Tag Archives: History

Phalanx: Discipline in Geometry

11 August 2025 By in History, History Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Near the ancient Sumerian city of Girsu, mid-way between present-day Bagdad and Kuwait City, stood a battle marker; the Stele of Vultures, now housed in the Louvre. It commemorates Lagash’s 3rd millennium BC victory over Umma. The stele derives its name from the monument’s carved vultures flying away with the heads of the dead.  It also depicts soldiers of Lagash marching in a dense, shield to shield formation, holding spears chest high and horizontal, led by their ruler: Eannatum, who commissioned the stele in 2460 BC. The importance of the stele, though, is that it is the first visual depiction of the use of a phalanx in a battle. It is believed that the phalanx as a military tactic is much older.

The phalanx was more than a combat formation, it was a battlefield philosophy enshrining discipline and courage over strength, unity of the team over the individual. A dense, rectangular wall of men, generally 8 deep stretching across the battlefield to protect against flanking maneuvers. Each man wore heavy armor of leather and bronze: helmet, cuirass, greaves, armed with a spear and a short sword. But the breakthrough that brought the phalanx great renown was the apsis, a round shield invented for the Greek hoplite in the 8th or 7th century BC. With its dual grip, a forearm strap and central handhold, it allowed the infantryman precise control of his shield, helping create an impenetrable barrier of bronze and bone against the oncoming enemy’s spears and swords. It transformed the phalanx from an offensive wall of attack to an added defensive engine of defiance.

The phalanx only succeeded in cohesion. When courage and discipline held, the formation with the apsis as its core defense was practically unbeatable on confined terrain. It overcame the enemy with a seamless, tight mass executing a relentless forward march into the belly of the opposing beast. But it was only as strong as its weakest link. Once discipline faltered and cohesion broke, the formation collapsed, and the opposing army ran it to ground. Victory belonged not to brute force, but to the combined strength of the military unit. Teams won, individuals lost.

From late 8th century BC onward, Greek phalanxes were manned by hoplites: citizen soldiers, generally landowners and farmers. Emerging in Sparta or Argos, possibly imported from Sumeria or born of parallel discovery in Greece, phalanx battles initially were confined, blunt, and deadly affairs. They devolved into fierce pushing masses of brawn, bone, and metal until one side broke. Heavy casualties occurred when the enemy lines broke and soldiers fled Helter skelter in shock and chaos, pursued by the victors for plunder, unless they were restrained by honor.

The phalanx became the standard that destroyed the mighty Persian armies at Marathon and Thermopylae early in the 5th century BC. At Marathon in 490 BC 10,000 Athenians and 1000 Plataeans stretched out their formation to match the breadth of 26,000 Persians, filling the Marathon plain and denying the armies any room for flanking movements.

The Greeks stacked their wings with additional rows of hoplites and thinned them progressively toward the center creating a convex crescent. The Greek wings advance faster than the center generating a pincer movement that collapsed on the Persian center. When the dust settled 192 Athenians and 11 Plataeans were lost while the Persian losses were approximated at 6400.

In the 19th century, Napoleon, possibly improvising on phalanx encircling tactics developed at Marathon, would invert his attacking army with a concave formation consisting of a strong center and weaker wings. His strategy being to split the enemies’ center with strength and attack their divided ranks on the flanks. The tactic worked until Wellington at Waterloo.

At Marathon, unity triumphed with geometric discipline. At Thermopylae the formation bought time and ended with a sacrifice that concluded Persian hubris.

During the second Persian invasion in 480 BC, Darius’s son Xerxes with 120,000-300,000 men attacked a contingent of 7000 Greeks at Thermopylae. The Greeks held back the Persian advance like a cork in a bottle, using a rotating phalanx of roughly 200 men to defend a narrow pass for two days, until betrayal by Ephialtes exposed their flank and they were destroyed in a inescapable Persian barrage of arrows. Greek losses were estimated at 4000 men including Leonidas’ 300 Spartans and 2000-4000 Persians (beginning and ending estimates for manpower strength vary widely).

The Greeks defiant stand at Thermopylae allowed the Greek navy to regroup at Salamis where they won a decisive victory against the Persian navy. A year later the Greeks at Plataea crushed the Persians quest for a Hellenic satrapy.

The Phalanx endured for another century, including use in the Peloponnesian War, where it remained lethal but of limited use. Then came Epaminondas at Leuctra in 371 BC, transforming the phalanx into a machine that erased Sparta’s mighty reputation. Typically, each army’s phalanx strength was concentrated on their right wing so that the strongest part of a force always faced off against the weaker wing of the opposition. What Epaminondas did was say nuts to that.

He reversed the order and created an oblique formation, more triangular than rectangular with his strongest troops on the left wing. His left wing was stacked 50 deep while keeping his center and right wings thin. His 50-deep was aimed directly at Sparta’s best under the command of King Cleombrotus (in those days officers and kings were in the front rows of the phalanx). As the phalanxes began to attack Epaminondas kept his right-wing stationery creating an asymmetrical front. The left wing easily broke through Sparta’s right wing, killing Cleombrotus and collapsing their superior flank. At that point Epaminondas’s wing pivoted inward creating an enveloping arc around the remaining parts of Sparta’s phalanx effectively ending the Spartan myth of invincibility.

Epaminondas tactics shortened battles with fewer casualties. His innovations proved that properly trained and equipped citizen soldiers could defeat professional warriors while instilling a new civic honor through restraint and discipline. His oblique formation allowed landowners and farmers to settle their disputes, usually in a few hours or less, with minimal loss, and return to their farms in time for the harvest. Epaminondas not only brought asymmetrical tactics to the battlefield but shattered claims of superiority by employing the unexpected.

As the Golden Age of Athens and western civilization’s Greek center waned and Roman hegemony rose, the phalanx evolved again. The Greek phalanx gave way to the Roman manipular system, a staggered checkerboard pattern, enabling units to rotate, reinforce, or retreat as needed. It was a needed refinement and improvement to the phalanx, more effectual on open plains and less susceptible to calvary and arrows.

Then came Hannibal to Cannae in 216 BC. During the 2nd Punic War, he upended the war cart of tactics once again and ruthlessly exploited Rome’s refinements.

Hannibal’s improvisations of the phalanx maneuvering tactics, but not the actual formation, showed that he had studied Marathon. Instead of a convex line with strong wings and a weak center he developed a concave line with strong wings and weak center. He allowed the center to fall back, which the Romans unwittingly obliged by surging into Hannibal’s weak center. With the Romans committed Hannibal’s deception encircled them with precision and brutal lethality. The Romans were annihilated on the field losing somewhere between 50,000-70,000 killed and another 10,000 captured. Hannibal lost 6000-8000 men (again estimates vary). Then came the 3rd Punic War.

The phalanx began as a wall of spears and shields, a bulwark of bronze and bone. Its stunning victories echo through history’s scholarly halls and hallowed plains of death and destruction. Yet its Achilles’ heel, vulnerable flanks, precise terrain requirements proved incompatible to horses and gunpowder.

Still its legacy of discipline and unity endure. Born of necessity, refined through rigor, and studied for centuries, the phalanx stands as a testament Aristotle’s enduring insight, slightly abridged but still profound, ‘The whole is greater than the parts.’ And perhaps the Roman’s said it best: ‘E pluribus unum’, ‘out of many, one.’

Source: A War Like No Other by Victor Davis Hanson, 2005. Et al. Graphic: Stele of Vultures.

Women and Glass: The Starlight Calculators of Harvard

26 July 2025 By in Physics, Science Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

In the halcyon days of yore before digital ubiquity and tonal exactitude, computers were made of flesh and blood, fallibility crossed with imaginative leaps of genius. Photographs etched starlight’s past onto glistening glass and preserved silver. Solid archives where memory endures and future discoveries shimmer with potential, encoded in celestial light of the heavens awaiting the discerning caress of curiosity, intuition, and reason.

In 1613, English poet Richard Brathwait, best remembered for his semi-autobiographical Drunken Barnaby’s Four Journeys, enshrined the word computer into written English while contemplating the divine order of the heavens, calling God the “Truest computer of Times.” Rooted in the Latin computare, meaning “to reckon together,” the term evolved over the next three centuries to describe human minds inimitably attuned to the interpretation of visual data: star fields, spectral lines, geologic cross-sections, meteorological charts, and other cognitive terranes steeped in mystery, teasing initiates with hints of vision and translation. These were not mere calculators nor unimaginative computers, but perceptive analysts, tracing patterns, exposing truths, and coaxing insights from fluid shapes etched into the fabric of nature.

By the time of the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution, human computers had become the invisible deciphering force behind truth seeking laboratories, the unsung partners in progress, cataloging, interpreting, and taming the flood of empirical but seemingly nonsensical data that overwhelmed those without insight. Harvard College Observatory was no exception. With photography now harnessed to astronomy’s telescopes, the observatory could suddenly capture and archive starlight onto glass plates of coated silver, forever changing astronomy from the sketches of Galileo to silver etches of eternal starlight.

But these glass plates, resplendent with cosmic information, remained galleries of dusty, exposed negatives, inert until absorbed and guided by human curiosity and insight.

Enter the women computers of Harvard, beginning in 1875, over 140 women, many recruited by Edward Charles Pickering, processed more than 550,000 photographic plates, the last collected in 1992, bringing much needed coherence and linearity to the chaos of too much. They sorted signal from celestial noise, revealing the hidden order of the universe inscribed in silver, preserved in silica.

In 1875 the initial cohorts, the pioneers, the first names of Harvard women computers, although not exactly given that moniker, to appear on the glass plates were names like Rebecca Titsworth Rogers, Rhoda G. Saunders, and Anna Winlock assisting in the absolutely essential process of what we would now call cross-referencing the glass plate’s ‘metadata’ with the astronomical data.  Ascertaining that time and space of the data match the time and space of the metadata. In 1881 Pickering, the observatory’s fourth director, began hiring women specifically as Astronomical Computers, a formal role focused on analyzing and deciphering the growing collection of glass plate photographs.

This shift in 1881 was more than semantic, a fancy title for drudge work and tedious plate cataloging but a structured program where women like Williamina Fleming, Annie Jump Cannon, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, and Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin were tasked with not just cataloging stars, but studying stellar spectra, and the lights powering life and imagination throughout the universe. Indispensable efforts that lead to the Henry Draper Catalogue, eventually containing the half million plus glass plates, and the foundations of modern stellar classification systems and 21st century astronomy. Their stories are worthy of a Horatio Alger novel, maybe not exactly rags to riches, but certainly humble beginnings to astronomical fame. They were paid peanuts, but they were the elephants in the observatory.

Williamina Fleming, in 1879 arrived in Boston penniless and abandoned by her husband secured a job as a domestic in the home of Edward Pickering, yes that guy. She impressed Pickering’s wife, Elizabeth, with such intelligence that she recommended her for work in the observatory. She quickly outpaced her male counterparts and in 1881 was officially hired as one of the first Harvard Computers.

Studying the photographed spectra of stars, she developed a classification system, the natural human desire to find order in apparent chaos, based on the abundance of hydrogen on the surface of a star or more exact the strength of hydrogen absorption lines from the spectra data. The most abundant stars were classed as A stars, the next most abundant as B stars, and on down to V.

In 1896 Pickering hired Annie Jump Cannon, a physics degree from Wellesley and an amateur photographer, modified Fleming’s stellar classification system based also on the surface temperature of a star rather than hydrogen abundance. Her method was to use the strength of the Balmer absorption lines, electrons excited within hydrogen atoms, like dancers at different tempos, reveal themselves through subtle spectral lines now understood to be differing ionization states of the atom directly tied to the surface temperature of the star.

Her system used the same letters to avoid redoing the entire Harvard catalogue, but she reduced the list down to 7 and reordered them from hottest to coolest: O, B, A, F, G, K, M. Her classification is still in use today. Earth revolves around a G-class star which has a medium surface temperature of about 5800 K (9980 F or 5527 C).

Henrietta Swan Leavitt graduated from Harvard’s Women’s College in 1892 with what we might now call a liberal arts degree. A year later, she began graduate work in astronomy, foundation for employment at the Harvard Observatory. After several extended detours tucked under her petticoats, Edward Charles Pickering brought her back to the Observatory in 1903. She worked initially without pay, later earning an unfathomable 30 cents an hour.

There, Leavitt collaborated with Annie Jump Cannon, in a coincidence of some note both women were deaf, though one is left with the feeling that the absence of sound may have amplified the remaining sensory inputs to their fertile minds. In time, Leavitt uncovered a linear relationship between the period of Cepheid variable stars and their luminosity, a revelation that became an integral part of the cosmic yardstick for measuring galactic distances. The Period-Luminosity relation is now enshrined as Leavitt’s Law.

Cepheid variables form the second rung of the Cosmic Distance Ladder; after parallax, and before Type Ia supernovae, galaxy rotation curves, surface brightness fluctuations, and, finally, the ripples of Einsteinian gravitational waves. Leavitt’s metric would prove essential to Edwin Hubble’s demonstration that the universe is expanding.

Swedish mathematician Gösta Mittag-Leffler considered nominating her for the Nobel Prize in Physics, but his plans stalled upon learning she had died in 1921. The Nobel, then as now, is non-awardable to the dead.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, a transplanted Brit, joined the Harvard Observatory as an unpaid graduate fellow while working towards her PhD at Radcliffe in astronomy. Upon earning her doctorate, she continued at the Observatory with no title and little pay. By 1938 she was awarded the title of Astronomer and by 1956 was made full professor of Harvard’s faculty.

In her dissertation she accurately showed for the first time that stars are composed primarily of hydrogen and helium, proving that hydrogen was the most abundant element in the universe, overturning long held but erroneous assumptions. But in a twist of fate, astronomer Henry Norris Russell persuaded her to label her conclusions of hydrogen abundance as spurious. Four years later Russell’s research reached the same conclusion, but he barely gave her an honorable mention when he published his results.

She wasn’t the first nor will she be the last to suffer at the hands of egotistical professors, more enamored of self rather than truth, but her elemental abundance contribution to astronomy brushed away the conceit that stars must mimic rocky planets in their composition, much like Galileo ended Earth’s reign as a center of everything. Twentieth century astronomer Otto Struve hailed her dissertation as “the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy.”

Undeterred and building on her studies of spectral emissions of stars she turned her gaze to high luminosity and variable stars with husband astronomer Sergi Illarionovich Gaposchkin. After 2 million observations of variable stars, their efforts laid the groundwork for stellar evolution: how stars change over the course of time. From hints of dispersed stardust to starlight and back again. Cycles of stellar life repeated billions of times over billions of years.

Harvard’s astronomical female human computers, initially mere clerks transcribing stars from silver and glass, evolved into interpreters of light, shaping the very foundations of astronomy. Through logic, imagination, and an unyielding devotion to truth, they charted the heavens and opened lighted pathways for generations to follow.

Graphic: The Harvard Computers standing in front of Building C at the Harvard College Observatory, 13 May 1913, Unknown author. Public Domain

Tripping

16 April 2025 By in History, Mental Health, Science Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Albert Hofmann, employed by Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland, was conducting research on ergots, a toxic fungus, in 1938 to identify potential circulatory and respiratory stimulants. While synthesizing compounds derived from the fungus, he inadvertently created lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), an alkaloid of the ergoline family, known for their physiological effects on the human nervous system.

Five years later on April 16, 1943, Hofmann became the first person to experience the hallucinogenic effects of LSD while re-synthesizing the compound. He accidentally absorbed a small amount through his skin, leading to vivid hallucinations he later described as a dreamlike state with kaleidoscopic visuals. With two groundbreaking lab accidents occurring five years apart, The Daily Telegraph ranked Hofmann as the greatest living genius in 2007.

During the counter-cultural movement of the 1960s, LSD emerged as a popular recreational drug, attracting advocates such as Timothy Leary, a Harvard psychologist who famously urged people to “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Leary championed the use of psychedelics to explore altered states of consciousness and challenge conventional societal norms. LSD also played a pivotal role in Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which focused on the horrific abuse of patients in mental institutions. The book, later adapted into a film starring Jack Nicholson, significantly influenced awareness of the cruelty of mental institutions. However, LSD’s trajectory took a sinister turn beyond recreation when it became a tool for government mind-control experiments.

Starting in the 1950s, the CIA launched MKUltra, a covert program designed to explore drugs and techniques for breaking down individuals psychologically. LSD became a central component of these experiments, often administered secretly to unsuspecting individuals to study its effects. Targets included prisoners, drug addicts, prostitutes, military personnel, CIA employees, and even random civilians. It is difficult to ascertain which acronym took the greater hit to its reputation: the CIA or LSD.

Source: Albert Hofmann by Morgan and Donahue, All That’s Interesting, 2025. Graphic: Albert Hofmann in 1993.

Black Swans Part I

23 March 2025 By in History, Science Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Black swans are rare and unpredictable events, what the military calls “unknown unknowns“, that often have significant, domain-specific impacts, such as in economics or climate. Despite their unpredictability, societies tend to rationalize these occurrences after the fact, crafting false narratives about their inevitability. COVID-19, for instance, ripples across multiple domains, beginning as a health crisis but expanding to influence the economy, legal systems, and societal tensions. As a human-made pathogen, its risks should have been anticipated.

Black swans throughout history are legendary. Examples include the advent of language and agriculture, the rise of Christianity (predicted yet world-changing), and the fall of Rome, which plunged the Western world into centuries of stagnation. Islam (also predicted), the Mongol conquests, the Black Death, and the Great Fire of London shaped and disrupted societies in profound ways. The fall of Constantinople, the Renaissance, the discovery of America, the printing press, and Martin Luther’s Reformation brought new paradigms. More recently, the Tambora eruption (“the year without a summer”), the Great Depression, WWII brought unforeseen disruptions to economies and geopolitics, the Manhattan Project, Sputnik, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the rise of PCs and the internet altered the trajectory of human progress. Events like 9/11 and the iPhone have similarly reshaped the modern world. While black swans may be rare, they are not inevitable. We should expect moments of dramatic collapse or unanticipated brilliance to recur throughout history.

Nassim Taleb, author of the 2007 book The Black Swan, suggests several approaches to mitigate the effects of such events without needing to predict them. His recommendations include prioritizing redundancy, flexibility, robustness, and simplicity, as well as preparing for extremes, fostering experimentation, and embracing antifragility: a concept where systems not only withstand shocks but emerge stronger.

Through the lens of history, black swans appear as a mix of good and bad, bringing societal changes that were largely unanticipated before their emergence. As history has shown, predicting the impossible is just that: impossible. What might the next frontier be, the next black swan to transform humanity? Could it be organic AI, a fusion of human ingenuity and machine intelligence, unlocking potential but posing profound risks to free will, societal equilibrium, and humanity’s very essence? (Next week—preparing for a black swan: an example.)

Natural Law—Point Counterpoint

19 March 2025 By in History, Philosophy, Religion, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment
Version 1.0.0

“The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law; where no law, no injustice.” — Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes saw human nature as a cauldron of chaos. In his state of nature, life is “nasty, brutish, and short,” a “war of all against all” where self-preservation is the only natural law. Shaped by Thucydides’ tales of strife and Machiavelli’s ruthless pragmatism, Hobbes cast man’s self-interest as a destructive force that casts morality aside. His remedy to avert chaos: a towering sovereign, ideally a monarch, to crush anarchy with an iron fist. The social contract trades liberty for security, forging laws as human tools to bind the beast within. Yet Hobbes stumbled: he failed to grasp power’s seductive pull. He assumed his Leviathan, though human, would rise above the self-interest he despised, wielding authority without buckling to its corruption.

“Reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind…that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.” — Second Treatise of Government by John Locke

John Locke painted a gentler portrait of man than did Hobbes. He rooted natural law in reason and divine will, granting all people inherent rights to life, liberty, and property. His state of nature is peaceful yet imperfect, marred by the “want of a common judge with authority,” leaving it vulnerable to human bias and external threats. Optimistic, Locke envisioned a social contract built on the consent of the governed, protecting these rights through mutual respect and laying the groundwork for constitutional rule. Where Hobbes saw a void to be filled with control, Locke trusted reason to elevate humanity, crafting government as a shield, not a shackle.

Hobbes and Locke clash at the fault line of power. Hobbes’s sovereign, meant to tame chaos, reflects the rulers’ thirst for dominance, but his naivety about power’s effect cracks his foundation. Locke’s ideals, morality, reason, rights, empower the ruled, who yearn for liberty after security sours. Hobbes missed the flaw: rulers, driven by the same self-interest he feared, bend laws to their will, spawning a dual reality—one code for the governed, another for the governors. Locke’s vision of freedom and limited government inspires their soul, while Hobbes’s call for order fortifies their bones with courts, police, and laws of men. The U.S. Constitution marries both, yet scandals tip the scales: power corrupts, and liberty frays as safeguards buckle under the rulers’ grip.

Hobbes and Locke both accept the imperfection of man but take different paths to mitigate that imperfection with workable safeguards. Hobbes insists on the rule by law but drafted by imperfect man and applied with a Machiavellian indifference with no solution for absolute powers corrupting influence. Locke also chooses to rule by law but guided by morality, God and the will to depose of despots.

Sources: Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes; Second Treatise of Government, John Locke. Graphic:Original Leviathan frontispiece, a king composed of subjects, designed with Hobbes’s input.

White Guard

16 March 2025 By in History, Novel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Mikhail Bulgakov’s White Guard, set during the Ukrainian War of Independence (1917–1921) amid the Russian Civil War, captures Kyiv in an existential power struggle against varied forces: Ukrainian nationalists allied with German troops, the White Guard clinging to Tsarist dreams, Lenin’s Bolsheviks closing in, plus Poles and Romanians. Against this bloody backdrop, Bulgakov crafts a semi-autobiographical tale of loss and fatalism, culminating in a nihilistic realization of humanity’s purpose: “But this isn’t frightening. All this will pass. The sufferings, agonies, blood, hunger, and wholesale death. The sword will go away, but these stars will remain… So why are we reluctant to turn our gaze to them? Why?”

Bulgakov, a doctor of venereal diseases like the book’s protagonist Alexei Turbin, knew hopelessness. In 1918, syphilis was a scourge, often incurable, leading to madness, mirroring the war’s societal decay. Alexei volunteers for the White Guard, tending to horrors he can’t heal, his efforts dissolving in a dream: “shadows galloped past…Turbin was dying in his sleep.” War becomes a disease, resistance futile. Yet Bulgakov’s lens widens. Sergeant Zhilin dreams of Revelation, “And God shall wipe away all tears…and there shall be no more death,” finding humility in cosmic indifference. Petka, an innocent, dreams simply of a sunlit ball, untouched by great powers. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8).

Then, out of dreamland into the light: “All this will pass.” The stars endure, wars fade. Writing in the 1920s after the White defeat, Bulgakov channels Russian fatalism—Dostoevsky’s inescapable will, Chekhov’s quiet surrender. But he’s not fully broken. His “Why?” pleads, mocks, resists. Why not look up? Survival is luck, death equalizes, yet fighting a losing battle confronts our nothingness. Kyiv falls, the Bolsheviks threaten, the White Guard vanishes, still, Bulgakov continues to ask. Why?

He blends despair with irony, a doctor mocking death as the stars watch. The German expulsion of the Reds in 1918 briefly eased bloodshed, but 1919 brought worse, “Great was the year and terrible the Year of Our Lord 1918, but more terrible still was 1919.” History moves on; stars don’t care. Bulgakov’s question lingers: Why? To fight is to live, fate be damned.

Source: White Guard, Mikhail Bulgakov, trans. Marian Schwartz. Graphic: Ukrainian Soldiers circa 1918.

Temperance in Early Virginia

5 March 2025 By in History Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

The Virginia Colony, established by the Virginia Company of London, was not a cradle of temperance in its early years. Founded in 1607 at Jamestown under a 1606 charter from King James I, this joint-stock venture aimed for profit—gold, trade, and later tobacco—not moral reform. Its settlers, a mix of Anglican adventurers, merchants, and laborers, relied on alcohol (beer and spirits) as a staple, given the assumed scarcity of safe water. Yet, a supposed temperance law dated 5 March 1623 is often cited as America’s first, though no documentary evidence from the Virginia Company’s records supports this claim.

The context for such a measure lies in the colony’s struggles. By 1623, Virginia was a fragile outpost under company control, reeling from the Powhatan Uprising of 1622. This surprise attack by the Powhatan Confederacy killed about 347 settlers—over a quarter of the population—likely in response to English land grabs for growing tobacco. The massacre disrupted food supplies, leaving grain scarce. If a 1623 law restricted alcohol production, it may have been a pragmatic response to conserve resources, not a temperance crusade. Virginia Company records don’t mention such a law, but they do show earlier alcohol regulations for practical ends—economic control, public order, or resource management—rather than moral prohibitions.

Earlier codes hint at this pattern, vigilance in the face of pioneering hardships. The Laws Divine, Moral and Martial, enacted around 1610–1611 under Sir Thomas Dale, imposed strict discipline in the struggling settlement, including penalties for drunkenness to curb idleness. In 1619, Governor George Yeardley’s assembly banned “drunkenness” and excessive gaming, possibly reflecting mild Puritan influence from England’s religious debates. However, these rules targeted abuse, not alcohol itself, and didn’t amount to temperance as later understood. The absence of a Puritan majority—unlike in New England—underscores this distinction. Virginia’s settlers were commerce-driven subjects of the Crown, not the religious reformers who arrived later with the Plymouth Colony (1620) or Massachusetts Bay (1630).

The 1623 claim might stem from a misinterpretation of these regulatory measures, exaggerated by later historians or temperance advocates seeking an early precedent. For comparison, in 1623, the Virginia Company of Plymouth’s minister William Blackstone distributed apples (later tied to cider), but no temperance law emerged there either. Both companies, focused on survival and profit, bore little resemblance to the Puritan ethos that shaped later American temperance movements. Without primary evidence, the 1623 Virginia temperance law remains a historical ghost—possibly a practical rule born of crisis, not a moral milestone.

Source: Initial claim from Encyclopedia of Trivia, elaborated by Grok 3. Graphic: Indian Massacre of 1622, Woodcut by Matthaus Merian, 1628. Public Domain.

Locke and Jefferson

2 March 2025 By in History, Philosophy Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

John Locke’s theory on the social contract is a cornerstone of his political philosophy and western democracies, as outlined in his work “Second Treatise of Government.” According to Locke, the social contract is an agreement among individuals to form a government that will protect their natural rights to life, liberty, and property. The social contract is a compromise between man’s inherent natural rights and the need to preserve and protect those rights.

Thomas Jefferson, in his Declaration of Independence builds on Locke’s concepts, tweak is probably a better word. Locke writes that people have “natural rights” to “life, liberty, and estate” (property), and if a government violates these, it’s “dissolved,” giving people the right to form a new one. Jefferson writes into the Declaration its famous “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—swapping “property” for a broader, aspirational feel. Locke’s idea that government derives legitimacy from the “consent of the governed” shows up when Jefferson lists grievances against King George III, arguing the king’s abuses justify breaking away. And Locke’s justification for revolution—“when a long train of abuses” threatens these rights, people can resist—mirrors Jefferson’s “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.”

Locke’s key points in his Second Treatise:

  1. State of Nature: Locke believed that in the state of nature, individuals are free and equal, governed by natural law, which dictates that no one should harm another in their life, health, liberty, or possessions. Anarchy with adherence to God’s moral code.
  2. Natural Rights: Locke argued that individuals have inherent rights to life, liberty, and property. These rights are inalienable and must be protected by any legitimate government.
  3. Consent of the Governed: Locke emphasized that government derives its authority from the consent of the governed. People agree to form a government to protect their natural rights, and this consent is the basis of political legitimacy.
  4. Limited Government: Locke’s social contract theory advocates for a government with limited powers, designed to serve the common good and protect individual rights.
  5. Right to Revolution: Locke believed that if a government becomes tyrannical and or violates the social contract, the people have the right to revolt and establish a new government that will better protect their rights.

Source: Second Treaties of Government by John Locke, 1690. Graphic: John Locke by Godfrey Kneller 1697.  Public Domain.

The Mystic

12 February 2025 By in Movies, Philosophy, Politics Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Rasputin: Dark Servant of Destiny.  Grigori Rasputin, often referred to as the “Mad Monk,” was a peasant with a fondness for madeira, cheap steaks, and prostitutes. He seemingly cured the Tsar’s son, Alexei, returning him to health by a gift from God: the power of faith.

Rasputin, living by the Russian proverb “You can’t avoid that which is meant to happen,” accepted his fate and was welcomed by the Empress and her son into the royal household with open arms. However, he was later expelled from the royal household by the Tsar and his handlers for violating another Russian proverb: “Don’t bring your own rules into someone else’s monastery.”

Rasputin: Dark Servant of Destiny, a 1996 HBO TV movie seen by almost no one, is Alan Rickman’s tour de force. It provides an exquisite emotional interpretation of religious fervor and mystical power. The film brings the myth of Rasputin into the realm of authenticity and historical plausibility.

The film recreates Rasputin’s madness amidst the early 20th-century events that predated and possibly presaged the madness of events set into motion by Lenin in 1917 (Rasputin was murdered towards the end of 1916). These events led to what Orwell succinctly summarized in “Animal Farm” when the new boss replaced the old boss: “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.“

Genre: Biographical, Drama, Historical

Directed by: Uli Edel

Screenplay by: Peter Pruce

Music by: Brad Fiedel

Cast: Alan Rickman, Greta Scacchi, Ian McKellen, Freddie Finlay

Film Location: Budapest, Hungary and St. Petersburg, Russia

ElsBob: 7.0/10

IMDb: 6.9/10

Rotten Tomatoes Critics: -%

Rotten Tomatoes Popcornmeter: 79%

Metacritic Metascore: -%

Metacritic User Score: -/10

Theaters: 23 March 1996

Runtime: 135 minutes

Source: Rotten Tomatoes, IMDb. Graphic: Rasputin Movie Trailer, copyright HBO.

Exploits in Dying

8 February 2025 By in History, Mythology Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

Grigori Rasputin, a Russian mystic, met an inglorious, improbable, and inexplicable end in 1916 at his assassin’s Moika Palace in Saint Petersburg. Although accounts vary, Rasputin’s executioners ostensibly made multiple attempts to murder him. They began with cyanide-laced cakes, which did not achieve their desired outcome. Next, in an attempt to reach a different result with the same measures, they offered him wine fortified with more cyanide. This attained the same result as the first attempt.

Following this, they shot him multiple times, but he continued to move, eventually attacking his would-be murderers. Finally, they wrapped him up in a carpet and tossed him into a freezing river, where he supposedly died of hypothermia.

A less imaginative account of his death suggests that he died from a single bullet to the head.

Rasputin supposedly left a letter, which was read by Alexandra, the wife of Tsar Nicholas II, prophesizing that if he was killed by Russian nobles, the Russian Tsar’s family would be executed within a few years.

Source: Biography, 2021. Graphic; Rasputin, c1910, Russian Empire, public domain.