With bewildering rapidity, Garvey rose from being a so-so street orator to a public speaker of supernatural eloquence, with a voice “like thunder from Heaven”, capable of filling Madison Square Garden and holding every spectator rapt, even the ones who had come to mock. He founded a black newspaper that soon became the most influential of its then-thriving kind. He transformed his pan-African organisation, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, into a thousands-strong body that soon rivalled its more moderate counterpart the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP). He decided that what the Negro race really needed was its own fleet, which he named the Black Star Line, and managed to persuade countless thousands of African Americans that this was their dream, too. People who could barely afford canned food would buy shares, and (though the story ended in tears) they lived to see Black Star Liners being sailed under black captains, and were thrilled. No wonder Garvey could ride in triumph through Harlem in a great open car, sporting quasi-military finery and a tricorn with white feathers.

more from The New Statesman here.

From Women in History:

BIRTH DATE: c.1820. Because she was a slave, and owners did not record their slaves’ birthdates, the exact date of Harriet’s birth is unknown — different accounts list 1820 or 1821.

BIRTH PLACE: Edward Brodas plantation near Bucktown, Dorchester County, Maryland.

EDUCATION: Because of her indentured status, Harriet was denied the opportunity for education — leaving her illiterate her entire life. Slaveowners did not want their slaves to know how to read or write.

FAMILY BACKGROUND: Born into slavery on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Harriet’s ancestors had been brought to America in shackles from Africa during the first half of the 18th Century. Harriet was the 11th child born to Benjamin Ross and Harriet Greene (slaves of Edward Brodas), her given name was Araminta and she was often called “Minty” as a child. But by the time she was an adult, she was calling herself Harriet.

As was the custom for many slaves, Harriet began working at an early age. When five years old, she was first sent away from home, “loaned out” to another plantation, checking muskrat traps in icy cold rivers. She quickly became too sick to work and was returned, malnourished and suffering from the cold exposure. Once she recovered, she was loaned out to another plantation, working as a nurse to the planter’s infant child. By the age of 12, she was working as a field hand, plowing and hauling wood. At 13, while defending a fellow slave who tried to run away, her overseer struck her in the head with a two-pound weight. This resulted in recurring narcoleptic seizures, or sleeping spells, that plagued her the rest of her life.

In 1844, at about the age of 25, Harriet married John Tubman, a freeman. She gained permission to marry him from her owners and lived with him in his cabin, but she was required to continue working for her master. When Harriet told John of her dreams of one day gaining her freedom, he told her that she would never be free and, if she tried running away, he would turn her in. On one of her first return visits to Maryland, Harriet went to John’s cabin in hopes of getting him to go north with her. She found that he had taken another wife. Later in 1869, she married Nelson Davis. She never had any children.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS: The Biblical story of Exodus in which Moses freed the Israelites from slavery in Egypt to freedom in Israel, saw repetition in the years before the Civil War when Harriet Tubman freed over 300 blacks from slavery in the South to freedom in the North. For her commendable work she herself was nicknamed “Moses.”

Despite the hardships inflicted upon her and the unfairness of them, Harriet used her labors for self discipline and set for herself the goal of escaping to the North. She accomplished this goal in 1849, when alone and on foot she ran away from the plantation in the middle of the night and followed the north star to free land in Pennsylvania. It came about after her master died and she heard rumors that she and two of her brothers were to be sold to a chain gang. Her brothers left with her, but became scared, deciding not to take the risk, and so returned to the plantation. She traveled only at night, until she knew she had crossed the border between slaveholding and non-slaveholding states. She later said:

“I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person now I was free. There was such a glory over everything … and I felt like I was in heaven.”

More here.

From Nature:

Languages show periodic bursts of evolution, in which many new words blossom, according to new research that treats linguistic evolution like its biological counterpart. The research suggests that new words evolve slowly most of the time, but with spurts of diversification when two languages divide.

If all language evolved at the same stately pace, the distance between any two languages could be easily calculated by multiplying this constant by how long ago the two tongues parted ways. But in this week’s Science, Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading, UK, and his colleagues have found that branches heavy with linguistic divorces evolve faster, suggesting ‘punctuational bursts’ of language change when two languages split.

The authors calculate that the rapid change in these bursts accounts for between 10% and 33% of total word differences between languages.

More here.

..
The Physics of Angels
Trish Crapo

I suspect the world remembers everything—
time and bones and words flung together
and me in it, suspecting. If we can believe
in photons—entities that possess movement
but not mass, and if the spirit, too
is made of light—then who am I to say
I haven’t lived before—or you,
and thus this tenderness?
Who am I to doubt that grace
is elemental, like fire—or that souls
have no need of us, finally?

..

Though for all times, also for Black History Month:

Hair–braided chestnut,
coiled like a lyncher’s rope,
Eyes–fagots,
Lips–old scars, or the first red blisters,
Breath–the last sweet scent of cane,
And her slim body, white as the ash
of black flesh after flame.

In the FT, Harry Eyres reviews Charlotte Higgins’ Latin Love Lessons:

I am extremely sympathetic with Higgins’s overall thesis that we would all do far better to spend more time with Roman poetry and less with popular psychology; indeed the recent renaissance of Latin as an exciting – not dry and dusty – language to learn, exemplified by the runaway success of Harry Mount’s amusing Amo, Amas, Amat, is one of the most encouraging cultural trends to emerge for ages. I also like many of Higgins’ commentaries on individual poems: her comparison of Propertius’s obsessive circling round the experience of being in love with Proust is spot-on. She loves Catullus also; not just the most famous poems about his obsessive love for Lesbia but the long, densely mythological tale of Peleus and Thetis.

But with one comment the admirable Higgins stopped me in my tracks and made me ponder whether it was quite so easy to assimilate the Roman poets to the world of Bridget Jones. This was a cheery injunction to her readers to indulge in safe sex at all times. What, I suddenly wondered, would the Roman poets make of the idea of “safe sex”?

Here I came back to Horace and the beautiful poem singled out by Martha Kearney that begins his last book of odes. It is addressed to Venus, the goddess of love: the 50-year-old poet implores the goddess to spare him a return of the love “wars” he thought he had put behind him. He begs her to go instead to the houses of amorous young men who, when they achieve their heart’s desire, will set up statues and institute festivals in her honour. He is past it; past the stage of “women or boys, of hopes of the mutual happiness of love, of drinking bouts and garlands of fresh flowers”.

In the Economist:

[T]he so-called ultracapacitors on which the XH-150 is based may supplant rather than merely supplement a car’s batteries. And if that happens, a lot of other batteries may be for the chop, too. For it is possible that the long and expensive search for a better battery to power the brave, new, emission-free electrical world has been following the wrong trail.

A traditional capacitor stores electricity as static charges, positive and negative, on two electrodes that are separated by an insulator. This works best when the electrodes are parallel with each other, which means they need to have smooth surfaces. The amount of charge that can be stored depends on the surface area of the electrodes, the strength and composition of the insulation between them, and how close they are together. If the electrodes are then connected by a wire, a current will flow from one to the other. A battery, by contrast, stores what is known as an electrochemical potential. Its two electrodes are made of different chemicals—ones that will release energy when they react. But because the electrodes are physically separated from one another their chemical constituents can react only by remote control…

The reason ultracapacitors may be able to bridge the gap between speed and endurance is that, like batteries, they use ions and an electrolyte rather than simply relying on the static charges.

Adina Hoffman in The Nation reviews some new memoirs:

If Oz is interested in forging a myth of his own origins as well as of his country, Sari Nusseibeh prefers to debunk. While he, too, was raised in a hothouse, as the privileged son of one of Jerusalem’s most distinguished and ancient Muslim families (since the seventh century they have held the literal key to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre), he has perhaps a bit less to prove and never once casts himself as the victim. On the other hand, as a Palestinian–and a Palestinian writing in English, for a foreign audience–he starts out as something of an underdog, and he and co-writer Anthony David have clearly set out to make a subtle political point or two to a readership that is probably much more familiar with Israel’s saga than Palestine’s. But the book is not a polemic. It’s very much the story of Nusseibeh’s political and intellectual growth, told in a mild and good-naturedly self-deprecating tone and cast against the backdrop of his people’s troubled history.

Once Upon a Country was inspired, he says, by Oz’s memoir, which, in the generous terms typical of Nusseibeh, he calls a “masterpiece.” Although he grew up “no more than a hundred feet away from where Oz lived out his childhood,” he was struck by the fact that “there were hardly any Arabs in [Oz’s] story, and not a hint of the world I knew as a child.” (Born in 1949, Nusseibeh is ten years Oz’s junior.) His book attempts to tell something of what went on across the road while also offering a cleareyed reckoning of the state of the Palestinian national movement. There are no heroes here, even though Nusseibeh himself might reasonably be viewed by readers as one: he could easily live a much more carefree life elsewhere but has chosen to stay in Jerusalem and work not just for his people’s independence but also for what might be called, without condescension, their education. With admirable humility and a pair of mismatched socks, he goes about the business of helping shape a university (Al-Quds), a state, a civil society.

Over at EurekAlert!:

Could lessons learned from Mother Nature help airport security screening checkpoints better protect us from terror threats?

The authors of a new book, Natural Security: A Darwinian Approach to a Dangerous World, believe they can — if governments are willing to think outside the box and pay heed to some of nature’s most successful evolutionary strategies for species adaptation and survival.

“Biological organisms have figured out millions of ways, over three and a half billion years of evolution, to keep themselves safe from a vast array of threats,” said Raphael Sagarin, a Duke University ecologist who co-edited the book with Terence Taylor, an international security expert.

“Arms races among invertebrates, intelligence gathering by the immune system and alarm calls by marmots are just a few of nature’s successful security strategies that have been tested and modified over time in response to changing threats and situations,” Sagarin said. “In our book, we look at these strategies and ask how we could apply them to our own safety.”

In fact, Sontag’s confrontation with her own ordinariness is the most intriguing element of Rieff’s story. For a woman who had always believed in her own exceptionality, who had defined herself by her will to be different, to rise above, the terrifying democracy of illness is one of its most painful aspects. Throughout her final illness, she tells Rieff, “This time, for the first time in my life, I don’t feel special.” In the most profound and affecting passages of the book, Rieff questions whether, on some level, his mother thought that she was too special to die. He investigates the line between hubris and bravery, grandiosity and vitality. Do we ever truly accept that we will die? Is there a part of the mind, especially for someone as ambitious, as avid, as Sontag, that refuses to believe in its own extinction? Rieff enumerates the qualities that enabled her to transcend her unhappy girlhood in Arizona and her early unhappy marriage to become one of the country’s most formidable intellectuals. “Her sense that whatever she could will in life she could probably accomplish … had served her so well for so long that, empirically, it would have been madness on her part not to have made it her organizing principle, her true north,” he writes. That same belief in the power of her own desire, that spectacular ambition, that intellectual bravado, made it impossible to accept that fatal illness was not another circumstance she could master.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

The Just
Jorge Luis Borges

A man who cultivates his garden, as Voltaire wished.
He who is grateful for the existence of music.
He who takes pleasure in tracing an etymology.
Two workmen playing, in a cafe in the South, a silent game of chess.
The potter, contemplating a color and a form.
The typographer who sets this page well, though it may not please him.
A woman and a man, who read the last tercets of a certain canto.
He who strokes a sleeping animal.
He who justifies, or wishes to, a wrong done him.
He who is grateful for the existence of Stevenson.
He who prefers others to be right.
These people, unaware, are saving the world.

Translation: Alastair Reid

More on Borges and “The Just”

..

Gabriel Piterberg in The New Left Review:

What was her alternative? From 1940 onwards, Arendt argued that the appropriate—non-Zionist—political solution to the Jewish Question would be a European federation, in which the Jews would be one nation among others, with representation in a common parliament: ‘our fate can only be bound up with that of other small European peoples’; a settlement in Palestine might also be feasible, but only if attached to some such European commonwealth. [20] On the principle of a federation she never wavered; it was based on her rejection of the idea both of the nation-state and of ‘minorities’ within it, given eloquent historical expression in—among other texts—Origins of Totalitarianism. Historically, her vision of the role of Jews in one could be regarded (although she was certainly unaware of this) as a virtual replication of Otto Bauer’s solution for the Austro-Hungarian empire in The Nationalities Question and Social Democracy; while her prediction of a European federation equipped with its own parliament has, of course, been substantially vindicated, however far the eu remains from such a federal union. It also reflects her life-long engagement with Bernard Lazare. In opposition to Herzlian Zionism, Lazare advocated ‘nations within a nation’, a structure within which the Jews could find their place as a collective without needing either to emigrate or assimilate. Though Arendt did not adhere to an anarchist world-view, Lazare’s writings continued to inform her critique of the 19th-century nation-state and of Herzl’s bourgeois-nationalist Zionism.

Amara Lakhous in Reset:

The election of Benazir Bhutto in 1988 was a cultural shock to the Arab world. No Arab woman had ever run for president or prime minister. Even today, women in Saudi Arabia are not allowed to drive a car, based on truly ridiculous customary rules. How did Benazir manage to come to power at the age of 35, while Arab Muslim women have been left behind? The successful political case of Benazir Bhutto shows that Pakistani people do not take notes from the Wahhabist Saudi model like the Afghani Taliban do, but instead follow the English or Indian path.

There is a passage in the introduction to Benazir Bhutto’s autobiography which best sums up her extraordinary public and private affairs. “Pakistan is no ordinary country. And mine has been no ordinary life”, writes Benazir. “My father and two brothers were killed. My mother, husband and I were all imprisoned. I have spent long years in exile. Despite the difficulties and sorrows, however I feel blessed that I could break the bastions of tradition by becoming Islam’s first elected woman prime minister. That election was the tipping point in the debate raging in the Muslim world on the role of women in Islam.””.

From PBS.Org:

Dred Scott first went to trial to sue for his freedom in 1847. Ten years later, after a decade of appeals and court reversals, his case was finally brought before the United States Supreme Court. In what is perhaps the most infamous case in its history, the court decided that all people of African ancestry — slaves as well as those who were free — could never become citizens of the United States and therefore could not sue in federal court. The court also ruled that the federal government did not have the power to prohibit slavery in its territories. Scott, needless to say, remained a slave.

Born around 1800, Scott migrated westward with his master, Peter Blow. They travelled from Scott’s home state of Virginia to Alabama and then, in 1830, to St. Louis, Missouri. Two years later Peter Blow died; Scott was subsequently bought by army surgeon Dr. John Emerson, who later took Scott to the free state of Illinois. In the spring of 1836, after a stay of two and a half years, Emerson moved to a fort in the Wisconsin Territory, taking Scott along. While there, Scott met and married Harriet Robinson, a slave owned by a local justice of the peace. Ownership of Harriet was transferred to Emerson.

Scott’s extended stay in Illinois, a free state, gave him the legal standing to make a claim for freedom, as did his extended stay in Wisconsin, where slavery was also prohibited.

The decision of the court was read in March of 1857. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney — a staunch supporter of slavery — wrote the “majority opinion” for the court. It stated that because Scott was black, he was not a citizen and therefore had no right to sue. The decision also declared the Missouri Compromise of 1820, legislation which restricted slavery in certain territories, unconstitutional.

More here.

In Evolutionary Psychology, Brian Boyd reviews Jon Adams’ Interference Patterns: Literary Study, Scientific Knowledge, and Disciplinary Autonomy.

Adams objects to a closer link between literature and the sciences especially because he accepts Richard Rorty’s stress on the different questions that different disciplines ask. But neither consilience nor an evolutionary approach to literature imperils pluralism. Consilience requires only that all levels of explanation be compatible. A chemistry that asked only the same questions as physics would no longer be chemistry, but chemistry incompatible with physics would no longer be science. Neither Freudian psychoanalysis nor a biology-denying constructivism proves compatible with evolution or evidence, but within an evolutionary perspective on literature, the latter can be studied from many different angles, so long as they are compatible with other empirical disciplines.

We can study literature from anthropological, economic, political, religious or sociological angles, but with evolution’s power to explain multilevel selection and the complex interplay between competition and cooperation, we can explore sociality with far greater depth and range. Or we can study literature from neurological or psychological angles, using all the temporal and physical breadth of evolution and all the temporal and physical resolution of neuroscience. Or we can study literature as literature, as art, with all the expertise of human readers, scholarship and traditions and where appropriate with all the power of scientific method.

Tariq Ali in The Guardian:

Anthony Powell was the most European of 20th-century British novelists. We need to dispense with the blinkered view that his A Dance to the Music of Time is a novel sequence that can be enjoyed only by English “toffs” or readers of the Daily Telegraph. It’s a prejudice that has dogged Powell for far too long.

What is on offer in the 12 novels that constitute the Dance (published between 1951 and 1975) is not the nuances of class snobbery, but a reflection of the social history of five crucial decades of the last century, beginning with the end of the first world war and ending with the turbulence of the 60s. There is nothing quite like it in English letters. Some years ago I encountered one of our leading literary critics at a party and the following conversation took place:

“What do you think of the Dance?”

“Oh, you’ve read it?”

“Yes, I have.”

“Well, I didn’t like it. You obviously did?”

“I did. Why didn’t you?”

“Closed world.”

A closed world it is not. The sequence contains the most entertaining accounts of bohemian life in London from 1920-58, decades during which Powell not only mingled with that world, but also often enjoyed it more than coming-out parties in Belgravia.

More here.  [Thanks to Maniza Naqvi.]

From The New York Times:

DESPERATE PASSAGE: The Donner Party’s Perilous Journey West.

By Ethan Rarick.

……it is the tale of the Donner party — 81 men, women and children struggling for their lives against the elements in the Sierra Nevada during the winter of 1846-47 — that forms the template for our reaction to all subsequent accounts like it. The pioneers, some of whom resorted to cannibalism, have been both praised and maligned for the decisions they made on the way from Missouri to California.

But Rarick’s account is not really about science; it is about humanity, and his major contribution is his choice to focus on the Reed family. In most tellings, the Donners, for obvious reasons, are at the emotional center of the story. Rarick, instead, finds a greater dramatic vehicle in James Reed — “a man with a full head of hair and a bit of a smirk and iron convictions, others be damned” — who traveled with his wife, Margret; her mother (she died on the trail); and four children. He emphasizes Reed’s championing of the party’s attempt at a new, supposedly faster route to California, a decision that caused significant delay and, in addition to exhausting the travelers and depleting their supplies, prevented them from crossing the Sierra before winter. Likewise, when Reed is banished en route for killing a teamster in a scuffle, and Margret and the children are left at the mercy of the rest of the group, Rarick sees a crucial setback for the Donner party, the loss of its “one true leader.” Reed rides ahead and eventually raises a rescue party; in moving scenes, he is reunited with his family, all of whom, miraculously, survived.

More here.

From Science:

Blue-eyed? Thank a genetic switch that turns off your body’s ability to make brown pigment in your peepers. Researchers have finally located the mutation that causes blue eyes, and the findings suggest that all blue-eyed humans share a single common ancestor born 6000 to 10,000 years ago. Researchers have implicated the OCA2 gene in several eye colors. The gene is involved in the production of melanin, a pigment that gives hair and skin their hues. It also codes for brown eyes and can lead to green or hazel eyes when mutated. Despite years of searching, however, scientists have not found a mutation for blue eyes on the gene.

It turns out they were looking in the wrong place. Trying to narrow the site of the mutation, gene mapper Hans Eiberg of the University of Copenhagen and colleagues examined members of a large Danish family, an approach that allowed them to follow DNA as it passed from one generation to another. Then, by comparing people with brown or blue eyes, including people from Jordan and Turkey, the researchers were able to pinpoint the exact mutation. It wasn’t on the OCA gene but rather on a nearby gene called HERC2. The mutation works like a switch that regulates the OCA gene, the team reports in the January issue of Human Genetics, turning off the production of brown eye color and allowing blue eyes to shine through. Because blue eye color is found almost exclusively in people of European descent, Eiberg’s team speculates that the mutation traces back to the Neolithic expansion, when people in the Black Sea region migrated to northern Europe 6000 to 10,000 years ago.

More here.

Frans BM de Waal, Christophe Boesch, Victoria Horner, and Andrew Whiten at the website of Emory University:

A recent study in Science by Esther Herrmann et al (7 September 2007, p. 1360) claims equivalence in technical skills between apes – chimpanzees and orangutans – and two-year-old human children, but inferior social skills in the apes. These results are taken as support for a “cultural intelligence hypothesis.”

The study features an impressive battery of tests, seemingly administered in the same format to apes and children. It has been pointed out before, however, that the easiest way to standardize conditions – by having a human experimenter provide the social cues – introduces handicaps for the apes. When the experimenter is human for all subjects, only the apes are dealing with a species other than their own. This may not be as relevant for physical or technical problems, which focus on inanimate objects, but one expects this to matter for social tasks which rely crucially on the relation between experimenter and subject. The reported findings are consistent with the apes being handicapped specifically in the social domain.

The differences between the set ups for children and apes in this study appear multifold. Human children sit on or next to their parent (introducing potential “Clever Hans” effects), are talked to, are used to dealing with human strangers, and are tested by a member of their own species. The apes are alone, observe the task from behind a barrier, receive no verbal instructions, and are tested by a species not their own. We are not suggesting that human experimenters should never be used, but that the social skills which matter most for apes, especially as they relate to culture, are those shown with conspecific models.

More here.

Note: February is designated as The Black History Month. We will be posting at least one feature a day to honor the individuals and events that have made African American History.

Americans have recognized black history annually since 1926, first as “Negro History Week” and later as “Black History Month.” What you might not know is that black history had barely begun to be studied-or even documented-when the tradition originated. Although blacks have been in America at least as far back as colonial times, it was not until the 20th century that they gained a respectable presence in the history books.

Blacks Absent from History Books

We owe the celebration of Black History Month, and more importantly, the study of black history, to Dr. Carter G. Woodson. Born to parents who were former slaves, he spent his childhood working in the Kentucky coal mines and enrolled in high school at age twenty. He graduated within two years and later went on to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard. The scholar was disturbed to find in his studies that history books largely ignored the black American population-and when blacks did figure into the picture, it was generally in ways that reflected the inferior social position they were assigned at the time.

Established Journal of Negro History

Woodson, always one to act on his ambitions, decided to take on the challenge of writing black Americans into the nation’s history. He established the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (now called the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History) in 1915, and a year later founded the widely respected Journal of Negro History. In 1926, he launched Negro History Week as an initiative to bring national attention to the contributions of black people throughout American history.

Woodson chose the second week of February for Negro History Week because it marks the birthdays of two men who greatly influenced the black American population, Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln.

More here.