The Augustan History and The Onion

The problem with history as a source for fiction is that a lot of history is already fiction.  Or, rather, we have no idea how much of it is fiction.

Consider what we know about the Roman Emperors of the Third Century, that melancholy time of civil wars and usurpations.  Written sources are extremely rare and fragmented.  A lot of what we think we know comes from the Historia Augusta, a motley collection of tales that mixes what seem to be real documents with a lot of stuff someone might well have made up.  No one is even sure when it was written--it bills itself as a collection of six historians made during the early Fourth Century, but no one seems to believe this anymore.  The putative author of this weird work (which I've never read--but all authors on the period have to cite it) might make a good character in a historical novel.  What was he after?  Is the Augustan History something like The Onion?  Incidentally, The Onion would be a superb source on the spirit of our era, if you could pass its distortions and heightenings through some kind of reverse filter.

So would The Simpsons, for that matter.  These channels are sensitive to the zeitgeist in a way more deliberate journalism isn't.

Is the author of the Augustan History still mocking us after all these centuries.  Is one of those Emperors completely made up?  If so, which one?

Military strategy for the unmilitary

Someday I'll write a big, fat fantasy novel.  I say this, even though I don't particularly like reading big, fat fantasy novels.  Writers like to say that they write books they'd like to read.  I'm sure I could write a BFFN that I'd like to read--the question (and one that's come up a bit too frequently) is whether anyone else will want to read it.

But one thing I do know--BFFNs must have a lot of military activity, and at least one giant battle.  And it stands to reason that those battles will need to reflect the limitations and affordances of historical military combat.  Here is where I hope my deep reading in history will stand me in good stead.  I hope.

I'm not militarily minded and don't gravitate to explicitly military fiction.  But I do like to know how things got done.  Most history writers are either too fanatically detailed or too cursory for me.  What am I looking for?

In The Fall of the Roman Empire, Peter Heather gives an account of military operations after large Gothic forces crossed the Danube and moved into.  He describes how the Rhodope Mountains

...are extremely difficult to cross from north-east to south-west...and movement north and south through the Haemus Mountains is channeled through just five major passes....

And bravo for Heather, there is a nice clear map without a lot of extraneous details, showing the geography and the routes of the armies between 377 and 382.

He goes on, about the Romans.

Heavily outnumbered as they were, the available forces had no prospect of defeating the Goths; so...they fortified the passes through the Haemus Mountains...Some of the passes...are quite broad, but they are all high.

Then he gives an account of how 4,400 Russians held one of these same passes, Shipka Pass, against 40,000 Turks during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877.  For two months, the Romans were similarly successful, but then a force of Alans and Huns joined the Goths.  If one pass was forced, the soldiers at the others would be cut off.

Once the Goths and their allies were south of the Haemus, they could rampage at will.  The only geographic barrier beyond was the Hellespont itself.  This situation led to Valens's defeat at Adrianople.

It's this type of description of terrain and strategy that makes me feel that I understand something.  Using history as a crib, I could write some convincing strategic maneuvering, using what I know of geology, geography, and climate.  And I could make sure it was something I enjoy reading.  What about the rest of you?

More Shorpy

Shorpy continues to be one of my favorite blogs--"the 100-year-old photo blog" as it bills itself.  Here, a few recent images that struck me.  Each is linked to the larger original on the Shorpy site--to get the full effect (particularly of Winter Crossing, the railcar ferry), you should click through (new window).

A little person wearing a Coolidge ribbon (identified by readers as soprano Hansi Herman, of Rose's Royal Midgets).  What part of cigarette-smoking, fur-wearing, Coolidge-supporting, performing German midget seems politically incorrect to you?

Detroit, winter 1900.  The heart of the civilization of the great industrial age.  Steampunk has become a weirdly dominant subgenre, and this image shows why, even though no one would actually want to be standing out their amid the jagged ice floes and cutting winter wind, and even though most steampunk tends to the Victorian rather than the American Renaissance--somewhere at the other end of this stands a Stanford White palazzo, and....

This isn't Evelyn Nesbitt, despite my mention of Stanford White.  The original Gibson Girl?  Someday you'll see my mystery novel that takes place in the world of White, Saint-Gaudens, and the invention of the Adirondack style.

Or maybe you won't.  But it's fun to think about.

And, just to show that everything isn't in glorious black and white, a 4x5 Kodachrome from 1942

L. Sprague de Camp and the uses of history

Recently I was listening to Garrett Fagan's lectures on Great Battles of the Ancient World (a Teaching Company class--I recommend them highly for light education while sweating), when I learned that Assyrian methods of siege warfare entered the Greek world through encounters with Carthage, during the wars over Sicily.  A fun topic for a historical novel, I thought.

Then I did a little research and realized I had been beaten to the punch, by L. Sprague de Camp, a youthful favorite I had not thought of recently.  In his novel The Arrows of Hercules, he deals with exactly those events, through the person of an engineer in the employ of Dionysios I of Syracuse.

De Camp wrote science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, and historical nonfiction.  He was one of those debonair globe-trotting polymaths that sometimes find a congenial home in genre fiction.  His historical novels are the complete opposite of bodice rippers--they are more about bodice inventors ("hey, do you think we could take that baleen stuff and use it to....?")  Like most of his books, TAH is episodic and doesn't have a strong plotline.  Like real history, this happens, and then that happens.  Sometimes there's a connection, and sometimes there isn't.

Even the characters described as passionate and impulsive are quite measured in their emotional reaction.  And de Camp's attitude is that engineers are pretty much engineers, now matter what era they turn up in.

So don't look here for a Stephen Pressfield-style description of maggoty corpses.  There is some brutal violence, but it is over quickly.  I'm not sure there's a spot in the market for de Camp's  charming, informative witnessing to interesting events, but something like it should still do.

Most historical novels where someone experiences great events or a specific culture are told from the point of view of a time traveler, even if he is not literally that.  Blackthorne in Clavell's Shogun comes easily to mind--he's described as a seventeenth century Englishman, but he's clearly from the twentieth century.  Similary TAH's Zopyrus.  In Lest Darkness Fall, one of de Camp's best books, it is explicitly a time traveler who pops into the Rome of Late Antiquity--the period I've recently been reading a lot about.  My interest in it might actually stem from that book, which made a big impression on me in my youth.

I've never written a historical novel, but I think this era, between the great era of Sparta and Athens and the advent of Alexander the Great, has some promise as a setting.

Knowing history: the late Roman Empire

History informs much of my work, and makes up a lot of my free reading.

But it's easy to think that the past is a story that's been told to us, whereas it really is just a few syllables here and there, vaguely heard through a gale.  As part of my reading on the fall of the Roman Empire (not great scheme behind it--it's just that a lot of good books have recently come out on the subject), I recently finished Peter Heather's The Fall of the Roman Empire, which, really, is a detailed history of the period 376-476 with a few halfhearted attempts to show how the whole melancholy thing could have come out differently.  I don't think Heather ever convinces himself.

But he's extremely clear on what we know, and what we just guess.  The sources are, as always, fragmentary and partisan.  He  has his opinions on who is trustworthy, and whose testimony should be regarded with suspicion.  It's a nice glimpse at the history workshop, where those nice seamless narratives are put together.  And Heather's characterization of what was really a grim bureaucratic tyranny, which he compares to Soviet party congresses, is enlightening.

Attila, of course, plays a prominent role.  But the commander who really caught my attention was the Vandal leader, Geiseric, conqueror of North Africa, previously unknown to me.  Escaping a difficult situation in Spain, he shuttled his followers across the Straits of Gibraltar into the remote province of Mauretania Tingitana in 429.  He then moved east (St. Augustine died in the besieged city of Hippo Regius), and conquered what was the richest province in the Empire.  This conquest was a major nail in the Empire's coffin:  the revenues from this province helped pay for the army.

In 455 Geiseric launched a naval expedition which sacked Rome, much more violently and destructively than the relatively benign looting of Alaric back in 410.

In 468, an huge fleet sailed from Constantinople to reconquer North Africa, but was destroyed by fireships, much like the Spanish fleet of 1588.  Heather indulges in one of his wishful counterfactuals here, considering what the fleet could have accomplished if the wind had been blowing in the other direction.  Maybe.  Geiseric was clearly a formidable opponent, and his descendants ruled his kindgom through peaceful succession until Justinian's conquest in the next century.

If Geiseric were on the "right" side, he'd be someone we knew about.  His political and military talents were incredible.  He not only conquered and destroyed, but built a functioning and stable kingdom.  If Justinian hadn't come along, what would have become of a wealthy Arian Vandal kingdom in North Africa?  Probably conquered by the Arabs as they swept on their conquests, like everywhere else.  But maybe not....  There's a counterfactual for you.

Apples: the ease of misunderstanding the past

There is a farmer’s market near where I work.  I always go, and at this time of year, the stands carry a huge variety of apples.  Some are available most of the season, while some have a short harvest season.  Apples have been grown in New England for centuries, and apple cider used to be the prefered light alcoholic drink around here.

But when I look into the various apples I try, I find that most of them do not have a particularly long history.  A favorite, the Macoun, came about as a cross between two older apples, the Mcintosh and the Jersey Red, and was only named in 1923.  Even older varieties have been subtly bred to improve disease resistance, separation of the stem, disease resistance, simultaneous ripening, etc.

When we read a novel set in a previous era where people eat apples (and if it's set in New England they certainly will) our understanding of what they are eating and how they get them is incorrect.  The past is another orchard.  "Good keepers" were more important in an era without refrigeration and nitrogen-filled warehouses, even if they didn't taste particularly good.  And the trees they got the apples from weren't those comfortable dwarves you see it a pick-your-own orchard.  They were...well, they were trees.  You could fall out of them and kill yourself.

It's easy to forget how much work had to be done to get us from then to now.  Generation after generation, busy agronomists and farmers have competed to create apples that will appeal to apple eaters, and be cheap and efficient for apple growers to produce.  So raise a Macoun, or a Spencer, or a Northern Spy and, before you take a bite, and give thanks for their labors.

Understanding history (or failing to)

Something has been puzzling sociologists and criminologists over the past decade or so:  why are crime rates dropping so dramatically?  A couple of days ago Free Exchange, over at Economist.com, had yet another explanation: the advent of antidepressants and anti-ADHD meds.

This one seems weaker than most (as time goes by, the efficacy of both these drug types seems to be dropping:  it's possible that their action is completely misunderstood), but that's not what I'm interested in.  It's this:

This social change is going on, right now, in front of our eyes.  We have more statistical, analytical, and data-gathering power than anyone ever has, and we still can't understand what's causing it.  So why do we think we can explain anything about (say) how Goths, Alans, and Vandals overwhelmed the western Roman Empire?  Or how Western Europe managed to dominate the global economy in the 19th and 20th centuries?  Or anything at all?

Don't get me wrong.  I love history, and will continue to read it.  I just don't know that I can ever believe any historian's statement that "this happened because of that".

Or a politician's statement about the same.  If we'd passed dramatic gun-control legislation in the early 90s, many people would be saying that, clearly, the drop in crime rate was due to those restrictions.  And how could anyone argue?  It would be absolutely obvious.

Disclosure:  I favored gun-control legislation back then, and would certainly have reached that (completely incorrect) conclusion.  I no longer think guns are a particular social problem (partially because crime rate is clearly not correlated with them), and think that we should take the Bill of Rights seriously, even though I do not own a gun, and never plan to.

Rome's cultural survival

I suppose one reason Rome resonated for long after its fall was the survival of various of its cultural products.  Latin is pretty obvious.  Until the Renaissance, Western medicine was Galenic medicine (though it vanished and got reintroduced from Byzantium and the Arabs).  And astronomy was Ptolemaic astronomy.  Both were products of the late Principate.  It's a bit as if, having lost the political unity, Europeans held on to the intellectual unity, far beyond where it made sense.  Would these ideas have had the same staying power if they had not emerged in association with that dream of unity?  Ptolemaic astronomy itself seems almost like a crude metaphor for political rule from the center, having nothing to do with physical reality at all.

Rome Falls Again

As I mentioned, there has been a flurry of new books about the end of the Roman Empire.  It’s an interesting puzzle, with resonance for any empire:  how does something so solid and functional come apart?  Could anything have been done to prevent it?

But that is only one of the interesting questions raised by the Roman Empire.  The other, probably even more interesting, is how such an empire was created in the first place, and how, once created, it stayed together for so long.  This enterprise ruled the entire Mediterranean basin, and additional territories as far north as Britain, for many centuries. It built roads, administered justice, and kept down pirates and brigands.  It maintained cult temples, built arenas where prisoners and animals were slaughtered for entertainment, and fed urban populations from the produce of vast factory farms worked by slaves.  All at a level of technology no higher than anywhere else.

And how did they ever run it?  As Peter Heather observes, in The Fall of the Roman Empire (#2 in my Fall of Rome reading series), in a useful chapter called "The Limits of Empire":

Looking at the map with modern eyes, we perceive the Roman Empire as impressive enough:  looked at in fourth-century terms, it is staggering.  Furthermore, measuring it in the real currency of how long it took human beings to cover the distances involved, you could say it was five times larger than it appears on the map.  To put it another way, running the Roman Empire with the communications then available was akin to running, in the modern day, an entity somewhere between five and ten times the size of the European Union.

And keep in mind that the European Union has 27 member states.

Somehow, a mid-Italian city state had successfully emulsified all the old long-standing political and cultural entities of the Mediterranean basin and beyond.  And that emulsion didn't crack for nearly five hundred years.

Warlords with powerful regional bases tore the Late Republic apart, but it stayed together.  One emperor after another succeeded Nero, but it stayed together.  The ludicrous Commodus couldn't destroy it, neither could the deranged Caracalla or the bizarre Elagabalus.  The fifty years of constant civil war following the death of Alexander Severus, with dozens of emperors and usurpers, should have finally taken it down, but didn't.  Diocletian and Constantine's military/bureaucratic Dominate made the whole thing much less fun, but it stayed together.  By that point, it wasn't even ruled from Rome, but from regional strongpoints like Trier and Antioch.  And when the Western regions were finally torn from this system (including the original capital, Rome), the East kept together, like a smoke ring blown through history, for hundreds of years more.

The Fall is only noticable because it stood for so long without falling.  And the Rise was certainly not inevitable.  What would Western history have looked like if there never had been a Roman Empire in the first place?

The Fall of Rome: a lately popular topic

In the past few years, there has been an interesting cluster of history books focused on the end of the Roman Empire:  its fall, its decline, its transition into other forms (part of the point is the disagreement on what to call what happened).  I don’t know if this sudden supply of popular scholarship is coincidence, a sign of some general mood, or simply the result of enough new information to force a reevaluation.

I’ve read one (Bryan Ward-Perkins’s The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization) and am in the process of reading another (Peter Heather’s The Fall of the Roman Empire).  Then there is Goldsworthy and Wickham.  News on those when and if I get to them.

Ward-Perkins’s book is in three sections.  The first is a impressionistic account of how various tribes moved into the Roman Empire and how they related to the people they now ruled.  The last is a bit of a rant about recent historiographic trends that have repositioned the Fall of the Roman Empire as Late Antiquity, even as Ward-Perkins states that Late Antiquity is a pretty good term for that period (roughtly 400-800 CE).  He is quite entertaining on why northern European members of the EU might wish to come up with a kinder and gentler Fall of Rome.

The best section is the middle one, where he analyzes physical evidence for an understanding of the economic complexity of the Roman Empire.  He shows that, no matter what its flaws, there was one big advantage to living under the rule of the Caesars:  the extended peace and trading networks raised the economy to a high level for a pre-industrial society.  Everyone had tiled roofs, good pottery, and other implements of daily life—and Ward-Perkins is at pains to point out that the daily life of poor and middling people was actually relatively decent.  Having access to trading networks allowed farmers to rise above subsistence and specialize in the crops best suited to their local soils and climates.

All of this disappeared after collapse of unified Roman rule in the West.  Ward-Perkins is persuasive that, no matter how innovative the relations between Germanic rulers and native ruled, their lives had become materially much poorer.

Ward-Perkins goes directly at the point that comfort, safety, and material wealth are important measures of human happiness, and of civilizational complexity.  Those who didn’t have to live it can praise spiritual values or other aspects of nonmaterial culture.  As he points out, near the end of the book:

We have no wish to emulate the asceticism of a saint like Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, who spent solitary nights immersed in the North Sea praising God.  But, viewed from a suitable distance, he is deeply attractive, in touch with both God and nature:  after his vigils a pair of otters would come out of the sea to dry him with their fur and warm his feet with their breath.  This is a much more beguiling vision of the past than mine, with its distribution maps of peasant settlements, and its discussion of good- and bad-quality pottery.

I’d say this a book for the enthusiast, not someone coming to this period for the first time—though I’m not sure what else I would recommend as an introduction.  I might actually recommend Peter Brown’s The World of Late Antiquity—although Brown is, in fact, the dark genius who pioneered the concept of Late Antiquity, and Ward-Perkins spends some time cautiously taking potshots at him.  I think once I get through Heather, at least, I’ll return to Brown to remind myself of what these revisionists are going on about.

But if you are an enthusiast, Ward-Perkins’s book is well worth reading, and refreshingly short and brisk.

Military informational graphics I could use

Yesterday, I discussed an interesting informational graphic I cam across in the course of my work.

I read a lot of history.  Unlike some people, I don't focus on military history, but certainly read a fair amount of it. The first rule of any military history book is that there are never enough maps.  Sometimes there are ridiculously few, but even when there are a fair number, they are insufficient.

Partially that's because, no matter what, what you finally have are unit designations moving around on a surface somehow coded for terrain.  I am not an expert in tactic, weaponry, or logistics.  Just looking at those rectangles doesn't tell me much.

I don't even know the range of their weapons (if we're in the modern era).  How far do their arms fire?  What units are in range, which ones are not?

I don't know the effects of terrain.  Can this unit actually see that one, or not?  How long would it take for this unit to move toward the enemy?

I don't know what the various commanders perceived.  What did they think the battlefield looked like?  How adequate were the maps they had?  What did they see?

This may all seem vaguely sissy to real military readers, but, as I said, that's not me.  And this would be impractical for all maps.  That can be expensive, and I doubt the publisher provides a lot of money for that.

Still, it would be fun to see a campaign seen, not only from the empyrean post-game wrap up POV, but also from ground level, so you can follow the decisions as they get made from the information available.

Trusting a photograph

Photographs are staged, selected, manipulated, and modified, and are in no way a useful guide to reality. We know that. But when we see a photograph, particularly an old one, we feel we’re seeing something. James K. Polk was not a handsome man, but it is fascinating to see this image of a him (I gather there was a photo of William Henry Harrison, so it's not actually the first of a sitting President, which I had long thought). That’s what he looked like, we say to ourselves. Amazing

And it is. That is, kind of, what he looked like.  Is this steely eyed man John Brown, or this somewhat more ingratiating version?  At least we're pretty sure about the hair.  

But back then, you were conscious of being photographed. The speed of the emulsion meant you had to sit still for a long time for your image to be clear—or be dead, the reason dead soldiers and dead babies make up a large proportion of early figure photographs.

So think about the first-ever photograph ever taken, Louis Daguerre’s image of the Boulevard du Temple.

Standing there, getting his shoes shined, is the first person to be photographed, and it’s a candid shot. That long-legged guy there was one person who didn’t pose, because he didn’t know there was anything to pose for.

But now we’re suspicious. Everything is staged, selected, etc. Did Daguerre put his buddy Jacques up to it?

Daguerre: Hey, Jacques, I’ll show you something fun. See that shoeshine guy out there? He’s not getting much business. Why don’t you go out there and get your shoes shined?

Jacques: What’s wrong with my shoes?

D: Nothing. But if you go out there—

J: They’re old, sure. But if I’d known you would make a comment, I’d have worn my other pair.

D: There’s nothing wrong with your shoes, Jacques. Great shoes. From around here?  There's a great place on the Place Vendome....

J: I picked them up on a business trip to Mulhouse.

D: Well, see? But, anyway, if you’d just go out there to that shoeshine guy, I’ll show you something amazing....

J: Again with the shine. The shoes are clean, Louis. I'm careful about stuff like that.  Why should I go out and get my shoes cleaned?

D: Here. I’ll pay for it. And enough for a tip, too.

J: Do you think I can’t afford to have my shoes shined? I’ll have you know, things have been going pretty well. Pretty well, indeed. I don’t have the free time for fancy chemical experiments, but I got enough to get by.

D: I didn’t mean—

J: You didn’t used to be like this, Louis.  Is it those chemicals you’ve been smelling?

D: For God’s sake, go out there! You’ll see why. You’ll think it’s great. I swear.

J: Fine. I’ll do it. Just don’t expect me to come back.

Poor Jacques. He never knew that generations yet unborn would be looking at him. But if he hadn’t been there, would it have been as interesting a picture? We’ll never really know how it happened.....

Everything you know is wrong

A few months ago I wrote about the slippery nature of truth in personal narrative. Typical level: low to medium.

Fiction was invented for a reason. Reality isn’t “boring”, really, but it is poorly structured, noisy, with obscured causation, and a complete lack of justice. And the final resolution to any problem, no matter how minor or serious? Everybody dies.

Not to give anything away, but pretty much everything we know of as history partakes of the same problem. As far as written evidence goes, it’s all written after the fact, sometimes long after the fact, either by axe-grinding participants in the events or by those who have benefited by the victory of one side or another and are basing their account on the self-serving oral testimony of people who barely remember what happened.

No surprise, photographs are increasingly seen to be made up as well. Chris Bertram of Crooked Timber points me at an account of a famous Robert Capa photo of a dying soldier during the Spanish Civil War: most likely faked, as were various other famous iconic images.

All of the images examined in the article are really images crafted to fit into a prevailing narrative, whether about the fears of a looming European war, the Male Gaze, postwar love among the ruins, or the dignity of the struggle for civil rights. We love things that tell us that what we already believe is absolutely true.

Images too, are contingent and full of distracting non-narrative elements. Really, without narrative support, few of them are readable. Random instants in time are lacking context, past, and motivation, problems made worse by the fact that they are two-dimensional, taken from a certain angle, and have issues with focus and resolution. We see a lot less than we think we see in them. No wonder photographers, through selection, manipulation, and outright staging, try to come up with ones clear enough for us to understand them. Boosting the signal-to-noise ration means focusing on some signals more than others.

The wonder is that we take any of them as at all representative of that annoyingly contingent reality we know is all around us.

The Great Carbon Transition

I used the phrase "Great Carbon Transition" in my last post, and then wondered where I had gotten it.  I did a phrase search and found...that it had come from the inside of my own head.  Google found no other uses.

I think this is a great term for what the next fifty years or so are going to involve.  And it's the kind of absurd Capitalized Phrase For A Historical Period that always appears in SF novels set in the far future to describe historical events that occured between that time and the present, which real people so seldom use.

But we are, after all, the future's past, so Great Carbon Transition it is.  Remember, you heard it here first.

The perils of childhood play

As I’ve mentioned before, I like the 100-year-old photo blog, Shorpy, both for the pictures and the comments. But the comments on this one startled me.

The title is "Children's playground, St. Louis", and it is from 1936, taken by Arthur Rothstein for the Farm Security Administration.

One commenter sees this as "a wonderful place to go play."

I see a horrendous, dangerous dump, not a happy scene of “use what’s available” childhood play. And I think the photographer’s caption is sardonic.  This is what people then were trying to get rid of.

You always get some “good old days” commenters on Shorpy, but this time they seem to have gone off the rails, describing the healthy joy of playing with old springs and bones in a cesspit.

Now, sure, open and unrestricted play in a mildly dangerous and ominous place is one of those real pleasures of childhood that is definitely rarer now than it used to be, and I suppose that’s a loss. Jerry’s Pit, near my house, was a flooded brick pit that for years served as the local swimming hole, and the skinny kids in the pictures of it sure do look happy.

But this scene is something quite different. For one thing, the kid is alone in this spot. Think there’s a reason for that? He’s making the best of it. But I don’t think that best is all that good.

Sins of literature: the general popular with his troops

Having taken a tour of Civil War named streets in my neighborhood, I'm thinking, naturally, of George B. McClellan.  The Seven Days battles happened on his retreat down the Peninsula, and marked the advent of Robert E. Lee.  Second Manassas (see?  I'm not unreasonable about the name itself, just seeing it in my neighborhood) happened when McClellan was temporarily replaced by Pope, successful in the West, who then got creamed by Lee.

McClellan was a superb manager and a terrible leader.  We most value those who rise to the top in a crisis, even though most time is spent in non-crisis.  McClellan was at his worst in a crisis, and at his best with the routine.

McClellan's men loved him.  And why not?  He kept them fed, supplied, and, as far as he could, safe from combat.  He would only put them in harm's way when he had overwhelming superiority of numbers.  Vain, self-important, and paranoid, McClellan would make a poor hero of a work of fiction.

But writers often use "popular with his troops" as an index of admirability.  And, I suppose, it is.  Lee was popular with his troops too, and Lee is a classic fictional hero.  But humans can love, en masse, people they would not admire or even like individually.  Can fiction handle a popular, pompous narcissist?  History certainly can.

More Civil War street names

Not far from my house is the site of Camp Cameron, where annual musters were held before the Civil War.  It was then an actual camp, for new recruits, until neighbors complained about how rowdy the young troops were, and they were moved elsewhere.  The land, straddling Cambridge and Somerville, was developed in the 1880s.

The short little streets there have names from the Seven Days Battles of the Peninsular Campaign:  Malvern, Glendale, Seven Pines, and Fair Oaks*.  Never mind that Seven Pines and Fair Oaks are two names for the same battle.  I like to think that these were names the soldiers gave to roads between lines of tents, which hung around until houses were built there, but another street is named Yorktown, which is a developer-type name, used for high schools, shopping centers, etc.

History is important to developers.  An attractive conversion of factory buildings to condos on the other side of Cameron Avenue is on a street proudly named Tannery Brook.  In the actual age of tanneries (and there were a lot around here--I live in what was the low-rent, swampy, smelly, Irish and French-Canadian area of town) that would not have been a selling point.

Bloody battles and smelly industrial operations become charming if seen from far enough away.

*I get this wrong all the time:  Seven Pines/Fair Oaks was part of the overall campaign, but not part of the Seven Days Battles.  My apologies to the real buffs.

Unreasonable rage at a street name

Near my children's school, here in Cambridge, Mass., is a short street with a name that, for a long time, irritated me.  The street is called Manassas Avenue.

Two things bugged me.  In 1861 and 1862 two battles took place at a creek in northern Virginia called Bull Run.  The first was the first battle of the Civil War.  So, the first thing:  we northerners call those battles the first and second battles of Bull Run, since we favored geographic features while southerners favored the nearest town when naming battles.  But Manassas, I have to say, seems to be winning out, and I see the battles referred to more often that way than I remember from my youth.  I can kind of deal with that, though I always suspect the loyalties of the National Park Service.

But, the stranger thing:  we lost.  The North got its butt handed to it in both those battles.  Can historical knowledge have fallen so low that a street in the heart of the heart of the North, Cambridge, got that awful name?  Any Gettysburg Streets in Charleston or New Orleans?  Somehow, I doubt it.

Well, come to find out, Manassas Ave. is named after a person, Manasses P. Dougherty.  The name was changed in 1907, from Sparks St. Court.

I'm still suspicious.  Why the spelling change?  A southern sympathiser in the Registry of Deeds?  Rewriting history is those people's favorite hobby.  You can't take anything for granted.

Butcher knives and other improper signifiers

The Boston Globe had a story recently about people being honored for saving a woman from being murdered by her husband with butcher knife.  They did a dangerous and brave thing, but that's not what struck me.

It was "butcher knife".  This what might be called a "headline signifier":  that is, something, probably not accurate, that catches the reader's eye and conveys the meaning, rather than the actually reality, of events.

Most people do not have anything called a "butcher knife" in their home, mostly because no one butchers meat at home.  But saying someone was attacked with a "utility knife" or a "chef's knife" would seem to be minimizing the risk, while at the same time being inappropriately finicky about terminology.

We accept this, though, I admit, I always think "well, what kind of knife was it?"  When someone attacks someone else with an item found in the kitchen, do they grab the boning knife or the santoku?  A writer's mind wants to know.

Related (albeit distantly) to this is the event, found in even sober history books, of someone being "torn limb from limb" by a mob.  Or, even more dramatically, "torn to pieces".

Maybe this literally happened.  But seeing these phrases in place of  the more mundane "killed by an angry mob" makes me wonder what actually did occur.   The medieval and early modern practice of "quartering" usually involved cutting the body into parts with (wait for it) a butcher knife, or, in French style, attaching horses to to the limbs in a coordinated effort.  The human body is pretty well constructed.  Beating someone to death and tearing a few pieces off (what I presume is what usually happened when someone was attacked by a mob) is relatively easy, the other things relatively hard, particularly with a tightly packed group of people who probably can't move freely to begin with.

This is actually sounding kind of gruesome.  But "torn limb from limb" is a seemingly meaningful description that raises a number of questions when you think about it.  I'm not currently planning to describe the death of a character at the hands of a mob, but if I do, I'd like to get it right.  Where should I turn?