The American Revolution (or the American War), from 1775 to 1783, was only a part of a long string of Britain's Empire's Wars, during which squabbling ruling factions attempted to control what can be collectively known as Englishmen. After generations of bloodletting, marching, pillaging and building, the British Empire reached the limits of the administrative and communications systems then available by 1774. The 1774-83 conflict was the first failure of the Imperial system that had run Britain since the Glorious Revolution in 1688. However, its end changed the Imperial system in time for the conflicts triggered by the French Revolution. The American Revolution, thus, helped Britain to fight Napoleon by challenging its very fabric and requiring reform and change.

A Legal Empire: From Magna Charta to the US Constitution

England has had its share of kings and queens, but a common thread throughout its history has been a certain exceptionalism; it defies tyranny consistently, sometimes at substantial cost in blood and treasure. Not even the Romans could make Britons simply roll over and take orders. Resistance to arbitrary rule or privilege is even a part of its mythology. Well known to most are the traditions of Arthur of Camelot, a quasi-mystical king who may have had some substance. After the last shipload of Romans departed, they left behind a Pendragon—war duke. From there the record is hazy, but the legend is strong: a small body of men kept the peace in one part of Britain, a peace based on equality and fairness. The spirit of equality in Arthurian legends has persisted in British history since then, though scholars debate and dismiss the relevance of how Christian these "knights" were.

One successor to Arthur was Alfred, the only English king with “the Great” attached to his name. While there was an Aethelred (or Ethelred, depending on sources) of Wessex in the 9th Century who traditionally called himself the first King of the Anglo-Saxons, historians agree on little else about his life and the extent of his authority. Historians say his legal and military system formed the traditional foundations of the Anglo-Saxon-American system. Ethnographers and historians agree that Alfred’s name is attached to one foundation of the Anglo-Saxon legal system: under ideal conditions, the King's courts treat all persons equally, even if privileges that exempted many often confused the process. His military system was a defense in depth by locally living settlers, not unlike the late Western Roman Empire, but instead of central control, Alfred spread out the responsibility for local defense to nobles. This was the basis of the Anglo-American militia system, still seen as a remnant today.

Combined, the possibly real Arthur and the known-but-mysterious Alfred formed a considerable tradition of self-reliance, local justice, and a locally derived peerage that depended not on a faraway king but on local resources. While kings, queens, and lord protectors would come and go over the centuries, not one of them would easily rule the British Isles without their consent.

When William of Normandy conquered England in 1066, he radically changed the Alfredian codes but kept much of the military system, transforming it into his own admirable creature. The House of Anjou eventually joined the Norman/Anglo-Saxon union, merging the thrones of half of France and England by the mid-12th Century. The resulting House of Angevin/Plantagenet was ruling England and a third of modern Europe in 1215. In that year, John I's barons presented him with a statement outlining his limitations, a document we now call the Magna Charta, or Great Charter.

Based on the 10th Century Charter of Liberties, the 13th Century Great Charter limited how the British Isles raised taxes, deployed and raised troops, and approved or disapproved archbishop elections and the creation of laws. When John denounced it before the ink was dry, the result was civil war. The Charter was reissued in 1216, recast in 1225, and periodically hauled out for every monarch who ever claimed to rule in England. It remained in force intact in Britain and Wales until 1829, and has had only minor surgery since.

The Magna Charta’s lasting legacy is habeas corpus, which legally requires proving that anyone committed a crime at all, or that a legal person committed it. Under it, judicial abuse is nearly impossible when observed, and it has been one of the least abused legal traditions in the American-British system. But beyond that, the Charter’s limits on supreme authority—indeed, it denies that any temporal “authority” can be “supreme”—seem to have encoded themselves into the English language.

After the Great Charter there were centuries when no one expected anything worse could happen. Laws were observed by tradition; courts were perverted by “interest;” untimely deaths and civil wars put monarchs on the English throne, sometimes for only a few days. Only habit upheld the need of the people to have a uniform law and by grudging force. As Plantagenet, Lancaster, and York gave way to Tudor and Stuart, there were revolts, riots, and civil conflicts that assured whoever tried to rule England that they needed to be fair or they simply wouldn’t be around.

From the late Middle Ages, there has been discussion of the “English constitution,” which meant an inherited understanding of the basis of all laws. Although never written, this small “c” constitution has served as the basis of the Anglo-Saxon legal system, according to legal minds and philosophers. Parliament issued the "English Bill of Rights" to William of Nassau before his enthronement; this was the closest Britain ever came to a written constitution. That document let the new Dutch king know that there was a limit to his power. Since he assumed control of a country that had functionally ejected his predecessor, it had to have had an impact equal to that of the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

The American Articles of Confederation made little impression on Britain since they echoed those of the Swiss cantons in many respects, yet they preserved a semblance of unity, but the Constitution of 1787 made a slightly distinct impression, reflecting the two houses of governance that had been in European practice for generations. The independence of the judiciary, however, was intriguing to the Empire because it presented a means by which courts far away from Britain could effectively administer British interests by slamming gavels without reference from the home country. By that simple mechanism, governors from Ireland to Australia to India and Bermuda could act independently within a well-defined guideline: British law. The “checks and balances” found in the Construction was an important instrument of control if there was no large ground force, which Britain rarely had. When no single branch of government—Parliament, ministry or courts—could effectively trump the other, simply pointing to the bureaucrats and the process could avert civil conflicts, dynastic disputes and even contested elections. It made the crown autonomous and increasingly irrelevant. The British thought it odd that in America the head of state and government were the same (the President), where for most of the rest of the world they were separate (crown and prime minister). The incapacity of George III and the regency of his son Clarence (George IV) resulted from a strengthened balance between the Imperial government and civil authority. Britain never established its own constitution, but it has adapted the American Constitution's mechanisms since its publication.

Technical Realities: Limits of Imperial Governance in the 18th Century

Great Britain did not control the largest empire in the world in 1775, but it had to control much of a continent across a large ocean, an attribute that it shared with Spain. But Spain had been trying with often limited success to control its New World holdings for the better part of two centuries, fighting off England, the Netherlands, the Pope, North African corsairs and France, not to mention the occasional civil war and an ongoing conflict with Portugal and a few million aboriginals that resisted being enslaved. Since the Armada of 1588, Spain had slipped into an advanced state of decay, and by 1770 was still on the downhill to chaos. Holding all her overseas colonies for another century was unlikely, and it appears as if many Spaniards were aware of it. Spanish alcaldes in Latin America needing instructions from Madrid could wait for years or decades for an answer, sometimes until the principals were dead and the original bureaucrat had long before returned to Spain or moved elsewhere.

But the English still held onto everything east of the Mississippi and a rather vague line between Georgia and Florida. Russia held trading stations along the Pacific coast, in Alaska and in the Sandwich Islands (modern Hawaii). France moved many Acadians from Quebec to Louisiana, moderately under Spanish protection but really forming their own colony. Yet, the English colonies seem to have been the healthiest and most robust, even among the islands of the Caribbean. How?

English administrative methods and attitudes towards the government played key roles in the success of the English colonies, even with the “German” Kings that followed William and Mary. The colonial government, still controlled by bureaucrats, had limited reach and even less influence over business practices and daily life. Since the coronation of William of Orange in 1688, the dominant Williamite/Whig political economy posited that labor was the root of all wealth and allowed almost anyone access to the tools for self-reliance. A colony that could hold a piece of land, farm it for long enough to raise capital for improvements, could become self-administrating and could be self-supporting within a few years. Cash crops such as tobacco and hemp raised tremendous revenues with investors, as did sugar and maize (corn), both easily distilled into alcohol. New World cotton lacked profitability until the invention of the gin in the early 19th Century.

This emphasis on the power of labor was a Dutch philosophy, one that had made the Netherlands one of the wealthiest nations in Europe that had developed despite Spain’s theoretical control of the country. It also flew in the face of Renaissance political economy, which valued only the control of land. This outlook concentrated wealth in the hands of a few who owned the land, who, by extension, were the only ones who could decide what happened to it and how others living on it should be governed. This was the Continental viewpoint and that of the Jacobite/Tory English who supported James II Stuart in the 1688-89 crisis. It was this political and economic view that dominated Hanover thinking and the Southern colonies in North America. New England was decidedly Williamite; the Middle Colonies were about evenly split. This made New England the center of the American economic universe for manufactures, and because of its independent nature, the hotbed of revolution.

Believing that a ruling class that owned land should be in charge of everything made the American Tories very loyal to those in England who believed likewise, and when New England burst into open rebellion the South and the Middle Colonies remained quiescent for a time, most of the leadership believing that the whole thing would blow over. When the idea that Americans could create a new country with its own manufactures, based on an agrarian/commercial trading economy, caught on, the Tories remained loyal to the Crown, but increasing numbers of others found themselves drawn to the ideas and the apparent inevitability of independence. English administration methods were light-handed until the war went badly in New England, but then a “march of folly” began in Britain. The folly was that the English believed they could beat, shove, and cow the Americans back into obedience to English law and the Crown, and that they also had to beat, shove, and cow all those who did not agree. Tories pointed to Scotland and the eventual submission obtained there; Whigs pointed to Ireland and the grumbling submission that never lasted more than a generation there. Few knew of a way out of the ideological mess that originated with how money was to be made, and how much there could be of it.

As the war ended in New England and wound down in the Middle Colonies, Britain believed it could hold on to the South if it couldn’t hold everything. It could protect their Caribbean investments and provide a base against Spain in the future...and perhaps the Americans if needed. But the Americans fought just well enough to be rid of the British in the South, and while they defeated their former masters at Yorktown, they also defeated the former British Indian allies in the Ohio country with an ease that surprised even the Americans. As France and Spain, the Netherlands and even Russia piled into the war effort, Britain found itself not only overextended but overtaxed. The country was going broke, and only the manufacturing segment was making enough capital to keep the system going.

By 1782 it was clear that the British way of fighting and paying for wars wouldn’t work on the Americans. British aristocratic dominance depended on a subordinate relationship between the levels of nobles who provided the wealth and the direction for society, hopefully in concert with their worship at church. American/Whig free-market philosophy let citizens make whatever they could, whenever they could, and however they could. Whig rulers worked to protect wealth, not control it, and had no truck with churches. With the end of the war, many in Britain understood that the basis of wealth had to shift if they wanted to survive the next war.

Thus was born the economical basis for the continuing Industrial Revolution, where laborers became servants of the factories, not the lords. They earned wages, not an allowance, and they could turn their skills to their own use, even go into business themselves if they were so inclined. This kind of business innovation took hold in English manufacturing centers and spread throughout the British Isles wherever there was coal for fuel and water for transportation.

The Jewels in the Crown: The Colonies

Losing the American War wasn’t the end of the British Empire, merely the end of the first phase of growth. At the beginning of the, Britain was chronically short on everything but demands for more money, men and materials. By its end, though heavily in debt, Britain had replaced its shortages with innovation, forward thinking, and newer ideas that were only made possible by superior industrial and financial organization. The “wizard war” of 1939-45 had nothing on the “inventor’s war” of 1775-1783.

Critical among the campaigns of the war was the late naval campaign in the West Indies, where British forces held the Bahamas, Antigua, and Jamaica. Small in themselves, they formed a naval barrier between the parts of the Spanish New World colonies in the event of another war, and that was only a generation away. The West Indies bases were critical to the naval war that France secured supplies from the Americas, and once Spain became France’s ally, to destabilize Spanish specie shipments. The British hold on a few islands in the Caribbean was enough to affect Continental finance.

Far away from the Americas, British naval forces outfought the French in 1782. British traders were quick to export cotton goods, tea, and other high-value goods. Britain’s relationship with India, once the American War was over, gradually shifted from trader to competitor to ruler as they outfought and outmaneuvered the Mughals, who usually refused to cooperate with each other. Britain, fighting a handful of pitched battles against forces far larger than themselves, secured trade agreements with the largest and most powerful states in India. The result, by 1805, was British dominance of the second most populous country on Earth. Though it was expensive to maintain for a generation, that Britain had secure bases and access to markets and manpower that France could never match was enough to keep the engine of British finance running at top speed.

Discovered just before the Revolution and colonized just after, Australia was a faraway desert that could absorb whatever excess energies (and people) Britain could not afford to keep. Vagrants, petty and serious criminals, seditionists, and adventurers moved to the new land on the other side of the world, and there they eventually prospered and grew. But more importantly, the Empire kept growing throughout the wars with France, so that there was always hope for a future that investors could back and shipbuilders could get credit for.

Just across the St. Lawrence River from America, Canada was a cornerstone of the British Empire for the next century. Though not as populous as the US, it was a toehold on vast resources that was fought over one more time from 1812 to 1815. Fighting on a vast battle front that stretched from the Atlantic to Lake Michigan to the mouth of the Mississippi, one of Britain’s goals was to gain access to the Gulf of Mexico and the interior of North America. Holding onto the Great Lakes was critical to controlling a route to the Mississippi. The British defeat on Lake Erie in 1813 made Canada’s chance of being a trade competitor to the US fade; Andrew Jackson’s decisive victory in the swamps around New Orleans in 1815 ended them. When Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812, Britain rushed to her aid, and in return had leverage to get the Romanovs to reduce their Pacific power, allowing western Canada access to the Pacific. Two military losses and a diplomatic coup in the space of three years allowed Canada to become a treasure house.

Despite the apparent embarrassment of the loss of her most important colony, and because of it, the British Empire thrived and prospered after 1783. The demands of the global conflict strengthened it, reforming their economic and legal methods to compensate for the loss and make new profits. Britain had found the limits of the Empire in 1776, and improved its methods continually until World War I.

The American War stretched Perfidious Albion enormously, but she grew strong to take up the strain.

Steele’s Battalion: The Great War Diaries

Although Battalion takes place generations after the Revolution, a curious thing about the impact of the American War on Anglo-American relations was that, by the end of the 19th Century, the relations between British and American troops (though not their leadership) was as if nothing untoward had happened.

And Finally...

On 27 June:

1743: The Battle of Dettingen takes place near Karlstein am Main in Bavaria. It was the last time an English sovereign (George II) commanded and troops (English, Hanoverian, and Austrian) in battle, barely defeating/escaping the French during the War of the Austrian Succession.

1898: Joshua Slocum lands his 36-foot gaff-rigged oyster sloop Spray at Newport, Rhode Island, completing the world’s first solo circumnavigation by boat. Slocum left Boston on 24 April 1895 and sailed roughly 46,000 miles over three years.

And today is INDUSTRIAL WORKERS OF THE WORLD DAY, observing the creation of the IWW in Chicago, Illinois on this day in 1905. The Wobblies employ revolutionary industrial unionism as their philosophy and tactics, connecting with socialist, syndicalist, and anarchist labor movements, and they’re still around.

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This is a riff on a Daniel Brumstetter essay in Aeon from September 2025

Military members often write last letters to their loved ones they don’t want those people to see, because they were goodbyes; I did. Left it in my pack like the other guys did; still do, probably, hoping that there’s enough left of the letters to be sent home with whatever’s left of their carcasses. But this bit mostly contains the last letters written by Frenchmen about to be executed by the Nazis.

If I were a maker of books, I would make a register, with comments, of various deaths. He who would teach men to die would teach them to live.

Michel de Montaigne

A last letter is uniquely personal, yet there is a universal feel to them, almost as if they paint a naked portrait of the human condition. Last letters peer into the souls of those confronting death. They aren’t like everyday letters, diaries, memoirs, political tracts or philosophical treatises because of the urgency that shapes the act of writing. The authors know they will not have another chance to say what they must say.

Use your imagination.

Dawn breaks on what you know is the last morning of your life. A prison guard hands you a blank sheet of paper and a pen hours before your execution. To whom do you write? What do you say, knowing this is your last chance to say it? Do you soften the blow for your kids?

I can give no longer any further testimony of my affection than this letter…Colvert will never again see his Plouf, nor his little Plumette. He is leaving for a big, big journey,

Robert Beck

How about your parents?

They are going to rip me from this life that you gave me and that I clung to so.

Jacques Baudry

Or your lover? Here, you can be deeply philosophical, with death no longer on the horizon. The moment has been decided, and its arrival is imminent and irrevocable.

Be courageous, ma Cherie. It is no doubt the last time that I write you. Today, I will have lived.

Huynh Khuong An

To read these last letters is to take a journey deep into the world of emotions at the very frontier of living and dying. In one’s last moments, superficiality cuts away, revealing something meaningful and deep about the human condition.

In everything else there may be sham: the fine reasonings of philosophy may be a mere pose in us; or else our trials, by not testing us to the quick, give us a chance to keep our face always composed. But in the last scene, between death and ourselves, there is no more pretending; we must talk plain, we must show what there is that is good and clean at the bottom of the pot.

Montaigne

These last letters tell us what this something at the bottom of the pot is.

As I prepare for this last mission, I am a bit homesick...Mother and Dad; you are very close to me, and I long so to talk to you. America has asked much of our generation, but I’m glad to give her all I have because she has given me so much.

Arnold Rahe, USAAF, 1943

Do we realize, scribbling these last lines, what these words will mean to our loved ones? How much to we care? Should we be bitter? Sad?

This evening, I think of your sweetness, your kindness, of our sweet moments, those from long ago and those of yesterday, know well, my darling, one could not love you more than I did…And I will fall asleep with your sweet image in my eyes and the taste of our last kisses that are not that distant, my sweet friend, my gentle little Lienne. Be sensible ... Be reasonable. Love me, for a long time yet…I kiss passionately your photograph…the one from Luchon in which you are wearing flowers.

Georges Pitard

Or should we just remember those best of times we had? Those people will read these letters in moments of infinite sadness; leave them with the good and leave out the bad. But make sure to leave them.

I dreamt a great deal, this last while, about the wonderful meals we would have when I was freed…You will have them without me, with family, but not in sadness…I relived ..all my travels, all my experiences, all my meals…It is 8 am, it will be time to leave. I ate, smoked, drank some coffee. I see no more business to settle.

Daniel Decourdemanche

As I remember it, my last letter to Mom was a lot like this last one, but I wrote it in 1974, so I really don’t recall that well. I talked about her, my sisters, my step-family, my life. I mostly recall how I ended it.

Just remember, Ma; I volunteered for this job.

John D. Beatty

Steele’s Battalion: The Great War Diaries

Ned Steele knew every letter, every diary entry he wrote in France and Flanders could have been his last, yet he tried to keep that certainty out. It usually worked; it didn’t always.

And Finally...

On 20 June:

451: The battle called Catalaunian Plains near modern-day Châlons-en-Champagne in northeastern France took place between Western Roman and Visigothic forces led by Flavius Aetius and the army of Attila the Hun. The all-day brawl halted the westward Hun advance into Gaul.

1949: Gertrude “Gorgeous Gussie” Moran shocks the crowd with her visible and frilly underwear during match play at Wimbledon, London, England. While her outfit met the all-white requirements, apparently the tournament didn’t think to regulate women’s skirt lengths.

And today is NATIONAL AMERICAN EAGLE DAY, commemorating this day in 1782 when the US Congress approved the Great Seal of the United States, opting for the bald eagle instead of the turkey (Franklin’s suggestion) as the symbol of the country. If it had gone the other way, would we be calling those people “eagles?”

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What on Earth is going on in America right now?

An opinion can be argued with; a conviction is best shot.

T.E. Lawrence

We’ve put criminals in office; we’ve even reelected them after their convictions. But the spin The Party (Democrat, Republican, “Independent,” all the rest in one lump) put on them belies the very idea of “leadership” and has turned our government into a kleptocracy maintained by a mass media machine bought and paid for by The Party. A sitting governor said the quiet part out loud recently, pleading for wealthy taxpayers to move back to her state and do their “patriotic duty” and pay her usurious taxes to cover her social welfare programs, including paying rent for illegal aliens. The bitter part of that story will be that the voters will comfortably reelect her in November not because she’s clearly a grifter or because they feel she’s acting in the best interests of her state, but because of the party box on the ballots.

And no one really cares.

It’s The Party that’s destroyed our political system—the one Washington warned us about—and will destroy the country. These grifters in suits screech they are trying to preserve the system through the SAVE America Act that will quietly die in Congress. Why? Because The Party can’t stand the idea that they can’t manipulate the voter rolls to make sure their grifters get in office. Even if, by some miracle, it gets signed into law, a federal judge will read his script and declare it unconstitutional, and then another will, and another, until the leadership changes in Washington and they stop pressing the issue. Oh, yes, judges have scripts, too, because they aspire to higher office like the other grifters in public office. Remember that The Party got them there, and they expect to rise in the system through the same means.

The electorate might want fair elections, but they don’t vote for them.

Voters forget stuff; they don’t know stuff; they believe in stuff that isn’t true; they like stuff that isn’t good for them, and they vote according to their scripts, mostly by checking their wing of The Party’s letter, especially in the pocket boroughs; you know, the guaranteed districts for the last part of The Party that drew the congressional district map.

Yes, The Party box is evil, but it will always be there because The Party runs the elections, says who’s on the ballots, what those ballots look like, and even how they’re counted. Electronic voting? Do you think anyone will count those votes fairly? Oops! Sorry; that bunch just disappeared! Can’t understand it; can’t recover them either; sorry! Do you think anyone really polices the voter rolls at all? Have your keeper adjust your meds if you think hundreds of voters live in that abandoned strip mall. Infinite ballot counts that find enough “mail-in” and “early” ballots with identical postmarks to make the distant third-place candidate leap safely into second place overnight? Perfectly credible only to the naïve and The Party.

It matters not who casts the ballots. What matters is who counts the ballots.

Joseph Stalin

The Party has to keep itself in charge.

And they will for the foreseeable future because we’re too lazy to kick them out. The hard work of looking at the voter roles, of unifying the crazy-quilt of registration and residency laws…you know, to make sure they’re not manipulated by the local kleptocrats. We can do it; we just don’t have the spine to do it, to fight The Party’s incredibly long reach. We’d rather let them just do what they want and act like it’s all in our/their best interests because of that letter after their name and, well, it’s easier than the alternative.

Take the (election) money out.

As I’ve advocated for decades:

• Take those letters off the ballot.

• Vote only for chief executives: presidents, governors, and mayors.

• End the pseudo-elections for representatives at all levels, eliminate all the districts, and draft those who represent us by lot from telephone company and utility billing records for a single term.

• Make the sheriffs, judges, district attorneys, clerks, and all others civil service jobs.

But, as we all know, that won’t happen because The Party won’t allow it and their media slaves live off the gravy train.

Ye are a factious crew, and enemies of all good government…Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there not one vice you do not possess?...Gold is your God…Religion? My horse knows more of religion…Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation. You [who] were deputed here by the people to get grievances redressed are yourselves become the greatest grievance…Go, get you out! Make haste! Ye venal slaves, be gone!...In the name of God, go!

Oliver Cromwell to Parliament, 20 Apr 1653

Do we need another civil war to get rid of these grifters who take our money and leave us in the ashes of our failed cities?

Crop Duster: A Novel of WWII

I don’t write about politics a lot—too divisive—but California drove me to do this. Crop Duster is tangentially about the fallout from a certain German election in 1933.

And Finally...

On 13 June:

323 BC: The latest accepted date for the death of Alexander the Great in Babylon; it may have been as early as 10 June. His cause of death is also unclear (may have been malaria, typhoid, poisoning, or a host of other things), as is his current burial place, as his tomb in Alexandria, Egypt, vanished in the 4th Century AD.

1920: US Post Office prohibits mailing children. After introducing Parcel Post in 1913, a few US parents technically “mailed” their children (accompanied by postal workers) to relatives to save on train fare. After several instances garnered media attention, the Post Office banned the practice.

And today is WORLD SOFTBALL DAY, in part commemorating this day in 1991, when the International Olympic Committee added women’s softball and men’s baseball to the Summer Games in 1992. Organizers dropped both softball and baseball in 2020 because of low interest, but they will make a comeback in 2026. Make up your minds, people.

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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.

The Marco Polo Bridge and Gekokujo

On 7 July 1937, Japanese forces demanded entry into a suburban Beijing town, alleging that a Japanese soldier was missing. The Chinese objected; the shooting started, and Japan invaded. Despite the “missing” soldier returning to his unit, the Japanese persisted. Facts, of course, didn’t matter to the samurai, who would have whatever they wanted in China if they had to kill the last Chinese to do it. They proved this lack of regard starting in December at Nanking, where the death toll of civilians and disarmed Chinese soldiers may have exceeded 300,000 burned, shot, mutilated, strangled, and raped to death Chinese. Japanese officers had beheading contests. The international community watched from their churches, missions, and other more-or-less off-limits sanctuaries from samurai savagery, recording much of it in diaries which Japan spent generations denying.

Tokyo watched and waited as ammunition and fuel costs devoured the profits of Japanese businesses in Manchuria, and their soldiers and sailors plunged deeper into China. Diplomatically defensive while the atrocities piled up, the politicians and diplomats could only wait until the Chinese stopped fighting, which everyone hoped would be soon. In the meantime, American companies, at Washington’s behest, pleaded “limited availability” for critical exports, including tetra-ethyl led (TEL), high-nitrate fertilizers, and molasses used to make alcohols for explosive propellants. Suddenly copra, then jute, then nickel were in short supply. Almost everything Japan needed from elsewhere that the Americans could control became subject to silent sanctions.

Yet the samurai charged on, convinced that these Chinese vermin would end and that they could get the needed resources further into China. Just kill a few more, burn another town, rape a few thousand more women, and Chiang will give up. But the casualties kept piling up, the fuel and ammunition supplies burned up faster than expected, and the Chinese kept fighting in their ever-hopeless string of catastrophic losses punctuated by the odd Chinese pyrrhic victory, grubbing supplies and arms from Germany and the Soviets, the Americans and occasionally the British, begging for cash to pay for it all.

Tokyo could only watch, because at home, gekokujo incidents ran rampant. Ardent Shishi patriots murdered politicians and recalcitrant generals and even threatened the Imperial Palace. Neither the IJA nor the IJN could control or bargain with the fanatics dreaming of a “Showa Restoration” that would abolish political government, forgetting that it was the last Imperial “restoration” that enabled political government. Events after the 26 February Incident in 1936, controlling the samurai became nearly impossible. It was the day of the samurai and their Shishi, whether or not Japan liked it.

Useless Pacts

In 1936, Japan had signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Germany as a threat to the Soviet Union and communism in general. Part of the fallout from that Pact was that the Soviets began supplying the Chinese, even if Stalin didn’t believe China was ready for communism (he didn’t back Mao’s CCP yet). In 1940, Japan signed the Tripartite Pact, a military alliance with Germany and Italy, that had practically no value to Japan other than the recognition by the two fascist powers of Japan’s “sphere of influence” in East Asia. While the three might have had common enemies—the US, USSR, and Britain—they had no means to help each other in any meaningful way. When Germany invaded Russia in 1941, Japan paid lip service to Germany’s plea for Japan to march into Siberia because they were so immersed in China, even if the IJA desired such a move. All that Japan’s strengthening of diplomatic ties with Europe did was make more enemies.

Indochina: The Steps Too Far

Desperate to cut off the supply routes to China, Japan bargained with Vichy for a “friendly occupation” of Tonkin (northern Indochina) in September 1940, which the French were in no position to resist. The tiny French garrison tried to resist Vichy control, but their pro-De Gaulle leaders were recalled. Staunch patriots, taking orders from Petain, replaced them. While the IJA said the move was strategic, the IJN said it was potentially catastrophic because it threatened their fuel and made expanding the occupation into Cochin China (southern Indochina) essential as a springboard to the Dutch East Indies, where they wanted to go, anyway. While this was so, Japan also knew that if they moved south, war with the US was almost certain—a war that Japanese realists knew it could not win.

The Tonkin move alarmed Washington, which reacted swiftly, cutting off most petroleum additives that only they controlled while throttling Japan’s credit. Enraged and frightened by the new sanctions, the samurai redoubled their efforts in China while they prepared to move into Cochin China, taking that fatal step in July 1941. Washington reacted by cutting off all petroleum products, all iron and aluminum scrap, and freezing all Japanese assets in the US.

The samurai believed they had little choice but to go to war with the rest of the world.

Roots of Samurai Rage and Fear: The Road to Destruction

There is practically no daylight between the samurai and the Tokyo government in most accounts of pre-1941 Japan, but the truth is far different. Yes, the samurai were savages, but the government was too frightened to stop them, and the war they were driving Japan into was hopeless before the first bomb dropped on Pearl Harbor.

And Finally...

On 6 June:

1916: Yuan Shikai dies of kidney failure in Beijing, China. Not satisfied with being a mere president of China, Shikai tried mightily to have himself crowned Emperor of China, and said he was the Emperor for 83 days, triggering the collapse of China’s central government and ushering in a period of chaos in China.

1944: The US, Britain, and Canada invade France at Normandy. The largest amphibious invasion in history—and it will probably ever be so—grabbed a narrow foothold on the continent that, within a week, contained nearly a million men.

And today is NATIONAL YO-YO DAY, celebrating the birth of Donald F. Duncan, Sr., in Kansas City, Missouri, on this day in 1892. Duncan was an American entrepreneur who founded the Duncan Toys Company and popularized the yo-yo, hence the day. I could never make them work.

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This is a riff on an Aeon essay by Ben Chu.

A great wave of desire for more self-sufficiency is sweeping across the planet. Donald Trump has declared the “economic independence” of the United States, wanting to excise the US from the global trading system that it has so painstakingly built since WWII—a system that has delivered considerable economic benefits for everyone.

Trump is not alone in wanting to rely less on other countries for imports of goods and raw materials. China’s president Xi Jinping has been advocating self-reliance for China, discouraging imports and trying to enhance Chinese domestic production of everything from food to computer chips.

Others have followed this path too.

As the medieval world gave way to the Enlightenment and Romanticism in Europe, Jean-Jacques Rousseau reinvigorated the ideal of autarky. Rousseau held that primitive man had been naturally ‘solitary’, coming together with others only for mating, and was much happier for it.

…wandering in the forests without industry, without speech, without a home, without war, and without relationships, with no need for his fellow men, and similarly with no desire to harm them, perhaps even without ever recognizing any of them individually.

Jean Jaques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality (1754)

Not a new idea, even to Rousseau.

The impulse has resonated deeply with both individuals and communities over many centuries. Understanding how the two interact and reinforce each other might be crucial to understanding the enduring appeal of this way of thinking, and for getting a sense of where it can lead us, whether as individuals, as nation states or as a global community.

Rousseau was wrong.

In Kenya’s Olorgesailie basin, anthropologists have found hand-worked axes made of obsidian—volcanic glass not from the area, suggesting that these Stone Age humans who lived some 320,000 years ago were trading with other groups. Part of what defines our species, making us distinct from other apes, seems to be Homo sapiens’ cooperative and social nature and, specifically, our capability for cultural learning.

Sakoku in Japan.

The Tokugawas imposed the policy of sakoku, or ‘closed country’ on Japan in the 17th Century, to maintain what they—Japanese, not just the shogun—saw as racial and ideological purity from especially Western ideas. They banned Christian missionaries; authorities persecuted Japanese citizens within the country and compelled their priests to abjure prior to execution. They forbade emigration and reduced Western trade almost to nothing. Economic isolationism also connected with resistance to foreign empires' incursions and served as a practical way to secure sovereignty and control, extending beyond mere abstract principles.

Self-sufficiency does not mean narrowness. To be self-sufficient is not to be altogether self-contained.

Gandhi

Gandhi’s vision of an India independent of British rule was for a network of economically autonomous villages growing their own crops and spinning their own cotton for clothing, writing, “every village has to be self-sustained and capable of managing its affairs even to the extent of defending itself against the whole world.” That’s why the image of the spinning wheel once sat at the heart of the tricolor Indian flag.

For Gandhi, self-sufficiency did not mean there would be no trade, but trade only in the things that the village could not realistically produce itself.

Yet at other times Gandhi struck a much more isolationist tone, insisting that ‘it is certainly our right and duty to discard everything foreign that is superfluous and even everything foreign that is necessary if we can produce or manufacture it in our country.’ Gandhi’s self-sufficiency movement - Swadeshi in Hindi - has to be understood as self-sufficiency for India primarily in relation to Britain, the imperial overlord. The movement's announcement occurred in Bengal in 1905, accompanied by a boycott of British goods. Swadeshi was Gandhi’s antidote to what he saw as the predatory imperial capitalism of the British.

That mindset of India needing self-sufficiency remained long after the nation achieved independence.

Germany's experience in WWI, when the British navy's blockade starved the country, prompted Hitler's autarkism. Writing in the 1920s, Hitler dismissed the idea that Germany could nourish its population through increases in agricultural productivity and lamented that “the German people is today even less in a position than in the years of peace to feed itself from its own land and territory.” The road to national self-preservation for the former lance-corporal would have to run through a radical program of building national self-sufficiency. And he believed that Germany’s salvation lay in conquering and exploiting the rural bounty of lands to the east, thus gaining the notorious Lebensraum (‘living space’). In a speech in 1936, when he had ascended to the German Chancellorship and crushed all internal opposition, Hitler made his expansionist territorial intentions plain:

If I had the Ural Mountains with their incalculable store of treasures in raw materials, Siberia with its vast forests, and the Ukraine with its tremendous wheat fields, Germany and the National Socialist leadership would swim in plenty!

Joseph Stalin, despite having Hitler’s fecund lands under his direct control, also felt a dread of national insecurity and pursued a policy of self- sufficiency for the Soviet Union in the 1930s, deliberately cutting off exports and seeking to establish Soviet economic independence from the capitalist world. Mao used similar justifications for self-reliance, based on national security in China during the Great Leap Forward of the 1950s, when he sought to create a national domestic steel industry from scratch by forcing farmers to melt down their pots and pans in backyard furnaces. In the 1950s, Kim II Sung made national self-sufficiency not just an important aim for North Korea, but the lodestar of his new regime, calling it Juche.

Establishing Juche means ... rejecting dependence on others, using one’s own brains, believing in one’s own strength, displaying the revolutionary spirit of self-reliance.

The specter of war primarily motivated Kim, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, rather than ideals of national virtue, when they implemented their programs of national isolationism. The outcomes of their visions for self-sufficiency were catastrophic, resulting in genocide and suffering on a scarcely imaginable scale. North Korea remains a hermit kingdom, shaped by a totalitarian family cult, effectively a prison state for its people, a warning of the economic and social toll of isolationism. Yet despite the economic disasters autarky has often wrought, it’s important to recognize that some outstanding national economic success stories have also felt its allure.

A free people ought not only to be armed, but disciplined, and their safety and interest require that they should promote such manufactories as tend to render them independent of others for essential, particularly military, supplies.

George Washington, January 1790

The context was the threat of Great Britain, which was still a profound military danger to the nascent republic. Washington and his Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton, believed they had to build up the states’ industrial base to enable the republic to defend itself. And this meant a high wall of tariffs to prevent the infant factories of the US from being suffocated by cheaper imported products from a more productive Britain. One of the first acts of the First Congress was the imposition of a tariff.

If we don’t have ... steel and lots of other things, we don’t have a military and, frankly, we just won’t have a country very long,..We used to make so many ships. We don’t make them anymore very much, but we’re going to make them very fast, very soon.

Donald Trump, 2025

When Trump explained why he had re-imposed tariffs on steel imports, he explicitly linked trade policy to national self-reliance and defense capabilities. Trump resurrected ideas that were influential at the very birth of the republic.

Like El Nino, the drive for self- sufficiency keeps returning.

Steele’s Battalion: The Great War Diaries

Arguably, America’s uneven performance in WWI resulted from American isolationism. A young man goes to France in an army that had never fought a war like he did. Yet, he and America prevailed.

…a novel about an all-American hero in the First World War…A gripping and satisfyingly detailed war novel in the vein of Sergeant York.

Kirkus Reviews

And Finally...

On 30 May:

1942: Operation MILLENNIUM begins, with as many as a thousand RAF aircraft targeting Cologne, Germany, in the largest air attack on a single target up to that time. A little under a thousand planes hit Cologne, dropping just over 34,000 tons of bombs, causing considerable damage and inflicting about 20,000 casualties.

1970: The US observes its last 30 May Memorial Day. Begun as Decoration Day in 1868, the Uniform Monday Holiday Act of 1968, which became effective in 1971, designated Memorial Day a national holiday and moved it from 30 May to the last Monday in May.

And today is NATIONAL CREATIVITY DAY, encouraging us to engage in making something never seen before, never imagined, or in describing something in a new way to stimulate not just imagination but a sense of accomplishing something—anything.

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For your tomorrow, we gave our today.

John Maxwell Evans

Not everyone honors all graveyards and shrines, especially military ones, for a lot of reasons. In 1985, President Ronald Reagan drew criticism for his visit with West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to a cemetery in Bitburg, Germany, that contained the graves of 2,000 German soldiers who died in World War II. Critics, including Holocaust survivor and Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, became especially incensed upon learning that the cemetery contained the graves of 49 deceased SS members.

Which SS were they in?

While it is popular (and partially accurate) to say that the Nazis tasked parts of the SS with implementing the Final Solution, it’s like saying water is wet. By 1944, it was impossible to have a profession that required a license, work for any part of the government or the Nazi party, or contract with the government without paying dues to the Allgemeine (general)-SS . Most senior military officers were also members, besides being party members, if they wanted to get promoted. And several German Army divisions built their own death camps in Russia, and many more took part in what is now called “ethnic cleansing,” and even “genocide” operations. Anyone condemning them lately?

The Waffen-(armed)-SS was a unique combat organization.

First formed as a bodyguard, the Waffen-SS grew from three regiments to over 38 divisions—about 900,000 men at its peak in 1944, outnumbering employees of the SS itself. Functionally, its units answered to the army commanders they served with, and by 1944 about a third of their ranks were draftees. Waffen-SS units included Germans and anyone else who wanted to serve, including Norwegians, Belgians, Englishmen, and Americans. While the organization took part in many atrocities (the International Tribunal declared it a criminal organization), so did the German Army. They all took a personal oath to Hitler; so did all German officers. The SS-Totenkopfverbände (TV, Death’s Head Units) ran the camps. Additional organs of the SS included the Gestapo and the Sicherheitsdienst (SD).

They all get painted with the same broad SS = war criminals brush.

If members of certain organizations have no moral right to be buried with “real” soldiers because of what’s on their collars, it’s hard to explain what morally differentiates the handful of poor (dead) sods in Bitburg from the camp guards. Revisionists can accept pragmatic reasons for treating them differently, but we should not dishonor all of them at the same time just because of who they’re buried with.

The Yasukuni Shrine is no different.

Emperor Meiji founded this Shinto shrine—the name means Peaceful Country Shrine—in Tokyo in 1869, and it commemorates all those who died in the service of Japan beginning in 1868 (the Boshin War). The shrine lists the names, origins, birthdates, and places of death of over two million people, including a thousand convicted war criminals from the Pacific War, and it commemorates anyone who died on behalf of Japan, including Koreans and Taiwanese, and it honors the souls of all the people who died during World War II, regardless of their nationality.

To dishonor the Yasukuni Shrine is to misunderstand both Shinto and the shrine…except for modern politics.

In the Shinto faith, the souls of the departed—kami—linger among the people they lived among, and people cannot ignore them just because they may have done something wrong in life. In Japanese culture, the dead are still part of the family. The Showa Emperor Hirohito visited the shrine eight times between the end of the war and 1975. However, he thereafter boycotted the shrine because of his (sudden) displeasure over the enshrinement of top convicted Japanese war criminals. Neither his son, the Heisei Emperor Akihito, nor his grandson, the Reiwa Emperor Naruhito, has visited the shrine because of those same “optics.” The Japanese Government’s involvement with the shrine remains highly controversial in some circles for reasons that have nothing to do with most of the souls honored there, which include Americans who firebombed Japan and those who died in the Bataan Death March.

We don’t boycott Arlington because of the handful of Confederate former slave-owners buried there in an obscure corner. They’re dead; they did what their societies wanted them to do; let them rest.

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This is a riff on a Matthew Parker History Today article from 2014

It was supposed to have a glorious historical symmetry. August 2014, exactly a hundred years after the triumphant completion of the Panama Canal, should have seen the opening of the new $5.5 billion expansion. Amid strikes, huge cost overruns and rumors that the main construction consortium was in financial difficulty, the completion date slipped first to October, then to March 2015. The expansion project concluded in June 2016 at nearly twice the quoted cost. Each day of delay reportedly cost the canal company nearly a million dollars in lost revenue. Panama’s fiendish geology and extraordinary rainfall caused the cost overruns. The canal project has always attracted insane optimism, corruption, and disaster. Part of the danger of “the lure of Panama” was that, from the earliest days, it always looked so obvious and easy. Given the history of The Big Ditch, what is startling is that any of these setbacks should come as a surprise.

The Panama Canal has broken many people, fortunes, and reputations.

Having established a colony on the isthmus’ Atlantic coast in September 1513, the Spanish conquistador Vasco Nunez de Balboa led a party of men into the interior to search for the rumored Great Ocean across the mountains. Only a third survived the heat, insects, snakes and hostile Cuna Indians in the jungle, but on 25 September Balboa climbed a hill and ‘silent on a peak in Darien’ he turned one way and then the other; he could see both oceans clearly. Only a tantalizingly narrow strip of land blocked the way to the riches of the East. Alvaro de Saavedra, an engineer with Balboa, reported to Spain’s Charles V that although they should continue searching for a strait between the two oceans, if they did not find one, “yet it might not be impossible to make one.” In 1534, since no one found a waterway, Charles ordered a survey with a view to excavation. In an early example of the hubris that the canal dream attracted throughout its history, a priest wrote to Charles from Panama:

If there are mountains, there are also hands...To a King of Spain with the wealth of the Indies at his command, when the object to be attained is the spice trade, what is possible is easy.

Fortunately for future diggers, the Spanish authorities soon decided that it was safer to have a wall of land between the riches of Peru and rival European powers, so they did not undertake any work.

A bold plan from Scotland.

William Paterson was born in 1658. Part missionary, part buccaneer, and part speculator, he made a fortune as a promoter of moneymaking schemes, which included founding the Bank of England. After a sojourn in the Caribbean, Paterson had been in the grip of a venture to cap everything. By establishing ports on both coasts of the Panama isthmus, they could transfer cargoes over the narrow strip of land, saving ships the long and dangerous voyage around Cape Horn. Paterson identified a spot where, he said, there was “no mountain range at all” and where “broad, low valleys” extended from coast to coast. It was perfect enough to envisage not just a road but, in time, a waterway. Paterson intended a truly global entrepot, to rival any in the world, and whoever controlled it, proclaimed the Scot, would possess “the Gates to the Pacific and the keys to the Universe.” It is clear, however, that Paterson had never seen Panama. When the Scottish Parliament, jealous of the riches flowing into England from trade, passed an Act to encourage new settlements and commerce, Paterson rushed to Edinburgh to sell his Darien scheme, named for the dangerous and densely forested region on the modern Colombia-Panama border.

Do but open these doors and trade will increase trade, and money will beget money.

William Paterson to the Scottish Parliament

Warnings about Spain’s jealous guarding of the area and Paterson’s tendency to over-promote did not prevent the government from approving the plan. In June 1695, an Act of the Scottish Parliament established the Company of Scotland trading to Africa and the Indies, but then the English Parliament turned against the project. £300,000 in English subscriptions and royal assent to the Act vanished. However, a wave of Scottish patriotic indignation saw £400,000 pouring in from all levels of society, about half the country’s available capital.

It was a colossal risk for so much of the national silver.

In July 1698, five ships carrying 1,200 people left Edinburgh for Panama. Although over 40 of the colonists died on the three-and-a-half month voyage, at first all went well. They established friendly relations with the local tribes, cleared land, and found the soil to be highly fertile. But as soon as the Scots had landed in the New World, there were fierce protests from the Spanish ambassador and English merchants. In response, William III issued orders to the Governors of Virginia, New York, New England, Jamaica and Barbados, forbidding them to trade with or supply provisions to the Darien colonists. For a trading station, this was a fatal blow.

Everything unraveled.

The death rate from fever skyrocketed. No one attempted to open an overland route to the Pacific through Paterson’s imaginary valleys. Relations with the Indians cooled when it became apparent that the new arrivals were not preparing to attack the Spanish. Scarcity of food brought increasing weakness, disease, and demoralization; among the first to die was Paterson’s wife. Within six months, nearly 400 settlers had perished from fever or starvation. The onset of the rainy season in May and the concurrent further worsening of living conditions was the final straw. Utterly discouraged, on 20 June 1699, after just seven months, the Scots abandoned the isthmus. Only half of the weakened settlers would survive the journey home. Two more fleets sailed from Scotland, and twice settlers briefly re-established the colony. But in March 1700, the last settlers, weakened by hunger and disease, were driven out by Spanish troops. Paterson’s scheme cost over 2,000 lives, the savings of an entire nation and, with that, Scottish independence. Seeing the futility of trying to compete with England and stripped of capital from the disaster, Scotland merged into Great Britain in 1707.

The “Darien Disaster” hastened the coming of the Act of Union that dissolved the Scottish parliament.

Scotland’s tragedy did nothing to dampen interest in the dream of a transisthmian canal. Benjamin Franklin envisaged a canal to ensure world peace through enhanced commerce and communication. Thomas Jefferson saw the canal as an essential step towards the southward expansion of US power. But it was the lifting of the dead hand of Spanish rule in the 1820s and Europe’s Canal Age (ca. 1760-1860) and the United States, and the development of steam power, which gave the idea fresh momentum.

The isthmus saw a stream of optimistic surveyors and explorers.

It was an idea that, once taken on, seemed again and again to become an obsession. Backers were sometimes private companies, sometimes kings or emperors. The King of the Netherlands and Louis-Philippe of France were at various times interested. Most explorers got lost, perished from hunger or disease, or the Indians wiped them out. But they still sent back optimistic and false reports of “remarkable depressions” and Indian canals. The idea of a canal joining the Atlantic to the Pacific attracted amateur and proven engineers, millionaires, dreamers, charlatans like Paterson, and crackpots.

By the mid-19th Century, it was the greatest, unfulfilled engineering challenge in the world.

Which was why the isthmus remained the focus of international great power rivalry. In the 1840s it almost brought war between Britain and the US, only averted by the Clinton-Bulwer Treaty in 1850, pledging that neither would build a canal on their own. For the Americans, no canal was better than one under the control of a foreign power. At the end of the American Civil War, Washington launched an aggressive policy to reverse creeping European involvement in Central America. For Abraham Lincoln’s and Andrew Johnston’s Secretary of State William Seward, a transisthmian canal was a cornerstone of Manifest Destiny. Under Ulysses Grant (who, as a young Army officer, had transited the isthmus by train), surveyors meticulously carried out a series of surveys to decide the preferred route. They decided the best option was a canal in Nicaragua, using a high lake. But the Clinton-Bulwer Treaty and concerns that it did not have a strong enough navy to defend the waterway prevented any other action.

Here come the French.

Ferdinand de Lesseps, builder of the Suez Canal, brought the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interocéanique to Panama in and began construction on a canal in 1881. The French public, told that it was their patriotic duty to back the canal project, duly did so in their hundreds of thousands. De Lesseps decided on a sea-level canal before he’d even seen the isthmus, but shared the enormous confidence of his age in the benign effects of new technology and tried to raise money in Britain and the United States. The Americans, infuriated that the French should be meddling in what they saw as their backyard, gave him nothing. Britain applauded him for his achievement at Suez, but his Panama plans were cold-shouldered.

The French effort, characterized by corruption, fantasy, and heroism, resulted in one of history’s greatest ever engineering disasters.

By 1884, the estimates of cost had been wildly optimistic, and there was a pretty much permanent epidemic of disease on the isthmus, the worst killers being malaria and yellow fever. People then thought "miasma"—toxic emanations from the rich corruption of tropical soil disturbed by the digging—caused malaria. The British Empire successfully used Jesuit’s bark, or quinine, as a preventive for malaria, but the French shunned it. Yellow fever was supposedly the result of filth or dead animals, or even, experts suggested, from a particular wind off the sea or from eating apples. Treatment comprised mustard, brandy, and cigars.

Knowledge that mosquitoes transmitted both diseases was still a decade away.

Over 20,000 died during the French canal period, most of them Jamaicans, who provided the muscle for the effort. Amazingly, some Frenchmen were prepared to die for the canal. Three out of four of the French engineers who set out to be part of de Lesseps’ scheme were dead within three months. Jules Dingier arrived in Panama as chief engineer in early 1883. Many people shared his theory that immoral personal behavior or moral weakness caused that yellow fever. To prove that the disease held no fear for him and to stiffen morale, he brought his wife, his son and daughter, and his daughter’s fiancé to Panama. Within a year and a half, all succumbed to the disease. Dingier returned to France a broken man. The sense of death all around, a sword of Damocles hanging over them, stoked a feeling of idealistic unreality. “The constant dangers of yellow fever,” wrote one engineer, “exalted the energy of those who were filled with a sincere love for the great task undertaken. To its irradiating influence was joined the heroic joy of self-sacrifice for the greatness of France.”

American observers on the isthmus took a more cynical line.

To them, such patriotic reflections were so much “Gallic hot air.” “Nothing is ever done by the canal company without an inordinate amount of pomp, circumstance and red tape,” one American journalist wrote in late 1887. “Of what one hears in Panama disregard one third, doubt one third, and disbelieve the other third ... The air is as rife with deception as with miasma.” To raise money at home, the company had to cover up the death rate and set ever more unrealistic excavation targets while distributing over 12 million francs to the French press to keep it on side.

The money borrowed became ever more expensive.

As the de Lesseps adventure, bedeviled by disease and engineering problems (many because of Panama’s extraordinarily heavy rainfall) and also fire, war and earthquakes, slid towards failure, American technicians on the isthmus became convinced that they would assume control of the enterprise. Great Britain, just as de Lesseps’ Suez Canal had been, also assumed they would take the Panama Canal over. Yet, in the crunch at the beginning of the 20th Century, the American diplomats found their British counterparts at last willing to remove the restrictions of the 1850 treaty. Embroiled in a costly and unpopular war in South Africa, a naval arms race with Germany, and fearful of Russian ambitions towards India, Great Britain had to remove the shackles of the treaty and concede hegemony over the western hemisphere to the United States.

Theodore Roosevelt acted with utter ruthlessness to make the canal a reality.

The Americans bought out the French company for $40 million, a figure that dwarfs the purchases of Louisiana, Alaska and the Philippines. When the Colombian government seemed unwilling to give in to the American demands that they concede total control over a canal zone, Roosevelt made plans to invade Panama, but fomented, supported and protected a separatist revolution on the isthmus. He then bullied the new Panama republic into signing a treaty that reduced it to vassalage and established total military control of the new canal zone. US citizens reacted sharply, and they accused the president of dragging the country down to the sordid level of the European land-grabbing powers. But it was a fait accompli and a watershed for US presidential power and American imperial ambition.

America learned virtually nothing from France’s failures.

For the first two years, they hoped to build a sea-level canal, which de Lesseps had already shown was impossible. Because of the fallout from Roosevelt’s action, there was pressure to ‘make the dirt fly’ and excavation work started without proper preparation. They tied the project up in horrendous bureaucracy to avoid the corruption of the French era. Worst of all, although established scientists had proven the mosquito theory for transmitting malaria and yellow fever, conservative members of the US canal leadership called it “balderdash” and would not back William Gorgas, the Commission’s head doctor, who was an experienced yellow fever specialist. The disease inevitably struck and, lacking the motivation of the French, three quarters of the American workers fled the isthmus as panic broke out.

A year after the start, the project was on its knees.

After two years of chaotic bungling, planners decided on a lock and lake canal, a “bridge of water” rather than a sea-level through-cut. Roosevelt hired John Stevens, a successful railway engineer, as chief engineer for the canal. He fully supported Gorgas’ work and, in 1906, a visit by the president himself boosted morale. To attract and keep skilled labor from the US, the canal authorities offered generous holidays, high pay, and free accommodation. In 1907, Roosevelt handed the project over to the Army after a crisis arose from Stevens's resignation because of exhaustion; the project experienced a 100 percent technical labor turnover each year, and domestic criticism arose that graft and waste riddled the project.

The Army regime was utterly ruthless, arresting and deporting critics and keeping the Panama republic on a tight rein.

This achieved, its greatest challenge was the Culebra Cut, the highest point on the canal line. This nine-mile stretch required three quarters of the total excavation. At the peak of the work, it contained 76 miles of track carrying 160 trains, 300 rock drills, and 6,000 men. With temperatures reaching 120 degrees, it became known as Hell’s Gorge. As the workers removed the mountain, the ground fought back. Because of the extreme geological complexity of the isthmus, slides were numberless, eventually adding 25 million cubic yards to the total excavation, which in the end would be three times that required for the Suez Canal. An American called it the “land of fantastical and unexpected. No one could say when the sun went down at night what the condition of the Cut would be the next morning.” Or, as one West Indian put it: “Today you dig, tomorrow it slides.”

Most of the labor force was from Barbados.

Of a population of 200,000, some 45,000 went to Panama during the American period. Both the French and the Americans treated West Indians as cheap and expendable. One described the working conditions as “some sort of semi-slavery,” and a rigid apartheid system was in place throughout the canal zone under the Americans. The West Indian workers received all the most dangerous jobs, and disease or accidents on the works made them three times as likely to die as any others. Nearly 6,000 died during the American construction period, as well as 300 US citizens. Despite obvious resentments, the West Indian accounts are full of pride in knowing they were part of a civilizing achievement. “Many times I met death at the door,” wrote one worker 50 years after the completion of the canal, “but thank God I am alive to see the great improvement the canal had made and the wonderful fame it has around the world.”

When the canal opened, it started a whole new chapter in trans-Pacific power politics.

Building it was the easy part, because the same day it opened in 1914, Japan declared war on Germany while seeing the Canal as a direct threat to their position in Asia. After the Americans turned the Canal over to Panama as required by treaty, China installed their operating companies on both ends, stopped only in 2026 by the Panamanian Supreme Court.

Everyone wants to control the path between the seas.

The Persistent Past: Discovering the Steele Diaries

Uncovering the past often requires monumental effort by many hands. When influential people try to keep facts from being discovered, it gets even harder.

This is how history books are written.

And Finally...

On 23 May:

1618: The third Defenestration of Prague took place when Bohemian nobles threw two imperial regents and their secretary from a third-story window of Prague Castle. This act of defiance against Habsburg authority triggered the revolt that sparked the Thirty Years’ War. The 1419 Defenestration sparked the Hussite Wars; the 1483 Defenestration didn’t do much.

1908: John Bardeen is born in Madison, Wisconsin. Bardeen was a brilliant physicist and engineer, known as the only person to win the Nobel Prize in Physics twice—first for the invention of the transistor (1956) and second for the theory of superconductivity (1972). Marie Curie won two Nobels for chemistry.

And today is NATIONAL TAFFY DAY for no discernable reason. I never liked the stuff—makes my jaw hurt—but knock yourself out.

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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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