de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception
The Zapotecs, known as the 'Cloud People', dwelt in the southern highlands of central Mesoamerica, specifically, in the Valley of Oaxaca, which they inhabited from the late Preclassic period to the end of the Classic period (500 BCE - 900 CE).
de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception
"In the traditional Ladino language of her Sephardic Jewish ancestors, Güler Orgun tells us how her family found a new home in the Ottoman Empire after being expelled from Spain in the late 15th century.
We learn why her parents converted to Islam, and how Güler herself later came to find her Jewish roots again - before she married a Muslim man" (a Centropa Cinema production).
de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception
Using historic primary sources and digitized sound files, one Princeton professor (audibly) mapped the cacophony of 1920s and 30s New York in an interactive graphic. Have a listen: http://curbed.cc/163piBg
West Virginia’s abandoned Lake Shawnee Amusement Park shut down back in 1966 and has laid in ruins ever since. Many believe Lake Shawnee to be horribly cursed. The park was built upon the site of a desecrated Native American burial ground, and was the location of a brutal massacre of settlers. This week it opens for tours.
Geraldine Hoff Doyle, was a 17 years (in 1942) while she was working at the American Broach & Machine Co. when a photographer snapped a pic of her on the job. That image used by J. Howard Miller for the now iconic ‘We Can Do It!’ poster, released during World War II. Because the “We Can Do It!” poster was created for an internal Westinghouse project, it did not become widely known until the 1980s, when it began to be used by advocates of women’s equality in the workplace. Doyle did not know she may have been the model for “We Can Do It!” until 1984, when she came across an article in Modern Maturity magazine which linked a photo of her to the poster, which she had not seen before.
de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception
An analysis of ancient DNA from a 24,000-year-old Siberian skeleton generates a new model for the original peopling of the Western Hemisphere.
Models of gene flow from Aisa to the Americas, like this one from a 2007 PLOS ONE paper, may need to be reconsidered.WIKIMEDIA, ERIKA TAMM ET AL.Native Americans may not have descended from East Asians who crossed the Bering Land Bridge more than 15,000 years ago, according to a new genomic analysis of a millennia-old Siberian skeleton. A portion of the nuclear DNA recovered from the upper arm bone of a 4-year-old boy that was buried near the Siberian village of Mal’ta about 24,000 years ago is shared by modern Native Americans and no other group. But the boy appears to have been descended from people of European or western Asian origin.
Eske Willerslev, a University of Copenhagen ancient DNA expert, announced the findings last week at the Paleoamerican Odyssey conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the resulting manuscript is in press at Nature. In addition to finding genome regions shared by modern Native Americans, he and collaborator Kelly Graf of Texas A&M University found that the boy’s Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA belonged to haplogroups that are found almost exclusively in Europeans and people living in Asia west of the Altai Mountains.
Conspicuously absent from the child’s DNA, however, was any connection to modern East Asians, a genetic relationship present in the genomes of virtually all Native Americans. This means that the population from which the boy came must have included ancestors of modern Native Americans, upsetting the popular belief that the original inhabitants of North, Central, and South America descended directly from East Asians.
According to Science, Willerslev and Graf suggest that at some point before 24,000 years ago, the ancestors of modern Native Americans and those of East Asians split into two genetically distinct groups. The Mal’ta boy belonged to a population that migrated to Siberia from Eurasia and mixed with the second before the newly formed population moved into the New World, eventually populating the Americas.
Previously, the presence of European DNA in the modern Native American genome was attributed to interbreeding after Europeans made contact. This new finding may turn that supposition on its head. “The west Eurasian [genetic] signatures that we very often find in today's Native Americans don't all come from postcolonial admixture,” Willerslev said during his presentation. “Some of them are ancient.”
Though reconstructing humanity’s westward expansion into the New World involves some speculation, recovering the intact DNA of the Mal’ta boy represents a technological feat: his is oldest complete genome of a modern human sequenced to date.
de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception
Eva Braun, the middle of three daughters of Friedrich Braun (1879-1964) and Franziska Kronberger (1885-1976), was born in Simbach, Germany, on 6th February, 1912. Her father was a master craftsman.
Eva worked as an assistant in the studio of Heinrich Hoffmann. In 1932 she met Adolf Hitler. Eva later told her sister: "I'd stayed on after closing time to file some papers and I'd climbed up a ladder to fetch the files kept on the top shelves of the cupboard. At that moment the boss came in accompanied by a man of uncertain age with a funny moustache, a light-coloured, English-style overcoat and a big felt hat in his hand. They both sat down on the other side of the room, opposite me. I tried to squint in their direction without appearing to turn round and sensed that this character was looking at my legs... That very day I'd shortened my skirt, and I felt slightly embarrassed because I wasn't sure I'd got the hem even." Hoffmann sent her out to buy beer and sausages, and then invited Eva to join them: "The elderly gentleman (Hitler) was paying me compliments. We talked about music and a play at the Staatstheater, as I remember, with him devouring me with his eyes all the time. Then, as it was getting late, I rushed off. I refused an offer of a lift in his Mercedes. Just think what Papa's reaction would have been!"
Henriette Hoffman knew Eva Braun, who worked in her father's studio. She recalled that "Eva had pale blonde hair, cut short, blue eyes, and, although she had been educated in a Catholic convent, she had learnt feminine wiles - a certain look, and swaying hips when she walked, which made men turn their heads.... She was given theatre tickets like I was, and she thanked him with a curtsey." Baldur von Schirach later commented: "Eva was a worldly type of girl - bobbed chestnut-brown hair, a make-up that was unconventional for the time, fashionable pullover and short, narrow skirts, silk stockings and high-heeled shoes. I took her for a French girl. Usually she was walking a boxer dog. For me she was the most beautiful girl in Munich."
David Pryce-Jones, points out that Eva Braun was not alone in finding Hitler physically attractive: "Women by the thousand abased themselves at Hitler's feet, they tried to kiss his boots, and some of them succeeded, even to the point of swallowing the gravel on which he had trod, according to Reck-Malleczewen, whose fastidious hatred of the vulgarian Hitler was genuinely conservative. As a figurehead, as a male in absolute power, Hitler's aphrodisiac effect was scarcely even sublimated in the more impressionable women who constituted his beloved mass audience. They moaned, they were hysterical, they fainted, for an introspective bachelor deficient in sexuality.... In one respect Hitler was a final item in an intimate treasure-hunt, the object which could never be brought home, and in another respect he was a historical Big Daddy, patting the heads of blonde children. Restraint was impossible, in the frustration of apparently approaching the unapproachable; this was, so to speak, a masturbation of the spirit. She had herself to display."
At the time Hitler was romantically attached to Geli Raubal, the daughter of his half-sister, Angela Raubal. Hitler, who had now turned forty, became infatuated with Geli and rumours soon spread that he was having an affair with his young niece. Hitler became extremely possessive and Emil Maurice, his chauffeur, who also showed interest in Geli, was sacked. Although she was 20 years old, she looked very young for her age. Patrick Hitler, Adolf Hitler's nephew, met Geli Raubal during this period: "Geli looks more like a child than a girl. You couldn't call her pretty exactly, but she had great natural charm. She usually went without a hat and wore very plain clothes, pleated skirts and white blouses. No jewellery except a gold swastika given to her by Uncle Adolf, whom she called Uncle Alf."
Adolf Hitler greeting Eva Braun at Obersalzberg .
Wilhelm Stocker, an SA officer, was often on guard duty outside Hitler's Munich flat, later told the author of Eva and Adolf (1974): "Many times when Hitler was away for several days at a political rally or tending to party matters in Berlin or elsewhere, Geli would associate with other men. I liked the girl myself so I never told anyone what she did or where she went on these free nights. Hitler would have been furious if he had known that she was out with such men as a violin player from Augsburg or a ski instructor from Innsbruck. After she was satisfied that I wouldn't tell her uncle - and I had a personal reason for not telling him - she often confided in me. She admitted to me that at times Hitler made her do things in the privacy of her room that sickened her but when I asked her why she didn't refuse to do them she just shrugged and said that she didn't want to lose him to some woman that would do what he wanted. She was a girl that needed attention and needed it often. And she definitely wanted to remain Hitler's favourite girlfriend. She was willing to do anything to retain that status. At the beginning of 1931 I think she was worried that there might be another woman in Hitler's life because she mentioned to me several times that her uncle didn't seem to be as interested in her as he once was."
Geli also complained about the way Hitler controlled her life. On 8th September, 1931, Hitler left for Hamburg after having a blazing row with Geli over her desire to spend some time in Vienna. Hitler was heard to shout at Geli as he was about to get into his car: "For the last time, no!" After he left Geli shot herself through the heart with a revolver. Hitler's housekeeper, Anni Winter, reported that a torn-up letter from Eva Braun was found in Geli's room on the night of her suicide which read: "Dear Herr Hitler, Thank you again for the wonderful invitation to the theatre. It was a memorable evening. I am most grateful to you for your kindness. I am counting the hours until I may have the joy of another meeting. Yours, Eva."
When he heard the news Hitler threatened to take his own life but was talked out of it by senior members of theNazi Party. One consequence of Geli's suicide was that Hitler became a vegetarian. He claimed that meat now reminded him of Geli's corpse. He also began to spend more time with Eva Braun. Alan Bullock, the author ofHitler: A Study in Tyranny (1962) has pointed out: "She was a pretty, empty-headed blonde, with a round face and blue eyes, who worked as a shop girl in Hoffmann's photographer's shop. Hitler met her there, paid her a few casual compliments, gave her flowers, and occasionally invited her to be one of his party on an outing. The initiative was all on Eva's side: she told her friends that Hitler was in love with her and that she would make him marry her."
Anni Winter, Hitler's housekeeper, remembers that Eva was often at Hitler's flat: "Eva Braun was there often when Hitler was in Munich. She was always running after him, insisting on being alone with him. She was a most demanding woman." Cate Haste, the author of Nazi Women (2001) has argued: "From the start, their relationship was conducted in secrecy, not least because Hitler did not want to be associated in public with any one woman. Eva lived at home, and her parents were strict. Hitler, almost totally preoccupied with politics, was rarely in Munich. Eva was kept firmly in the background of his life. The pattern of secrecy that began their relationship suited Hitler, and continued to its end. And so did the pattern of despair. In November 1932, Eva Braun attempted suicide by shooting herself with her father's pistol, but she then rang Hitler's doctor, who came in time to save her, and the whole thing was hushed up. Hitler came to visit her with flowers at the clinic where she was recovering. Eva, the shadowy, loyal figure at the periphery of Hitler's life, continued to be frustrated by his neglect. Hitler would turn up at unpredictable times, and his moods shifted between gushing charm and indifference."
However he still had relationships with other women Hitler was especially fond of film-stars and one girlfriend the actress Renate Mueller, committed suicide by throwing herself out of a hotel window in Berlin. Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler's official photographer, argued in his book, Hitler was My Friend (1955) that he was not even sure Hitler had a sexual relationship with Braun: "Eva moved into his house, became the constant companion of his leisure hours and, to the best of my knowledge, that was all there was to it... Not at any time was there any perceptible change in his attitude towards her which might have pointed to the assumption of more intimate relations between them."
The historian, Alan Bullock suggests in his book, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (1962), that Hitler was incapable of normal sexual intercourse. He quotes Ernst Hanfstaengel, a close intimate of Hitler. In his book, Hitler: The Missing Years (1957) Hanfstaengel argues: "The abounding nervous energy which found no normal release sought compensation first in the subjection of his entourage, then in his country, then of Europe... In the sexual no man's land in which he lived, he only once nearly found the woman, and never even the man, who might have brought him relief."
Hitler had no desire to have children. He told several people that if he had children they were certain to disappoint him as they would never match his own genius. Eva was extremely jealous of Hitler's other girlfriends and in 1932 she also attempted suicide by shooting herself in the neck. Doctors managed to save her life, and after this incident Hitler seemed to become more attached to Eva.
On her twenty-third birthday, Eva Braun again tried to kill herself. Hitler was shocked and turned up at her home asking for forgiveness. She recorded in her diary on 18th February, 1935, that he promised to buy her a house: "Dear God, please let them come true and let it happen in the near future... I am infinitely happy that he loves me so much and I pray that it may always remain so. I never want it to be my fault if one day he should cease to love me." However, in her diary on 28th May she complains: "Is this the mad love he promised me, when he doesn't send me a single comforting line in three months?"
Eva Braun .
Cate Haste, the author of Nazi Women (2001) has argued: "Hitler could not afford another scandal over a woman's suicide. Moreover, in a perverse way, Eva Braun had shown her steady loyalty to him, the thing Hitler craved most from women. She was rewarded by being allowed to play a small part in his private, but never his public, life." Hitler refused to marry Braun. According to Hitler: "The bad side of marriage is that it creates rights. In that case it's far better to have a mistress. The burden is lightened, and everything is placed on the level of a gift."
Eva Braun was eventually given an apartment in the Reich Chancellery. However, she had to enter it through the servants' quarters. Her close friend, Henriette Hoffman, the daughter of Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler's official photographer, later commented: "It was furnished like a guest house, deep armchairs covered in rustic material, pots of flowers, cupboards painted with gentians, whole years' editions of film magazines. She had film stars' clothes copied, knew which star sign they were born under, and was interested in their lives." Henriette added that she often had her two dogs by her side and "was smoking fast and nervously, as she always did when she knew that Hitler was not nearby."
However, he continued to see other women including Unity Mitford. Princess Carmencita Wrede was a member of the inner-circle and does not believe Unity had a physical relationship with Hitler and was very jealous of Eva Braun. As Princess Carmencita points out: "Hitler calculated exactly the correct distance between him and Unity. Class differences were basic. Unity, Diana, Sigi von Laffert, Hella Khevenhuller, were too fine, really too aristocratic for him. Eva Braun was at his social level. My sister and I knew Eva and her sister, Gretl, well. In 1937 I was with Nevile Henderson - this idiot Henderson, Unity called him - at the Parteitag. Hitler was there, and Eva stood by herself, wearing a little raincoat. Hitler looked round and his gaze fell on her without change of expression. No other woman would have put up with that. Unity could not bear it. She was always badgering me, How is this Eva Braun? What does she have that I don't? How does she do it? She said to me, He never asks me to the Obersalzberg because Eva is always there. She's not in the Reichskanzlei, I replied, so you aren't on the Obersalzberg, fair's fair. There was a proper rivalry between them. Unity was thoroughly jealous."
Eva Braun .
Eva Braun was also very jealous of Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe. She admitted in her unpublished memoirs that her relationship with Hitler upset those around him: "Every visit of mine to the Reich Chancellery seemed to them an impudent encroachment upon their sacred privileges, and every hour that Adolf wasted upon me was an hour which he might have spent to so much greater advantage in their devoted company.... His manners are exceedingly courteous, especially to women. At least that is how he has always been towards me. Whenever I arrived or left he always kissed my hand, often taking one of mine into both of his and shaking it for a time to emphasise the sincerity of the pleasure it gave him to see one, at the same time looking deep into my eyes." Princess Stephanie admitted that they were physically intimate but they were never lovers. She claimed this was because Hitler was homosexual.
Albert Speer recalled that on one occasion, in front of Eva Braun, Hitler said: "A highly intelligent man should take a primitive and stupid woman. Imagine if, on top of everything else, I had a woman who interfered with my work! In my leisure time I want to have peace." Ian Kershaw has argued in Hitler 1889-1936 (1998): "Like his father, he preferred women much younger than himself - girls he could dominate, who would be obedient playthings but not get in the way. The two women with whom he would become most intimately associated, Geli Raubal (nineteen years younger than he was) and Eva Braun (twenty-three years younger), fitted the same model."
Reinhard Spitzy, aide to Joachim von Ribbentrop, met Eva Braun on several occasions: "Hitler wanted to be absolutely free, and she should give him a small bourgeois home with cake and tea. Hitler didn't want to have a socially high person. He could have had them, but he didn't want to have a woman who would discuss with him political questions or who would try to have her influence, and that Eva Braun never did. Eva Braun didn't interfere in politics." Albert Speer thought that Eva Braun was Hitler's ideal partner: "Eva was very feminine... a man's woman, incredibly undemanding of herself, helpful to many people behind the scenes - nobody ever knew that - and infinitely thoughtful of Hitler. She was a restful sort of girl. And her love for Hitler was beyond question." Eva was never seen in public with him. Any photograph that showed her face was stamped "Publication Forbidden".
Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler
The Nazi Party always attempted to keep Hitler's love life secret. In his speeches Hitler claimed that he had never married because he was "married to the German people." The severe casualties suffered during the First World War meant that there was a large number of widows and spinsters in Germany. Women in Germany found Hitler's bachelor image attractive and this helped win him votes during elections.
Reinhard Spitzy claims that Eva Braun had some privileges that enabled her to do what was forbidden to others: "She was allowed to sing, to dance, to paint her nails with red paint, and she was allowed to smoke a cigarette outside. Meanwhile, we had to go to the loo to smoke... Hitler had a very good nose, and it was forbidden to smoke. But Eva Braun was allowed everything." Albert Speer defended Eva's behaviour: "She has been much maligned... she was a very nice girl."
Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler in 1938 .
William L. Shirer, the author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960) points out: "Hitler, although he was undoubtedly extremely fond of her and found relaxation in her unobtrusive company, had always kept her out of sight, refusing to allow her to come to his various headquarters where he spent almost all of his time during the war years, and rarely permitting her even to come to Berlin. She remained immured at the Berghof on the Obersalzberg, passing her time in swimming and skiing, in reading cheap novels and seeing trashy films, in dancing (which Hitler disapproved of) and endlessly grooming herself, pining away for her absent loved one."
Herbert Döhring, Hitler's manservant at the Berghof, later recalled: "She (Eva) was friendly, elegant, but she was sometimes moody and morose. Those who knew how the relationship was between them couldn't hold this against her. It was not a love affair - never. This was apparent to my wife before and after we married. She was convinced it was a friendship - a forced, necessary one." Albert Speer recalls that in 1943, Eva Braun came to him in tears, sobbing that "the Fuhrer has just told me to find someone else... he (Hitler) said that he can no longer fulfil me." Speer told Gitta Sereny: "There are no two ways of interpreting this... She made it quite clear: Hitler had told her that he was too busy, too immersed, too tired - he could no longer satisfy her as a man."
Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler
Hitler gave Eva a flat in Munich but she later moved into the Berghof in Berchtesgaden. She remained there until 1945 when she joined Hitler in his Berlin Bunker. On 28th April, 1945, Hitler married Braun. That night Hitler tested out a cyanide pill on his pet Alsatian dog, Blondi. Braun agreed to commit suicide with him. She could have become rich by writing her memoirs but she preferred not to live without Hitler.
The Soviet troops were now only 300 yards away from Hitler's underground bunker. On 30th April Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun went into a private room and took cyanide tablets. Hitler also shot himself in the head. The bodies were then cremated and his ashes were hidden in the Chancellery grounds. Albert Speer commented: "Eva's love for him, her loyalty, were absolute - as she proved unmistakably at the end."
Eva Braun had just completed her Catholic convent education, and was living at home with one of her two sisters and her parents, who were protective towards her. When she mentioned Hitler to her father after their meeting, he was hostile and dismissive of him. Hitler had recently moved to his larger flat in the Prinzregentenplatz, and Geli had moved in. There is little sign that Eva Braun was infatuated with Hitler, or that he paid more than occasional attention to her during 1930.
Hitler, although he was undoubtedly extremely fond of her and found relaxation in her unobtrusive company, had always kept her out of sight, refusing to allow her to come to his various headquarters where he spent almost all of his time during the war years, and rarely permitting her even to come to Berlin. She remained immured at the Berghof on the Obersalzberg, passing her time in swimming and skiing, in reading cheap novels and seeing trashy films, in dancing (which Hitler disapproved of) and endlessly grooming herself, pining away for her absent loved one.
Eva was a worldly type of girl - bobbed chestnut-brown hair, a make-up that was unconventional for the time, fashionable pullover and short, narrow skirts, silk stockings and high-heeled shoes. I took her for a French girl. Usually she was walking a boxer dog. For me she was the most beautiful girl in Munich.
From the start, their relationship was conducted in secrecy, not least because Hitler did not want to be associated in public with any one woman. Eva lived at home, and her parents were strict. Hitler, almost totally preoccupied with politics, was rarely in Munich. Eva was kept firmly in the background of his life. The pattern of secrecy that began their relationship suited Hitler, and continued to its end. And so did the pattern of despair. In November 1932, Eva Braun attempted suicide by shooting herself with her father's pistol, but she then rang Hitler's doctor, who came in time to save her, and the whole thing was hushed up. Hitler came to visit her with flowers at the clinic where she was recovering. Eva, the shadowy, loyal figure at the periphery of Hitler's life, continued to be frustrated by his neglect. Hitler would turn up at unpredictable times, and his moods shifted between gushing charm and indifference.
de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception
“Treachery in the Remotest Territories of Scotland:” Northern Resistance to the Canmore Dynasty, 1130-1230
By R. Andrew McDonald
Canadian Journal of History, vol.33 (1999)
Introduction: The Annals of Ulster, a rich source of information for events in medieval Scotland, note in laconic style tinder the year 1130, “a battle between the men of Scotland and the men of Moray, and in it four thousand of the men of Moray fell, including their king, Angus . . . .” One hundred years later, a gruesome scene was played out at Forfar, where an infant girl, the last member of a family that had opposed the Scottish kings for over fifty years, was killed by having her head smashed on the market cross. These events frame a century during which the kings of Scots descended from Malcolm III “Canmore” and his second wife, Queen Margaret (both d. 1093), faced persistent opposition from the remote and unassimilated northern fringes of their kingdom, especially the regions of Moray (a large and ill-defined area encompassing the lands around the Moray Firth, stretching from the Grampians to the western seaboard) and Ross (the province north of Moray, bounded by the River Oykel and the Dornoch Firth to the north and the shore of the Cromarty Firth to the south). This paper deals with a hitherto largely neglected facet of medieval Scottish history: resistance to the so-called “Canmore dynasty” (Malcolm III and his descendants) from Moray and Ross between the early twelfth century and 1230. It begins by outlining the incidents of insurrection faced by the Scottish kings in this period, and then proceeds to analyze this resistance, paying particular attention to the leaders, timing, military aspects, and geographical context of opposition. The paper concludes by examining questions of regional identity in twelfth-century Scotland and reflects upon whether a strong sense of Moravian identity might have contributed to the tenacity of resistance.
Given the frequency, tenacity, and often bloody nature of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century insurrections, serious consideration of them remains surprisingly limited in recent scholarly work. The reasons for this are not far to seek. First, the evidence itself is scattered among a variety of English, Scottish, and Irish sources, which are often difficult to interpret and provide little in the way of either context or explanation. Second, the focus of modem scholarship on themes of medieval kingdom-building, the Europeanization of Scotland in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the relatively early emergence of Scotland as a unified kingdom under the Canmore kings, have tended to overshadow or obscure questions of resistance, alienation, and dissent. To take but one example from a work concerned specifically with the regions under consideration here: the 1976 Moray Book devoted only a dozen lines to the various uprisings associated with the far north before brushing them aside to concentrate on the coming of the “new order” with its glittering symbols of castles, monasteries, burghs and feudalism. In a similar, and uncharacteristically judgmental tone, Professor Barrow contrasted the “harsh, brutally Iron Age quality” of tenth- and eleventh-century Moray with the new sense of “liberation and relief’ felt when the region was annexed by David I in 1130. Views such as these (in fairness, later treatments by Professor Barrow were much more even-handed), born of a focus, imposed by the sources, on the centre of the Scottish kingdom and its monarchs, nonetheless leave the impression that the insurrections of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were merely a series of sporadic, haphazard, piratical raids that were easily crushed. This paper argues that not only were many of the uprisings carefully timed and orchestrated predatory strikes against the Scottish kings in their weakest moments, but also that careful reexamination of these insurrections is crucial to our understanding of key issues in the history of twelfth-century Scotland.
The long and eventful reign of Malcolm III “Canmore” ["Great Chief"] (1058-93), which established the so-called “Canmore dynasty” that would rule Scotland until the death of Alexander III in 1286, brooked little opposition. This was due, in large measure, to the fact that Malcolm’s path to the kingship had been a bloody one, during which he had taken care to eliminate any potential rivals. Within eight months of killing his predecessor, Macbeth (1040-57), at Lumphanan in August of 1057, Malcolm eliminated Macbeth’s stepson and successor, Lulach (1057-58), in March of 1058. Nonetheless, there are hints in Irish sources of unrest in Moray during the reign of Malcolm III. In 1085, “Donald, Malcolm’s son, king of Scotland . . . ended his life unhappily.” Both the identity and status of this individual are open to question, but it is possible that he was an otherwise unknown son of Malcolm III by his first wife, Ingibjorg of Orkney, or else a member of Malcolm’s kin who may have had some role in governing or administering the north. Similarly, the circumstances of his death are not clear, but mishap or violence seem to have played a role. This makes it tempting to link the death of this Donald with another event of 1085: a raid of Malcolm III in which Lulach’s widow and large amounts of booty were taken, and from which Lulach’s son, Mael Snechta, narrowly escaped. Mael Snechta himself lived until 1085, when his obit appeared in the Irish Annals along with other churchmen who ended their lives “happily” [i.e. in religion]. What cannot be ascertained is whether the death of Donald precipitated Malcolm’s raid or vice versa, or, indeed, whether the two events are related at all, but it might well be that one represented vengeance for the other.
de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception
The great humanitarian organisation was founded on October 29th, 1863.
Helping hand: Emperor Napoleon III visits the wounded after the Battle of SolferinoThe Battle of Solferino, fought in northern Italy in 1859, was a decisive episode in the struggle for Italian independence, in the birth of the Red Cross movement and in the creation of the Geneva Conventions. The bloody battle between the Austrians and a French-Italian alliance lasted for hours before the Austrians were driven into retreat. The casualties have been estimated at anything from 30,000 to 40,000 men. Thousands of wounded were left on the battlefield, far too many for the victors’ small medical teams to cope with. It happened that a 31-year-old Swiss businessman named Henri Dunant was travelling through the area and was utterly horrified by the battle (which he afterwards said compelled young men to be murderers) and by its aftermath. He helped to organise people from the nearby villages to bring water, food and aid to the wounded, regardless of their nationality. He persuaded the French to release a few captured Austrian doctors to help and he paid for the hasty creation of makeshift hospitals.
In 1862 Dunant wrote an account of what he had seen in which he suggested that national armies should have efficiently trained non-combatant volunteers to give help to the wounded of both sides. He also wanted international treaties to guarantee the protection of those involved. He sent copies to important figures all over Europe and he made a strong impression.
Dunant came from Geneva, where he had grown up a devout Calvinist with a deep interest in charitable work. In his twenties he engaged in business activities in North Africa and Italy and helped to create the international Young Men’s Christian Association.
In 1863 the Public Welfare Association in Geneva set up a five-man committee to consider Dunant’s ideas. Gustave Moynier, the association’s president and a prominent local figure, and Dunant himself were the key members. The committee organised an international conference in Geneva in October to start things moving. Delegates from countries including Austria, France, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Prussia, Russia, Spain and Sweden attended and on the 29th approved the proposals of the committee of five. This effectively marked the launch of the Red Cross movement. The symbol of a red cross on a white background reversed the Swiss national emblem of a white cross on a red background. Later, in Muslim countries, the Red Cross would become the Red Crescent.
In 1864 the Swiss government organised a conference in Geneva at which delegates from European countries as well as the US, Mexico and Brazil signed the first Geneva Convention ‘for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded in Armies in the Field’, which set up rules on the lines Dunant had advocated and would in time be accepted as international law by almost all the countries in the world. In that same year the first Red Cross volunteers in a battle wearing the Red Cross symbol attended an action in Denmark.
Dunant had been hugely successful, but the fly in the ointment was that he and Gustave Moynier had come to dislike each other intensely. From 1864 Moynier was president of the committee of five, which would subsequently become the International Committee of the Red Cross. He regarded Dunant as a romantic, impractical idealist and soon forced him out of the movement. Dunant had spent far more time on the Red Cross than on business and in 1867 he went bankrupt, which enabled Moynier to have him expelled from the committee. A warrant was issued for Dunant’s arrest on a charge of fraudulent bankruptcy. He left Geneva and was reduced to living in poverty in various European cities. Although he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1901, he was an almost forgotten figure when he died in 1910 in a Swiss nursing home at the age of 82.
Moynier had died that same year. Meanwhile the Red Cross movement had flourished. Its work began to extend from the military sphere to a far broader range of peacetime disasters and needs. The British Red Cross Society was founded in 1870 and the American National Red Cross Society in the US goes back to 1881. The First World War dramatically increased the need for the organisation and the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the International Red Cross Committee in 1917. There are now Red Cross and Red Crescent societies in almost every country in the world, with more than 90 million members, volunteers and staff. Henri Dunant’s reputation has been amply restored and he is now revered as the founding spirit of one of the greatest humanitarian organisations in history.
de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception
High Minds The Victorians and the Birth of Modern Britain Simon Heffer Cornerstone 896pp £30
Here is a familiar story, told in a most unfamiliar way. The story is familiar from many books about the ‘age of reform/improvement’ and others of that ilk. While there is much in it which has been historical knowledge for at least two generations, I was quite affected to find Mr Heffer using Lytton Strachey as a sparring partner in his warm-up pages – just like my tutor at Trinity College, Cambridge 60 years ago.
Heffer’s vision is clear and uncomplicated, free from a usual historian’s diffidence about the beginning and end of this ‘reforming’ age and how to explain it. For him it began with the ‘hungry forties’ and ended about 1880. It was driven by the anxious, high-minded discourse of notable Victorians. Heffer expounds on this vision of Englishmen wrestling with the manifold challenges of their troubled country, but rather passes over what else in the world challenged them, such as foreign policy, Empire and Ireland. His story is wholly domestic. Very reasonably, he admires how those Victorians made the Britain of 1880 in many ways a better land to live in – and a more democratic one – than it had been 50 years before; also, he asserts, a more ‘secularised’ one. With reforming movements and improvements already made or rooted before the 1840s, he has little concern, with one all-important exception. That exception is the key to his belief (if I understand him correctly) that the statesmen he has chosen to study breathed a unique moral atmosphere, traceable back to Thomas Arnold, the renowned headmaster of Rugby School from 1828 to 1841.
Arnold’s name must appear in any historian’s list of eminent opinion-forming Victorians. Heffer lists the usual suspects, including Thomas Carlyle, J.S. Mill, J.A. Froude, John Ruskin, Charles Kingsley, Matthew Arnold (the great headmaster’s son), Samuel Smiles, Thomas Huxley (the ardent supporter of Darwin and arguably the Richard Dawkins of his day), J.K. Stephen, Samuel Butler; but he brings into company with them politicians – Robert Peel, Richard Cobden, Shaftesbury and Gladstone chief among them – and a scattering of exemplary Victorians of moral altitudes, ranging from Angela Burdett-Coutts through Joseph Paxton, Charles Dickens and Henry Cole to Thomas Holloway. Much space is given to Prince Albert, whose high-mindedness has never been questioned. But Heffer has mined the royal archives for evidence to clinch the case that, once he had given up trying to share his wife’s royal duties, he did a great deal of good and in good company, too: a model of public spirited high-mindedness.
This big book has a heavy biographical weighting of familiar figures. But the way the author presents his dramatis personae and their achievements is all his own. Those achievements, whether embodied in the statute book, or in iron, glass, brick and stone, only materialise out of lengthy expositions of their enactors’ states of mind, as disclosed either by their biographers or by themselves, in their own words. An enormous proportion of the book’s nearly 900 pages – my guess is about one third – is given to citations and reported speech from their publications, letters, evidence to royal commissions and, above all, performances in Parliament.
This is pretty daunting stuff. Peel, Gladstone and their like were no stand-up comics. (Disraeli of course was, but being of low mind in this interpretation, he is little cited.) Heffer is likely to find appreciative followers among those who like a good leisurely read, who do not already know much about the 19th century and who take naturally to a view of it de haut en bas and who are pleased to have some of its most prominent men and, towards the end, women presented with dignity and respect. However, for the better informed reader, they may find these pages heavy going and, especially in their ventures into the region of ‘intellectual history’, perhaps a tad oversimplified for their liking. As for young people, should any such venture within reading distance of so formidably large a volume, they may blench at the sunless vistas of plain prose and long paragraphs, unenlivened by ‘boxes’, pictures or tables of prime ministers and other holders of high office. There is a bibliography of the books that Heffer has used and in what editions; a credit to his honesty, but less helpful as a guide to further reading.
Geoffrey Best's books include Mid-Victorian Britain, 1851-75 (Flamingo, 2008). He is a Fellow of the British Academy
Models of gene flow from Aisa to the Americas, like this one from a 2007 PLOS ONE paper, may need to be reconsidered.WIKIMEDIA, ERIKA TAMM ET AL.Native Americans may not have descended from East Asians who crossed the Bering Land Bridge more than 15,000 years ago, according to a new genomic analysis of a millennia-old Siberian skeleton. A portion of the nuclear DNA recovered from the upper arm bone of a 4-year-old boy that was buried near the Siberian village of Mal’ta about 24,000 years ago is shared by modern Native Americans and no other group. But the boy appears to have been descended from people of European or western Asian origin.
Introduction: The Annals of Ulster, a rich source of information for events in medieval Scotland, note in laconic style tinder the year 1130, “a battle between the men of Scotland and the men of Moray, and in it four thousand of the men of Moray fell, including their king, Angus . . . .” One hundred years later, a gruesome scene was played out at Forfar, where an infant girl, the last member of a family that had opposed the Scottish kings for over fifty years, was killed by having her head smashed on the market cross. These events frame a century during which the kings of Scots descended from Malcolm III “Canmore” and his second wife, Queen Margaret (both d. 1093), faced persistent opposition from the remote and unassimilated northern fringes of their kingdom, especially the regions of Moray (a large and ill-defined area encompassing the lands around the Moray Firth, stretching from the Grampians to the western seaboard) and Ross (the province north of Moray, bounded by the River Oykel and the Dornoch Firth to the north and the shore of the Cromarty Firth to the south). This paper deals with a hitherto largely neglected facet of medieval Scottish history: resistance to the so-called “Canmore dynasty” (Malcolm III and his descendants) from Moray and Ross between the early twelfth century and 1230. It begins by outlining the incidents of insurrection faced by the Scottish kings in this period, and then proceeds to analyze this resistance, paying particular attention to the leaders, timing, military aspects, and geographical context of opposition. The paper concludes by examining questions of regional identity in twelfth-century Scotland and reflects upon whether a strong sense of Moravian identity might have contributed to the tenacity of resistance.
Helping hand: Emperor Napoleon III visits the wounded after the Battle of SolferinoThe Battle of Solferino, fought in northern Italy in 1859, was a decisive episode in the struggle for Italian independence, in the birth of the Red Cross movement and in the creation of the Geneva Conventions. The bloody battle between the Austrians and a French-Italian alliance lasted for hours before the Austrians were driven into retreat. The casualties have been estimated at anything from 30,000 to 40,000 men. Thousands of wounded were left on the battlefield, far too many for the victors’ small medical teams to cope with. It happened that a 31-year-old Swiss businessman named Henri Dunant was travelling through the area and was utterly horrified by the battle (which he afterwards said compelled young men to be murderers) and by its aftermath. He helped to organise people from the nearby villages to bring water, food and aid to the wounded, regardless of their nationality. He persuaded the French to release a few captured Austrian doctors to help and he paid for the hasty creation of makeshift hospitals.
High Minds