Perhaps this is fitting for Halloween... but I just had to mention my new obsession...witches.

Strangely enough when you study Early Modern England and you have a knack of finding stuff about Puritans and fanatical religious groups... witches appear and I love reading about them, studying the process of finding them and how they prosecuted them.


I have effectively gone down the rabbit hole at this point and found a new obsession.

Suffolk, England apparently, in the 1500s was a hotbed for witches and so I am currently reading all I can about this.

Happy Halloween! 

Violence

You know, there are moments when I read something and I feel the immediate need to share. This just occurred as I read some of Weber's Peasants Into Frenchmen. 

 

Take note of the dates associated with the text as I explain this awesome story. So, apparently French villages liked other French villages about as much as hipster coffee dude likes Starbucks ( I like both btw). To often settle inter-village conflict by actually going into physical battle... Described as a struggle with massive injury using staves, stones, cudgels, gouging, and biting. Yep, if Jean in one village thought Louis in another gave him the stink eye... Each village would basically assault each other until they got worn out. This was the 19th century btw, not the Middle Ages lol. Gotta love history.

Research

The persistent bother with having some sort of ongoing blog and having a very busy life...resides in the fact that there are huge swaths of time where I completely forget that I had a blog in the first place. It is not personal or intentional, I just have so much going on that I forget.

I have now survived my first full month of a PhD program without falling completely apart and dying on the inside. I am enjoying my European and Pedagogy courses and I feel like I am on the right path.

On the educational/research side... I have read some pretty cool things.



There was a village in  what is now Germany that is fantastic because they secretly (I say secretly because most of them tried to deny it at first) ritually buried a live bull at a crossroad to stop an epidemic of hoof and mouth disease in the village...yea you heard me right.

Check the book out here:

Can you imagine this conversation in the beginning... 
Hey guys we have to stop this disease, it could kill all our cows.

Oh man yea, but what are we going to do?

Well I heard that in a few villages over they had a pig that was sick and they did this and well, it worked I think.

What did they do

Well... You see... they took a male pig to the crossroads at twilight and buried him alive.

Uhhh...that sounds crazy and kind of pagan.

Yea, but it worked.

LETS DO IT!

Sad Cow does not like this idea.

Darwin and the Complexity of History

History is always pretty complicated.
The word complex is probably scribed into every history book known to man because no history is ever easy.
Many major figures in history are usually a mix of good and bad... often contradictory. 

I did not know anything really about Charles Darwin prior to this semester, one of the reasons I found an entire class based upon his work and its relation to the Victorian Era so interesting....

Now that I know him...he is pretty complex lol.

Darwin was a huge humanitarian, he loathed slavery and it pained him to see people abused, animals abused for that matter.

His whole family, a mix of the Wedgwoods (yea the tea pot and dinner china people) and Darwins were HUGE abolitionists and very anti-cruelty to a high degree...


When Darwin was a child and he would fish at his Wedgwood relations home, they taught him to soak worms in brine prior to hooking them so they would not feel the metal hook going into them.  Let us think about this for a second... he did not want the worm to feel pain.

This did not stop Darwin from being a HUGE hunter, he was a hunting enthusiast and also... when he was on his trip to the Galapagos... he captured, killed, and preserved hundreds of specimens, shooting tons of game to eat.  I am sure he tried to do it in the most humane way as possible, but still... does not want to make that worm suffer.

One of the books I am reading attributes Darwin's entire exploration into the origin of species and man to his hatred of slavery and in defiance of the normal excuse that somehow those enslaved by other men were lesser...not in the same species. As disgusting and horrible as it sounds, that horrible excuse was pretty prominent and others all the way through until the Civil Rights movement used those kind of disgusting and dim witted excuses to deny people the vote, rights, or even human dignity. 

Darwin witnessed the harsh treatment of slaves on some of his trips and it devastated him... and so he wanted to prove that regardless of skin, people came from the same stock.

I already liked Darwin, I just like him a lot more now. 

GREEN BEER!!!!!???!! WOOOOO... no.

We all fall for it.. even I do as I sit here after having shamrock shaped pancakes for breakfast and green rice krispy treats all day while drinking Irish Breakfast Tea.
(ok well the ones of us who are obsessive about things Irish)... we get all caught up in the fervor of St. Patrick's Day and yes, I will have a guinness tonight as well, as I should.

But... what is it all about?

The very modernized and proper depiction of St. Patrick

No... he did not run all the snakes out of Ireland, though the comics with him driving the car with them in it is pretty hilarious and fantastic.

He was not even from Ireland.

But...that is OK, we are an adaptive society of people, we go with it. 

He was probably born somewhere in Scotland in the late 3oos, so you know...records are not the best. It is not like his mum had the opportunity to facebook every moment of his life... look Patrick's first bowl of gruel, look Patrick playing with his stick doll... nope... 

Patrick did not have the best adolescence... I mean if you are a young teen and you are kidnapped, made a slave, and then forced to tend sheep in Ireland, it is not exactly what you planned on doing (and if you did...well, special... just special)

Eventually he escaped and began working to Christianize the pagan Irish, which turned out to be pretty successful since when I visited Ireland I found more Churches in Dublin than I did in Middle Georgia and well, wow...that is a difficult thing to do.

He lived like many of us think the mendicant orders lived during the middle ages...vow of poverty, chaste, scant living...and he continued to work to turn people to God, inspiring others in Ireland to follow in his footsteps, so pretty cool guy, I can see why he has a holiday.

So...the Shamrock?  Simple, he used it to explain the holy trinity..worked out pretty well. 

Do not even ask me to explain how it turned into green beer and drunken lunacy.  I went to the Savannah celebration once, I am good.  

That being said... I am currently wearing a green tshirt with a giant cat leprechaun on it.  

Have a Happy St. Patrick's Day! 

The Past is Not Ideal

This is going to be quick because I am currently studying for my graduate comprehensive exams, but something occurred to me this morning as I read...something that I encounter a lot and something that really aggravates me about people who look to the past as "better times".

First... many people have this idealistic view of the past so let me just shatter that for a moment and say that just because I love studying the past in no way means I want to revisit it.

We are a progressive society (for the most part) and we move forward in the hopes to make life better for all people...at least some of us do.

So... first...
Those nuts who think that we should go back to the days of the founders when FREEDOM was real!!!!  This is the worst representation of 'Mercuh that I can think of and it is an example of the growing dangers of civil religion and nationalism that I have seen in a while.
The 1700s were not ideal for anyone...well unless you were a wealthy, white, and land owning male. Women had no rights, no property and were at the will of their fathers or husbands... there was slavery... and a lot of the population could not vote... how is that ideal?
By the way... during our Second president's tenure...we had some of the strongest censorship laws in our history with the alien and sedition acts.... just saying.

Second...
the 1950s
Um Red Scare people and Jim Crow
I am not even going past that...that is enough. 

Thanks 

Grit and Darwin

I am in full paper mode right now so I do not have much time to talk...but after reading most of Desmond and Moore's biography of Darwin, I have such a different perception of him.
I always pictured him as this high society naturalist with an edge, but... during his time on the Beagle , Charles Darwin was anything but dainty. He spent most of his time rouging it on the plains of South America with native guides and riding with gauchos, eating armadillo and puma and liking it. He had to bargain with warlords and tread over hundreds of miles of rough territory just to look at new flora and species. 
I just did not know... it is a pretty interesting thing.