Ayn Rand: goddess of the market

She was born Alisa Rosenbaum, the eldest daughter in a haute-bourgeois Russian Jewish family that was ruined by the 1918 revolution. When she came to the United States in 1926, she reinvented herself as Ayn Rand, charismatic philosopher and novelist who inspired a generation of rebels and free-market theorists.

Historian Jennifer Burns, author of the new book Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, talks about Rand and her enduring influence in this recent lecture (iTunes) at the University of Virginia.

Some highlights of her talk:

• As a 12-year-old Rand witnessed the Russian Revolution and the confiscation of her father’s business. This personal history gave her impeccable anti-Communist credentials, and added to her credibility as a critic of any kind of socialism.
• Her philosophy, influenced by Nietzsche, saw the selfishness of creative people as a moral imperative and decried any governmental interference in personal freedom. She in turn influenced important policymakers like Alan Greenspan, who as a young man was one of her circle of admirers.

For more from Jennifer Burns, check out her 2006 course US History: from Civil War to Present (website), and her current course Intellectual History of the United States Since 1865 (website). Burns presents her subjects clearly and straightforwardly (if somewhat lacking in humor), and I learned a lot from her US history course. The Intellectual history course looks promising, but it is marred by the poor quality of the audio recording.

The REAL story of Thanksgiving (redux)

In honor of turkey day, I pulled this from the DIY Scholar archives:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Pilgrims, the Indians, the feasting — we learned all that stuff in school. But what’s the real story?

Sarah Hale. Image credit*

Check out American as Pumpkin Pie: A History of Thanksgiving (website, iTunes), a recent episode of the podcast BackStory – With the American History Guys. There you’ll hear about Sarah Hale, 19th century editor of a leading women’s magazine, who campaigned for more than 30 years to convince Americans that they needed a national Thanksgiving holiday. In Hale’s view, such a holiday would celebrate rural virtues, help Americanize immigrants and unite the country. It also showcased the role of women, Hale’s readers, who would produce the feast for their families, and by extension, fill their homes with love and domestic peace.

If you want to learn more about Sarah Hale’s campaign for Thanskgiving, read Pilgrims and Progress by religion scholar Anne Blue Wills of Davidson College, who is interviewed on the show.

Related posts:
BackStory keeps getting better
American history lite

*Image credit: Wikipedia. Public domain.

The Russian revolution on Mars

Here’s an offbeat bit of cinema for your weekend viewing pleasure: Aelita: Queen of Mars, a 1924 silent film made in the Soviet Union about space travelers who arrive on Mars and help the downtrodden workers unite and throw off their exploiting overlords. You might want to fast-forward through the early bits to get to the excitement.

You can look at the first segment right here:

Reading Homer as an anthropologist

What happens when you stop thinking of the Iliad as a work of fiction but instead see it as a primary text to help explain an ancient society?

That’s what archaeologist Tara Carter does in lecture 21 and lecture 22 of her great UC San Diego course Prehistory and the Birth of Civilization (feed).

She presents the Iliad as a window into the culture and norms of the society of Mycenaen Greece, a civilization that collapsed 400 years before the Iliad took written form sometime around 800 BCE.

The Lion Gate at Mycenae. Image credit*

She presents evidence that the Iliad, originally an oral epic, retains echoes of the vanished civilization that probably gave it birth. Here are some of the echoes according to Carter:

• The Iliad reflects a “chiefly society” in which powerful chiefs controlled trade and raiding and shared the profits with their subordinates. (Earlier in the course she described the Vikings of Iceland, another chiefly society, the subject of her own academic research.)
• The “horse taming” Trojans, as Homer called them, were probably dominant in the Mediterranean horse trade, and controlling that trade may have had more to do with the Trojan war then beauty of Helen.
• The conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon is an example of the kind of conflict that arises in chiefly societies between skilled warriors and the official chiefs.

For more on the Trojans, check out the following:

• This lecture by Yale historian Donald Kagan, part of his course Introduction to Ancient Greek History (website, iTunes).
• The Trojan War – Myth or Fact: Recent Excavations at Troy (iTunes), presented by archaeologist C. Brian Rose, part of a series from archaeology museum at the University of Pennsylvania.

(Note: UCSD classes will vanish from the server in mid-December. Grab Carter’s course while you can.)

*Image credit: Wikipedia. Creative Commons License.

Windows 7: not ready for prime time

If you are a Mac or a Linux user, or if you lack the computer nerdiness gene, you’ll want to skip this post. But if you are tempted by the current hoopla to upgrade your Windows XP machine to Windows 7, read on. It is a cautionary tale.

I have a reasonably peppy 18-month-old Dell OptiPlex that has, with a few hiccups, been satisfactorily running Windows XP. Yet I was lured by the reviewers who have heaped praise on Microsoft’s new release. And I thought it might solve some of the annoyances in my XP set up, like the propensity of my speech recognition software (Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10) to crash at odd moments.

So, I bought a Windows 7 Professional (64-bit) upgrade, backed up my data and took the plunge.

At first, things went swimmingly. The Windows Easy Transfer tool worked as advertised moving all my data files and settings. I found drivers for all of my peripherals and then I started reinstalling all my programs. (One big mistake: I did not make a “system image” when I had Windows 7 up and running with all the new drivers installed. You’ll see why in a moment.)

I was delighted that I could use Dragon without a system crash. So far so good.

Then, somewhere in the process of installing my other programs, things started going haywire. First, the “sleep” function stopped working. My system wouldn’t “wake up” and I had to manually turn it off and on again. I tried going back to a restore point, but the restore procedure failed, and it wiped out all of my other restore points. Since I had not made a system image earlier, I was out of luck.

Things quickly went from bad to worse. Programs started freezing and the trusty old control-alt-delete would not terminate them. When I tried to reboot, the system got stuck on a black screen and would not go forward. In short… I went through many hours of computer hell.

Finally, I gave up and went back to XP. Fortunately, I had made a disk image backup of my old system with Acronis True Image 2009, and within an hour I was back to my old, not so trusty XP system.

So what are the morals?

1. Make sure to make a disk image of your current system with a product like Acronis so you can go back to XP if you have to.  (Note, on my system Acronis True Image 2009 worked fine, but the 2010 version crashed my XP system, and when I put it on W7 it  seemed to make my W7 problems worse.)

2. Once your W7 system is up and running, use the system backup software to make a disk image, so you don’t have to rely on the flaky  restore point system. (At this point I need to grouse about the W7 backup and restore tools.  Why should a failed system restore wipe out all of my earlier restore points? I did make a disk image using W7’s native back up program, but when I tried to use it, I got the dreaded black screen system-hang.  Where is an elegant, easy to use back up option like the Mac’s Time Machine?)

3. Make more system images along the way, so you can roll it back if installing your software breaks something.

My next computer will be a Mac.

Unwanted side effects of democracy

Maybe it’s the legacy of the Cold War — all of those years of being the bastion of freedom and democracy — but somehow Americans got in the habit of viewing democracy as something completely good, something that everyone in his or her right mind must want, like a chocolate sundae with no calories.

But democracy, like a chocolate sundae, can have unwanted side effects. In this lecture, historian Margaret Anderson relates the cautionary tale of World War I, a war that no European leader really wanted and a war that they seemed powerless to end.

Anderson says that if the war had erupted 50 years earlier, before the advent of near universal suffrage, the leaders would have had much more flexibility in avoiding the war, and if war actually broke out, they would have had an easier time in ending it.

“Why didn’t they just stop this madness?” she asks. Among other forces, she indicts nationalism and democracy. Because of nationalism, leaders framed their alliances as quasi-fraternal bonds in order to get popular support. That made shifting these alliances much much harder.

The Royal Irish Rifles in a communication trench during the Battle of the Somme, 1916. Image credit*

And the nature of democratic politics made it hard to end the war. Leaders had sold the war to their constituents as necessary for national survival. So, once the stalemate became apparent, how could they back down and negotiate a settlement with the devilish enemy?

Leaders “believed that their countries had not endured such terrible sacrifices in order to leave this conflict with minor adjustments in the balance of power. The more people die, the more you have to get out of the war to justify the war itself.”

Note: This lecture is part of Anderson’s excellent UC Berkeley course Modern Europe, 1453 to the Present (feed, website).

*Image credit: Wikipedia. Public domain.

The Cold War is history

Many conditions were necessary for the end of the Cold War to happen as it did.

In an academic conference, entitled The Cold War is History (iTunes, website), Stanford historian James Sheehan reminds us that even when the Berlin wall fell, reunification of Germany was not a done deal. In fact, there were two enormously important developments that allowed reunification to happen.

First was the eclipse of violence in Western Europe, that is the disappearance of the possibility of a European war. “By the 1970s the Europeans had given up the idea that there would be a war between themselves,” Sheehan notes.

Second, was the development of European institutions that represented the willingness of European states to open up their borders and share sovereignty.

Both of these developments, seen in the long historical perspective, were unprecedented. But because Europeans had given up the option of war, and because Germany was part of the European project, its old enemies, the Allies of World War II, were willing to allow German reunification to happen, even if Margaret Thatcher had to be dragged along kicking and screaming.

Listeners’ note: Sheehan’s remarks are in the first video of the three videos of the conference. To skip the long-winded introductions, fast forward past the first 12 minutes.

For more from James Sheehan, check out his excellent Stanford course History of the International System.

Today’s Financial Crisis in a Historical Mirror

Economist and blogger extraordinaire Brad DeLong takes a whirlwind tour of economic history in his recent talk, Today’s Financial Crisis in a Historical Mirror (weblink).

First comes the tale of the Panic of 1825. As DeLong tells it, this was the first time a central bank (Bank of England) intervened to avert a financial crisis by bailing out an important bank (“Can you say ‘too big to fail?’” DeLong asks.)

After a short detour into economic theory (Irving Fisher’s Quantity Theory of Money) to explain the amount of spending in an economy, DeLong goes on to narrate more recent history: the dotcom bust, the hubris of Alan Greenspan and our current dilemma.

Note to you econ nerds out there: can anyone explain why DeLong thinks that expanding the money supply and getting treasury interest rates “closer to normal levels” is a good idea? To my untutored mind this looks like a prescription for inflation.

Technical note: to download this talk, it helps to have a download utility like DownloadHelper (see How to download streaming audio and video/ Part 1).

Related posts:

• Slouching Towards Utopia?
• Great Recessions-Lessons Learned from Japan
• The best financial crisis lectures yet
• What would John Maynard do?

We think what we speak

Each language has a toolkit to help us learn what to pay attention to.

So argues Stanford psychology professor Lera Boroditsky during this episode of the Stanford University radio show Entitled Opinions (about Life and Literature) (website, iTunes).

Boroditsky studies how the languages we use influence the way we think. And she’s come up with some startling examples.

For instance, the Kuuk Thaayorre people of northern Australia don’t have words for our concepts of relative location: right, left, forward and back. Instead, when they refer to a location, they always use cardinal directions like north and south. So, they say things like “there is an ant on your southeast leg.” Not surprisingly, these people always know which way is north, even without technology like a compass. That’s a handy skill for a nomadic forager to have.

She has also studied the way languages with grammatical gender influence how people think about everyday objects. For example, the noun “bridge” is feminine in German, but masculine in Spanish. When asked to describe a bridge, German speakers are more likely to use adjectives like beautiful and elegant, while Spanish speakers are more likely to use words like strong and sturdy.

It’s not that languages determine what we think, she notes. People after all create languages. Instead, it’s a two-way street: thought creates language and language creates thought.

(Listening hint: skip the first eight minutes of the interview, which is a long-winded introduction by interviewer Joshua Landy, a Stanford professor of French.)

Doubt and the New Testament

Yale University religion professor Dale Martin has some words of warning for the students in his course Introduction to New Testament History and Literature (website, iTunes):

“De omnibus dubitandum.”

Say it loud, he tells his students. Say it with feeling. “Say it tonight, before you go to sleep. Say it in the morning, when you wake. Every day of the semester say it before you go to sleep.”

What does it mean? Doubt everything. “And that includes me, because I’m going to lie to you a lot all semester long. Or, at least, somebody will accuse me of that I guarantee.”

A folio from P46, an early 3rd century collection of Pauline epistles. Image credit*

With his Texas twang and exhortations such as these, Martin’s speaking style has a passing resemblance to the cadences of a televangelist. Indeed Martin, a self-described “former fundamentalist” repeatedly emphasizes that it’s perfectly legitimate to read the New Testament through the eyes of faith.

But he has a different mission. He wants to teach his students to read the New Testament critically, as historical documents with a context and an agenda. He shows the class how it’s done in lecture 5, The New Testament as History, in which he contrasts the itinerary of Paul’s ministry in Acts of the Apostles with Paul’s own account of his travels in his letters. Then he asks the students to explain the many conflicts and contradictions.

Who is more likely to be telling the truth, Martin wants to know. Is it Paul or the author of Acts? They can’t both be right. And its the job of the doubting historian to try to pull apart each side’s likely motives to get at the truth.

Related posts:
How the Biblical texts became Holy Scripture
Web resources on early Christianity
Dreaming of the Apocalypse
The World of the Hebrew Bible

*Image credit: Wikipedia. Public domain.