hubris, they aspire briefly to become the very person they forge. It is an intoxicating enterprise, this fusion of imagination and chicanery.

A white collar crime as sophisticated as it is deplorable.

Eventually, experts identify and expose most forgeries, just like most deceits unravel. Examples abound. In one recent case, a Galileo document dating from 1610, with historically groundbreaking sketches and notes depicting the orbits of Jupiter’s moons, stored at the University of Michigan Library for a century before being outed in August 2022 as the work of the infamous 20th Century Italian forger, Tobia Nicotra. Following extensive research into the document, focusing on a telltale watermark of the paper used by Nicotra, the library announced that their once-priceless “jewel” was a fake and, as a result, the revisionist history of Galileo prompted by this manuscript required yet another revision.

One might reasonably assume that all such proven forgeries would instantly lose their value and become worthless curiosities, but this is not always the case.

Indeed, some counterfeits and forgeries are collectible in themselves and even boast values similar to the originals. In the Sotheby’s October 18, 2024 sale of books from the magnificent Renaissance library of T. Kimball Brooker, an authentic 1502 copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy—one of eight known copies printed on vellum in Venice at the Aldine press, beautifully illuminated, brought $165,100. Several lots later, the Gabiano-Trot forgery of the same book printed on vellum just a year after in Lyon, France—the first edition of Dante ever printed outside Italy—sold at auction for a competitive $158,750. The intrigue behind Lyoness Aldine counterfeits is the stuff of legend, and in the history of intellectual property theft it is hardly surpassable for prowess, guts, and mendacity.

Were there a Forgers Hall of Fame—or, Infamy—influential sleight-of-handwriting artists would certainly include the precocious, deeply troubled

Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770)

As a boy, Chatterton brilliantly forged the spurious, inspired “Rowley” poems that would have a major impact on the Romantic poets Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley. Precoious and deeply troubled, Chatterton killed himself in London at just 17.

James MacPherson (1736-1796)

The Scottish poet, politician, and collector claimed to have discovered and translated a Scottish/Gaelic epic from the third century by a Bard named Ossian. Though the subject of withering attacks from critics like Samuel Johnson, who claimed the “Ossian cycle” was a fraud, MacPherson’s forgery proved popular and is credited, for worse or better, with helping to fashion Scotland’s national self-image.

Robert Spring (1813-1876)

Spring migrated from England to America, erased his past, and set up an antiquarian bookshop in Philadelphia, where he began forging payment orders and letters by George Washington and others. Authorities arrested him, and he fled to Canada, but he returned to America, leaving a trail of fake documents before they apprehended him again. Like Cosey and Wise, Spring has the distinction of being collected in his own right as an upmarket forger whose work, whether identified as fake, is no doubt held in the archives of prestigious collections. Many, if not most, university or public libraries of any size could mount an exhibit of literary forgeries.

Good artists copy. Great artists steal.

Pablo Picasso

Forgers do both. And whether we think of them as twisted imitators, diabolical artificers, antiauthoritarian heroes, or whatever else, it is reasonable to believe that they will continue to cast shadows where legitimate writers tread. As E.K. Chambers long ago suggested, those of us who value originals over fakes will ever owe gratitude to the Lasus of Hermione, Edmund Malones, Carter and Pollards of the world for revealing the truth. After all, the history of literary forgery is still actively being made. More than one bookseller friend of mine is even now involved in exposing brazen forgeries of iconic modern writers.

This kind of ongoing work represents just the kind of erudite, diligent, passionate investigation that will bring forgers to heel at least most of the time. For as long as writers write and forgers forge, there will be astute, idealistic book sleuths—often book dealers, auction houses, and librarians—shining a true light into devious shadows.

The Past Not Taken: Three Novellas

The Truxton Archive at New England’s Crest University is a trove of over 20,000 documents, with an unclear provenance. Some of those documents could upend our view of America’s past, but may also be forgeries. How to tell the difference?

Curtis Durand walks us through the painstaking process of detecting fakes, showing us how our history books are written.

And Finally...

On 11 April:

1814: Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, signs the Treaty of Fontainebleau, abdicating his throne and ending the War of the Sixth Coalition, which had been raging for two years. Though stripped of his power, he kept the title and sailed off to his first exile on the island of Elba.

2007: Kurt Vonnegut dies in Manhattan, age 84, of complications from a fall when he hit his head. The author of Cat’s Cradle, Sirens of Titan and other absurdist novels, he is best known for his semi-autobiographical Slaughterhouse Five, or, The Children’s Crusade, partly based on his experience in Schlachthof fünf, where he sheltered from the British bombing of Dresden in January 1945.

And today is NATIONAL SUBMARINE DAY, commemorating this date in 1900 when the US Navy accepted its first true submarine, Holland IV, from her builders at Newport, Rhode Island.

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There were several events and phenomena in Japan’s history that supplied ample fuel to a simmering fire that seemed to have been burning in the minds of much of the military and naval leadership of Japan before 1941. While much of Japan was quietly intent on merely surviving, the dominant social group in the archipelago was constantly trying to either stay in charge or justify having been in charge. This essay is one of several that visit the most important elements of samurai rage against the West and their own subjects, and their constant fear of being overthrown or even contradicted. As shown by the various “insults” and momentous events in Japan over the centuries, the formation of movements and societies and the ensuing incidents happened all too easily. Too, Japan and the Japanese were apparently masters at holding a grudge.

Peasant riots and famines were nothing particularly new in 20^th Century Japan, but in July 1918 a series of disturbances without precedent in scope and violence broke out. Mid-1918 rice prices, already elevated by the labor and shipping shortages of 1917 brought about by WWI and the Siberian adventure, were spiraling out of control. A staple in both rural and urban areas, the government had made the situation worse by buying up all the rice they could on the open market to feed the IJA in Russia. While prices of everything were also rising, rice was more important to the farmers, who still made up more than half the population. Especially rice farmers, whose crop was regularly subsidized, felt they weren’t getting a big enough piece of the broker’s margins: in some areas, brokers increased the price of rice by over 1000%.

On 23 July 1918, a peaceful petitioning in the fishing village of Uozu in the Toyama Prefecture quickly turned ugly. Soon strikes, looting and bombing of police stations and government offices were widespread throughout Japan. Over 66,000 people were involved in over four hundred separate incidents that led to some 25,000 arrests and over eight thousand convictions. Penalties ranged from fines to hanging.

The outbreak of lawlessness during wartime (the IJN was heavily involved from the Mediterranean to the Gulf of Baja to the Coral Sea, and the IJA had sent about 45,000 troops to Siberia and was sending more) stunned the government of Terauchi Masatake, which took responsibility and resigned on 29 September. But the inability to manage consumer prices and goods availability was a bigger concern, one that Japan was unsure how to address. What seemed clear was that Japan could not feed her rapidly growing population with indigenous farmers, which triggered more imports from Korea and Taiwan. These riots, particularly the most vicious and widespread of them, could have finally pushed the samurai to decide that Japan could only fulfill its need for resources to support its growing population by looking outside the archipelago.

Hara Takashi stepped into the office of Prime Minister on 28 September 1918. He was the first civilian (he had never served in the military), commoner (born in a samurai family, he chose to be classified as a commoner), and Christian (he attended a French parochial school and had been baptized a Catholic at 19) to hold the office of Prime Minister. He had served in the Foreign Office and as a reporter, but by 1918 he was president of the Constitutional Association of Political Friendship (Rikken Seiyūkai), the largest political party in the Lower House of the Diet. By 1920, Hara had appointed members of the Seiyūkai to every cabinet post but except the IJA, IJN and Home Affairs ministers.

This was the peak of the Taisho Democracy.

Hara was unpopular with nearly everyone. He disappointed liberals and socialists because he refused to back universal suffrage. As a party politician (something new to Japan anyway), Hara was never popular with either conservatives, bureaucrats or samurai, and the ultranationalists hated him.

While Hara was in office, Japan took part in the Paris Peace Conference and joined the League of Nations as a founding member. In Korea, he authorized military force to suppress the Sam-Il Movement, but later began more lenient policies aimed at reducing opposition to Japanese rule.

After suppressing the Sam-Il Movement, Hara pursued a conciliatory policy towards the colonies, particularly Korea. He arranged for the political moderate Saitō Makoto to take over as governor-general of Korea. This marked a great liberalization of Japanese rule over Korea—Koreans could even teach their own language in their schools. Hara also sought to encourage a limited amount of self-rule in Korea, so long as it kept in mind that Korea was under Japanese imperial control. Hara’s Korean policies won few supporters: Koreans considered them inadequate, and Japanese considered them excessive.

On the evening of 4 November 1921, Nakaoka Kon’ichi, a right-wing railroad switchman who felt that the Seiyūkai had grown too powerful, stabbed Hara to death at the Tokyo Railroad Station. Even though Nakaoka was released only 13 years after the court convicted him, the crime sent shock waves through the nascent democracy. It was the first assassination of a sitting prime minister since Japan technically became a constitutional democracy. Hara’s death marked the slow decline of the popularity of the Seiyūkai, which slowly faded away.

The Great Kanto Earthquake.

The Great Kanto earthquake on 1 September 1923 devastated much of the Island of Honshu, resulting in up to 140,000 deaths, causing raging fires in Tokyo and wiping out millions in wealth. A false rumor of Korean violence and a Korean independence movement drove the Home Ministry to declare martial law, resulting in the arrest of many menial-labor Koreans all over Japan. The ensuing mob violence may have murdered over 10,000 Koreans and Chinese.

Not wanting to let a crisis go to waste, conservative Japanese commentators interpreted the Kanto earthquake as an act of divine retribution. They scolded the Japanese people for their self-centered, immoral, and extravagant lifestyles. The disaster and the resulting recriminations revealed to Japan an unparalleled opportunity to rebuild Japanese values. In reconstructing the Imperial City (though the palace was largely undamaged), the nation, and the Japanese people, the ’23 earthquake fostered a culture of catastrophe and reconstruction that amplified accusations of moral degeneracy and made the return to ancient, non-Western values that much more strident.

The Toranomon Incident (Toranomon Jiken)

An attempt to kill the Imperial Regent, who would become the Showa Emperor Hirohito, followed this resurgence of Japanese values. On 27 December 1923, the Regent was on his way to the opening of the 48^th Session of the Imperial Diet when, at the Toranomon intersection between the Akasaka Palace and the Diet in downtown Tokyo, Daisuke Namba—student, communist agitator, and son of a member of the Imperial Diet—fired a small pistol at the future Showa’s carriage. The bullet shattered a window on the carriage, injuring a chamberlain, but the Regent was unharmed.

It was motivated partly by the would-be assassin’s leftist ideology, and also by a strong desire to avenge the death of Kōtoku Shusui—a pseudonym for Kōtoku Denjirō, a radical journalist credited with introducing anarchism to Japan, executed in the aftermath of the High Treason Incident in 1910. Although Namba claimed he was rational (and the court agreed), authorities proclaimed him insane to the public, sentenced to death on 13 November 1924, and executed two days later.

Prime Minister Yamamoto (a common name in Japan) Gonnohyoe took responsibility for the Toranomon Incident and resigned, along with his cabinet and several other top officials. Kiyoura Keigo, who presided over a cabinet made up entirely of members of the House of Peers who were not associated with any political party, replaced him. This was extremely unpopular at an age when political parties were demanding more representation. The government cited later the Toranomon Incident as one justification for the Peace Preservation Law of 1925, but Kiyoura’s government lasted only six months. The incident enabled the military and police to round up and liquidate many Communists, socialists, anarchists, and other unwelcome elements in the Japanese commonweal.

The Showa Financial Crisis (Shōwa Kin’yū Kyōkō)

After World War I, Japan briefly enjoyed a small business boom, like much of the rest of the world, investing heavily in production capacity in what proved to be a tiny economic bubble. But then the rice riots of 1918 inflated prices, and after 1920 came an economic slowdown.

The Great Kanto Earthquake triggered an economic depression, which led to widespread business failures. The Wakatsuki Reijirō government intervened through the Bank of Japan by issuing discounted “earthquake bonds” to overextended banks. In January 1927, when the government proposed to redeem these bonds, rumors spread that the banks holding these bonds would go bankrupt, which caused a run on the banks. Over thirty banks, including the Bank of Taiwan and the second-tier zaibatsu financial institution Suzuki Shoten, went under. Wakatsuki requested an emergency decree to allow the Bank of Japan to extend emergency loans to save these banks, but the Privy Council denied his request, forcing him to resign.

Fervently anti-communist Tanaka Giichi succeeded Wakatsuki. Tanaka staunched the bleeding with a three-week bank holiday and emergency loans. The parliamentary elections of 1927 had sustained Tanaka’s government in office by only one seat. Because of the collapse of many smaller banks, the large financial branches of the five great zaibatsu houses could dominate Japanese finances until 1945.

Since it was the first full year of the reign of the Showa Emperor Hirohito (who inherited the throne on 25 December 1926), the crisis got his name. It started out as a financial panic and was a foreshadowing of the Great Depression, but it is also a lesson in the cumulative effect of financial shocks.

The 15 March Incident (San Ichi-go jiken)

Alarm over renewed activity by the proscribed Japan Communist Party in 1928 led to the 15 March Incident, in which the Special Higher Police arrested over 1,600 Communists—actual and suspected—under the Public Safety Preservation Law of 1925.

The show trials that followed were intended to reveal as much about the inner workings of the Japanese communists as possible, highlighting their connections with the labor movement and openly leftist organizations. The court found all the defendants guilty, but they pardoned or gave lighter sentences to those who recanted. This was an attempt to “change the direction” (tenkō) of the leftists so that they could embrace the national community. The tenkō policy had a deleterious effect on the rank-and-file in Japanese communist organizations. In the same year, Giichi pushed through an amendment to the law, raising the maximum penalty for thought crimes from ten years to death.

Crossing the Line

In order to reduce tensions in the Tokyo area at the climax of the Aizawa trial in December 1935, the IJA ordered the Imperial Guard Division from Tokyo to Manchuria. Since this unit had many Kōdōha (Imperial Way) members assigned to it, that event would have set back their planned revolution by years. The Kōdōha thus decided that the time was right for direct action. This would become the 26 February Incident (Niniroku Jiken, or 2-26 Incident), the most dangerous and flagrant of all the samurai-triggered “incidents” before 1941.

At first, both Nishida Mitsugi and Kita Ikki, leading lights in the Kōdōha, were against the plan, but when it became clear that the Young Officers (seinen shōkō, another politicized IJA group) were going to act anyway, they provided at least token support. For days before they triggered their plan, they convinced recalcitrant officers to take part. A senior officer later said that they would have lacked replacements if they had punished all officers taking part.

This was the best organized of the prewar “incidents.” The plan was to kill five senior officers and three civilians, from Prime Minister Okada Keisuke to Inspector General of Military Training Watanabe Jōtarō. The conspirators adopted the name “Righteous Army” (gigun), thought up a slogan: “revere the Emperor; destroy the traitors” (Sonnō Tōkan), and took the trouble to write a manifesto, which included:

…Now, as we are faced with great emergencies both foreign and domestic, if we do not execute the disloyal and unrighteous who threaten the kokutai, if we do not cut away the villains who obstruct the Emperor’s authority, who block the Restoration, the Imperial plan for our nation will come to nothing [...] To cut away the evil ministers and military factions near the Emperor and destroy their heart: that is our duty and we will complete it.

The action started off at 5:00 in the morning of 26 February, with the attack on Okada: they got it wrong and instead killed his brother-in-law, who bore a resemblance. They killed Finance Minister Takahashi Korekiyo and Watanabe. They also ransacked the Asahi Shimbun offices and seized the Ministry of War, but they failed to grab the Imperial Palace.

For three days, the situation in Tokyo remained dangerous while the Showa kept asking if the government or the military had suppressed the rebellion. On the morning of 29 February, 22,000 men of the IJA and IJN with 22 tanks surrounded the 1,500 men of the Righteous Army. Some of the insurgent leaders killed themselves, but just as many surrendered. But if they were expecting another sham trial like those that followed the other “incidents,” they were sadly mistaken. The trials were secret (by Imperial decree); nineteen were shot. Because the 26 February attempted coup failed, the IJA removed nearly all Kōdōha members from top positions, sacked nine of fifteen full generals, and Araki resigned. Without the Kōdōha, the Tōseiha (Control faction) lost most of its reason to exist. Although Tōseiha followers gained control of the army, the Kōdōha ideals of spiritual power and imperial mysticism remained embedded, as did its tradition of insubordination by junior officers for “good” causes (Gekokujō). From the outside, people believed the civil authorities had restored the rule of law.

But power in pre-1945 Japan rested not with politicians, but with the samurai.

The military took more control of the civil affairs of everyday life in Japan, culminating in the merging of all political parties into the Imperial Rule Assistance Association (IRAA) that rubber-stamped what the military wanted. After years of chaos in and out of the military, it was time for a breather, but the trials for the 26 February Incident were still going on when the Marco Polo Bridge Incident happened in July 1937. In truth, this was another gekokujō mess that Japan could either exploit or try to clean up. Hoping for a weakness, they chose exploitation.

The die had been cast.

By 1940, the kokutai of Aizawa and the Imperial Rescripts joined with “all the world under one roof” (hakko ichiu) in Japanese political doctrine, teaching that the people belonged to the state and that the Emperor’s rule was divinely inspired. It was through these means that the military tied the Japanese people and the Showa into logical and ethical knots.

Despite the guilty verdict from the 26 February Incident, devotees erected shrines to the “twenty-two samurai” (the nineteen executed, two suicides, and Aizawa) after 1945.

Steele’s Battalion: The Great War Diaries

Breaking with my tradition of plugging related books, I wanted to share part of an e-mail I received from an unexpected, Pulitzer-prize winning fan.

I wanted to share a bit more about what struck me in Steele’s Battalion: The Great War Diaries (the remarkable narrative you’ve crafted of Ned Steele’s journey from Detroit into the hell of the Great War). Right from the opening pages, the way the diary unfolds—a scholar uncovering Steele’s own voice in an old steamer trunk—feels like a literary excavation that invites the reader deep into history itself. There’s such a vivid juxtaposition between Steele’s early sense of duty and the visceral horror he describes as he earns his commission, leads machine-gun units on a Flanders hill, and endures the grim mechanics of life in the trenches. These moments—where exhaustion, terror, friendship, and fleeting beauty coexist on every page—made me feel as if I were experiencing the war through his eyes rather than reading about it on a distant landscape.

What I found especially resonant was the specificity with which each entry captures not just the physical chaos of warfare the mud, the wire, the unending din of guns but also the emotional cadence of Steele’s internal world: his fleeting impressions of ruined towns, his acute awareness of fear and responsibility, and how those seemingly ordinary human thoughts persist amidst extraordinary circumstances. Your voice manages to hold both the relentless brutality of that world and the haunting humanity of the men who lived it.

Donna Tartt, author of The Goldfinch

Unsolicited, unexpected, took a while to figure it out, but there it is. Somebody liked it.

And Finally...

On 4 April:

1581: Queen Elizabeth I dubs Sir Francis Drake a knight on the deck of his flagship, Golden Hind, at Deptford, England. A slaver, privateer, and lifelong seafarer, Drake’s circumnavigation of the Earth, completed the previous September, was the first by an Englishman and the second in history.

1917: The US Senate passes its approval (that they voted on 2 April) for President Wilson’s request for a declaration of war against Germany to the House of Representatives, which would pass the measure on 6 April in Washington, DC. The odd timing was due, according to sources, to procedural difficulties.

And today is NATIONAL VITAMIN C DAY, observing this day in 1932 when vitamin C was first isolated at the University of Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This isolation provided the first concrete proof of the existence of the anti-scorbutic factor—the substance in food that prevents scurvy—and was a crucial step towards understanding vitamin deficiencies and developing synthetic vitamin C supplements.

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This is a riff on an Alexander Lee History Today article by the same name from February 2025

According to some, written history began in the 14th Century. It may seem ridiculous, but the Phantom Time conspiracy theory has serious implications. Except for those that include aliens, there are more conspiracy theories about history than anything else. Some people believe that the Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare’s plays, the Illuminati assassinated JFK, and the Merovingians descended from Christ.

But none of these come close to the weirdness that Jean Hardouin dreamed up. A 17th Century French priest, Hardouin convinced himself that almost every book written before about 1300 AD—including the Gospels, holding that all Greek and Latin literature—was a forgery.

Down the rabbit hole

Hardouin did not start out as a conspiracy theorist. Born in 1646 in a little town near Brittany’s Atlantic coast, he had shown promise as a classical scholar. After joining the Jesuits and completing his studies, he published groundbreaking editions of Themistius’ speeches and Pliny’s Natural History. He pioneered the ‘scientific’ study of numismatics. Louis XIV even commissioned him to write a history of the Church councils.

Do you think that I’d have got up at 4 AM my whole life, just to say what others had already said before me?

Hardouin

Hardouin’s brilliance was his undoing, and became desperate to say something new, something all writers can relate to. He could not resist the unusual, even if it bordered on the ridiculous. He took pride in his “infallible” nose for heresy and believed he had discovered a truly objective yardstick for history in numismatics—the study of coins.

It was this that led him down the rabbit hole. In August 1690, he suspected that something wasn’t quite right with the works of the Church Fathers. Their chronology didn’t stack up with what the coins seemed to suggest. Worse still, their orthodoxy was dubious, as was the authorship of some of their texts. For almost two years, he slogged away, hoping to assuage his doubts. By May 1692, he concluded that the only explanation for these anomalies was that everything was fake.

In Introduction to the Critique of Ancient Writings (Ad Censuram Scriptorum Veterum Prolegomena), Hardouin explained that the Christian Church Fathers transmitted their doctrine orally for the first 1,300 years of the Church’s history and not set down in writing. In the late 14th Century, “atheist” monks suddenly undermined the Church’s authority by introducing heresy into its teachings. To do this, they fabricated all the works traditionally ascribed to the Church Fathers and the Scholastics. According to Hardouin, they had then buttressed their deceit by forging almost the whole of classical literature, too. In fact, other than a few inscriptions, the only ‘genuine monuments of Latin antiquity’ were Cicero, Pliny’s Natural History, Virgil’s Georgies, and Horace’s Satires and Epistles.

The implications of Hardouin’s theory were even weirder.

If someone forged thousands of years of documents, did they also invent people or events that external evidence (coins, inscriptions) did not confirm? If people invented single events and personalities, why not entire centuries?

For a long time, these implications lay dormant. But shortly after WWII, the Russo-American psychiatrist Immanuel Velikovsky used apparent discrepancies between ancient texts to suggest not only that Egyptian history needed completely redrawing but also that the Greek “Dark Ages” never happened. About 40 years later, a German editor called Heribert Illig took this a step further. Shifting his focus further forward in time, Illig claimed that the Holy Roman Emperor Otto III and Pope Sylvester II invented the entire period 614-911 AD as part of a vast conspiracy to position themselves at the symbolically significant year 1000.

It gets worse.

In a sprawling, seven-volume screed entitled History: Fiction or Science?, Russian mathematician Anatoly Fomenko argues everything before 1000 AD was simply “invented” by early-modern scholars like Joseph Justus Scaliger. Fomenko claims that whenever Scaliger came across an event that was described in two different sources, he ascribed it to two different dates, and sometimes even two different locations. Similarly, a single figure could be split into two, or a new person created out of several others. Soon enough, Scaliger ended up with two chronologies: one covering more recent history was real; the other covering everything before a ‘phantom copy.’ In this version, Jesus was born in 1152 AD and died in 1185. Plutarch was the same person as Petrarch, and Solomon was Suleiman the Magnificent. Fomenko thinks these claims are perfectly obvious because we only know most ancient texts from medieval copies, and that many of the eclipses mentioned in “antique” documents could not have happened when they are said to have.

Turtles all the way down

How have perfectly intelligent people, like Hardouin, come to embrace such bizarre theories? Psychological factors certainly play a part. Like any conspiracy theory, the phantom time hypothesis identifies a villain responsible for something wrong with the world. Once the heroic truth-teller exposes this fraud, it will reveal an even deeper truth. Then there is the lack of faith in authority. Hardouin lived amid the birth pangs of modern Biblical criticism and published his Prolegomena shortly after Louis XIV’s clampdown on Protestant heresy. Fomenko developed his ideas while the USSR was in the grip of glasnost.

But a far more important reason seems to be the nature of history itself. Or rather, the difficulty of separating history from pseudo-history. At root, this is a question of truth. Although historians are notionally interested in establishing the truth, testing the past isn’t easy. Our evidence simply doesn’t provide us with the impersonal facts that might allow that. Rather than being a window onto a past reality, documents—our primary source of evidence—are components of that reality. It doesn’t matter what sort of text we are dealing with: a chronicle, a political pamphlet, or a shopping list. They are all an attempt to structure, shape, or supplement the world from which they sprang, even if they purport to just describe it. Even the words they use can be tricky. As many post-modern philosophers have argued, words do not have a fixed relationship to the external world but derive their meaning from use. There is no hard truth in the sense that scientists might recognize. Every element of every document depends on its meaning on every other. As Terry Pratchett put it, it’s turtles all the way down.

If we are to understand any document, we need to understand how it functioned as part of a whole and worked in relation to other documents. To do this, we need some criteria for evaluating the sources. But where the boundary of reason lies isn’t always obvious. Take Hardouin. He was looking for a scientific way of overcoming the difficulties with which documents were fraught. He saw coins as solid, external evidence with which to fix dates. Since the philological techniques he had used on Pliny had served him so well, he saw no reason not to apply them to a wider range of documents. The same methods had detected forgeries before.

In the 15th Century, Lorenzo Valla exposed the Donation of Constantine, which the papacy had long used to justify its claims to plenitude of power, as a forgery. So why not the others? Fomenko has done much the same, except with astronomical data and mathematics.

The weakness of this, of course, is its myopia. However reasonable such scientific methods may seem, they are uniquely unsuited to the messy business of history. Hardouin failed to recognize that, in seeking to judge texts against a fixed standard of quality—whether in Latin, Greek, or matters of orthodoxy—he was reading them subjectively and anachronistically. So too with Fomenko’s use of eclipses. But once we use such methods to establish that texts are forged, we cannot evaluate any single document against any other. The very basis of historical reasoning collapses, and this destroys any possibility of refutation. That leaves only conspiracy theories.

Phantom time

So why does this matter? None of these phantom time theories has ever carried much weight with historians. The academic establishment rejected Hardouin’s Prolegomena almost as soon as it came out. Mathurin Veyssiere de La Croze wrote not one, but two attacks on him; the Jesuit Order urged the pope to ban his writings altogether. He repudiated his theory in public, but in private he continued to churn out similar ideas until his death. Every historian who has come across their work also vilified Velikovsky, Illig, and Fomenko.

But there’s still a hard core of people who believe them, Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov among them. And that is dangerous. Not because history can’t sustain vigorous debate. It can. Rather, because entertaining such ideas legitimates them.

If it is legitimate to doubt the existence not just of events, but of entire centuries, with no possibility of refutation, it is legitimate to dispute everything and use false histories for anything.

The Persistent Past: Discovering The Steele Diaries

Dealing with sources is hard enough; working through the charlatans of the history trade just makes it harder. Maria and Curtis, working with unique sources, also have to watch for the possibility that everything they were working with had no substance…until they found their proof.

And Finally...

On 28 March:

1854: Britain and France declare war on Russia, joining the Ottoman Empire in the Crimean War. Disputes over control of holy places in Jerusalem (Catholic vs. Orthodox) and Russia’s growing power threatened both British trade routes and Ottoman sovereignty.

1949: Astronomer Fred Hoyle coins the term “big bang” on BBC Radio in London, England. Meant as sarcasm, the term was a way to describe the opposition to the single-point origin of the universe.

And today is NATIONAL SOMETHING ON A STICK DAY, which strikes me as odd because it seems the whole point of going to the State Fair is to eat something deep fried and on a stick…and around here, the State Fair is in late summer.

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The devices and methods developed for siege warfare before the 17th Century ran from the ingeniously simple to the diabolically complex. No formula for siege has ever been proof against all defenses, and no defense was ever completely impervious to assault. Engineering was the principal discipline employed in siegecraft, but diplomacy, animal husbandry, chemistry, espionage, and horticulture were also put to use. Both attackers and defenders employed their finest minds and the most desperate measures to conduct and to break sieges.

The Decision to Lay Siege

Though the Romans were the first known builders of extensive siege trains, savvy warriors probably practiced siege operations millennia before the bad boys on the Tiber started flexing their muscle. The Egyptians undertook the first recorded siege in history at Megiddo, just after the first recorded battle in 1457 BC. Middle Eastern cities like Jericho and Aleppo had walls twenty or more feet thick at the base that surrounded the center of the town, and enclosed several wells. Although low-mortar construction explains much of this thickness, walls didn't need to be over 20 feet high if they only had to keep out nomadic brigands. The gate tower remnants at the 5th Century BC Acre fortress, the elaborate towers near Troy VIIa, and the triple walls of Antioch were too elaborate and expensive unless they had to withstand serious attacks.

The strategic situation for sieges was never simple. An attacker had two contradicting imperatives in a siege: overcoming the enemy’s defenses—which often required painstaking construction—and not becoming a sitting target for a relief force, which meant they had to work fast. Most attackers were on the move, often far from home. Sieges, even of simple curtain-wall fortifications, required equipment not obtainable locally, but they mostly required time that few attackers wanted to spend standing still. Thus, any attacking force had to be ready to conduct a siege when they invaded another country or, sometimes, had to be prepared to ignore a potential siege situation. The first required bringing specialized parts for siege engines in the initial invasion, even if only to be used just-in case. The second was to prosecute the conflict in such a way that any bottled-up forces were not important to victory. While the siege was going on, the attacker was usually feeding off the countryside, but not always. Henry V conducted his 1415 siege of Harfleur after the French had already destroyed much of the surrounding area, but Henry was ready and paid and fed his men using his fleet from England. The Mongols under the Khans didn’t have that concern and were content to do with the area around 14th Century Kiev what they usually did, which was to take what they needed and destroy what they didn’t. Scipio and his cosmopolitan Roman army plundered Carthage during the three-year 2nd Century BC siege, knowing that it was his job to crush Rome’s chief rival once and for all.

The Decision to Be Besieged

If the attacker was willing to wage a siege, the defender usually had only a few days or even hours to take their forces and resources into their forts. At which point the clock began, and it could run for a very long time. The siege of Troy was traditionally ten years long; Venetian-ruled Candia, on the island of Crete, fell after an Ottoman siege that lasted over two decades (1648-1669). Preparing to defend against a siege was not much removed, logistically, from conducting one. A defender had to be prepared to live essentially stationary, sometimes for years at a time.

This meant that a besieged fortification had to have a source of food and water to survive. They also needed to defend the place, repair breaches in the walls, and repair any other damage done to the structures while the enemy was waiting to exploit any weakness. So, the besieged needed labor and raw materials. Builders repairing a wall could not also fight off attacks at the same time, so the labor force had to include at least some non-combatants. Getting ready for a siege was easier than it looked, since fortresses were often either cities themselves or were near them. Walled towns and cities dotted Europe and the Middle East. The Templars on Malta had an underground cistern that took nearly three years to fill. Chinese city planners buried enough material to recreate half the city of Beijing before the 15th Century. In 1658, Copenhagen decreed that all male citizens had to join "fertile women” and approved the death of women who did not bear children by their 20th year because of the demands of the siege of the island city.

Raising sieges sometimes created brief alliances. A French force led by Joan of Arc lifted the English siege of Orleans, leading a combination of French nobles who would otherwise not have cooperated if not for her charismatic leadership. A coalition of English and Scottish forces that was only interested in resolving the conflict between Mary of Scotland and Elizabeth I quickly raised the siege of Dunbar in the 16th Century.

If relief was not forthcoming, the fortification had to hold out long enough for its attacker to just give up. If unprepared, famine, drought, plague or fire (intentional or not) could debilitate the besieged early. A combination of famine and disease, combined with a stealthy Greek attack on earthquake-weakened gates, finished the siege of Troy. Caesar built two lines of fortifications at Alesia—one facing in and one out—to hold off the German-Gaul counterattacks that imperiled his 52 BC siege. Gibraltar, besieged fourteen times in its history, has become a hollow rock, where much of the population lived underground for decades.

Smashing the Walls

Fortifications of any description begin with a defined space enclosed by an obstacle. This runs the gamut from stacks of sticks a few feet high to mortar and block ramparts yards thick and dozens of feet high surrounded by moats, canals, or other water-filled obstacles. But too, they depend on some level of active defense so that any attacker outside the walls, which can never be absolutely impervious, can be driven away from whatever damage they can do. Fortress walls need to be wide enough at the top to accommodate defenders and their equipment. The walls of Harlech in Wales are nearly ten feet wide; parts of the wall surrounding the Forbidden City in Beijing are nearly twenty yards wide. Most fortresses employed other means of impeding attack, including moats, ditches, smaller fortifications, and more movable obstacles like abatis and even simple fences. A glacis wider than any French cannon could reach protected the Lines of Torres Vedras in Portugal during the Peninsula War in the 19th Century.

The simplest means for an attacker to breach a wall is to knock it down. As simple as that sounds, the measures the defenders could take to prevent it made it difficult. Most of the advantage was on the side of the defender since initiative was moot and surprise was difficult, at best. Which left direct assault, but before gunpowder, this rarely destroyed or even damaged the walls themselves. Attacking over the walls was risky and costly in terms of human life, and rarely successful. The defenders had most of the advantages and nearly none of the liabilities that the attacker had during an assault. Therefore, brute force attacks with ladders and towers were infrequently staged.

There were novelties used in siege warfare that often worked; both attackers and defenders employed flame, biological and chemical weapons with varying effects. Defending against the Romans from 214 to 212 BC, Syracuse’s Archimedes devised several counter-siege weapons that kept attackers at bay for nearly two years, including a sulfur gas ejector. The outnumbered Byzantines developed both liquid and solid fuel weapons in a family of devices known as Greek Fire. Polish-Lithuanian forces threw plague-infested meat over the walls of Marienburg in 1410; days later, the Teutonic Order defenders hurled plague-infested bodies back. The Spanish forces at Tenochtitlán in 1541 built warships on the surrounding lake to interdict Aztec supply lines.

Sieges could make or break an empire.

A besieger could never afford to get too weak while besieging; there was always a possibility that an army once besieged might defeat any retreating army. Once the siege of Troy began, after about nine years of war, the Greek’s relentless campaign that had cowed all of Troy’s allies in Asia Minor and the eastern Mediterranean weakened the once-prosperous kingdom. A Norse kingdom that ranged and dominated northern Europe from the Don to the Mersey undertook a siege of Paris from 885 to 886. Its failure changed the entire balance of power in the Baltic and North Sea.

A siege always brings initiative to a standstill, where the defender and attacker must react to each other instead of acting freely, except to concede. Siege, though popular throughout warfare, is always a risk to both the besieger and the besieged. As technology improved, new tactics and strategies came along in a constant cycle of paper-scissors-rock parity. Even in the 21st Century, siege strategies defy absolute formulation.

The Fire Blitz: Burning Down Japan

American plans before 1941 called for a siege/blockade of Japan, but as the war dragged on, Japan’s leaders didn’t seem interested in giving up. This was part of the reasoning behind the firebombing campaign that began in March 1945.

And Finally...

On 21 March:

3952 BC: According to the Venerable Bede’s De Temporibus ("On Time"), completed in 703 AD, God created the Sun, the Moon, and time on this day. Other scholars would expand and refute his dating of Genesis for centuries.

1918: The first phase of the German 1918 offensive codenamed MICHAEL begins in Flanders. The offensive failed to eject British forces from Flanders before large numbers of American reinforcements joined the war, and ironically, American forces helped stop the offensive’s last attacks in June.

And today is NATIONAL COMMON COURTESY DAY, serving as a reminder to practice simple acts of politeness, respect, and consideration, like saying “please” and “thank you,” holding doors, or letting someone merge in traffic, to improve daily interactions and create a more positive society. It has nothing to do with the 2006 founding of Twitter at New York University on this day, since courtesy and social media don’t meet, ever.

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Happy day, Ev!

This is a riff on a Hoover Institution post.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Amendment I, Constitution of the United States

What are the limits on free speech in America? What aren’t you allowed to say? And who may restrict speech?

MYTH: You can’t yell “fire” in a crowded theater.

FACT: This famous phrase comes from the 1919 Supreme Court case Schenck v. United States, but the full phrase is:

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The author stated that certain kinds of false claims are punishable when they have a tendency to lead to immediate physical harm. However, later precedents have sharply limited the holding. Schenck v. United States introduced the “clear and present danger” test for when speech loses its constitutional protection, and applied that test to uphold restrictions on anti-draft speech during wartime, on the theory that the speech had a tendency to cause draft evasion. However, according to the more recent Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) ruling, authorities can only punish a speaker for incitement if that speaker (1) intends to cause (2) imminent lawless action, and the action is (3) likely to happen.

• “Someone should burn down theaters” is protected speech.

• “Come with me to burn down the theater right now, and bring your torches” is not.

MYTH: “Hate speech” is illegal in the United States.

FACT: There is no Amendment I exception for “hate speech,” and there is no legal definition of “hate speech” under American law. Amendment I protects many viewpoints: hateful, loving, or otherwise. Authorities may restrict genuine threats of violence, but not because of its supposedly hateful viewpoint. Anti-racist threats of violence are just as punishable as racist threats of violence.

MYTH: Misinformation and disinformation are not forms of protected speech.

FACT: Amendment I protects even “knowing lies” about the government, history, science, and so on. Innocent mistakes are even more clearly protected. Some particular kinds of falsehoods are punishable. Classic examples of unprotected speech are defamation (false statements that damage someone’s reputation), fraud (lying to get money or other property), perjury (lying under oath), and false advertising (falsehoods, perhaps even unintentional ones, in commercial advertising). But the government cannot use criminal law or even civil liability to police falsehoods.

MYTH: The government can limit certain views only by controlling the time, place, or manner of their expression.

FACT: The government can impose reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions that are unrelated to the content of speech, so long as such restrictions aren’t too burdensome. But it must apply those restrictions uniformly to speech expressing different views. Indeed, it can’t discriminate based on subject, let alone viewpoint.

MYTH: The government can punish you for burning an American flag.

FACT: The Supreme Court held in Texas v. Johnson (1989) and United States v. Eichman (1990) that the law can’t target flag burning for special punishments. At this writing, this still holds true, recent executive orders notwithstanding. Amendment I protects speech and symbolic expression even when it expresses offensive and anti-American ideas. However, the government can evenhandedly apply neutral laws to flag burning. Someone who steals and burns a flag could face punishment for theft or vandalism. But the law has to be applied equally regardless of whether the person stole a flag or anything else.

MYTH: You’re allowed to exercise your free speech everywhere in America.

FACT: Amendment I restricts the government, but not private individuals or businesses. Its first words are “Congress shall make no law,” and Amendment XIV starts with “No State shall” has been read as extending that precept to state and local governments. Amendment I does not constrain private property owners, including individuals or businesses. There’s nothing unconstitutional about restricting speech at your own dinner table, or in a shopping mall or workplace you own or operate, or in a school or university you run, or the newspaper or magazine you publish, the website you host or the Substack you create. However, some state laws (and, to a modest extent, federal laws) do, in some measure, limit the power of private employers, landlords, places of public accommodation, and educational institutions to restrict speech by employees, tenants, patrons, and students; those rules differ considerably from state to state.

MYTH: Amendment I provides protection for vandalism and trespassing to express a viewpoint.

FACT: Amendment I protects the burning of effigies, but not of buildings. The Constitution protects those waving signs and screaming, but not if they trespass or block traffic to do so. No law negates the validity of another without expressly doing so by legislative intent, and no part of Amendment I invalidates property or personal rights.

The simplest expression of the limits to free speech is: “your right to express yourself ends at the intersection of my nose with your fist.”

Happy Pi Day!

This is the day (3/14…get it?) that Pastafarians celebrate the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or that more rational people observe and discuss pi, the ratio of a circumference to a diameter of a circle. First observed in 1988 by San Francisco physicist Larry Shaw, UNESCO has recognized it as the International Day of Mathematics, and the US Congress has recognized it as Pi Day.

Of course, an irrational number has to have an irrational attachment. In 2005, a Kansas science teacher founded the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster to lampoon his school board’s insistence on including intelligent design in science courses, adopting 14 March as their holiday (the pi again). Different strokes…

The Devil’s Own Day: Shiloh and the American Civil War

One of the most precious freedoms we have is that of expression, and freedom after peaceful expression is just as important. The secession of the slaveholding states, contrary to popular belief in some circles, was not an expression.

And Finally...

On 14 March:

1916: The US Army’s Punitive Expedition into Mexico begins out of Fort Bliss, Texas. John J. Pershing led the Provisional Division ostensibly to capture Pancho Villa amid yet another Mexican revolution/civil war. There’s no sign anyone ever came close, but it gave Pershing valuable administrative experience he’d need in France, and time for the Department of War to reorganize the National Guard.

1933: Maurice Micklewhite/Michael Caine is born in Rotherhithe, London, England. With a distinct Cockney accent, Caine has won two Academy Awards (nominated in five separate decades), three Golden Globes, and a Screen Actors Guild award. Knighted in 2000, by 2017 his films had grossed over $7 billion worldwide.

And today is GENIUS DAY, celebrating the birth of Albert Einstein on this day in 1879, in Ulm, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It’s also CELEBRATE SCIENTISTS DAY and SCIENCE EDUCATION DAY. That Albert was something…

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There were several events and phenomena in Japan’s history that supplied ample fuel to a simmering fire that seemed to have been burning in the minds of much of the military and naval leadership of Japan before 1941. While much of Japan was quietly intent on merely surviving, the dominant social group in the archipelago was constantly trying to either stay in charge or justify having been in charge. This essay is one of several that visit the most important elements of samurai rage against the West and their own subjects, and their constant fear of being overthrown or even contradicted. As shown by the various “insults” and momentous events in Japan over the centuries, the formation of movements and societies and the ensuing incidents happened all too easily. Too, Japan and the Japanese were apparently masters at holding a grudge.

Outlawing Dissent.

To ensure that impure thoughts contaminated no one, the Meiji Emperor issued the Safety Preservation Law (Hoan Jōrei) on 25 December 1894. This Imperial Ordinance was to suppress the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement (Jiyū Minken Undō) that dated from the 1880s. Though this movement was a motivating factor behind the Meiji Constitution and the creation of the Diet, the Meiji and those from the former Satsuma domain had become annoyed with it. In effect, it had outlived its usefulness.

This was the most drastic of the several laws enacted to contain political opposition to the Meiji oligarchy. The law imposed stringent restrictions on the press, public speeches, and political meetings. Article Four of the Law granted the chief of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, with the approval of the Home Minister, the power to banish for three years anyone found inciting disturbances or planning to disrupt public order within seven and a half miles of the Imperial Palace.

Within three days of the law’s promulgation, authorities arrested and expelled hundreds of prominent activists in the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement. Despite the Law being repealed in 1898, the government introduced the more stringent Public Order and Police Law of 1900.

As with the Public Safety Preservation Law of 1894, the Public Order and Police Law of 1900 (Chian Keisatsu Hō), issued by Yamagata Aritomo during his second term as Prime Minister, was used to suppress political dissent and the rising organized labor movements. Besides restrictions on speech, assembly and association, it also specifically prohibited workers from organizing and going on strike.

The 1900 law not only targeted political dissent; it also criminalized the discussion of ideas. In 1920, the authorities prosecuted Morito Tatsuo of Tokyo Imperial University for publishing an article that criticized the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin. Unfortunately, he discussed anarchist ideas in some detail. For the crime of even talking about proscribed ideas in any context whatsoever, Morito spent three months in jail on charges of treason. The government clampdown on dissent further intensified after the 1921 assassination of Prime Minister Hara Takashi.

The Diet deleted a provision of the 1900 ordinance that banned women from political associations in 1922. They deleted the provisions forbidding workers to organize and go on strike in 1926, although they immediately added identical provisions in an amendment to the Public Security Preservation Law of 1925. Slowly, little by little and step by step, dissent in Japan was being made illegal.

The High Treason Incident.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the High Treason Incident (Taigyaku Jiken) is that there was no proof the crime most of the defendants were charged with even took place. Like the Dreyfus case in France, there was never any solid evidence to prove that the accused had committed a crime, or that there was one at all.

On 20 May 1910, police searched the room of Miyashita Takichi, a laborer in Nagano Prefecture, and found materials which could have been used to construct bombs. Investigating further, the police arrested four other men, including the writer Shūsui Kōtoku, and a woman. Soon the prosecutor’s office concluded that they had arrested members of a nationwide conspiracy against the Japanese monarchy: nothing less than a plot to kill the Emperor. Using the case as an excuse, the authorities rounded up and questioned the “social deviants” and others they didn’t like from all over the country. This included socialists, anarchists, communists, and others suspected or known to not like the Imperial system, including four Buddhist monks. The authorities interrogated people who had been imprisoned for years about it. Authorities charged twenty-six people under Article 73 of the Criminal Code, which covered harming or intending harm to the Imperial family. Found guilty on 18 January 1911, the court sentenced two to life imprisonment and the rest to hang—including one monk. The next day, an Imperial Rescript commuted the death sentences of twelve to life imprisonment. Those hanged included Shūsui and the only woman. As tragic as the High Treason Incident was, and as lopsided as was its decision, the affair only reinforced in the samurai mind the fact that certain elements had to be rooted out, and that some ideas had to be suppressed.

The Tokko.

In a move that George Orwell himself would have found extraordinary, in 1911 Japan formed the Special Higher Police (Tokubetsu Kōtō Keisatsu) within the Home Ministry, known in the vernacular as the Tokko. The Tokko, also called the Peace Police (Chian Keisatsu) or, infamously, the Thought Police (Shisō Keisatsu) tasked to investigate and control political groups and ideologies considered a threat to public order. The Tokko served as a civilian counterpart to the military’s Kempeitai and combined both criminal investigation and counter-espionage functions. It was roughly equivalent to the FBI, but with warrant-free powers and a lack of restraint that would drive the ACLU into a frenzy. People have compared the powers of the Tokko to those of the Gestapo.

The Tokko had branches all over Japan and in overseas locations with high concentrations of Japanese subjects (including Shanghai, London, and Berlin) to monitor Japanese socialist and communist activity. A Student Section under the Ministry of Education monitored university professors and students. Within the Ministry of Justice, special “Thought Prosecutors” (shiso kenji) suppressed “thought criminals” either through punishment or through “conversion” back to orthodoxy via reeducation.

The 1 March Rebellion.

But it wasn’t just the Japanese that had to be suppressed. The 1 March/Sam-Il (Korean for 3-1—March 1st) Rebellion/Movement is remarkable for several reasons, but most notably because Korea actually believed that Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points were practical policies that someone was going to implement. After hearing Wilson’s speech at the Paris Peace Conference on 21 January 1919, where he spoke of self-determination, Korean students in Tokyo published a statement demanding Korean self-determination, just as Wilson had said should be available.

It wasn’t, of course—not for Korea, and not for another half-century in Japan. History doesn’t record what happened to the students in Tokyo, but the former Korean Emperor died the same day amid suspicions of poisoning. On 1 March 1919, activists at a restaurant in Seoul and at other locations throughout Korea read a Korean Declaration of Independence, which they signed and sent to the Governor General. The authorities took immediate action and arrested them. But there were also processions and signs and flag-waving by some two million Koreans in over a thousand demonstrations that the Japanese authorities couldn’t control or corral. So they called in the military.

Although scholars dispute what happened next, hundreds or thousands of people died, and some, locked in a church, burned when authorities set it alight. There were certainly thousands of arrests and executions without trials.

While some say the Sam-Il Movement was the birth of the Korean independence movement, it also sent yet another message to the samurai—and to Japan—that political liberalism was dangerous. This was one of the driving principles behind the Public Security Preservation Law of 1925.

Eliminating dissent seemed to be an obsession with the Japanese.

The Public Security (or Peace) Preservation Law (Chian Iji Hō), enacted on 12 May 1925 by the Kato Takaaki administration, was the third and by far the most far-reaching of all the suppressive laws passed in prewar Japan that specifically targeted socialism and communism. The dominant force behind the law was Minister of Justice (and future Prime Minister) Hiranuma Kiichiro.

By using the vague and subjective term kokutai, the law blended politics and ethics. Under it, the law allowed for the imprisonment of anyone who formed an association meaning to disrupt the kokutai (in this case, the system of private property), and anyone who knowingly joined such a group with this goal, could be locked up for ten years. The government could label any political opposition as “altering the kokutai.” Thus, the government outlawed any form of dissent.

Gradually, punishments for communists and their sympathizers—suspected or actual—became more severe. In time, religious organizations of all descriptions—except Shinto—fell within the purview of the Thought Police. They did away with appeals for thought crimes, and eventually, the Ministry of Justice began appointing defense attorneys for thought criminals. The authorities arrested over 70,000 people under the Public Security Preservation Law of 1925, but only about 10% of them reached trial. Only the Russian spy Richard Sorge and his informant Ozaki Hotsumi received the death penalty.

The tools for prosecuting dissent were important for samurai control of Japan. As long as no one could disagree, the samurai had a free hand to express their rage.

Roots of Samurai Rage and Fear: The Road to Destruction

Japan’s journey to its near destruction was long and hard, but the military caste that “led” her on that road tried to guarantee Japan would either triumph over her enemies, real and imaginary, foreign and domestic, or cease to be.

And Finally...

On 7 March:

1775: Captain James Cook in HMS Resolution sights the Oregon coast during his third voyage of exploration in search of the Northwest Passage, naming Cape Foulweather and Cape Perpetua, though he never landed. His voyage was the first to map the North Pacific coast of North America and courted interest in the seals he found there.

1936: Germany reoccupies the Rhineland unopposed by anyone, in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. German officers and other military observers at the time knew that if there had been any resistance whatsoever, the Germans would have pulled back again and Hitler’s government collapsed.

And today is NATIONAL BE HEARD DAY, NOT commemorating this day in 1876 when Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone, but promoting small businesses, encouraging them to use marketing and publicity to gain visibility and compete with larger companies. I could use some of that…

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This is a riff on a History Facts post from March 2025

Dancing mania (AKA dancing plague, choreomania, St. John’s Dance, tarantism, St. Vitus’ Dance) a phenomenon with possible biological causes, occurred primarily in mainland Europe between the 14th and 17th Centuries. There had been many reported outbreaks of “dancing plagues” around the Holy Roman Empire; the earliest in the 7th Century.

One of the earliest occurred in the 1020s in Bernburg, Germany, where peasants began singing and dancing around a church, disturbing a Christmas Eve service. In 1237, a large group of children traveled the 12 miles (20 km) from Erfurt to Arnstadt while jumping and dancing (the Pied Piper of Hamelin story originated at about the same time).

The first major outbreak of the mania occurred between 1373 and 1374 in England, Germany, and the Netherlands. On 24 June 1374, one of the biggest outbreaks began in Aachen before spreading to Cologne, Flanders, Franconia, Hainaut, Metz, Strasbourg, Tongeren, Utrecht, Italy and Luxemburg. Further episodes occurred in 1375 and 1376, with incidents in France, Germany, and the Netherlands, and in 1381, there was an outbreak in Augsburg. Further incidents occurred in 1418 in Strasbourg, where people fasted for days; this one may have been brought on by exhaustion. In 1428 in Schaffhausen, a monk danced to death and, in the same year, a group of women in Zürich were reportedly in a dancing frenzy.

Up to 400 people were struck by a “dancing plague” in Strasbourg in what is now France. This well-documented episode began in July 1518 when Frau Troffea spontaneously began boogying away in the middle of the street. She danced alone and continuously for an entire week before between 50 and 100 people joined her. By month’s end, the number had grown to several hundred. As the weeks went on, several dancers collapsed from exhaustion, and some suffered fatal heart attacks. The mysterious dancing eventually waned, and Strasbourg returned to normalcy in September. Further incidents occurred in the 16th Century when the mania was at its peak. The 1536 Basel outbreak involved a group of children. A 1551 occurrence in Anhalt involved just one man.

Hot blood, curses, contaminated grain?

Contemporary observers attributed these incidents to "hot blood" and suggested dancing continued until the urge disappeared. Some feared St. Vitus, the patron saint of dance, had cursed them, or spirits possessed them, or the bite of the tarantula affected them. Modern historians posit that stress, coupled with the rise of new and untreated diseases such as syphilis, likely induced this mass hysteria. Another theory points to a fungus known as ergot (Claviceps purpurea), sometimes found on bread. Ergot poisoning (ergotism) occurs when someone consumes grains or medications with toxins from the fungus. The fungus causes convulsions if consumed, and while rare today because of grain screening, it historically caused mass outbreaks and may have been responsible for uncontrollable dancing and other instances of mass panic.

A laughter epidemic ?

On 30 January 1962, three girls at an all-girl boarding school in Kashasha on Lake Victoria in Tanganyika began laughing hysterically out of nowhere. The epidemic soon spread throughout the school, affecting 95 of the 159 pupils, aged 12 to 18. Symptoms lasted from a few hours to 16 days, averaging around 7 days. Teachers and other staff were unaffected; the school closed, but the epidemic spread to Nshamba, where several of the school’s girls lived. In April and May 1962, 217 young villagers had laughing attacks. In June, the laughing epidemic spread to a Ramashenye girls’ middle school, affecting 48 girls. The effects also reached additional schools and Kanyangereka. The phenomenon died off 18 months after it started. All areas affected were within a 100-mile radius of Bukoba. In the end, there were no fatalities, though this mysterious event shut down 14 schools and affected 1,000 people.

The power of the mob and the media.

Mass psychogenic illness (MPI), also called mass sociogenic illness, mass psychogenic disorder, epidemic hysteria or mass hysteria, involves the rapid spread of illness signs and symptoms affecting members of a cohesive group, originating from a nervous system disturbance involving excitation, loss, or alteration of function, where physical complaints that are exhibited unconsciously have no known corresponding organic causes.

While ergot may have been responsible for dancing mania, the laughing plague that struck in Africa has no similar theories attached. It might be important that only young women were affected there, as MPI usually affects younger females, manifesting commonly in headaches. Researchers looking into these events say the earliest studied cases linked with epidemic hysteria are the dancing manias.

However, there’s another cause documented by scholars under another name: social contagion, exacerbated by mass and social media. After the rise of a popular breakthrough YouTube channel in 2019, where the presenter exhibits extensive Tourette’s-like behavior, there was a sharp rise in young people referred to clinics specializing in tics, thought to be related to social contagion spread via the Internet, and also to stress from the COVID-19 pandemic.

A report published in August 2021 showed that social media was the primary way the Tourette’s-like behavior spread, and this report called the phenomenon the first recorded instance of mass social media–induced illness (MSMI) made worse by photophobia-related epilepsy.

Physical symptoms, psychological effects, and the evidence by inference.

While dancing plagues have a plausible explanation, the laughing plague does not, merely a suggested pattern. Thoughtful scholars must look to both science and history to solve the puzzles of human behavior—the historian’s meat. Mysteries such as the laughing plague may remain mysteries, explained only by observing patterns. If social media—today’s boogyman for several reasons—makes people sick, the historian can’t look away and say, “that’s politics” when it isn’t. Nor can we dismiss the possibility that bored young women in Tanzania simply instigated the laughing plague to challenge adults.

We do not write history by simply recounting events and citing evidence. We often need heaping helpings of logic and skepticism.

The Past Not Taken: Three Novellas

Making assumptions about how past events came about is one of the most dangerous habits any scholar has to break. Making assumptions about sources is another. In these first Curtis Durand stories, he learns to do neither, while learning many do.

This, too, is how history books are written.

And Finally...

On 28 February:

1917: The Wilson administration releases the text of the Zimmerman Telegram to newspapers in the United States. Transmitted to the German Ambassadors to Mexico and Japan on 17 January by Arthur Zimmerman, both British and American intelligence had intercepted it, proposing an alliance between Germany, Mexico, and Japan. Historians often cite the telegram as a key cause of the US entry into WII.

1953: James Watson and Francis Crick announce their double-helix model of the structure of DNA to their colleagues at the University of Cambridge, England. Their paper, published in the journal Nature that April, won them and their colleague Maurice Wilkins renown and Nobel Prizes in 1962, also catapulting Rosalind Franklin’s x-ray diffraction images into the spotlight (Franklin died in 1958; there is no provision for posthumous Nobels).

And today is the first of two NATIONAL TOOTH FAIRY DAY observances each year; the other is 22 August. The creator, children’s author Katie Davis, probably figured the kids she created it for needed more than one reminder to take care of their choppers.

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This is a riff on an NPR article from October 2025

By 1812, Napoleon seemed all powerful. Nearly all of Europe was under his control. He had forced most of the continent into his continental system, keeping them from trading with Britain to bring the island nation to heel. But the Russian Empire and Sweden resisted. On 24 June 1812, Napoleon invaded Russia with an army of over half a million men, comprising French, Austrian, Prussian, Polish, and other troops from all over his Empire.

Within six weeks, Napoleon lost half his men to disease, heat, exhaustion because of nearly continuous forced-marches (as much as 33 miles a day; normal was 15), and desertion. Despite the French force “winning” battles at Smolensk in August and Borodino in September, the Russian Army refused to stand still enough for the French to destroy them while Napoleon drove deeper into Russia. On 14 September 1812, his advance forces entered an abandoned and burning Moscow; no delegation met him. By then, Napoleon’s army stood at less than a third of the numbers he had in June.

On 12 October, Napoleon ordered his army to retreat, as winter weather had already arrived. It wasn’t a military defeat, but there was no victory either, as Russia refused to join his continental system and both Austria and Prussia soon defected. Traditionally, historians regard this campaign, one of the largest in the 19th Century, as the beginning of the end for Napoleon and the French Empire.

Napoleon’s casualties during the long march back from Moscow were catastrophic, caused by disease (the most common cause of soldier death before WWI), starvation, exposure, Russian guerillas and Cossacks. But which disease killed more of them? Researchers believe typhus and trench fever were among the afflictions that Napoleon’s soldiers suffered, based on historical accounts, the discovery of body lice on the remains of soldiers, and DNA analysis from nearly a decade ago.

In a study published in the November 2025 issue of Current Biology, researchers say the diseases likely included two unexpected pathogens that would have helped hasten many soldiers’ demise. A 2001 construction project in a suburb of Vilnius, Lithuania, uncovered a mass grave where 2-3,000 of Napoleon’s men lay buried, and it provided the teeth of thirteen of Napoleon’s soldiers, each from a unique individual.

These teeth would have had blood flowing through their interiors long ago, and thus, traces of pathogens. The two unexpected pathogens included paratyphoid, contracted through contaminated food, and relapsing fever, carried by body lice that dates back to the Iron Age. What was surprising was what the researchers did not find: typhus and trench fever.

Studying these remains also resulted in a much different picture of early 19th Century warfare. While historians have long known that the paintings and novels describing fit young men in shiny uniforms were false images, scientific proof has been contradictory or elusive. But with thousands more graves to examine and more precise scientific techniques, researchers can show that these men were under microbial assault on all fronts. In addition, forced marches on short rations with heavy equipment often starved and overworked them to the point of physical breakdown. It’s an ugly picture of malnutrition, broken feet from marching too far, too fast, and bodies already riddled with disease before they started into Russia.

Napoleon's invasion of Russia may have faced doom even before it started.

The Persistent Past: Discovering The Steele Diaries

While the study of history split from archaeology (that couldn’t provide dates) in the 19th Century, sort of, the reliance on artifacts to verify and enhance the archives (with the dates) has grown as science improves. Ned’s diaries, snapshots of a little-known unit in a savage conflict, are both archives and artifacts, as Curtis and Maria discover.

This is how history books are written.

And Finally...

On 21 February:

1804: Richard Trevithick demonstrates the first locomotive on rails at the Penydarren Ironworks, Merthyr Tydfil, Wales. His loco, a development of earlier steam engines, pulled ten tons of iron and seventy men along nine miles of track that, unfortunately, wasn’t strong enough to hold the load and soon failed.

1945: Anne Frank, 15, dies of typhus at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany just weeks before American troops liberated the camp. Though the exact date is unclear, this is the most widely accepted date, based on camp records that only listed prisoner numbers and gave the cause of death as “heart failure” regardless of actual cause, and eyewitness accounts.

And today is NATIONAL BOILED PEANUTS DAY, celebrating the official state snack of South Carolina. They originated in Africa, and people mostly enjoy them in the American South, especially during the summer months. I can’t eat ‘em anymore, but knock yourself out.

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This is a riff on a Nautilus newsletter article from June 2023 by Katarina Zimmer.

One Sunday in August 1635, the Mather family was finally about to reach the New World from England when a furious storm caught the ship and its crew by surprise. The cables anchoring the vessel near a group of islands 6 miles off the New England coast reportedly snapped, and the vessel with its dozens of passengers hurtled toward a rocky shore. Fortunately, the winds turned at the last minute and steered the ship in another direction, as their son Increase Mather would later write.

Others weren’t so lucky. According to colony governors in what are now Boston and Plymouth, Massachusetts, the storm drove other ships aground, toppled houses, blew down hundreds of thousands of trees, and caused the sea to swell by up to 20 feet.

[It] was such a mighty storm of wind and rain…as none living in these parts ... ever saw.

Governor William Bradford

Contemporary simulations suggest the Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635 was probably the strongest in recorded eastern New England history. (Sandy, which killed nearly 150 people and caused some $65 billion in damage in the US, was no longer even a hurricane when it made landfall in 2012.) Scientists know about the Great Colonial Hurricane’s impact not only from written reports but also from hidden, physical impressions of the long-ago storm left on the landscape.

They show hurricanes can come in waves across the ages.

At the bottom of a pond, Jeffrey Donnelly, a hurricane scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and his colleagues found subtle, buried evidence of the storm that almost felled the Mather line. The researchers were collecting sediment cores from Salt Pond on Cape Cod, about a third of a mile from the ocean, which has long been a place of mud. They found a pinky finger-thick layer of pure ocean sand in layers that dated back to roughly 1635. The only thing that could have pulled that much beach material over the sand barrier and that far inland was a truly massive storm.

The cores showed even more storms.

Although written accounts suggest the 1635 storm was the strongest of its time, exhumed samples showed it wasn’t the only one. Donnelly found evidence of 10 major storms in the area between 1400 and 1675—surprising, given that major hurricanes are virtually unheard of so far north today. That hurricanes were much more frequent in the past begs the question of why, and whether these levels of storm activity could someday return.

The birth of a new branch of both science and history.

Paleotempestology—the study of old storms—feels like a tongue-twisting, esoteric subniche of meteorology or oceanography or both, borne from shifty grains of sand and mud. Practitioners hope their new branch of science can use these buried traces of long-gone winds and scanty written accounts to show ancient patterns. Since its birth in the 1990s, it has generated insights into hurricane activity over centuries and even millennia. Like so many important developments in science and history, it had its start with a simple question.

During a 1989 lecture, Kam-biu Liu, a scientist at Louisiana State University, was explaining how ash layers marked the activity of ancient volcanoes when one of his students, Miriam Fearn, asked if hurricanes also left behind detectable traces. This was a possibility Liu hadn’t considered before. That summer, they tested the idea at Lake Shelby, a placid freshwater lake near Alabama’s coast.

I still remember vividly the excitement we experienced when we pulled up our first cores from Lake Shelby and we found a distinct sand layer at the top, which was undoubtedly attributed to Hurricane Frederic of 1979.

Kam-biu Liu

In the following years, Liu collected cores from along the Gulf of Mexico coast and at various sites around the Caribbean. Meanwhile, others were producing cores from other places, including the Northeastern US and from large marine caverns called blue holes in the Bahamas. Virtually all revealed an undeniable pattern: mundane sediment punctuated by layers of sand—some obvious, but many so faint they require close analysis of the grain sizes—which mark the surges of dramatic storms that blew through long ago.

These ancient depository records are generating a far different picture of storm patterns than instrumental records alone, which only go back 170 years—or even written records, which, in the US, trace only a few centuries. A proverbial eye-blink in the history of larger climate and weather patterns.

We already think of this area as being pretty active. But that it has tripled in the past is pretty remarkable and has definite implications for how susceptible this region is to storm activity.

Tyler Winkler, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

In the western Atlantic, hurricanes have undergone wild swings, often striking at frequencies that far exceed those in the past couple of centuries. By themselves, the sand layers in individual cores appear random. Paleotempestologists find that, for centuries or millennia at a time, hurricane activity from different sites sometimes lines up. This means that hurricanes are not solely random events but can come in waves across the ages, driven by regional or even global climatic changes, suggesting that the climate system can modulate hurricane activity significantly. The big mystery scientists are trying to solve is why—and what that could mean for us.

To find out, paleotempestologists are digging deeper.

In several cores from around the Atlantic basin, they have discovered a period of heightened hurricane activity in the Atlantic starting around 250 A.D., long before Europeans set foot on the North American continent. Between 250 and 1150 A.D., for instance, Donnelly’s team counted about 20 major storms in the Salt Pond cores, roughly matching a pattern of elevated storm activity in other records from the Gulf of Mexico coast and parts of the Caribbean. What caused this tempestuous outburst across the North Atlantic?

Researchers think it may have to do with the warming of sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic during the Medieval Warm Period—between 950 and 1250 AD, which scientists think a natural uptick in solar radiation drove a slight increase in average global temperatures. They estimate that sea surface temperatures rose about half a degree above the long-term norm around this time.

This correlation between hurricane activity and temperatures is illuminating because, while climate models largely agree that climate change will make hurricanes stronger—as warmer waters fuel them with more energy—there is much less certainty on whether more storms are forming to begin with.

The data from the Medieval Warm Period add to existing evidence that rising temperatures on land and in the ocean play a role in increased hurricane formation. Warmer temperatures can generate more disturbances in the atmosphere. The extreme heat rising off the west coast of Africa—where many Atlantic storms form—can create the kinds of perturbations that can turn into wind-sucking low-pressure systems where hurricanes are often born, fueled by warm ocean waters and humid air.

But temperatures are not the whole story.

Another factor in hurricane formation is wind shear—or its absence. Sudden changes in wind speed and direction can disrupt the upward airflows needed to create a hurricane and simply tear them apart. It’s conceivable that the climate during the Medieval Warm Period produced not only warmer sea temperatures but also conditions that discouraged wind shear—something that some recent studies suggest.

Piecing together this deep historical record of these transient—but powerful—storms is important. Identifying the natural forces that shape hurricane activity will hopefully help provide more accurate long-term forecasts for our era. If hurricanes frequently hit places like New England in the past, they might hit there again. With today’s densely populated coastlines and supercharged hurricanes, the impact might be worse than what early colonists witnessed.

There is still a lot more to be done.

Liu currently likens this young field to paleoanthropology, where biologists try to piece together the story of human evolution from piecemeal records over the past few million years—a femur here, a skull fragment there, some pulp in a tooth. Paleotempestologists hope that their work can answer big questions relevant to the future of hundreds of millions of people living along the world’s coastlines.

The answers may lie in tiny grains of sand, blown in by storms of the ages, waiting for scientists to uncover them and for historians digging into obscure archives, teasing out accounts of storms centuries ago.

The Liberty Bell Files: J Edgar’s Demons

Some people believe there are monsters under their beds. One of those people was J. Edgar Hoover, who saw conspiracies and subversion, perversion and spies all around him. What if he ordered his agents to investigate them all? What if those lists and files were in a project called LIBERTY BELL, investigated by the Special Projects Division, which doesn’t exist either? And what if, in all those non-existent files, there were some real live conspiracies, subversions and spies? An illegal waste of time, of course; could never have happened.

What if they did?

And Finally...

On 14 February:

1929: Alexander Flaming discovers Penicillin at St. Mary’s Hospital, London, England, in a contaminated petri dish. This accidental discovery laid the foundation for the development of the first true antibiotic. It became available to the public only in 1945, but the military used it on military casualties before that time.

1943: German forces under Erwin Rommel attack American forces at Kasserine Pass in Tunisia, forcing them back in disarray. Despite the initial German success, Allied reinforcements and stiffening resistance stopped the advance, and Rommel withdrew by February 23rd.

And today is VALENTINE’S DAY commemorating (or not) this day in 278 when the Romans beheaded St. Valentine in Rome. He’s the patron saint of beekeepers and epileptics, affianced couples, happy marriages and, of course, romance. Gents; ladies; if you forgot that special someone today…

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There were several events and phenomena in Japan’s history that supplied ample fuel to a simmering fire that seemed to have been burning in the minds of much of the military and naval leadership of Japan before 1941. While much of Japan was quietly intent on merely surviving, the dominant social group in the archipelago was constantly trying to either stay in charge or justify having been in charge. This essay is one of several that visit the most important elements of samurai rage against the West and their own subjects, and their constant fear of being overthrown or even contradicted. As shown by the various “insults” and momentous events in Japan over the centuries, the formation of movements and societies and the ensuing incidents happened all too easily. Too, Japan and the Japanese were apparently masters at holding a grudge.

Roots of Japan’s Rage: Manchuria

By 1920, China was in an advanced state of disintegration. By early 1928, the Soviet-dominated Kuomintang’s (KMT) Northern Expedition had defeated most of the warlords in Manchuria, and the Nationalist government was once again in a position to exert control over the area. This was a situation most dire for Japan, especially since the Soviets had already installed puppet governments in Outer Mongolia and Tannu Tuva.

When the Nationalists started moving again on 21 April 1928, Hikosuke Fukuda ordered the Kwantung Army's 6^th Division into Jinan—contrary to instructions from Tokyo to avoid confrontation—as the Northern Faction troops moved out and the Nationalists moved in. On 3 May, a confrontation took place and resulted in the (to this day unexplained) deaths of 12 Japanese, breaking the previous quietness. On 7 May, Hikosuke issued an ultimatum that was certain to be refused (and was) and later mutilated and slaughtered Chinese peace negotiators. By 11 May, the Japanese were on the offensive against the unprepared Chinese, pushing them out of Jinan and inflicting over seven thousand military and two thousand civilian casualties. Chiang-Kai-Shek withdrew his Chinese troops from the area and later wrote that he feared Japan was becoming his worst enemy.

The Fengtian Clique was a warlord faction that wrested control of most of Manchuria from the Nationalists, with Kwantung Army support. But after 1923, the leading warlord in Manchuria, Zhang Zuolin, was inviting British and American investors, which had been only Japanese before. After the Kanto Earthquake and the Showa Financial Crisis in 1923, this was alarming not just to the Kwantung Army and the South Manchuria Railway Company, but also to Tokyo.

On the night of 3 June 1928, Daisaku Komoto, Kaneo Tomiya, and Fujii Sadatoshi—junior Kwantung Army officers who decided that Zhang would be better dead—planted a bomb under a bridge that Zhang would cross in a train near Huanggutun. In the early morning hours of 4 June, the bomb went off, demolishing the bridge and train and fatally injuring Zhang and several others. However, the Kwantung Army didn’t seize the opportunity to mobilize and occupy more of Manchuria, even though they had been preparing another Fengtian Clique senior general for the role.

Worse, Zhang’s son, Zhang Xueliang, quickly emerged as a leader of the warlord faction and reached an “accommodation” with the Nationalists to leave him in power in Manchuria, which considerably weakened Japan’s political position there. To add insult to injury, the Showa publicly criticized Prime Minister Tanaka Giichi (who resigned) for his inability to bring the perpetrators to justice, though privately he understood. If the Kwantung Army wanted an excuse to take over Manchuria, or anywhere else, they needed to improve the coordination of their insubordination.

They didn’t have long to wait. One of human history’s more blatant national exploitations of individual insubordination unfolded in September 1931, called the Manchurian Incident (Manshu-jihen) by the Japanese and the Mukden Incident by the Chinese. Earlier in the year, Chinese leaders had met in Nanking (Nanjing) and agreed to assert more control over Manchuria. In the same vein, Tokyo dispatched Tatekawa Yoshitsugu to ensure that the Kwantung Army didn’t provoke another incident, like the Huanggutun Incident. But Tatekawa wasn’t interested in preventing the Kwantung Army from doing anything at all. When two junior officers, Itagaki Seishiro and Ishiwara Kanji, set a relatively harmless charge under a span of South Manchurian Railway track no one cared about and set it off on 18 September 1931, Tatekawa was fast asleep after imbibing far too much liquor for a senior officer in his position charged with such responsibility.

Though a train passed over the damaged section without difficulty just minutes after the explosion, the Japanese propaganda machine cranked out stories blaming a nearby warlord garrison. To protect Japanese interests, Honjō Shigeru (a disciple of Araki Sadao) and his Kwantung Army invaded Manchuria. Honjō did not trouble himself to ask Tokyo or anyone else for instructions, permission or blessings for his actions.

Chiang didn’t much care at the time because Zhang Xueliang controlled Manchuria, who, though on good terms with the rest of China, was still an independent warlord answering to whoever backed him, and that was Japan. Liaoning Province, the part of Manchuria that the Japanese first occupied, declared itself independent from China. As the Kwantung Army spread out, there were battles for provincial capitals and for arms depots, but mostly the occupation was fairly peaceful until November, when a battle raged over Tsitsihar and its environs from mid-October to 19 November. When regular troops from Japan appeared in Manchuria, the Kwantung Army realized it had gambled correctly.

Merely taking over Manchuria and proclaiming it an independent kingdom did not mean that the Chinese merely said “OK” and went about their business. From the first hours of the occupation, Manchuria was a hotbed of resistance to both the Japanese and to the Manchukuo puppet government in Mukden.

There were several kinds of Chinese resistance organizations, some more dangerous and organized than others. Manchuria had been in a state of turmoil since the Boxer Rebellion, controlled by whichever warlord was on top at the moment. The warlords faced opposition from citizen militia groups, also known as “plain-clothes militias” because they didn’t wear uniforms. However, these groups were more of a nuisance than a serious threat. Quasi-religious peasant brotherhoods like the Red Spear Society (centered on Harbin) and the Big Swords Society (along the Korean border) were more organized and dangerous. Then there were the bandits, of which there were countless thousands in Manchuria with no particular organization, whose sole intent was survival. Many of these guerillas had been soldiers under Zhang Xueliang, and thus often had equipment and training equal to the Japanese.

Anti-Japanese forces destroyed bridges and attacked trains soon after the formation of Manchukuo. In the spring of 1932, the Kwantung Army started dealing with them. The Japanese planned pacification operations well in the early stages, but were only partially effective because of the poor training and equipment of the Manchukuo Imperial Army units. A more fundamental problem was that irregular warfare was simply not in the samurai playbook. The IJA lacked the equipment and training to chase guerrillas into the hills, valleys, and forests, although they could defeat any force that stood in one place and fought like soldiers. In due course, the Manchukuo Army would shoulder most of the security responsibilities in Manchuria, but it would never be capable of fighting on its own.

The anti-Japanese forces were always suffering from poor logistics, and the longer the Kwantung Army stayed in the field, the weaker their opponents became. By the end of February 1933, the Japanese had destroyed or driven into the Soviet Union most of the major forces they could understand and fight. In 1931, the Chinese communists began organizing small guerilla units bent mostly on proselytizing among the peasants. By 1934, the communists were forming their “Route” armies (which were based in provinces along the South Manchurian Railroad), and by 1936 were seriously disrupting Japanese and Manchukuo communications. But, like the other anti-Japanese armies, logistics eventually weakened the Reds to a point where retreat into China or the Soviet Union was the only way to keep any part of their forces together.

The samurai, unable to finish the conquest of Manchuria according to their rules, simmered…

Why The Samurai Lost Japan: A Study Of Miscalculation And Folly

Ambition can be pernicious, as the samurai discovered in Manchuria, and would later find out in China and the Pacific. Just how dangerous it was is the subject of the book.

And Finally...

On 7 February:

1917: The US passenger steamer SS California is torpedoed by U-85 off Ireland; 41 of the 205 people on board are killed, The sinking, close on the heels of the torpedoing of SS Housatonic days earlier and immediately after the US broke off diplomatic relations with Germany, spurred the US even closer to war.

1983: Elizabeth “Libby” Dole becomes Secretary of Transportation in Washington, DC. The wife of Senator Bob Dole, Secretary Dole technically became the first American woman to command combat troops, as at the time the US Coast Guard was under the Department of Transportation.

And today is NATIONAL PERIODIC TABLE DAY, commemorating this day in 1865 when John Newland published his paper, Law of Octaves, in England’s Chemical News, an early riff on what we now call the Periodic Table. Now you know when it started.

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This is a riff on a Strategika article by Owen West and Kevin Wallsten from January 2025.

In 1964, 75% of the public held a very favorable view of the military and its leaders. That dropped to 24% when Saigon fell in 1975, surged to 80% after 9/11, and plunged to 60% in 2024. This shows institutional confidence is ephemeral, tied to politics and performance.

For twelve of the past sixteen years, our military has relied more on shifting social values than steady martial standards to maintain its all-volunteer force (AVF). Its performance in recent years has done little to arrest the long-term cultural decline in the youth we ask to defend America.

Before the Vietnam era, military service enjoyed broad prestige. Over 15% of all 19-year-old men joined the military in 1964. The military drafted only a quarter of the recruits. Enlistees volunteered for a military that enjoyed societal approval but paid a pittance. The social upheaval of Vietnam caused Congress to do away with drafting soldiers altogether, converting to the AVF in 1973. Milton Friedman argued that better pay would attract recruits who would otherwise seek employment. Congress approved a healthy raise, and enlistments immediately increased.

For fifty years this model worked.

Volunteers entered the military during recessions and booms, military disasters and swift victories, periods of flashy popularity and morose perception. When unemployment fell, Congress increased pay. During the wartime surges in Iraq and Afghanistan, standards lowered slightly, then raised when troops returned home. Even when entrance standards dipped, the enlisted force remained far more educated than it had been before Vietnam, with high school graduation rates above 90%, compared to 50% in 1964.

Throughout this period, society grew more progressive, and the perceived benefits of military service faded. Having a relative who had served in earlier decades influenced the younger generation. After the post-9/11 patriotism faded, 80% of recruits came from military families where service remained ingrained.

The military was a family business.

But not a growth business. American military volunteerism had been declining for decades, masked by changes in population, composition, and compensation. The US population grew by 75% from 1964 to 2024, but recruiting needs plunged from 400,000 enlistees to 150,000. The percentage of women joining steadily grew from less than 1% to 18% of the force, masking the disinterest among men. Service motivation increasingly gave way to compensation. In 1964, enlisted soldiers earned less than most of their counterparts in the private sector. Today, enlisted service members are in the 83rd percentile of comparable civilian pay, not including potential college and VA benefits.

The White Male Recruitment Crisis

Male enlistments in the Army fell 35%, dropping from 58,000 new recruits in 2013 to just 37,700 in 2023. From 2018 to 2023, the number of white recruits in the Army fell from 44,042 to just 25,070. No other demographic group experienced a comparable decline. Sensing a sudden disinterest among white males, the Marines boosted their longstanding Latino overrepresentation to over 30% of accessions to make mission.

The Next Crisis

As long as the demand for troops was shrinking, the Pentagon could deal with small supply shocks, but in August 2021, the US pulled out of Afghanistan. Watching the hasty withdrawal splashed across the screens large and small, the abandonment of allies…who’d want to serve a leader who would authorize that? The National Guard fell 8,000 recruits short of its end-strength goal. In 2022, the volunteer deficit sharply worsened. The Army fell 15,000 troops short, a 25% gap. In 2023, The military combined fell short by 41,000 recruits. The Pentagon referred vaguely to a broad “recruiting crisis,” meaning enlistments had declined across all demographic groups.

Well, no…

The progressive movement has profoundly affected young, white Democratic men. For decades, recruiting polls have shown scant difference among young males. As recently as 2015, 19% of young, white Democratic men wanted to serve, compared to 20% of Blacks, Latinos and white Republicans. But by 2021, white Democrat male willingness to serve had plunged to 3%, four times lower than Black and Latino men, and eight times lower than white Republicans. The percentage of high school Democrats who say the military does a “good job” had similarly declined, from 84% in 2002 to 35% in 2023. According to Gallup, only 12% of Democrats aged 18 to 24 were “extremely proud” to be American, down from 54% in 2004.

If you’re not proud of your country, you won’t fight for it.

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion—DEI for short—distrusts intuitions of all descriptions, including the military. Because of it, the military came to view its longstanding promise to strip recruits of societal values and reboot them with the martial code as a relic. Uncomprehending, unable or unwilling to stand for martial values under Biden, the Pentagon changed its recruiting strategy in 2021 to “diversify” and grow its base. Advertisements emphasized individualism over assimilation, including DEI phraseology like “individual truth” and “authentic self,” to appeal to progressives. Drag queen digital takeovers bracketed official communications emphasizing duty, honor, and country; anime depicted the military as a refuge from childhood trauma; bullets in rainbow pride colors flew with abandon from flower-bedecked weapons.

It backfired and got worse after the Afghan rout.

The Pentagon’s emphasis on DEI caused everyone to withdraw. Desire to serve in the armed forces dropped between 2020 and 2023 among African American high school seniors (18% to 12%), Latino high school seniors (16% to 8%) and female high school seniors (12% to 7%). In 2020, 20% of high school Republican men said they wanted to serve, dropping to 15% in 2023—the lowest in forty years. In 2021, 65% of teens in military households said they wanted to serve. Only two years later, that figure had fallen to 32%. Worse, DEI alienated the military’s main recruiting pipeline: veteran families. According to data from the 2019 Pew Military Survey and the 2024 Survey of Military Veterans, the percentage of conservative veterans who would advise a family member to join the military plummeted from 88% in 2019 to only 53% in 2024. Conservative veterans in the survey cited the “military’s DEI and other social policies” as a major factor in withholding their endorsement, far greater than concerns about wartime injuries, VA care, or pay. Advised by his generals, Biden in 2023 said that diversity was necessary “for all successful military operations.” The Pentagon failed to recruit the progressives, and it alienated the conservatives. DEI, the darling of the “progressives” and more accurately described as Division, Exclusion, Indoctrination, drove a generation away from the ranks.

What is to be done?

The military must reconcile meritocracy with efforts that broaden the pool to interest DEI-infused recruits and keep top talent. President Trump will try to abolish DEI in the military, but it’s an uphill battle against intrenched interests and much louder voices, especially on social media, who often just rename their programs. The Reagan National Defense Surveys fielded in mid-November 2023 and mid-November 2024 already show a significant post-election uptick in service interest among Americans under 30, and the recruiting numbers soared after the June 2025 MIDNIGHT HAMMER strikes. But the military has not acknowledged its fundamental recruiting error. We are in a period of cultural interregnum concerning who will defend America, or why. After Trump leaves office in 2029, the military could as easily tip back to DEI, since it has not defined where it really stands or what it believes. The same is true of losing the war in Afghanistan; the military promised an explanation that never came.

Ask the vets.

The military must get serious about heeding its core constituency: the veterans whose endorsements are key to sourcing 80% of its volunteers. It must establish close ties with the veteran community. The Pentagon understands “influencers” are key recruit drivers, devoting a major poll to random adults who “influence youths ages 16-24.” Few respondents are veterans, and there is no sensitivity analysis tying policy changes to precious service recommendations. The Pentagon has to receive tough input from our veterans about the new procedures. Congress can’t throw more money at a recruiting problem the military refuses to analyze. Enlisting in the military already puts you in the top 20% of all young, comparable wage earners. Yet the DoD has fallen behind on manufacturing munitions to arm them. Funded at a paltry 3% of GDP, the level we were at in 1940, our defense base, despite showy high-tech bomb strikes, appears increasingly weak in our adversaries, increasing the probability of war. Let’s not delude ourselves about our imperiled national security. The oscillation between commanders-in-chief, from progressive Obama to conservative Trump to progressive Biden to conservative Trump, reflects a divisive country without a shared sense of values.

We are not the country we were in 1964—or even 1994.

No modern president has heartily called on American youth to join its military. The deepening cynicism of young people on the political left is a corrosive problem. On the right, there is a growing belief in isolationism, as if we can turn back the clock to the 19th Century.

Great civilizations are not murdered; they commit suicide.

Arnold Toynbee

Civilizations eventually lose their vigor, misspend their wealth, self-indulge, and under-fund their military forces, which leads to their downfall. Is America following that path? Our military reflects our culture. Until audited by a major war, we won’t know whether our all-volunteer force—recruited for some mix of adventurism, military professionalism, patriotism, and pay—will overcome our quantifiable shortages of mass firepower.

Do we have—or can we find—the right stuff to prevail or even survive?

The Persistent Past: Discovering The Steele Diaries

The Great War generation did not hesitate to step up; the Gulf War generation didn’t either. Millennials lack the "civil religion" that infused both generations. Maria Durand, at thirteen, discovers what real courage under fire is when she verifies a bunch of dusty old papers her father finds in a steamer trunk.

Discover how your history books are written.

And Finally...

On 31 January:

1543: Future founder of the last and longest shogunate, Tokugawa Ieyasu, is born in Okazaki Castle, Aichi, Japan. He was the third of the three “Great Unifiers” of Japan, with Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi, credited with ending the 150 year Sengoku period of civil war.

1943: Friedrich Von Paulus surrenders himself and a bulk of his command at the Gumrak Department Store in Stalingrad, Russia. Though the rest of the Stalingrad cauldron wouldn’t stop fighting for another two days, von Paulus’ capture is considered the end of the campaign. Upwards of 200,000 men would march into captivity; fewer than 5,000 would return.

And today is HELL IS FREEZING OVER DAY, commemorating this day in 1943 when a dam on the Rouge River broke and partially flooded the main street of the ill-defined hamlet of Hell (Fenton), Michigan, and froze. The event was marked by the local newspaper headline as “HELL FREEZES OVER,” a story obscured by the events in Russia.

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This is a riff on a Guardian story by Daniel Boffey from January 2025.

Researchers have identified British coins bearing the inscription of King Cunobelin mixed in with a hoard of Roman coins discovered in a field in Bunnik, near Utrecht, Netherlands, in October 2023. This was the first mixed composition coin collection found on mainland Europe, apparently deliberately buried it in a cloth or leather pouch over two thousand years ago. The hoard is now on display at the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden.

Gert-Jan Messelaar and Reinier Koelink, amateur archaeologists, found the 44 British gold coins, known as staters, among 360 Roman coins that are said to have amounted to 11 years in wages for an ordinary Roman soldier. Romans prepared to cross to Britain from where the archaeologists found the coins, and it may have been where they returned to Europe. A soggy area and a nearby water-bearing channel, unsuitable for habitation and agriculture, probably contained the pit where whoever it was who buried the coins.

The Coins.

The British coins bear the name of a Celtic king known as Cunobelinus, Cunobeline or Cunobelin, immortalized by Shakespeare as Cymbeline, who ruled southeastern Britain between 5 and 40 AD. Four staters are called posthumous issues, probably struck by Cunobelinus’s successors as ruler of the Catuvellauni tribe, the brothers Togodumnus and Caratacus, in about 43 AD.

Of the Roman coins, 72 are gold aurei, a high value currency, and 288 are silver denarii, dating from 200 BC to AD 47. The most recent coins in the hoard, struck in 46-47 AD, bear the portrait of the Emperor Claudius. Identical marks on the Claudius coins suggest they were struck in a single batch. Among other silver pieces are Roman coins from the time of Julius Caesar, and one features Juba, the king of Numidia in modern Algeria (Juba I died at the battle of Zama in 46 BC; Juba II died in 23 AD).

Rome Invades Britain III.

When Claudius ordered Aulus Plautius to invade Britain in 43 AD with four legions (between 10 and 25,000 men) and 20,000 auxiliaries, the island comprised several kingdoms. Caratacus and Togodumnus of the Catuvellauni tribe had been leading attacks on the Atrebates tribe, who had political and trading links with the Romans, extending the area of influence of the anti-Roman Catuvellauni further westwards from their homelands north of the River Thames. The first stage of this conquest was complete in about 50 AD.

Buried and Forgotten? Possible but Unlikely.

The coins may have been part of the spoils from the third Roman invasion of Britain (the first two, under Caesar, were in 55 and 54 BC), or they may have been a monetary gift (donativum) after a successful campaign. Some scholars believe returning Romans buried the coins, but it is also plausible that the coins did not belong to soldiers, and that whoever it was may not have taken them from or even to Britain. It’s just as possible that it was part of a merchant’s or a smuggler’s fortune—coins circulated in the ancient world like they do now. Some were ancient even for the time, and one is from faraway Africa.

Face it: it’s eleven years’ pay for a Legionnaire. It’s a retirement fund for whoever held it…if it belonged to an individual, which seems unlikely. It does not feel likely that this was an official payment means, but something pulled together in some haste with little regard to value, concentrating on bulk. Perhaps they intended it for something secret, like a bribe or ransom, and the receivers buried it for safekeeping before someone imprisoned, enslaved, or killed them, leaving it for the 21st Century to find. We can’t say now, but it is the job of the scholar to ask such questions, even if they have no answers.

The Persistent Past: Discovering The Steele Diaries

What we have for “history” is based partly on what we know, partly on what we believe, and partly on what we, well, guess at. When Curtis Durand finds a trunk-full of old diaries, papers and memorabilia from a General the history books have never heard of, what’s he supposed to do? Work the source, that’s what.

The origins of a steamer trunk full of historical source material (or of useless old paper) can be just as elusive as that of a hoard of coins found in a Dutch bog. The story of both is how your history books are written.

And Finally...

On 24 January:

41 AD: Officers from the Praetorian Guard murder Roman Emperor Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, known as Caligula, his wife and infant daughter on Palatine Hill in Rome. His paternal uncle, Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, known as Claudius to history, became Emperor.

1950: Percy L. Spencer of the Raytheon Manufacturing Company is granted a patent entitled “A Method For Heating Foodstuffs.” Spencer’s patent and subsequent developments made the microwave oven more practical than the 750-pound behemoth marketed to commercial establishments since 1957.

And today is MACINTOSH COMPUTER DAY, commemorating this day in 1984 when the first Macs went on sale in California. Underpowered, lacking software and memory (a whopping 128k) and priced at as much as a good used car, sales met early expectations but dropped off.

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This is a riff on a New York Times article by Alexander Nazaryan from February 2025.

The banks of England’s Thames River have hosted human settlements for thousands of years, from Neolithic huts to soaring skyscrapers. The river’s mud, lacking oxygen, acts as a sealant that helps preserve remains. Because there has been activity on and along the Thames for thousands of years, its mud is constantly yielding historical treasures. In 2018, workers building a sewage tunnel along the riverbank discovered an intact 500-year-old skeleton with the remains of leather boots on its feet.

Researchers Nichola Arthur and Heather Bonney of London’s Natural History Museum, and Jane Sidell of the University of Durham, recently dated dozens of bones dredged from the river, creating a comprehensive database that has dispelled longstanding theories about why the river came to serve as the last resting place for so many people. The team published their latest findings in the April 2025 issue of the Cambridge University Press journal Antiquity.

In this new study, the team radiocarbon dated 28 river samples from skulls never dated before, and two skulls from an older investigation for comparison. Half of the new samples came from either the Bronze (3300-1200 BC) or Iron (1200-550 BC) Age to the arrival of the Romans (43 AD), with a cluster appearing to be between the periods. The researchers' findings, based on dating and location, led them to conclude someone intentionally placed the bodies in the river, against previous theories that powerful tides moved them.

As far as other watery places go, bogs are an especially rich source for archaeologists, since their acidic waters allow for mummy-like levels of preservation. Britain’s most notable bog body is the Lindow Man, discovered at Lindow Moss near Wilmslow in Cheshire, North West England on 1 August 1984. Someone deposited the body face down sometime between 2 BC and 119 AD, according to some. At the time of death, Lindow Man was a healthy male in his mid-20s who had been of high social status as his body shows little evidence of having done heavy physical labor. There has been debate over the reason for his death, either violent and perhaps ritualistic.

None of the Thames bones has reached Lindow Man’s (called Pete Marsh by the wags) level of notoriety, possibly because bones don’t have faces; Pete does. These findings also help us understand how we research the past, as well as the past itself. Carbon-dating can cost as much as $1000 per sample, with no assurance that the sample will yield significant results. Significantly, too, bog bodies are routinely carbon-dated; bones found along the Thames can wait years, if ever: hundreds of samples from the Thames remain untested. The expense is one factor, but a combination of the level of interest—bog bodies with faces versus faceless bones—and the level of probable preservation, where bogs preserve more material than Thames mud, are also significant factors.

Not all historical sources are equal, nor are they treated equally.

The Persistent Past: Discovering The Steele Diaries

An obscure but important US Army General offered the Steele diaries he compiled during WWI, WWII and the Korean War, to archives before he passed away, but no one seemed interested until a 19th Century economic historian found them and realized their potential importance. He found the resources and put the work in uncovering a previously unknown chapter of the past.

Set in the small community where The Past Not Taken: Three Novellas takes place, here’s another story of how history books are written.

And Finally...

On 17 January:

1873: The First Battle of the Stronghold takes place, where 53 Modoc warriors, led by Captain Jack, defended their fortified position in the lava beds of northeastern California. The battle forced 400-plus US Army soldiers to retreat after suffering about 40 casualties compared to the Modoc’s none, a clear Modoc victory.

1977: A firing squad executed Gary Gilmore at the Utah State Prison in Draper, Utah, ending the decade-long moratorium on capital punishment in the US. Gilmore murdered two men in cold blood in 1976, and had waived all appeals, having asked everyone to just “butt out.” There was no question about his guilt and his desire to die, having attempted suicide twice while on death row.

And today is NATIONAL CLASSY DAY/BETTY WHITE’S BIRTHDAY, commemorating the birth of Betty Marion White Ludden in Oak Park, Illinois on this day in 1922. The veteran of WWII (American Women’s Voluntary Services (AWVS)) passed in December 2021, just short of her 100th birthday.

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This is a riff on a History Today article by Matthew Lyons in October 2025.

History names Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, born in Delft, Dutch Republic, on 24 October 1632, as the father of microbiology and a pioneer in microscopy. While Leeuwenhoek was the first to report on microorganisms, the history books are short on just why this talented amateur with no formal training in biology or science at all, came to “invent” microbiology.

Magnifying lenses date back to antiquity. Nero watched gladiators through ones made of emerald. Leeuwenhoek first saw crude lenses when he was an apprentice bookkeeper in the cloth trade, where thread counters used them to judge the quality of textiles. Leaving his apprenticeship in 1654, Leeuwenhoek lived and studied most of his adult life in a house he bought in 1655, on a street named Hyppolytusbuurt, opening a draper’s shop there. In the late 1650s, Leeuwenhoek started making small lenses himself.

In 1660, Leeuwenhoek became a chamberlain for the sheriffs in the city hall, maintaining the premises, heating, cleaning, opening for meetings, performing duties for those assembled, a position he would hold for almost 40 years. In 1669, the court of Holland appointed Leeuwenhoek as a land surveyor. Gradually, he combined that job with one as the “wine-gauger” (official measuring the contents of casks) of Delft.

By the early 1670s, Leeuwenhoek was building compound microscopes (devices using multiple lenses), invented around 1590 by Dutch spectacle makers Hans and Zacharias Janssen. What drove a civil servant and businessman to do it?

My own impulse and curiosity…there are in this town no amateurs who, like me, dabble in this art.

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek

He worked with his microscope when his various jobs allowed. With nothing else to guide him, Leeuwenhoek studied what he could get easily: his own sweat and blood, lice and their eggs, leaves, molds, skin, hair. He developed his own comparative measurements: a grain of fine sand, a hair from his head, a silkworm thread.

In the summer of 1674, Leeuwenhoek took a water sample from a boggy inland lake near Delft. He was astonished to discover that it contained what he called ‘kleijne diertgens’, little animals, or animalcula.

The motion of most of them in the water was so swift, and so various ... that I confess I could not but wonder at it…[Some] were above a thousand times smaller than the smallest ones which I have hitherto seen in the rind of cheese.

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek

Leeuwenhoek borrowed a method for counting sheep to count flocks: estimate the number of sheep walking alongside one another and multiply that by the estimated length of the flock. On that basis, there were 2,730,000 animalcula in each drop of water.

Although he considered himself a businessman and not a man of science, the spirit of his time compelled him to tell others what he had discovered. It took several letters from Leeuwenhoek to the Royal Society in England to get them to notice his discovery. ‘We had such stories written [to] us from Holland and laughed at them’, John Locke said. Finally, on 9 October 1676, Leeuwenhoek pulled all his observations together in a long letter they could not ignore. It took them three attempts to replicate the findings. The Society dispatched Irish physician Thomas Molyneaux to watch Leeuwenhoek at work. “His only secret,” Molyneaux reported in March 1685, “is making clearer glasses, and giving them a better polish than others can do.”

Over the course of his lifetime, Leeuwenhoek may have made five hundred microscopes, some of which may have been capable of 500x magnification. Though considered a scientific dilettante, by the end of the 17th Century Antonie van Leeuwenhoek had a virtual monopoly on microscopy and microscopic study, having accurately described red blood cells in 1674, and discovered human spermatozoa in 1677 (though he believed they were merely preformed humans).

Not bad for an amateur.

The Persistent Past: Discovering The Steele Diaries

While Dr. Curtis Durand is no amateur historian, his daughter Maria is but thirteen when she goes to work transcribing the Steele Diaries. Will she turn pro and stick with it, or just walk away from the grueling, painstaking toil needed to turn raw sources into discoveries?

This is how history books—and historians—are made.

And Finally...

On 10 January:

49 BC: Julius Caesar crosses the Rubicon, a small stream in northeastern Italy that served as a boundary between the province of Cisalpine Gaul and Italy, with his army. Doing so constituted a declaration of war against the Roman Senate and triggered a civil war that ended with Caesar holding absolute power after defeating all his opponents.

1927: Fritz Lang’s silent film Metropolis premiers in Germany’s most prestigious theater, the UFA-Palast am Zoo in Berlin, Germany. Based on Thea von Harbou’s novel of the same name, the film received mixed reviews for its melodramatic (nonsensical) plot, although the visual effects and art direction earned well-deserved praise. Although cinephiles now hail it as a groundbreaker, no complete copies of the original 153-minute film exist, but reconstructions abound and researchers occasionally discover lost segments.

And today is NATIONAL CUT YOUR ENERGY COSTS DAY, which may commemorate either the founding of Standard Oil in Cleveland, Ohio, on this day in 1870, or the Spindletop Hill gusher near Beaumont, Texas, on this day in 1898. Pick your poison…

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