bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Social Class
Authors: Macaulay Ronald
Published: November 2023

Over the past thirty years it has been shown quite clearly that in socially stratified societies there are systematic differences in the way people from different backgrounds speak. This is not a new phenomenon but goes back at least as far as Chaucer’s time. The invention of the portable tape recorder, however, has made it possible to investigate social differences in language more closely and to show exactly which features vary and under what circumstances. Briefly, the most common method has been to record samples of speech from people of different social backgrounds in a single community and to search the tapes for features of language that vary. Such features are labeled linguistic variables. For example, in New York City it is common to hear [t] instead of [0] in words such as think and three. This usage is not equally frequent among people from all social backgrounds but is more common among those lower down the social scale. The extent to which this is true can be shown by taking the contexts in which a choice is possible between [t] and [0] and counting the number of times [t] occurs. By converting this score to an average, it is possible to produce an index for this variable for each individual whose speech has been recorded. The indexes for individuals at the same socioeconomic level can then be combined and averaged to produce a score for that section of the community. The results for the (th) variable can be seen in figure 14.1.
Conversation
Authors: Macaulay Ronald
Published: November 2023

One of the cleverest ways in which we use language is in conversation. It is such a common part of our everyday ordinary experience that it is hard to realize just what an achievement it is. Someone has compared it to a dance and as in a dance it is necessary to coordinate the movements carefully to avoid getting tangled up or in each other’s way. It is something that young children may not know how to do. The number of times an adult has to say to a child Don’t interrupt is an obvious indicator of this. Like most other aspects of language, the rules for conversation differ from society to society. The account in this chapter is based mainly on American and British middle-class conversations and may not be relevant to other speech communities. There is a general rule in British and American middle-class conversation that two people may not speak at the same time. If this happens there is overlap between the two speakers and one has to stop speaking. Avoiding overlap requires a mechanism for turn-taking. In orderly conversation the change from one speaker’s turn to another is usually accomplished smoothly and very quickly. Speed is important because silences are significant. A pause of more than a split second between turns may indicate some reluctance, opposition, or even rejection of what the previous speaker has said.
Indo-European
Authors: Macaulay Ronald
Published: November 2023

In 1776 Sir William Jones, the founder of the Royal Asiatic Society and the chief justice of India, gave a lecture in which he drew attention to certain similarities which he had noticed between Sanskrit and European languages: The Sanskrit language, whatever may be its antiquity, is of wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either; yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could have been produced by accident; so strong that no philologer could examine all the three without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists. There is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and Celtic, though blended with a different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanskrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family. Although Jones was not the first to notice this resemblance, his lecture is often seen as the public announcement of a long process of scholarship mainly in the first half of the nineteenth century which led to the postulation of a reconstructed ancestor for a number of languages that have been spoken in an area stretching from the British Isles and Scandinavia in the west across the whole of Europe to Siberia and a large part of the Indian subcontinent. This reconstructed language is Proto-Indo-European (PIE, for short). There are no records of PIE. It is a hypothetical language worked out on the basis of comparing examples of words from languages that have survived (or of which we have some records) with their equivalent in other Indo-European languages.
Children’s Lore and Language
Authors: Macaulay Ronald
Published: November 2023

Having begun this exploration of language and its uses by looking at children’s learning of language, it is only fitting that we should conclude it by considering how children use language. Adults tend to think of themselves as knowing more than those who are younger than they are, and generally they are correct in this belief. There are, however, things that children know that adults either do not know or have forgotten that they once knew. Evidence of children’s lore and language was compiled by Iona and Peter Opie, who collected information from about five thousand children attending seventy schools in different parts of England, Scotland, and Wales. They published the results of their investigations in The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959), and their work has provided the basis for subsequent inquiries. One of their findings was the variety of truce terms in Great Britain (see fig. 34.1). Truce terms are the ways in which children call for “time out” in a game or a contest. The Opies found that, in addition to calling out a truce term, children in England often crossed their fingers, whereas in Scotland children put their thumbs up. The map shows that in the west of Scotland the term is keys, while in the rest of Scotland and much of the west of England and most of Wales the term is barley (presumably the same word as parley). In the eastern part of England the main term is either kings and crosses or kings.
Prologue
Authors: Dowbiggin Ian
Published: November 2023

As he watched urban civilization steadily close in on his cabin in New York State’s Adirondack Mountains, environmentalist Bill McKibben made a big personal decision: shortly after the birth of his only child, he chose to have a vasectomy. As McKibben confessed in his 1998 best-seller Maybe One, he underwent the operation to help slow population growth and prevent global warming.
Tarred and Feathered
Authors: Dowbiggin Ian
Published: November 2023

The 1970s began on a high note for the sterilization movement. Like never before, legal, medical, religious, and cultural barriers to sterilization were crumbling in America and abroad. Studies indicated that a ‘‘sterilization explosion’’ was occurring in the United States, while a growing number of men and women in developing countries were also undergoing sterilization. In 1979, a Gallup poll found that two-thirds of adult Americans approved of voluntary contraceptive sterilization. Birth control in general and sterilization in particular were no longer ‘‘dirty words.’’
Origins of the American Slave System
Authors: Klein Herbert S , Ben Vinson III
Published: November 2023

African slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean is a late development in the evolution of slavery in human society. Since the origins of complex societies, slavery was known to most cultures and regions of the world. Typically, slavery has meant domestic slavery, in which the labor power of the household was extended through the use of non-kin workers. But slaves have performed all known tasks and in some societies even formed separate classes and groups beyond the household level. Few peoples have escaped slavery themselves, and almost all societies have treated their slaves as outsiders, rootless and ahistorical individuals ultimately held against their will by the threat of force. In all societies in which they existed, they were also the most mobile labor force available.
Sugar and Slavery in the Caribbean in the 17th and 18th Centuries
Authors: Klein Herbert S , Ben Vinson III
Published: November 2023

The establishment of an independent Dutch nation in Europe had a major impact on the distribution of slaves and plantations in America. The long Dutch struggle from the 1590s to the 1640s against Spanish domination would profoundly affect Portugal, Africa, and Brazil. From 1580 to 1640 Portugal was integrated into the Spanish Crown. While this incorporation had opened up Spanish America to Portuguese slave traders and resident merchants, it also brought Portugal into direct confrontation with the rebellious Dutch, who were Brazil’s most important and powerful trading partner.
Plataea
Authors: Davis Paul K
Published: November 2023

The town of Plataea was unfortunately situated-in the ancient Greek province of Boeotia at the opening of two passes from southern Greece, one of which led toward the Peloponnese (home of Sparta) and one toward Attica (home of Athens). While this was an excellent location for trade, it was a crossroads for war as well, and any neighboring aggressor had to control Plataea to expand or defend its territory. Two powerful neighbors to the south was bad enough, but the occasional expansionary desires of Thebes, 9 miles to the north, also was a consideration. Thebes was also the most regular aggressor, and Plataea was often obliged to seek aid from one of her powerful southern neighbors. In 519 B.C. that aid came from Athens when Thebes attempted to force the creation of a Boeotian League, with itself as the leader. Thirty years later Plataeans fought alongside Athenians against the Persian army at Marathon. A decade later, Plataea was the site of the final Persian army defeat in Greece. In the 460s----450s B.C., Plataea also aided Sparta in suppressing a peasant revolt. In the 450s, Plataea aided Athens in establishing control over Boeotia; when Boeotia successfully revolted in 447, Plataea remained an Athenian ally. Thus, when Athens and Sparta fell out in 432/431 B.C., Plataea had friendly relations with both sides and no real desire to fight either of them.
Tyre
Authors: Davis Paul K
Published: November 2023

On 31 July he threw in his crack troops, and when their commander was killed Alexander charged in himself. He led forces along the battlements while his ships broke through into the harbor, landing more troops within the city. Rather than be caught between two forces, the soldiers withdrew into the city center and made a last stand at the shrine of Agenor. After such a long and arduous siege, Alexander did nothing to restrain his troops in their moment of victory. Pillage, loot, rape, and murder were the order of the day. The only saving grace for any of the citizens came from Alexander’s allied troops from Sidon, who took pity on the inhabitants and smuggled about 15,000 of them out of the city. Tyre’s King Azimilik with his advisers sought refuge in the temple of Melkart, and Alexander spared them. When the blood lust finally paled, 30,000 citizens survived only to be sold into slavery. Beforehand, however, Alexander crucified 2,000 men of fighting age. He then proceeded to sacrifice to Melkart as he had originally requested, following the service with a massive feast, games, and naval review.
Paris
Authors: Davis Paul K
Published: November 2023

The Danes sailed up the Seine River and threatened Paris in 845; in the 860s there were three attacks that achieved limited results for the invaders, who did little more than pillage on a large scale. The acquisition of either loot or bribes led to their withdrawal each time, but no serious military opposition arose to face them. Thus, they returned to France regularly for loot and bribes. A quick succession of Frankish rulers did nothing to enhance the region’s security. Charles the Bald died in 877, his son Louis the Stammerer a year and a half later, Louis’ two successors died by 884. In the wake of these short-term reigns, the three provinces into which Charlemagne’s kingdom had been divided once again saw a single king: Charles the Fat. Charles had shown no talent for leading men in battle, but he was of the proper bloodline. Neustria, as the westernmost province was called, was ruled by Charles’ appointed subordinates. The Duchy of France, the region that lay between the Seine and Loire rivers, came under the rule of Count Odo, whose brother Robert was grandfather of Hugh Capet, who initiated the French Capetian dynasty. Odo’s father, Robert the Strong, had driven back Viking raiders and begun to fortify Paris, so Odo inherited a fairly strong position. It was soon tested.
Acre
Authors: Davis Paul K
Published: November 2023

Acre is the best natural harbor on the coast of Palestine. As such it is of viral concern to anyone wishing to control trade and travel into and out of Palestine. European forces during the First Crusade initially captured it in 1104 and the city eventually became of more importance to the Latin kingdom the crusaders established than Jerusalem itself. It remained under European control throughout the crusading period, except for the years from 1187 to 1191. In 1187 the crusaders suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of Saladin at the Horns of Hattin. After this battle, almost all major crusader-held cities rapidly fell to Saladin’s army, including Acre and Jerusalem. Saladin visited Acre several times over the next two years, strengthening the walls and fortifications and stationing his best troops there. The only major Christian city to withstand the Muslim onslaught was Tyre, which provided a refuge for crusaders fleeing the Arab army. It was from here, in August 1189, that Guy de Lusignan led a small force to recapture Acre. Although they could easily have been destroyed, they were virtually ignored by the Muslim forces that were currently occupied with their siege of Beaufort. It was not until they had become entrenched in front of the city that Saladin took notice and moved his headquarters to the Plain of Acre.
Tenochtitlan
Authors: Davis Paul K
Published: November 2023

Until their mysterious disappearance about A.O. 1200 the Toltecs dominated much of Central America. Their fall was coincident with the arrival of nomadic tribes from the north. One of them, the Aztecs (People from Aztlan) drifted into the valley of central Mexico and became subject to whatever power achieved temporary hegemony. The Aztecs settled on the western side of Lake Texcoco, adapting themselves to the practice of building “floating gardens” of built-up silt. Here they established Tenochtitlan in the mid-fourteenth century. A second Aztec faction built a second city, Tlatelolco. The two cities placed themselves under the protection of rival powers-Tenochtitlan under Culhuacan, Tlatelolco under the Tepanecs. In the late fourteenth century the Tepanecs dominated the valley and expanded their power across the mountains to the west to encompass an area of peThaps 20,000 square miles. This consolidation was accomplished under King Tezozomoc, but after his death in 1423 the various city-states he had dominated began rebelling. Three powers joined together into a Triple Alliance to replace the Tepanecs, one being the Aztecs of Tenochtitlan. Despite an occasional disagreement, the three worked fairly well together and dominated central Mexico for ninety years. They consolidated their hold over the former Tepanec domain, then in 1465 began to expand. The Aztecs became the dominant partner in the triumvirate, but the three tribes collectively spread the empire from the Atlantic to the Pacific and as far southward as the modern-day border between Mexico and Guatemala. Only two tribes remained recalcitrant, the Tlaxaltecs and the Tarascans. The Aztecs established garrisons along disputed borders and occasionally warred against but never subjugated them.
Malta
Authors: Davis Paul K
Published: November 2023

For the Knights of St. John, the victory reaffirmed the order as the primary shield of Christianity against the forces of Islam. European monarchs contributed heavily to the rebuilding of their headquarters on Malta, built on the site of the modern city of Valetta on the Sciberras peninsula and named for the commander during the siege. A defeat and the loss of Malta would almost certainly have spelled their doom, but instead the “fame of 1565 was to make the Knights of Malta the acknowledged paragons of Christian chivalry for as long as that idea held sway in Europe” (Sire, The Knights of Malta, p. 72). The timely arrival of Spanish troops from Sicily, which saved the day, reaffirmed the predominance of Spain as the champion of Catholicism in Europe. The Spanish would have been obliged to undertake the task of recapturing Malta in order to deny it to the Muslims had they taken the island, and the commitment of manpower to that enterprise would probably have weakened their concurrent efforts to battle the Protestant Netherlands and amass the Spanish Armada invasion force that attempted to take control of England in 1588. The subsequent rise of Protestantism could well have been established decades sooner than it was.
Magdeburg
Authors: Davis Paul K
Published: November 2023

Ever since Martin Luther had nailed his 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg in 1517, violence between northern European Protestants and the champions of the Catholic Church was inevitable. Through the sixteenth century Spain’s armies battled for the faith against the heretics, then late in the 1500s the Holy Roman Empire assumed the cause. The immediate causes of the Thirty Years War originated in Prague in 1618, where a struggle over succession between Catholic and Protestant pretenders focused the attention of both faiths. Rather than submit to the rule of a ten-man administration (seven of whom were Catholic), rebels led by Count Matthias von Thurn threw them out of a window of the palace in Prague. The Protestant Union raised an army to aid the new Protestant administration in the city, while the Holy Roman Empire dispatched troops to restore order. The imperial forces were defeated. After that initial setback, however, they won a series of victories, culminating in the reestablishment of Catholic rule in Bohemia in 1623. The hero of the imperial cause was Jan Tserkales, Baron von Tilly. In 1625 the war flared again owing to the initiative of King Christian IV of Denmark, who hoped to make himself both religious and political leader of northern Europe. Baron von Tilly continued to have regular success against Protestant forces, as did Albert von Wallen-stein, the duke of Friedland, who had raised an army to fight for the empire. In 1629 the Catholic Church issued the Edict of Restitution, effectively banning most Protestant worship. Failing in his goals, King Christian signed the Treaty of Lubeck and returned to Denmark. Wallenstein had made himself into a powerful commander, so much so that many Catholic princes feared his ambition and convinced the Holy Roman Emperor to dismiss him once the fighting ended.
Vienna
Authors: Davis Paul K
Published: November 2023

Since the establishment of the Ottoman Empire, the Turks regularly attempted to extend their influence as far westward into Europe as possible. Their best chance of doing so came in 1524, when Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent tried but was turned back at Vienna. After that, a long series of ineffective sultans had ruled the empire with big dreams but little talent. In 1664, another foray into central Europe was turned back at St. Gotthard Pass in Switzerland. That campaign ended with the signing of the Treaty of Vasvar, mandating a twenty-year truce between the Turks and the Holy Roman Empire. In 1672 the Holy Roman Empire, based in Austria, went to war with King Louis XIV of France over possession of the United Provinces of Holland. At the same time, the Turks were fighting the Poles. This seemed a propitious time for a nationalist rising in Hungary. The Magyars of the region had been most recently under the control of the Holy Roman Empire, while other parts of the region had been under occasional Turkish domination. With both overlords otherwise occupied, Emmerich Toki.iii in 1674 led a Magyar independence movement. For no other reason than to bother his enemy Leopold I, the Holy Roman Emperor, Louis XIV asked the Ottoman government to assist Toki.iii. The grand vizier, Kara Mustapha, responded that he would aid the uprising as soon as his war with Poland was over, but it was immediately followed by a war with Russia. When that ended in 1682, the Turks were able to fulfill their pledge.
Louisbourg
Authors: Davis Paul K
Published: November 2023

Throughout the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth, Britain and France both colonized in North America. Britain, arriving first, occupied territory stretching along the eastern coast of the continent, while France was obliged to accept the less productive area of modern Canada. The northern territory had its economic benefits, however, and the French made large profits on furs and fishing. The British American colonists, however, also claimed the waters that the French fished, so not only the fishing rights but also the resulting supply of dried fish to European markets resulted in intense colonial rivalry. European wars had their North American aspects. After the War of the Spanish Succession ended with the signing of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, France’s King Louis XIV decided to build a strong fort on the Ile Royale (modern Cape Breton Island) to act as a base for French shipping and protection for the mouth of the St. Lawrence River. Thus was Louisbourg conceived and born. Construction began in 1720 and went on in a haphazard fashion for the next twenty years. At its completion, it was hailed as the Gibraltar of North America, but it suffered in the years immediately following from poor maintenance, insufficient artillery, and a less than enthusiastic population. The garrison was made up of French marines and Swiss mercenaries, neither possessing high morale.
Havana
Authors: Davis Paul K
Published: November 2023

All of Europe was jealous of Spain, whose looting of the Americas had brought them untold wealth since the conquistadors in the early sixteenth century conquered the Aztec and Inca empires. After the Spanish Armada was badly beaten in 1588, however, Spain’s iron grasp on the Americas began to weaken. England was quick to plant colonies in North America, but there was no gold. English pirates plundered Spanish treasure ships, but occupation of lands Cuba remained a Spanish possession until finally forfeited in 1898 in the wake of the Spanish-American War. Havana, however, remained the commercial center of both Cuba and the Caribbean and later became the political capital of the island as well.
Fort Stanwix
Authors: Davis Paul K
Published: November 2023

the rebel effort, as Washington’s victories at Trenton and Princeton had done the previous year, it also convinced the French to recognize American independence and provide massive amounts of aid. The garrison at Fort Stanwix, by stalling and ultimately deflecting St. Leger’s offensive, doomed Burgoyne and by extension the entire British effort to reestablish control of their American colonies. References: Hoffman Nickerson, The Turning Point of the Revolution, vol. 1 (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1967 [1928]);John Pancake, 1777, the Year of the Hangman (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1977); Christopher Ward, The Wtir of the Revolution, vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1952).
Pensacola
Authors: Davis Paul K
Published: November 2023

The Treaty of Paris, which ended the Seven Years/French and Indian War in 1763, had sweeping implications for European colonialism in North America. France lost virtually everything on the continent, retaining only fishing rights off Canada and a handful of Caribbean islands. Left with only unexplored and mostly inaccessible territory between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains, France gave up most of her imperial dreams and ceded that land, known as Louisiana, to her ally Spain. Spain gladly received it, for she had lost Florida to Britain as a result of the treaty and was glad to control the strategic port of New Orleans in compensation. Still, the defeat rankled French and Spanish alike, and both looked forward to the day they could exact a measure of revenge. Such an opportunity arose in 1775 when Britain’s thirteen American colonies began a revolution. Spain and France were both quick to funnel illicit arms and money to the Americans, but their support remained under the table until the American victory at Saratoga in October 1777. The decisiveness of the victory impressed the government in Paris, which signed a treaty of recognition and mutual defense in February 1778. Spain hesitated to openly support the Americans, however, fearing to aid a cause that their own colonists might emulate. When Britain rebuffed Spain’s attempt to act as mediator, however, Madrid allied with France (although not with the United States) and went to war in May 1779. She hoped not only to regain Florida but also to seize the opportunity to capture Gibraltar, which the British had occupied for decades.
Toulon
Authors: Davis Paul K
Published: November 2023

England as a hero and went on to redeem himself in an outstanding performance in India soon afterward. The English public was tired of the war by this time. When the news of Yorktown reached London, The government was unable to survive. In the spring of 1782 the newly elected leadership offered to negotiate a peace and talks began in Paris in September. They went on for a year before the Treaty of Paris of 1783 was signed. In this the London government recognized American independence, established The borders of the United States as the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River and the Great Lakes to The northern border of Florida. In return for assistance rendered the Revolution by the Spanish (particularly their governor in New Orleans Bernardo De Galvez) the Spanish received Florida, which They had surrendered to The English in the Treaty of Paris 1763 at the end of the French and Indian/Seven Years War.
Athens (Acropolis)
Authors: Davis Paul K
Published: November 2023

For much of Europe, Napoleon left a legacy of nationalism that the Concert of Europe suppressed only with the greatest difficulty. Although he never occupied Greece (but for a few Ionian islands), much of Napoleon’s influence arrived there via western Europeans who visited as part of their Grand Tour, diverted southward because of the wars of the previous two decades. Wealthy Greeks traveled to western Europe or sent their sons there for education, and the stirring of nationalist feeling followed in their train. Three and a half centuries of Turkish rule had been restrictive on the Greeks, but in many cases the upper classes and landowners found the Ottoman rule profitable. The Orthodox Church had also been given fairly free rein and had little reason to seek independence, but the modern tides were flowing. The seeds of revolt grew in two major Greek factions, the merchant class and the Phanariotes. The first traveled internationally and introduced foreign influences; further, they saw reduced taxation and regulation away from the Ottoman system. “Nothing was easier than for communication following the natural trade-routes to lead to conspiracy, financed and supplied from abroad” (Woodhouse, Short History of Modern Greece, p. 130). The Phanariotes were Greeks raised in Constantinople who first made their way into the bureaucracy as translators, gradually becoming the bulk of the Ottoman diplomatic corps. Their international contacts could be used to muster financial, political, and hopefully military support for a revolution.
Gaeta
Authors: Davis Paul K
Published: November 2023

The garrison was granted the honors of war and at the end of hostilities were demobilized and sent home. Francis and Maria Sophia left the city on a French corvette that Napoleon had ordered to remain behind after the rest of his fleet departed. The Neapolitan troops paraded for their monarchs, who boarded the ship to the strains of Naples’ national anthem. They stayed for a time in Rome, then went into permanent exile in Paris. Victor Emmanuel II was proclaimed king of Italy in March 1861, with the province of Veneto breaking away from Austrian rule and joining the rest of Italy in 1866. But a unified Italy did not translate into a stronger one, at least economically. The more industrialized north disdained the agricultural south. Although the king ruled under the auspices of a constitution, the parliamentary government proved unstable. Further, the pope increasingly felt himself more prisoner than pontiff as the political leadership became increasingly anti-clerical. That put the government and the Catholic population of Italy regularly at odds. Political instability and an unbalanced economy remain problems in Italy to this day.
Liege
Authors: Davis Paul K
Published: November 2023

In retrospect, World War I seemed almost inevitable in the wake of France’s humiliating defeat at Prussian hands in 1870. Multiple other factors contributed to the war, including nationalism, imperialism, naval and arms races, aggressive political leaders, and so on, but by early 1914 Europe had divided into rival camps and seemed merely to be waiting for an excuse to start fighting. Possession of the harbor also allowed Japanese warships to undergo refitting and repair on site, rather than having to return to Japan. It also gave them a superior harbor to Dalmy, which they had been using up to this point, through which to bring in more manpower and supplies. Also, by freeing the remains of the Japanese Third Army, they were able to march north and join with the rest of the army facing a sizable Russian force at the ciry of Mukden. The additional troops that the Third Army provided proved key in the Japanese victory there in February 1905.
Imphal
Authors: Davis Paul K
Published: November 2023

War came to Burma in January 1942, when Japanese forces invaded from French Indochina. British forces in Burma were rapidly over-whelmed and fled for India, which they reached in May. Had the Japanese kept pushing, India lay open, but their unexpectedly quick occupation of Burma, coupled with the oncoming monsoon, convinced them to stop and consolidate first. That consolidation, owing to the drain on Imperial Japanese Army resources in other theaters, lasted eighteen months. The British Indian Army had not been lax in taking advantage of their respite and had been reinforcing Lieutenant General William Slim’s forces along the Burma-India frontier. The primary concentration of forces was at Imphal, capital of the Manipur Province of India, located some 400 miles east-northeast of Calcutta. The city of lmphal lay on the Imphal plain, a plateau some 2,500 feet above sea level and surrounded by mountains. The Indian Army 4th Corps was based there, commanded by Lieutenant General Geoffrey Scoones. The 4th Corps consisted of the 17th, 20th, and 23rd Divisions. Imphal at the outset was served by but one improved road and a few unimproved roads, but since 1942 Slim and Scoones had thousands of laborers working to pave two more roads in order to flood Imphal with all supplies necessary for the troops to either beat back a Japanese offensive or launch one of their own. By March 1944, Slim had to decide for which of those options to prepare.
Requiem for a Flag-Waver (JVC 1998)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

As I was saying: Why complain if a jazz festival is no more than a congested confluence of concerts? JVC followed on the heels of Texaco (discussion of jazz is fated forevermore to sound like adspeak) and lay over the city like a shroud. People were still asking me when it would open as it was closing. Critics made the rounds glassy-eyed, somnambulant, shoulders set in permanent shrugs, as if to say don’t ask before anyone could. Buzz? There was no buzz—no I-can’t-wait-to-hear-that or goodidea-for-a-concert or wasn’t-that-amazing. As always, there were moments: I won’t soon forget Al Grey’s “Black and Blue” or Clark Terry reviving his duets with himself, or Joao Gilberto, who isn’t a jazz musician except by association, or... I’ve run out of things I won’t soon forget. Better consult notes. The festival began with six concerts at the Kaye Playhouse, a pleasingly petite theater that fosters specialty programs that would barely make a dent in Carnegie, Avery Fisher, or Symphony Space, unlike the Brazilians and Cubans who accounted for at least five major events in the halls that used to present Duke Ellington, Sarah Vaughan, Miles Davis, Stan Getz—you know, jazz stars. Last year’s Kaye series was an imaginative mixture of mainstream and jazz rep, so they did it again, only without the imagination. The almost exclusive focus on prewar (as in WWII) styles had, inevitably, a valedictory effect, combining memory and desire with the morbid fear that some venerated players might not be around much longer, which is one reason I felt grateful to be there. Still, when a tribute to Fats Waller got underway with Al Grey in a wheelchair and Clark Terry on the arm of an aide, the desire to pay homage was undercut by the assumption that these great men would be working at a fraction of their capacities.
Lester Bowie, 1941–1999
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

When an e-mail informed me of Lester Bowie’s death—at 58, on November 8, of cancer—I was reading Marshall Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts into Air, and suddenly everything he wrote about Goethe and Marx seemed to be about Lester. “Why should modern men, who have seen what man’s activity can bring about, passively accept the structure of their society as it is given?” A pretext for avant-garde jazz if I ever heard one. A subsequent idea, that revolutionary activity undercuts bourgeois rule by expressing energies “the bourgeoisie itself has set free,” is pure Lester: Lester in his long white lab coat, with not one but two Mephistophelean goatees waxed into points, his hair a flattop, his eyes smiling and luminous, his trumpet knifing the air with jerky parabolas of sputtering fragments, like a machine in need of oil. Lester was the most bourgeois of underminers, the wiliest jazz provocateur of his generation. He earned the glint in his eye honestly, along with the six children and 10 grandchildren, the Brooklyn brownstone, the Lexus, and the cigar that accentuated his preternatural calm; when he removed it, he was seriously intelligent, expansive, and funny, but the band whooping in time, which showman Lester interrupted to inquire if we were having a good time. We absolutely were.
Go Tell It on the Mountain (David S. Ware)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Let’s be bold: The David S. Ware Quartet is the best small band in jazz today. I realize that I’ll almost certainly hear another quartet, or trio or quintet or octet, this week or next, that will make me want to backpedal. But every time I see Ware’s group or return to the records, it flushes the competition from memory. Besides, hyperbole is so much fun and I do it so rarely, no? Thus, with the first set of last week’s two-night Blue Note gig resounding in my ears, along with a new CD, Corridors & Parallels (Aum Fidelity), I effortlessly banish from consciousness every other bandleader who might inspire a like-minded leap of faith and stoke the experience of listening to Ware and wanting—in that interval at least—to hear nobody else.
Master Class (Jimmy Heath)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

The October 19 and 20 Jazz at Lincoln Center tribute to Jimmy Heath, commemorating his 75th birthday, was called “He Walked with Giants”—a title typical of that series, and also of its unduly modest guest, whose superlative Riverside LPs were once anthologized as Fast Company and who himself titled a later album Peer Pleasure. Still, the implication that Heath is great by association riles me. I don’t want to overstate his claims—merely allow them to stand on their own. Miles Davis and John Coltrane, born the same year as Heath, are giants in a way that he is not, though they both benefited from his skills as bandleader, composer, and player. Heath’s achievement is of a different kind. He is primarily a craftsman, one of the most distinctive of his generation. If he remains undervalued even in his autumnal years, when he is routinely accorded living-legend status, it is because craftsmanship has limited charisma, especially when married to understatement, his stock in trade.
Gypsy State of Mind (Bireli Lagrene)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Bireli Lagrene, whose electrifying new album, Gypsy Project (Dreyfus Jazz), represents his best work in several years, must have days when he feels like Michael Corleone: Every time he gets away from the Django Nostra, they drag him back in. I’m not sure who “they” is, except for admirers like me, who—though startled by the intensive authenticity of his homage to Sinatra (Blue Eyes, 1998), his reclamation of unlikely standards such as “C’est Si Bon” (Standards, 1992), and the ostentatious bebopping excesses of what is perhaps his best previous album, Live in Marciac (1994)—long to hear him mine his Sinti roots, especially since no one else can do the Django thing with his fortitude or aplomb. To be sure, he has always revisited parts of Reinhardt’s repertory: “Nuages,” “Body and Soul,” “I Got Rhythm” and its ubiquitous changes. But summoning Reinhardt means more than replicating a guitar style or a set of tunes or a special instrumentation (guitar, violin, bass, rhythm guitars). It means a state of mind.
Catching Up
Authors: Rarick Ethan
Published: November 2023

Margret Reed fretted. It had been a week of hard travel since they left Independence, but at last they had caught the main body of Californiabound emigrants, a sprawling company led by a slightly pompous Kentucky lawyer named William Henry Russell. The extent of Russell’s domain—nearly fifty wagons and 150 adults—offered a safety-innumbers bulk that appealed to the Reeds and the Donners. But camp gossips spread the word that past applicants to the party had sometimes been rejected, and Margret feared that she and her family would also be turned aside.
Gambling
Authors: Rarick Ethan
Published: November 2023

Edwin Bryant decided to gamble. The newspaperman was now well ahead of the Donner Party on the trail, for his lingering doubts about the pace of the wagon trains had finally crystallized into action. At Fort Bernard, Bryant and his traveling companions traded their wagon for pack mules and rode ahead as fast as they could.
One Bad Hill
Authors: Rarick Ethan
Published: November 2023

Most of the wagons had already climbed the long, sandy hummock. John Snyder, the teamster for the Graves family, was toward the back of the line when he began urging his charges up the slope. It was rough terrain—emigrants recalled it as a ‘‘very bad ridge’’ or ‘‘one bad hill’’— and most men stopped to double-hitch, combining five or six pairs of oxen to haul just one wagon, like a truck driver dropping into a lower gear.
A Great Snowy Range
Authors: Rarick Ethan
Published: November 2023

By the time westward emigrants reached the Sierra Nevada, they had completed all but a hundred miles of a two-thousand-mile journey. Yet that final, brief stretch constituted a singular and frightening obstacle as testing as any they had yet endured. Lying almost entirely within the modern state of California, the Sierra Nevada is the largest single mountain range in the contiguous United States. (The Rockies and Appalachians, although covering a greater area, are collections of geologically distinct chains.) Slathered across an area almost as large as the Alps are more than five hundred peaks that exceed 12,000 feet in elevation, including Mt. Whitney, at 14,494 feet the highest point in the country, save Alaska. Such pinnacles are the topmost portion of a vast and mostly subsurface mass of granite, actually consisting of hundreds of individual pieces but known collectively to geologists as the Sierra Nevada batholith. Millions of years ago, this underground behemoth thrust upward through the earth’s surface, eventually transforming what had been a range of low hills into the majestic spires visible today.
From California, or Heaven?
Authors: Rarick Ethan
Published: November 2023

The trapped emigrants had kept a yearning vigil westward, peering off toward the mountains and squinting their eyes against the blinding white glare of sun and snow. In his diary, Patrick Breen anticipated the arrival of help. ‘‘Expecting some account from Suiters Soon,’’ he jotted down at one point. And then a few days later: ‘‘Expecting some person across the Mountain this week.’’ At Alder Creek, Jean Baptiste Trudeau took a more direct approach. The young Donner family worker once climbed to the top of a tall pine tree near camp—an impressive and exhausting feat given his condition—so that he might catch sight of any arriving rescue party.
Weeping
Authors: Rarick Ethan
Published: November 2023

George Donner looked away and wept. His three youngest children, the three little girls who remained in the bedraggled tent at Alder Creek with their parents, had been so pitifully hungry, their sunken faces so heartbreaking. Yet George and Tamzene had been unable to satisfy their daughters’ pleading. No more rescuers had come to help. No hunter had provided meat.
The Last Man
Authors: Rarick Ethan
Published: November 2023

By mid-April, a month had passed since the last relief party had left the lake camp. Little hope prevailed that anyone remained alive. Survival on almost nothing but human flesh seemed an impossibility, nutritionally and psychologically, particularly since the handful of emigrants left behind would have had few comrades to bolster their morale.
Sound and Silence: Changing Concepts of the Sublime
Authors: Novak Barbara
Published: November 2023

In the literature of landscape painting, the world “sublime” has played a suitably “exalted” role. Its venerable history has been documented in such studies as Samuel H. Monk’s The Sublime, and the characteristics it acquired in the late eighteenth century have until now generally stood for its interpretation. In the nineteenth century, however, the word, already loaded with meaning, took on additional baggage. By mid-century, we can speak of several interpretations of the sublime, so that the original concept, which more or less maintained its traditional meaning, existed side by side with its offspring. These later sublimes not only subtly alter the original meaning of the word, but affect our understanding of landscape attitudes in mid-nineteenth century America.

The late-eighteenth-century sublime, interpreted largely in terms of Burke’s definition, was associated with fear, gloom, and majesty. Majesty had to do with scale and size, exemplified particularly by mountain scenery. The sublime was primarily an esthetic, and to experience it was to have an esthetic reaction. This reaction provoked intimations of infinity and thus of Deity and the divine. It was an overwhelming divinity, dwarfing the observer who, though he aspired to transcendence, rarely forgot his own insignificance.
The Meteorological Vision: Clouds
Authors: Novak Barbara
Published: November 2023

Sky in American art has a clearly identifiable iconography. The painters of a culture deeply imbued with transcendental feeling found in it the purity of renewal, the colors of hope and desire, heavenly reflections of earthly nostalgias. They also cast upward to the sky the shrewd empirical glance that constantly corrected their powerful system of ideal beliefs. The sky is a finely tuned paradigm of the alliance between art and science. In that mutable void, the landscape artist’s concerns—poetic, ideal and symbolic, empirical and scientific—were sharpened rather than blurred. As the source of light, spiritual as well as secular, the sky relieved absolutism with infinite moods, unchanging ideals with endless process. No wonder the artists fixed their particular attention on those moist cargoes that described the void in brief but repeated compositions: clouds.
The Organic Foreground: Plants
Authors: Novak Barbara
Published: November 2023

In Henry Inman’s Mumble the Peg (fig. 6.1), a simple, even banal genre scene, two children are playing a game. Dominating the foreground is a small, isolated plant. We look at it with some puzzlement. Does its prominence signal some message we are missing, some allegory of growth perhaps—or a plant symbol we cannot recognize? We are aware that an elaborate system waits to echo the plant’s promptings.

When H. T. Tuckerman responded to Mumble the Peg, he ignored the plant but concentrated on the “vegetable” life of the two boys: “The freshness of their looks, like the verdure on which they are stretched, is as the smile of the best spring that preceded the manhood ‘of our discontent’— gleaming through the long vista of years.” Elsewhere, in an essay on flowers, Tuckerman found in them “the objectless, spontaneous luxury of existence that belongs to childhood. They typify most eloquently the benign intent of the universe; and by gratifying, through the senses, the instinct of beauty, vindicate the poetry of life with a divine sanction.” Children and flowers were part of an organic cosmology, a sentimental universe that both illustrated and masked the cultural significance of plants.
Parsifal
Authors: Millington Barry
Published: November 2023

The first performances were given at Bayreuth on 26 and 28 July 1882 for members of the Society of Patrons, followed by 14 further performances in July and August. In an agreement with his patron, King Ludwig II, designed to pay off the deficit incurred by the first Bayreuth festival, Wagner was obliged to employ the Munich Hoftheater personnel to perform the work, which meant that he had to accept the Jewish Hermann Levi to conduct it. Wagner’s intention of consecrating the Festspielhaus with Parsifal is indicated by the term Bühnenweihfestspiel, which may be translated ‘festival play for the consecration of a stage’. In spite of the thirty-year embargo placed on performances outside Bayreuth, Parsifal was occasionally given elsewhere in those years: Ludwig II had it put on privately in Munich in the years after Wagner’s death; it was seen by members of the Wagner Society in Amsterdam in 1905, and again in 1906 and 1908; and in the face of bitter hostility from Bayreuth it was mounted by the Metropolitan in 1903 under Alfred Hertz.
When Will This Cruel War Be Over?
Authors: Weber Jennifer L
Published: November 2023

New disasters arrived with the change of seasons, making the winter of 1862–63 the bleakest period of the war yet. Military setbacks coupled with opposition to the Emancipation Proclamation stirred new levels of discontent in the Union. Rumors that the Northwest was preparing to break away from the East were broadly reported and widely believed. Enlistments dried up, prompting the Congress to adopt a new draft law, which in turn generated even more dissent. Copperheads, it became clear, were unwilling to grant Lincoln any unusual powers with which to fight the war. Conservative Democrats could not see, much less acknowledge, the danger that secession and the Confederacy posed to the Union. Furious at the lack of support from Peace Democrats, soldiers swore to avenge themselves when they returned home. Amid this turmoil the administration suffered a serious political wound when a rogue general arrested a former congressman for speaking against the government. Although men who loudly opposed the administration had been subject to detention for nearly two years, this was a new low. The arrest raised concerns even among Republicans about the government’s ability to wield power responsibly. And as that drama played out, the Army of the Potomac suffered another crushing defeat. The Army of the Potomac appeared to enter a new era on November 7, when General Ambrose E. Burnside took command. He wasted little time before acting. On November 15 Burnside moved his men forty miles from Warrenton, Virginia, to Falmouth. Fredericksburg lay just across the Rappahannock River, ripe and inviting. To attack, though, the Yankees would first have to figure out a way to cross the river. The plan was to build pontoon bridges, but foul-ups with the order for pontoons put Burnside behind schedule in attacking the city.