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I just discovered that I am a tenth cousin (or so) of Sarah Palin: we share a common ancestor in Elder William Brewster. (On the upside, Adlai Stevenson, Thomas Pynchon, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Julia Child, and Cardinal Avery Dulles are also distant connections).
I started messing around with some genealogical searches after stumbling across the fact that I'm very distantly related to Charles Best (his grandfater, John Burbidge Best, was a cousin of one of my ancestors). I found out a few interesting things.
Let's start with the Burbidges first, shall we? A quick overview of the Nova Scotia male line is at a site dedicated to the Nova Scotia Eatons, maintained by a third cousin.
First of all, let me say that there is no evidence at all linking the Nova Scotia Burbidges with the Globe Burbages/Burbidges. It's the same name - James spelled it both ways in surviving documents - and the familie may have come from the same areas as the ones identified by the English census of 1881 as the main locus of the name - except that we came from the Isle of Wight (with some oral traditions of being connected more inland) and the very late traditions would put the Burbages in Warwickshire near Shakespeare (it is one of the two areas with the higest concentrations of names). But the records for our branch peter out in the early 18th century, and there's no obvious connection to bridge the intervening hundred years and the gap in space with London, where their family settled. I'm sure we have common ancestors, but it's an Anglo-Saxon surname and there's been a long time for it to develop and be spread around in that area.
2) There are more interesting connections. Let's start with the next in order: I had been told that we had Mayflower blood via settler ancestors (i.e. Americans who came up to Nova Scotia before the Revolution), so I decided to track that down.
We have several settler lines. The Clarkes/Clarks are one, but they resolve into relatively uninteresting late connections in New England. More interesting are the Rands, who came up from New England in about 1760, and who go back, via Martha's Vineyard, Connecticut, and Massachussetts, to Plymouth in the 1620s - but not quite to the Mayflower. The earliest in the New World of this line is a James Doughty/Doty (who shares a last name with a Mayflower passenger, Edward Doughty/Doty - actually an indentured servant who had problems with the law and fought the first duel in New England), who was born in Plymouth in 1624, was a soldier in King Philip's War, and settled back in Plymouth. However, he's either unrelated to the Mayflower man or (my guess, if the location of birth is correct) is a filius nullius who took his father's name.
There are some other prominentish names in that cluster, by early New England standards, but none which have any chance of Mayflower connections.
3) I'm going to return to the settler link on that line, though. The man who actually came up from New England in the 1760s married a woman, also from New England, who was descended from Doughty; his name was Jonathan Rand. His father was a Caleb Rand who seems to have been peripatetic, and whose parents were a John Rand and Mehitable Rand, nee Call.
Mehitable is the interesting, or at least, documented, link. Her father came over from England at about the age of one year, and came from what seems to have been a prominent gentry family. There's a history of the Calls from England by a family member which records a five-generation link back from John Call (her father) to one Richard Calle, who married the daughter of one Sir John Paston. In fact, the marriage is discussed - not positively - in the Paston letters: he was Paston's bailiff and the family was in trade (grocers, though not minor: a neice married one Henry Bacon, also a grocer, who was twice Mayor of Norwich. (There is a much more extensive history which this short document seems to have drawn on, but which I haven't looked at in detail -- this one has no interest in any American branch of the family.)
The Calls may also have a separate branch, a first cousins of the one who came over on my line, who was a Mayflower pilgrim, Thomas Rogers -- his parents (Thomas Matthew Rogers and Alice Calle) were contemporaneous with Shakespeare in Stratford, but as they were Puritans and John was a recusant, I have to assume that they were not on good terms. However, there may have been two Alice Calles with close but not identical dates -- there is little detail in the Call text regarding Alice -- in which case the identity does not hold.
The Pastons, to get back to them, were genuinely prominent and well-documented. They were Norman-descended gentry with some noble ancestors, which include the de Glanvilles - yes, including the justiciar and legal author - and via them there are links to Norman nobility - they really did come over with the Conquereror, at which time the Pastons are already prominent and recorded in the Domesday Book - and via them to both Danish Jarls a-Viking, Dukes of Normandy, and Kings of Brittany and Italy, and so, ultimately, to Charlemagne.
Media Illiteracy, Exemplum N
Jul. 13th, 2010 09:59 am
The Telly article with the title "Historians locate King Arthur's Round Table" has obviously been written by a total historical illiterate.
It does make some references via a genuine historian to Gildas' De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae, which really is a source for the period (but which does not, contrary to the impression left in the article, mention Arthur, although it does mention Aurelanius Ambrosius and the battle of Mount Badon).
It certainly does not reflect the fact that the entire Round Table element is not only not in the historical sources but was made up out of whole cloth by romance writers centuries after the historical period.
Parliamentary privilege
Apr. 27th, 2010 04:08 pmThe Speaker of the House has just reaffirmed the principle of parliamentary supremacy over the cabinet/government. He has allowed two weeks for some practical arrangement to be made between the government and parliament before giving an order as a result of the finding.
We are getting very close, again, to a face-off mirroring that of the English Civil War (though, one hopes, less violent) ...
Those who do not remember the past...
Jan. 16th, 2010 09:39 am... are doomed to repeat its arguments.
The National Post has a couple of articles on theodicy today responding to Pat Robertson's little off-the-meds observations on Haiti. Now I expect nothing and get less from Robertson, but maybe some journalist has heard of the Lisbon earthquake? Hello? or maybe just Candide?
Addendum, January 22nd:
The NYT had an article on Voltaire with a reference to his poem on the disaster in Lisbon as well as Candide. So all is not completely lost.
The National Post has a couple of articles on theodicy today responding to Pat Robertson's little off-the-meds observations on Haiti. Now I expect nothing and get less from Robertson, but maybe some journalist has heard of the Lisbon earthquake? Hello? or maybe just Candide?
Addendum, January 22nd:
The NYT had an article on Voltaire with a reference to his poem on the disaster in Lisbon as well as Candide. So all is not completely lost.
Reality meets fiction
Dec. 9th, 2008 09:30 amThis is not new news, of course, but:
Michael Ignatieff's father's (George Ignatieff, familiar to Torontonians via his Trinity and U of T connections) father's (Count Pavel Ignatieff) father was Count Nicholas Pavlovitch Ignatieff of the Flashman books.
This at least ought to get him extra name recognition outside Canada.
The effective threat of the Conservatives to prorogue Parliament to avoid facing a vote of non confidence effectively moves the crisis from a parliamentary one to a constitutional one -- because it amounts to trying to govern not only without the consent of Parliament but against the will of Parliament. This is admittedly for a relatively short period (a month and a half) but it still raises echoes of the Civil War, and and Charles' project of governing without Parliamentary support. At least Charles had an alternative (Filmerian) model of his own for legitimacy, but for good or ill that model has been decisively dropped from the repertoire, if not by the Restoration, then certainly by the Revolution of 1688.
It is arguable that the lack of legitimacy of such an attempt is so fundamental that it would justify the leaders of the opposition going to the Governor General and asking for the reins of government to be passed from the Harper Conservatives to the colaition without the formal prelude of a non-confidence vote on the floor of the House. The Crown, through its representative here, is the final bulwark against fundamentally tyrannical modes of government.
This is especially true as the populist arguments being used by the Conservatives are entirely specious. In a parliamentary democracy, we do not elect a government, or a Prime Minister. We elect M.P.s who, collectively, decide to support a government/ministry and thus a Prime Minister. To put it in another way, the Conservatives were not elected as the government of Canada; they were elected with a Parliamentary plurality only. There is nothing illegitimate in other parties deciding to form an alternative and more viable government.
The fact that the Conservative base in the relatively sparsely populated rural ridings as opposed to the Liberal/NDP base in heavily populated urban ridings means that more voters actually support the parties making up the coalition than the current government itself -- 42.4% as opposed to the Conservatives' 37.6% -- is very nice from an abstract "democratic legitimacy" point of view; butit has little to say about the real legitimacy of the proposed government in our system. If this succeeds -- and I see neither any likelihood nor any reason that it will not -- then there will be a substantial irony in the fact that this election will have brought the most concentratedly urban government to power in the history of the country (the Bloc has a rural base, but it has merely pledged to support the government, and would not be part of it).
I have a fair degree of sympathy for Charles, because my judgement of him is that he was both sincere and well-meaning, if ill-judged. I have none for Harper, and doubt that he will ever generate a posthumous Eikon Basilike, or a tribute like that in the Horatian Ode.
Diverging cultures
Jul. 9th, 2007 08:22 pmWhen I was born, Canada had no "universal health care" system. Four years before I was born, my father went to graduate school in the United States and had only a very minimal sense of being in a different culture during that time.
By the time I was twenty-one, Canada not only had a universal health care system but had started to think of it (by contrast with the United States) as a distinguishing mark of the Canadian polity (although this would be ramped up even more in the ensuing couple of decades). When I was twenty-one, I went to graduate school in the United States, and felt myself to be usually in a slightly uncomfortably alien culture. (This wasn't because I hadn't been abroad before: I'd lived in France and visted a number of other countries which are, on their surface, far more different from Canada than the U.S. is.)
At present -- witness Michael Moore's new film on health care -- it looks as though the U.S. is never likely to adopt any form of universal health care, and its political culture seems to have wandered off in a wildly different direction from every other country in the world.
This seems to me to be a story not about Canada (which had changed in terms of its self-definition over the period of time) but about the United States. Up until sometime shortly after I was born there had been a broad common song-sheet, as it were, from which the Western democracies had sung. Some might be a little faster and some slower, but they were all following the same general path. Canada was rather behind the European countries on the health-care front (as on a number of others), but when it implemented health care it was recognizably acting in harmony with most of its peers. Similarly, the adoption of a set of loosely interconnected values -- a broad secularization of the official levels of social expression, the adoption of "gender" equality and later expansions of equality rights (most recently the extension of some form or another of marital rights to homosexuals -- marriage in Canada, civil unions in the U.K., for example), the relative demilitarization of society -- not only has Canada's military muscle declined since the end of WWII, but the way in which e.g. regimental churches, cadets, and other quasi-miltary or miltary-liked institutions used to be integrated with Canadian society has prety well evaporated).
Some of the changes in Canada would seem to move us more in the direction of the U.S. After all, we have much weakened the monarchical affiliations of the public arena -- no crowns on pillarboxes, any more -- and we've adopted a Charter of Rights which moved us heavily in the direction of U.S. Bill of Rights jurisprudence.
But at some point the U.S. dropped out of singing from the shared songsheet. Some of the differences may now look rooted quite a long ways back -- the evisceration of the "left" in America by the New Deal compared to other western democracies goes back to the Depression, and American exceptionalism goes back much farther than that. In the early sixties, there was already the Beyond the Fringe joke that "they have the Republican Party, which is the equivalent of our Conservative Party, and the Democratic Party, which is the equivalent of our Conservative Party" -- although that is almost as much a commentary on the way in which the Liberals (not yet the LibDems) had dropped out of effective contention in the U.K. And there are still plenty of people in the U.S. (mainly in the cities and the "blue" areas on the American electoral map) who share ideals with the governing elites of the rest of the western societies. But the U.S. is now notable as the great holdout on public health care (see, e.g. the comments to this Crooked Timber thread). The Equal Rights Amendment was unable to be ratified. They are markedly more miltarily oriented than any other western country I've been in (the only country which has felt more suffused with a military theme was China, which is hardly Western).
You can find people in Canada who think, roughly, like "mainstream" Americans, but they are relatively few and far between. (They're still probably more common than in any other country.) Mark Steyn, David Warren, and David Frum are, after all, all Canadian in origin, and all stand rather to the right of the American spectrum.
By the time my five-year-old daughter is going to graduate school, the U.S. is likely to be so different that adjustment to its norms will probably be like adjusting to the norms of Germany, or France, rather than the nice, close, almost-cousins feeling that worked in my father's day.
By the time I was twenty-one, Canada not only had a universal health care system but had started to think of it (by contrast with the United States) as a distinguishing mark of the Canadian polity (although this would be ramped up even more in the ensuing couple of decades). When I was twenty-one, I went to graduate school in the United States, and felt myself to be usually in a slightly uncomfortably alien culture. (This wasn't because I hadn't been abroad before: I'd lived in France and visted a number of other countries which are, on their surface, far more different from Canada than the U.S. is.)
At present -- witness Michael Moore's new film on health care -- it looks as though the U.S. is never likely to adopt any form of universal health care, and its political culture seems to have wandered off in a wildly different direction from every other country in the world.
This seems to me to be a story not about Canada (which had changed in terms of its self-definition over the period of time) but about the United States. Up until sometime shortly after I was born there had been a broad common song-sheet, as it were, from which the Western democracies had sung. Some might be a little faster and some slower, but they were all following the same general path. Canada was rather behind the European countries on the health-care front (as on a number of others), but when it implemented health care it was recognizably acting in harmony with most of its peers. Similarly, the adoption of a set of loosely interconnected values -- a broad secularization of the official levels of social expression, the adoption of "gender" equality and later expansions of equality rights (most recently the extension of some form or another of marital rights to homosexuals -- marriage in Canada, civil unions in the U.K., for example), the relative demilitarization of society -- not only has Canada's military muscle declined since the end of WWII, but the way in which e.g. regimental churches, cadets, and other quasi-miltary or miltary-liked institutions used to be integrated with Canadian society has prety well evaporated).
Some of the changes in Canada would seem to move us more in the direction of the U.S. After all, we have much weakened the monarchical affiliations of the public arena -- no crowns on pillarboxes, any more -- and we've adopted a Charter of Rights which moved us heavily in the direction of U.S. Bill of Rights jurisprudence.
But at some point the U.S. dropped out of singing from the shared songsheet. Some of the differences may now look rooted quite a long ways back -- the evisceration of the "left" in America by the New Deal compared to other western democracies goes back to the Depression, and American exceptionalism goes back much farther than that. In the early sixties, there was already the Beyond the Fringe joke that "they have the Republican Party, which is the equivalent of our Conservative Party, and the Democratic Party, which is the equivalent of our Conservative Party" -- although that is almost as much a commentary on the way in which the Liberals (not yet the LibDems) had dropped out of effective contention in the U.K. And there are still plenty of people in the U.S. (mainly in the cities and the "blue" areas on the American electoral map) who share ideals with the governing elites of the rest of the western societies. But the U.S. is now notable as the great holdout on public health care (see, e.g. the comments to this Crooked Timber thread). The Equal Rights Amendment was unable to be ratified. They are markedly more miltarily oriented than any other western country I've been in (the only country which has felt more suffused with a military theme was China, which is hardly Western).
You can find people in Canada who think, roughly, like "mainstream" Americans, but they are relatively few and far between. (They're still probably more common than in any other country.) Mark Steyn, David Warren, and David Frum are, after all, all Canadian in origin, and all stand rather to the right of the American spectrum.
By the time my five-year-old daughter is going to graduate school, the U.S. is likely to be so different that adjustment to its norms will probably be like adjusting to the norms of Germany, or France, rather than the nice, close, almost-cousins feeling that worked in my father's day.
Here's an exercise I sometimes do: look at the things around me, or at what I'm wearing and think what would be different if it were:
The social aspect can be complicated by considering more general factors such as what level of income one would be likely to have (i.e. what part of the population was middle class compared to now, and what that meant), but I tend to ignore that, because the point of the exercise is to think about technical aspects of change rather than simply the social changes in the interim. If I start worrying about more general changes I also have to consider, e.g. the impact of different tariff rules on what would have been available to purchase, which goes way beyond my knowledge. On the other hand, where technical advances have made a function affordable instead of unaffordable, I do consider that: thus, say, anything where the real cost has dropped sharply due to mass production techniques will have availability considered.
Or consider my bedroom. In 1960:
Still, things map fairly closely on a functional level. A century ago, though:
In 1860:
One thing that tends to emerge is that although technical changes since 1960 have been pervasive in terms of how things are made (and they have been extensive: fuel injection instead of carburettors, much more extensive use of plastics, CD players/MP3 players instead of phonographs, digital cameras replacing film, much improved appliances and engines in just about every way) most functional slots today have equivalents (with the gaping exception of the personal computer). On the other hand, as one moves back to the beginning of the twentieth century, there are much bigger gaps in functionality.
The exercise really has a more interesting tone, though, when you turn it around. Imagine standing in that equivalent room in 1960 (or 1907, or 1860) and trying to project what sorts of changes would take place over the next N years. You'd probably focus on the big, large-scale things that you might foresee; the smaller-scale changes would probably escape you. I'll take a simple example: many of the toys which my five-year-old daughter buys with her allowance money are cheap molded plastic. In fact, they're so cheap that she can buy ten dolls for the price of a children's paperback. The difference in the price factor for "cheap small toy" is so considerable that it has a massive influence on her experience of play compared with my experience when I was young, when toys (even plastic toys) cost a good deal more.
- the year I was born (1960)
- a century ago
- a century before the year I was born?
The social aspect can be complicated by considering more general factors such as what level of income one would be likely to have (i.e. what part of the population was middle class compared to now, and what that meant), but I tend to ignore that, because the point of the exercise is to think about technical aspects of change rather than simply the social changes in the interim. If I start worrying about more general changes I also have to consider, e.g. the impact of different tariff rules on what would have been available to purchase, which goes way beyond my knowledge. On the other hand, where technical advances have made a function affordable instead of unaffordable, I do consider that: thus, say, anything where the real cost has dropped sharply due to mass production techniques will have availability considered.
Or consider my bedroom. In 1960:
- The digital alarm clock would probably have been a mechanical "Baby Ben" which required winding every evening
- Shampoo, aftershave, etc. would be in glass, not plastic, bottles (I ignore specific brand differences)
- The CD player would have been an LP player, if I had had one in my bedroom at all; the radio aspect might have been filled by a transistor radio (I certainly had my childhood bedroom furnished with a cheap LP player for stories at night; but given the relative newness of the LP format in 1960, I'm not sure whether this would have been likely then)
- More books would have been sewn rather than perfect bound
- The bookcase would be in a more conservative style (it's IVAR shelving, from IKEA)
- No compact fluorescent lights
Still, things map fairly closely on a functional level. A century ago, though:
- No alarm clock at all
- Shampoo, aftershave, etc. would still be in glass, not plastic, bottles, but the razor would probably have been a straight razor (the Gillette safety razor was introduced in 1903, but had not penetrated the market or become standard by 1907)
- There would have been nothing to fill the role of the CD player/radio
- All books would have been sewn rather than perfect bound, and would have been hardcover. Fewer books, as well, because their real cost was much higher
- The bookcase would definitely be in a more conservative style -- if I had had enough books to warrant having an (overflow) bookcase in the bedroom
- Maybe electric lights, depending on where in the country I lived and how well off I was, but I'm betting that I'd have been using candles.
In 1860:
- No alarm clock at all
- The razor would definitely have been a straight razor
- There would have been nothing to fill the role of the CD player/radio
- All books would have been sewn rather than perfect bound, and would have been hardcover. Fewer books, as well, because their real cost was much higher
- The bookcase would definitely be in a more conservative style -- if I had had enough books to warrant having an (overflow) bookcase in the bedroom
- No electric lights
One thing that tends to emerge is that although technical changes since 1960 have been pervasive in terms of how things are made (and they have been extensive: fuel injection instead of carburettors, much more extensive use of plastics, CD players/MP3 players instead of phonographs, digital cameras replacing film, much improved appliances and engines in just about every way) most functional slots today have equivalents (with the gaping exception of the personal computer). On the other hand, as one moves back to the beginning of the twentieth century, there are much bigger gaps in functionality.
The exercise really has a more interesting tone, though, when you turn it around. Imagine standing in that equivalent room in 1960 (or 1907, or 1860) and trying to project what sorts of changes would take place over the next N years. You'd probably focus on the big, large-scale things that you might foresee; the smaller-scale changes would probably escape you. I'll take a simple example: many of the toys which my five-year-old daughter buys with her allowance money are cheap molded plastic. In fact, they're so cheap that she can buy ten dolls for the price of a children's paperback. The difference in the price factor for "cheap small toy" is so considerable that it has a massive influence on her experience of play compared with my experience when I was young, when toys (even plastic toys) cost a good deal more.
Wodehouse and the Great War
Jun. 4th, 2007 07:46 pm![[info]](https://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
james_nicoll has posted here regarding Wodehouse with an ensuing discussion regarding the place of WWI in the Wodehouseverse -- opinions seem to vary between the "quintessentially postwar" to "WWI is entirely excluded".Wodehouse was already doing his "classic" type of froth before and all the way through the war period -- Psmith in the City (1910), Psmith Journalist (1915), Uneasy Money (1916), and Piccadilly Jim (1917) definitely qualify, so the position taken by
commodorified that WWI is a prerequisite is a little over-strong. However, it's clear that the overall market for the work may have been much expanded by the war -- it's Piccadilly Jim which is his first really big seller.Wodehouse spent a good deal of the war in the U.S., doing Broadway musicals, from at least 1915 on. Several books from the war years have earlier U.S. publication dates than U.K. publication dates. He certainly didn't live much in England through the twenties and thirties, and not at all after the Second World War (for obvious reasons).
Although there are certainly elements of the books which reflect the twenties (or later), the implicit setting of just about everything he wrote is effectively the Edwardian era, with occasional markers indicating a later actual date (such as a developed Hollywood industry in Laughing Gas (1936) -- Wodehouse probably had a firmer sense of Hollywood in the twenties than of England in the same period). This explains the absence of the war -- the impact on society wasn't part of the period he was reflecting, or of which he had direct experience in England. As the series of books continues they become less and less connected to any present world at all -- the books in the sixties and seventies, showing a pretty well unchanged Blandings, for example, are extreme forms of this.
