I’m one of seven trumpets (as well as other brass instruments and percussion) playing in the Mystic Brass Ensemble on Sunday, November 11 at 3PM at the First Baptist Church of Arlington (819 Mass. Ave., Arlington, MA). Come hear us! The concert is free, though donations are welcome.
Below is the line up of music, with links to others playing the pieces. The first half of Renaissance music will be antiphonal. That means half our group will be in a choir loft at the front of the church, the other half about 100 feet away in an even higher choir loft at the back of the church. How do we coordinate across this massive distance and still sound amazing? Come and find out!
Once we tire of dazzling you with antiphonal play, we’ll gather up front for the second half for modern pieces. It’ll be heroic and inspiring, because we’re brass (plus percussion).
This post is part of a series in which I’m dedicating a month to learning about periods in history this year. The full schedule can be found here. This is month four/five. (tl;dr at the bottom of this post)
I took some extra time for the Civil War. That was partially because I wanted to read more books, and partially because this was a time period on which I feel especially ignorant. It’s also one that seems – still – to come up in policy and arguments today. My understanding of the Civil War before this month was North (good) versus South (bad), pro- versus anti-slavery. Ugh. No. After getting suggestions from all of you, I found that most of them corresponded to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s suggestions of books to make you less stupid about the Civil War. I read those five first. Let’s begin.
I started with Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, by James M. McPherson. Really good straight up history book. My only complaint about it, if there is a complaint to be made, is that it’s almost too big. It covers so much. You feel like this could be a textbook in a semester-long course, not just something you try and read in a week. That’s not a problem with the book, so much as it’s a problem with my ambition. I think someday I’d like to go back and read it again now that I feel like I know more about the period in general. If I had to point to some highlights, I found it fascinating how long problems had been brewing under the surface in the United States before things broke down in 1860-61. I mean, long before The Mexican War there were issues with slavery and how the different states were handling the problem. And while we’re on the subject, The Mexican War was crazy enough, not just because all the major players from the Civil War were “on the same team” for that one. McPherson does a fantastic job in the run-up to the war, laying out the rationale for the war in the South not being only about a right to own slaves, but also for the necessity of new states to get to own slaves, too. Still, this book felt more like I was absorbing facts than attaining a greater understanding of the time period.
That changed with The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, by Frederick Douglass. My god. This can be a hard book to read, at times, and if it were fiction, I am sure it would have been toned down, because no editor would have believed it. The depictions of slavery, and what it was like to be in it, are simple and brutal. I just can’t fathom how people lived like that, but there you go. The man himself is astounding as well. To come through what he did, to be as generous and thoughtful as he was – I just don’t know what muscle to flex. If there was one book to read to make yourself less dumb about slavery – this is it. The chapter where he meets with some of his previous owners after slavery is abolished floored me. I don’t know if I have the capacity to be that forgiving.
In a similar vein, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household, by Thavolia Glymph, will definitely make you less dumb about how Southern households functioned. Douglass’ book focused on the slavery of the fields, of labor. This book focuses on the slavery in the house, specifically the ways in which the white women who “ran” plantation houses dealt with the more domestic slaves who did the work. Don’t kid yourself that such slaves had it “easier” or that there were more “loving” relationships between the women of the south and their slaves. Life was brutal in slavery, period. It was telling how much trouble white households had adjusting to the reconstruction period after losing “help” around the house. It was also fascinating to watch freed slaves figure out that they needed to be hired for “jobs” rather than as “help”, because it was in the nature of post-slave owners to think you could still buy a person as opposed to employing them for a job.
I can also recommend Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters, by Elizabeth Brown Pryor. Anyone who wants to argue that Lee was somehow against slavery should read this book. As the title suggests, you get a lot of actual writing from the man himself. You get to hear from him in his own voice. A lot of the arguments around Lee today seem to center on the fact that he was a “man of his time”. That’s hard to swallow. There were a LOT of radical abolitionists in Lee’s time, and most of the “civilized” world was anti-slavery. I can’t put this better than the author, though, who smacks down the argument that he’s great because greatness dwelled within:
[G]reatness must embody a farsightedness that reaches beyond the complacency of one’s narrow experience. It must rise above convention, and clearly advance a larger set of truths than those commonly held. It is hard to see such transcendent importance in Lee because his actions were tied to questionable mores, which were already largely rejected in his day, and were neither morally defensible nor sustainable over time. The tragedy is that he allowed his essentially noble spirit to founder in the ignobility of his era’s easy assumptions. Even had he won the war, and helped to carve out a new nation with a unique political structure, its foundation inevitable would have collapsed under the global condemnation of human slavery – which Lee himself admitted.
One more thing about the book stuck with me. Marriage sort of sucked back then:
Women of this time were far from giddy about the prospect of marriage, and more likely than men to view the transition with foreboding. Concerned about separation from their families and the gamble they were making on their future, many young women were inclined to prolong the engagement period… For women, marriage could also mean the loss of personal liberty and the beginning of an existence in which a man’s wished shaped her fate… Added to this was the loss of virginity, a pivotal event for most young women, and the very real fear of mortality during childbirth. In light of these factors, marriage for many girls denoted separation and death as much as it did union and fresh life.
I’m sure there are many who still feel the same way, but it was still brutal.
Next, I read Grant, by Ron Chernow. Let me tell you, Grant doesn’t get enough credit in the pantheon of great presidents. Even before he took on that role, he absolutely kicked butt in the West. I was brought up on Eastern Civil War battles, but a lot of pivotal stuff happened elsewhere. Grant made that happen. He’s most famous today because he eventually took over the Eastern front and finally moved the army into gear. He also seemed a master of logistics and in army management, not just in strategy.
Yeah, the man had problems with alcohol, but he also struggled to better himself. He was clearly brilliant. He trusted too much in men who didn’t deserve it, both during his presidency – leading to scandals – and after – leading to financial ruin. But he also led the country with a pretty clear moral compass through an incredibly difficult time. I loved the part of the book after his presidency the most when he and his wife Julia (also amazing, by the way) toured the world. The leaders of pretty much every country received him like royalty (which made me cry at times). And, when faced with his own mortality from cancer, the man sat down and wrote 300,000 plus words that made Mark Twain (who published his memoirs) declare Grant an unrivaled literary genius. His book sold a ridiculous number of copies and set up his wife for life, and that’s likely all he wanted at the end. Someday I will have to go read that.
People will always love Hamilton, because you know – Broadway – but this book is better.
Finally, I read Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, by Doris Kearns Goodwin, and I’m going to spend a bit of time on this one, because it is even better than everyone says. First, let me just praise the framing of this book. Goodwin starts by bringing us up to speed on Lincoln and his chief rivals for the 1860 Republican nomination: William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, and Edward Bates. You also get to meet some others, like Edwin Stanton, who messes with Lincoln as a lawyer. I thought I knew a decent amount about Lincoln, but I was pretty ignorant about the others (except knowing that Seward was responsible for the purchase of Alaska). But they’re pivotal to understanding the time, and they were very important gears in his administration.
These men were aghast that Lincoln won the Presidential nomination. Like Obama beating Clinton in 2007, the establishment was not prepared. One of the things I didn’t get about the time was that while the Republicans were the “anti-slavery” party in history, they still had a pretty wide spread of politics. The more conservative of them were “ok” with slavery as long as it stayed in the South, or even in their own houses, but they didn’t want it to spread. The more radical thought it an abomination. Lincoln straddled the middle, but if anything seemed a bit more on the conservative side in his public persona. Chase and Bates were pretty radical.
Seward was more conservative. He was not an abolitionist, at least not at the start. His wife, Frances, however, was. She was also a boss. She took him to task:
Nor did she spare him whenever she detected a blatantly conciliatory tone in his speeches or writings. While she conceded that “worldly wisdom certainly does impel a person to ‘swim with the tide’ – and if they can judge unerringly which way the tide runs, may bring them to port,” she continued to argue for “a more elevated course” that would “reconcile one to struggling against the current if necessary.”
Later, she goes after him – in writing – for a speech he delivered as secession was becoming all too real:
“Eloquent as your speech was it fails to meet the entire approval of those who love you best,” she began. “You are in danger of taking the path which led Daniel Webster to an unhonored grave ten years ago. Compromises based on the idea that the preservation of the Union is more important than the liberty of nearly 4,000,000 human beings cannot be right. The alteration of the Constitution to perpetuate slavery – the enforcement of a law to recapture a poor, suffering fugitive… these compromises cannot be approved by God or supported by good men…
“No one can dread war more than I do,” she continued; “for 16 years I have prayed earnestly that our son might be spared the misfortune of raising his hand against his fellow man – yet I could not to day assent to the perpetuation or extenuation of slavery to prevent war. I say this in no spirit of unkindness… but I must obey the admonitions of conscience which impel me to warn you of your dangers.”
Like I said – a boss. Every time she made an appearance in the book I got excited.
Anyway, Lincoln took these “rivals” and made them all cabinet members. None was more powerful than Seward, who became Secretary of State. Then Lincoln went on to balance them, befriend them, win them over. And then he did the same to the rest of the country. You almost get the sense he did this retail, one American at a time. If there’s any flaw in this book, it’s in the fact that it makes Lincoln out to be a perfect man. He might have been. He seemed almost unflappable. He also seemed to be the greatest politician ever to have lived. He knew exactly how far he could push people. He knew how to win everyone over.
I think it’s important to point out that today, he likely would have been decried as “weak” and “compromising” by progressives. He straddled and gave in again, and again, and again. Yet – he somehow achieved what everyone wanted. They never understood how he got there, and told him he was wrong the whole way, but what he accomplished was unbelievable. He also seemed a genius, a gifted writer, and a literal strongman. I would give anything to know how much of that was true.
One other thing that struck me throughout the book was how many Americans today misunderstand the framing of the war. I hear people all the time argue about whether the war was about “slavery” or “states’ rights”. There was a debate back then, but it seemed to take place entirely in the North. The South – that was about slavery. As historians better than me have pointed out, it’s right there in the secession documents. But in the North, there were plenty of conservatives who did not want slavery to end. Lincoln recognized this, and knew he had to keep the slave-owning border states in The Union, so he allowed and fostered the belief that this was all about “preserving the Union”, which totally pissed off the abolitionists who wanted him to admit the war was about slavery. But he fought tooth and nail to never, ever let the war be about slavery, for fear that would splinter the North.
The Emancipation Proclamation just freed states in the South. Not in the North. Slavery was still totally legal there. In fact, he did it that way because it was politically palatable to the North to screw the South, and only the South, that way. It was also justifiable under law, because it was couched as necessary to war strategy and permissible under his powers as Commander in Chief. Lincoln was obsessed with legality of his actions and believed he couldn’t end slavery in the Union because the Constitution protected it. That’s why he was so obsessed with passing the Thirteenth Amendment before the war ended, to free the slaves in the North. And, also, because he feared the Emancipation Proclamation could be reversed in the South once the war ended.
He got it all accomplished. He made Steward his best friend. He won over Stanton, his War Secretary, like a brother. He dealt with the loss of sons, was unfathomably kind, and forgiving to a fault. He made Frederick Douglass love him. He freed the slaves and changed the moral center of the country almost by sheer will alone. Without reading this book, I don’t know how to make it clear how much of a task this was.
My wife, Aimee, is tired of listening to me talk about Lincoln, I’m sure. But I can’t get him out of my head. There is no politician alive, and none that I can think of, who could have done what he did. And before you tell me that things are too partisan now for a politician like that to succeed, he did this as half the country seceded and the rest were all screaming at each other.
More than 600,000 Americans died in the Civil War. That’s about equal to all the Americans who have died in every other war the US has fought combined.
It was hard to read about Lincoln’s assassination so many times. I didn’t know that Seward was also almost assassinated that night. In fact, many in the Seward family were almost killed that night. The shock was so great, that Frances died not soon after, and the fact that’s not in every history book pisses me off. They almost got Vice President Johnson, too, but the guy assigned to him bailed at the last minute.
Johnson’s Presidency was a mess, and he was way too conservative, which screwed up Reconstruction. Grant, as noted before, fixed some of it, but we’re left with the lingering effects of all of that all the way through today. Don’t kid yourself. Slavery was a wound from which we won’t soon recover.
I have a much greater understanding of the time, of slavery, of the players, and the war, and of how we as a people dealt with it. I definitely think I’m much less stupid about the Civil War than I was. This was time exceedingly well spent.
I’m going to spend September learning about the history of World War I. You’ve already given me some great ideas. I want to post them here, so you can help me prioritize what to read. If you think I’m missing something, please tell me. I’m opening comments, or you can tweet me. I can probably do 4-5.
This post is part of a series in which I’m dedicating a month to learning about periods in history this year. The full schedule can be found here. This is month three. (tl;dr at the bottom of this post)
One of the things I’ve learned as I’ve grown and led a more public life is that the people in charge, and the people who are famous, really aren’t that different from you and me. They’re not always smarter. They don’t have this great understanding of things that we lack. They’re often not nicer, or wiser, or more educated. Sometimes they are – and those people are amazing – but too often, they’re just making it up as they go along, just like the rest of us.
When I read history as I kid, I was still a kid. I thought leaders were like gods in myths. Untouchable. Brilliant. It’s still how we talk about the Founding Fathers, as if they were so much better than the Average American today. I used to believe that, too.
If there’s one thing this month did – and I’m glad for it – it disabused me of that notion. These were people. They were sometimes remarkable people, who accomplished amazing things. But I know people like that in my everyday life, too, and just because they won’t be in the history books doesn’t mean they aren’t special.
My knowledge of the history of the American Revolution before this month was still centered on battles, or dates, and on a few key people in a few specific moments. The Boston Massacre. The Boston Tea Party. The Declaration of Independence. Valley Forge in winter. The battle of Yorktown.
But – pardon my French here – shit went down before, during, and after these events. People fucked up. They were driven by passion, by greed, by anger, by justice, by love, by politics. It wasn’t just some noble cry of freedom like we’re often taught.
I’m also struck by how unbelievably brave the colonists were. This was a huge risk. It cost them. You rarely see that kind of bravery, especially in masses of people. Stunning.
Side story here. I don’t really care for musicals. I’m partial to plays. Aimee is the opposite. She LOVES Broadway. Because I love her, I go to shows with her when we are in NYC. There are a few that break through my general misgivings. I loved Once, but that was arguably a very non-traditional show. I liked Wicked, but that was a cultural phenomenon. I could rattle off a list of shows I really didn’t care for.
A few years ago, I stunned Aimee by telling her that I wanted to see Hamilton. Not only that, but I wanted to see it with the original cast. The tickets cost A FORTUNE. Aimee balked, and we had a rare fight, because I really, really wanted to go and she thought it was ridiculous. Because she loves me, she relented. On our way to AcademyHealth ARM in Boston we stopped in NYC, and we saw Hamilton on June 24, 2016. We sat behind and to the left of Amy Schumer. Partick Rothfuss was in the gallery. It cost more than I want to say.
I don’t care. It was – hands down – the single best thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I have literally no regrets (and neither does Aimee, who has to admit I WAS RIGHT).
Part of that is because the show is genius. The music, the choreography, the talent – insane. I’m not equipped to say why, but I know it is, and you will not dispute me. When all other Broadway is long forgotten, people will be still be singing songs from Hamilton. Someday it will be performed on other planets. Deal with it.
Another part is that is humanized the historical characters in ways I hadn’t seen before. Hamilton was flawed. So were Jefferson, Madison, and Washington. So were Eliza and Angelica Schuyler. People made this country, and they weren’t much different from you and me.
The great writers know this and share it, as do the great historians. Lin Manuel-Miranda brought it to the masses, and put it to music with words that bore directly into your brain. And so, to this day, I remain a rabid fan, even if I never see another Broadway show again.
That’s what I’m hoping for with this year. Back to the revolution. I read four books. Let’s discuss.
The first was 1776 by David McCullough. It was good. But it’s basically a synopsis of what happened in, well, 1776. This was mid-war, a very important year, and one in which Washington and his army saw defeat and victory. But you’re dropped in media res, and I would have appreciated some context.
The second book I read – perhaps the best – was Patriots: The Men Who Started the American Revolution by A.J. Langguth. The framing of this book is to construct each chapter, from pre-revolution through the war and beyond, around a specific person. This way, you get to know each of the many people you’ve learned about in history through a more personal lens. Sam Adams, for instance, was frugal beyond measure, likely to let people slide on their taxes, and much more than a brewer. I also really enjoyed the chapter on Benedict Arnold, who was a total ass, personally as well as treasonously. This was the type of book I’d been looking for, and it really humanized many of the people you get to read about in history. Whichever twitter user who told me to read it, I thank you.
Third was Angel in the Whirlwind: The Triumph of the American Revolution by Benson Bobrick. Also a good read. By this point, I had most of the history down, so following the flow of the war didn’t interest me as much. It was in this book that I started to realize how amazing historians are. Take this vignette about Paul Revere’s ride:
Well before the lanterns flashed, Revere set off on his famous ride. Leaving his house accompanied by his dog, he had linked up with two colleagues who had agreed to row him across the river. En route to a sequestered mooring, however, he suddenly realized he had forgotten his spurs and some cloth with which to quiet the oarlocks of the boat. They detoured to where the girlfriend of one of them lived, and at a whistle she came to the window. They told her they needed some cloth. She wiggled and shook a little, this way and that, then tossed down her flannel underwear, “still warm from her body”
How… how do they know that? I don’t have this much detail down on things that have happened to ME. How can they learn such details about things centuries ago? Unreal. Also, it was full of fascinating facts, such as:
Pre-revolution Americans were amazingly literate. Almost everyone in America read a newspaper. In 1725, there were only two or three in the country, including one founded by James Franklin, Benjamin’s older brother.
Americans liked their provincial drinks. My favorite was the “Creaming Flip”, which was made from strong beer, New England rum, dried pumpkin, and sugar or molasses. Then you put a red-hot poker or loggerhead into it to make it bubble and foam. A citation said it was the “joy of connoisseurs”. Tell me that’s not just like a “Flaming Moe”.
Before the war, almost all clothing was imported from England. This made the war very, very uncomfortable.
I’d always learned that the British lined up to get shot and the revolutionaries hid behind trees. It wasn’t that simple. We had better guns, and were often better at using them. But it took longer to load them. Things got much better once we imported Friedrich Willhelm von Steuben who retrained the army into a fighting force at Valley Forge.
I could do this all day. Fourth was Whirlwind: The American Revolution and the War That Won It by John Ferling. Also good, same complaint. But it had this one fact that stuck with me: by conservative estimates, one in sixteen free American males of military age died in the Revolutionary War. One in ten died in the Civil War and one in 75 in WWII. Think about that. It kept me up one night. This war, and the Civil War, were devastating. So many died. It’s so different than war today.
These people were braver than I can imagine. They were willing to fight and die in ways we take for granted. They were just people, not that different from us today. I’m so glad I took the time to get to know some of them better.
I note, for the record, that all these books are male-centric, and white male-centric at that. I will make serious efforts to avoid that in the future.
I didn’t get to read John Adams by David McCullough. I ran out of time. But as I have some extra space in the schedule this summer, I plan to do it then. On to the Civil War!
I am trying to revive my yoga practice, with some success. I’m using the DownDog iPad app for home practice. I recommend it: it has good sequences, helpful instructions, and clear images to model the poses.
But I have a problem: Daily exposure to the instructor’s Yoga Voice is getting to me.
The Yoga Voice is the one that says that the instructor has Let Go Deeply and that they want you to give yourself double helpings of luscious Self-Care. The Yoga Voice is the cousin of the hated Poetry Voice:
After being introduced, a poet steps onstage and engages the audience with some light social speech. Maybe they talk about their forthcoming book, what they plan to read, how wonderfully warm it is for autumn here, how surprisingly cool for summer, how nice the people of this village and how prodigious the public works projects. During this banter the poet uses a slightly performative but mostly natural voice. It’s the voice they’d use to introduce you to their grandmother. Then they read the title of their first poem and launch into the first line. But now their voice is different. It’s as if at some point between the last breath of banter and the first breath of poem a fairy has twinkled by and dumped onto the poet’s tongue a bag of magical dust, which for some reason forces the poet to adopt a precious, lilting cadence, to end every other line on a down-note, and to introduce, pauses, within sentences, where pauses, need not go.
There’s likewise a Philosophy Voice, in which a bit of Oxbridge suddenly appears in the voice of a guy from Brooklyn, and many local dialects of Prayer Voices (tasting menu: try Canterbury, then Dallas, and finish with a bit of Salt Lake City).
“I think [the Poetry Voice] frames [the poet’s performance] as poetry,” says Deborah Tannen, professor of linguistics at Georgetown University and author of You Just Don’t Understand. In linguistics, “framing” signals what you think you’re doing when you say something — your relationship to the words and to the people you’re saying them to.
So, yes, I am trying to be healthy, and it’s good to have a Voice reminding me that the practice is more than just another freaking chore, and maybe four days out of five the Yoga Voice is what I want to listen to.
However, there is a piece of me that just can’t stand being wholesome. I would be much better able to sustain a daily practice if I could occasionally select the same routine, with the same instructions, but delivered in a profoundly inappropriate voice.
On those days, my ideal Yoga Voice would be deadpan but lucidly drunk Christopher Hitchens telling me to push my top thighs back and stretch my heels down toward the floor.
But he’s no longer with us. So maybe seductive Melanie Griffith?
Or Enraged Lucy Liu at the meeting of the Yakuza in Kill Bill 1? Heath Ledger’s Joker is too obvious (but still, it would be awesomely wrong).
Of course, sometimes Yoga instructors provide counsel about the challenges of the ancient practice, the difficulties of converting healthy intentions into beneficial practice, and the moral duties of ahimsa. For these disquisitions, I would appreciate being able to listen to either one of these guys:
As Bertie remarked,
It was one of those cases where you approve the broad, general principle of an idea but can’t help being in a bit of a twitter at the prospect of putting it into practical effect. I explained this to Jeeves, and he said much the same thing had bothered Hamlet. ― P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves in the Morning
The aforementioned voices would allow me to stay with Yoga without shirking my commitments to perversity and noncompliance. Your needs may be different. There may be men who do not bristle at Yoga’s wholesomeness but are uncomfortable entering such a strongly feminine environment. For them, here’s a Voice that is resolutely wholesome, yet ruggedly masculine:
This post is part of a series in which I’m dedicating a month to learning about periods in history this year. The full schedule can be found here. This is month two. (tl;dr at the bottom of this post)
Let’s get one thing out of the way, first. It seems like the phrase “The Dark Ages” has fallen out of style. I, having finished high school in the long ago, was unaware of this. I won’t be using it the rest of this post.
This time period covers an ENORMOUS length of time. It’s almost unfathomable. Still – the Roman Empire managed to hold on in various forms throughout this period. It seems like a long time ago, but the staying power is almost too big to comprehend.
I’m grateful to readers who suggested I not just focus on Western Europe for this month. While the empire seemed to collapse into chaos and barbarians more quickly in the West, forming totally new countries, things were very different in the East.
The first book I read was The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians by Peter Heather. A variety of theories exist as to who the Roman Empire collapsed. Some think that corruption took it apart from within. Others think that it became too big to be sustainable. Heather argues it was the barbarians. He shows how the Huns started interfering with the somewhat fragile balance of power in Western Rome, which forced many goths to move into the Empire as refugees. It wasn’t easy to absorb them. The Romans tried to regain control, and it didn’t go well. They lost to the Goths at Hadrianople (something almost unthinkable at the time), and they were sacking Rome thirty years later. The Vandals went after western Europe, and then North Africa. This was critically important (and something I never understood). The Western Roman Empire was hugely dependent on Northern Africa for its food. It’s like the United States’s Midwest. It was the farmland, and in the mid-fifth century, the Romans lost it.
The Huns used a different battle tactic than any others the Romans faced before. They fought on horseback, with a whole different type of bow, and they were perfectly suited to destroy an otherwise unbeatable Roman army. Why they came out of the Steppes of Eastern Europe isn’t totally understood, but they did, and they crushed everyone. By the time Atilla arrived, they were destroying armies from France all the way back to Eastern Rome. Ironically, when Atilla died, it likely hastened the collapse of the Roman Empire. Everyone took advantage of the situation, and the Vandals wound up defeating the Byzantine Armada in a tragic battle that pretty much ended the Western Empire. The Eastern Empire, on the other hand, went on for a long, long time.
As a contrast, consider How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower by Adrian Goldsworthy. He argues that Rome collapsed from within. His book begins with Marcus Aurelius (who is basically the Emperor who dies at the beginning of the movie Gladiator). At that time, the Emperor ruled, but still relied pretty heavily on the Senate to back him up and implement his will (and army). But the system had a big flaw – the Emperor chose his successor, often from his family, and always with the military behind him.
His son Commodus (the bad guy played by Joaquin Phoenix in Gladiator) wasn’t so good, and things went South. He was assassinated, and the military sort of took over. Over the next century or so, most Emperors only made it a few years before being assassinated, overthrown, or killed. Emperors were popping up all over, wherever an army chose a new one, and they’d fight with each other. Eventually, things quieted down; but it was too late.
The new Emperors had to rely on a growing bureaucracy to rule the empire. Corruption was inevitable. The smaller Senate might have been able to hold together a national sense of purpose, but local rulers in the far reaches of the Empire didn’t share this feeling. Mistrust became common, as did fear of losing power. Emperors began to travel extensively to control the Empire, and, of course, they could not.
Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century was completely different. She followed the life of a reasonable high level French noble to give a flavor of how life and politics changed for France in the 1300’s. That time was pretty much a disaster. We begin with the plague, which killed like a quarter of all people. So… not a good start. Then, we see how chivalry ruined everything further. A desire to achieve valor on the battlefield led to a number of unbelievable military disasters (including Crecy, which I was aware of thanks to Warren Ellis’s Crecy, a brilliant graphic novel that covered the battle from the English side.) The Hundred Years War was as much the fault of the French nobility as anything else.
Her main character – Enguerrand de Coucy serves as sort of a “Forrest Gump” to be there for all the momentous occurances. It works. The book is well written, and it makes me glad I wasn’t there. Lots of treason and lots of popes. Utter chaos. It seemed like half the rules were mad, likely from inbreeding.
Finally, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire by Kyle Harper has a whole other hypothesis: climate change. I kid you not. Using all kinds of bone records and such, he makes a case that the Empire really did well in the first two centuries because it was warm, wet, and there were few pandemics. Things changed after that. Disease, in the form of plagues, had a huge impact. So did the temperature in general. People have wondered for a long time what brought the Huns out of the Steppes, and this is as good an argument as any. It’s also possible that there’s a dual cause things going on. Perhaps Rome at its peak was more able to withstand external climate change, but once it was weakened, these changes pushed it over the edge. He notes four main turns: (1) Pandemics during the age of Marcus Aurelius, (2) Drought, pestilence, and political change in the middle of the third century, (3) The Huns coming out of the Steppes, and (4) Bubonic plague coupled with a small ice age.
Harper writes well, and I thought his book was constructed a bit more for the lay reader. Take that or leave it.
All of this was fascinating, but I’m ready for something completely different. Bring on the American Revolution!
I’m going to spend April learning about the history of The Revolutionary War. You’ve already given me some great ideas. I want to post them here, so you can help me prioritize what to read. If you think I’m missing something, please tell me. I’m opening comments, or you can tweet me.
This post is part of a series in which I’m dedicating a month to learning about periods in history this year. The full schedule can be found here. This is month one. (tl;dr at the bottom of this post)
This month was a bit surprising in that I the parts I thought I would enjoy the most and the parts I thought I would enjoy the least were somewhat reversed. Let me start by saying that I wasn’t ignorant about Rome before I read this month. I took a gazillion years of Latin in middle school and high school, and I’ve even read Virgil’s Aeneid in the original Latin. Not well, mind you (I’ve got a great story about the AP Latin test where I mixed up a mountain and a tree, and… forget it).
I’ve also always loved the architecture of Rome, and am well versed on the period of Cicero, to Caesar, into the emperors. That said, there was still plenty to learn.
I started the month with Mary Beard’s SPQR, which is every bit as good as everyone says it is. She begins the book by focusing on Cicero, which is a great idea, and then backs up to the beginning (Romulus and Remus!) and moves forward through the emperors. That’s a lot of ground to cover, and she does it fairly well. One of the things I appreciated the most was how she spent time talking about how we know what we know. There are no videos or news reports, obviously. Much of what we get is through what was written down and survived. It’s critical to remember that there were no printing presses. Things has to be hand copied or written many times.
One of the reasons we know so much about Cicero is that, as a politician, he would print up many, many copies of his speeches. He knew not everyone would come to hear him, so he had some infrastructure to write those things down and distribute them to people. Smart. Also, good for history.
A couple key players in history also spent a lot of time writing their memoirs. That’s why we know so much about them. If you didn’t take the time to do that… well, then you have even less control of who tells your story.
Beard’s book gives you a pretty good sense of the time, and does a good job of making you realize that life in ancient Rome, while certainly more precarious than now (politicians get killed way too often for comfort and you spent a lot of time fighting in wars), it was also reasonably comfortable at times. More on that in a bit. She also reminds you that the periods we focus on (Caesar +) are only a blip in the history of Rome.
Next I read Mike Duncan’s The Storm Before the Storm, which I wish I’d read first. That’s because his book focuses on the period right up to Caesar et al, and is a much more in depth history of Rome before what we know. I mean WAY more in depth. There were a hell of a lot of wars, and a hell of a lot of political intrigue before the Republic.
Side note – one of the things I also got from these books was that Kings and leadership didn’t pass down through family (ie sons) the way we seem to assume they do now. The ancient Romans would have thought that was ridiculous. How do you know kids can rule as well as their parents? That idea came along much, much later, and it was somewhat surprising to me.
I was also stunned at how interesting the whole setup of government was as the republic took shape. Very corrupt, but also very stable.
On the other hand, the discussion of political norms, and how those were slowly chipped away (in both books) hits a bit close to home at times. The political maneuvers ring true in a number of ways, and there’s a lot to make you uneasy. Still, you are much less likely to get killed while trying to vote or get elected today than you were then.
I used to think of “civilization” as meaning big buildings, big armies, and a stable government. But it’s the economic stuff I took for granted that mattered. Because roads were so good and trade was so robust, people would stop trying to specialize locally. The would get amazing pottery from far away, for instance, so why bother to make it close to home. Food moved all over, so you didn’t need to farm as much. But as the empire collapsed, so did its trade. You couldn’t get that pottery anymore. You couldn’t get cheap and easy food. The quality of life of pretty much everyone dropped dramatically, not just in how much money they had but in what you could actually obtain. People had to go back into farming or starve. I wasn’t thinking about the fall of civilization properly.
And THAT’s why I’m even more excited for March. I want to read more about that, and how people pulled themselves back up. It was also good to sit and think about how the world’s superpower that hung around for like 1000 years completely fell apart. Why? I want to know more about that and what came after. On to March.
Oh, I tried to go back to Gibbons again at the end of the month, and still couldn’t fininsh the book. I know it’s a classic. Sorry.
tl;dr: If you want to focus on history up to the fall of the republic, read Mike Duncan’s The Storm Before the Storm. Mary Beard’s SPQR, is more of a broader review of Rome from the beginning through the emperors, but also great. More Fall of Rome next month.
I’m going to spend March learning about the Fall of Rome and the Dark Ages. You’ve already also given me some great ideas. I want to post them here, so you can help me prioritize what to read. If you think I’m missing something, please go tell me. I’m opening comments, or you can tweet me.
I’m going to spend February learning about the history of Rome. You’ve already given me some great ideas. I want to post them here, so you can help me prioritize what to read. If you think I’m missing something, please go tell me. I’m opening comments, or you can tweet me.
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11/05/2018
Austin Frakt
