I just found out about a new book on the sixteenth century Dutch “Tulipmania,” Anne Goldgar’s Tulipmania. The book seems very intriguing because the University of Chicago Press description suggests that Goldgar’s scholarship is focused on debunking the myth that the Tulipmania episode was a case of the excess of financial speculation.

As Anne Goldgar reveals in Tulipmania, not one of these stories is true. Making use of extensive archival research, she lays waste to the legends, revealing that while the 1630s did see a speculative bubble in tulip prices, neither the height of the bubble nor its bursting were anywhere near as dramatic as we tend to think. By clearing away the accumulated myths, Goldgar is able to show us instead the far more interesting reality: the ways in which tulipmania reflected deep anxieties about the transformation of Dutch society in the Golden Age. She shows how Dutch citizens became enchanted by the combination of art and science that made up a tulip bulb, and how experts in tulips appeared in communities of merchants and craftsmen. She also illustrates vividly how the plague, the concerns of capitalism, and the loss of trust among individuals in a rapidly changing society combined to create the cultural crisis that was tulipmania.

I’m very excited to read this book because I’ve been interested in “Tulipmania” since I was a teenager and first read about it in the context of learning about the stock market and financial speculation. Definitely a book I am going to add to my summer reading list!

A new museum devoted to the promotion of creationism is opening soon in Petersburg, Kentucky (near Cincinnati). It features a number of exhibits and demonstrations meant to show that literal interpretations of the Bible are plausible.

What is most interesting about this to me is the fact that this is some sort of odd hybrid of religion and science. Museums, products of the Enlightenment and the 19th century bourgeoisie, were meant to promote knowledge and in some cases became secular substitutes for religious institutions. It seems like this sort of museum would satisfy neither creationists nor evolutionists.

The Creation Museum actually stands the natural history museum on its head. Natural history museums developed out of the Enlightenment: encyclopedic collections of natural objects were made subject to ever more searching forms of inquiry and organization. The natural history museum gave order to the natural world, taming its seeming chaos with the principles of human reason. And Darwin’s theory — which gave life a compelling order in time as well as space — became central to its purpose. Put on display was the prehistory of civilization, seeming to allude not just to the evolution of species but also cultures (which is why “primitive” cultures were long part of its domain). The natural history museum is a hall of human origins.

The complete article in the New York Times: “Adam and Eve in the Land of the Dinosaurs”

Diego Garcia, the former British navy outpost that is currently leased to the United States military, in the Indian Ocean was the site of the forced removal of several hundred indigenous inhabitants in the 1960s.

The Guardian reports that an appeal of a court ruling that affirmed their right to return to their homes was decided in their favor.

Hundreds of Indian Ocean islanders who were forcibly deported from their homeland by Britain 40 years ago won a battle yesterday which could see them set sail for an emotional return within days.

Although the number of individuals that were removed is relatively small, it is an amazing case that shows how much the British Government continued the sort of policies it developed during the heydey of its empire even during its decline. The judges’ decision left no doubt about the human rights implications of the removals:

The court of appeal in London found the British government guilty of “abuse of power” for attempting to prevent the Chagos Islanders from reclaiming land leased from under their feet by Britain to the US in the 1960s.

Three judges upheld a ruling in the islanders’ favour last year, ordered the government to pay their legal costs and withheld support for an appeal to the House of Lords. Giving his reason for the ruling Lord Justice Sedley wrote: “Few things are more important to a social group than its sense of belonging, not only to each other but to a place. What has sustained peoples in exile, from Babylon onwards, has been the possibility of one day returning home.” The judge added: “The barring of that door, however remote or inaccessible it may be for the present, is an act requiring overwhelming justification.”

This case makes me wonder about other instances of forced removals around the British Empire. Certainly, the larger scale ones are widely known, but I wonder how many other times this sort of thing happened — a very small group of people dislocated to serve some international interest.

The complete article from The Guardian: “Exiled islanders win 40-year battle to return home as judges accuse UK of abuse of power”

Researchers at North Carolina State University report (“Mayday 23: World Population Becomes More Urban Than Rural”) that May 23, 2007 is the date when the population of the world will be more urban than rural.

Working with United Nations estimates that predict the world will be 51.3 percent urban by 2010, the researchers projected the May 23, 2007, transition day based on the average daily rural and urban population increases from 2005 to 2010. On that day, a predicted global urban population of 3,303,992,253 will exceed that of 3,303,866,404 rural people.

Interestingly they compare the population statistics for the world to the United States urban-rural divide and not to Britain, which achieved a majority urban population first among Western industrialized nations.

In the United States, the tipping point from a majority rural to a majority urban population came early in the late 1910s, the researchers say. Today, 21 percent of our country is rural although some states — Maine, Mississippi, Vermont, and West Virginia — are still majority rural. In North Carolina, a rural majority held until the late 1980s.

In the current issue of Wired Magazine there is really interesting article about the history of the system of genus and species that biologists use. It has remained relatively constant in structure and organization for the past several centuries. Some scientists believe that there would be a better way to classify that is based on recent advances in DNA and other biological knowledge, but most say that it still works fine and holds up fairly well.

Most scientists say that 272 years after it was introduced, the naming system works just fine. Evolutionary theory and molecular biology have transformed our understanding of life. Computers and digital media have more recently upended longstanding theories of information management. But, over nearly three centuries, the classification system used to organize much of our biological knowledge has remained remarkably arbitrary and ancient: The so-called binomial system of genus and species that Linse and thousands of other biologists use today was first proposed by a Swedish biologist born 300 years ago Wednesday, Carolus Linnaeus.

Biological classification may seem like an esoteric problem better left to librarians than field researchers, but it is reaching unprecedented importance as discoveries swell the existing rolls of some 1.8 million known species, and prominent scientists such as E.O. Wilson throw their backing behind an ambitious project to make taxonomic data for all of life on Earth accessible online. Classification systems, meanwhile, have themselves become the subject of intensive study, thanks to the explosion in data-labeling and -sorting procedures allowed by digital media.

Linnaeus, a devout Christian with no concept of evolution, today might barely recognize much of the system he spawned. But his approach was remarkably modern. He bridged religious and scientific conceptions of nature, ordering the world as was most convenient, rather than seeking to describe how it truly was. His goal was not to uncover the hidden connections between organisms, but simply to give labels to ensure biologists could agree on what they were talking about.

“Taxonomy” is a hierarchical browser that visualizes the classification tree found in the Integrated Taxonomic Information System, which incorporates Carolus Linnaeus’ centuries-old naming system and organizing principles.

The result was a system that’s considered as important a scientific framework as the Babylonian calendar or the Earth-centric model of the universe. In other words, much of it was wrong, but it was an amazingly adaptable foundation that future generations could build upon to describe the world, and our place in it, reasonably accurately, scientists say.

The complete article from Wired: “What’s in a Name? The Future of Life”

Travel journalist Rick Steves writes about visiting Gibraltar. Most of the article is a bit fluffy and superficial but there are a few interesting points.

I knew, for instance, that it would have a unique legal status based on its geography, but I had no idea about the Anglican Church there.

Along with being “not Spanish,” the colony is part British and part Gibraltarian. They have the big three-pronged English electrical plugs, their own currency (it’s the pound sterling — but, like Scotland, they have their own version), and their own Web domain (gi). Gibraltar’s Anglican Church is proudly “headquarters of the Anglican Church in Europe” (not very centrally located for the business of administering that vast parish).

The extent that Britain and the British Empire are celebrated there is interesting to me as well. Maybe it is just a gimmick to lure tourists, but the fact that the residents have chosen to remain British seems to suggest that the affiliation is significant culturally as well.

Old England seems to permeate the island. As we drove high above the port, my taxi driver pointed down to a tiny breakwater and said, “That’s where they pickled Admiral Nelson after the Battle of Trafalgar.” (While the Brits won the battle, Nelson died, and, according to legend, his body was preserved in a barrel of spirits for the trip back to London.)

The complete article on CNN.com: “Got married in Gibraltar near Spain”

Political scientist Pete Moore downloaded a bunch of Coalition Provisional Authority documents about the early period of the US occupation of Iraq. His son inadvertently turned on the “view / track changes” option in the “view” menu in Microsoft Word, and there ended up being a treasure trove of information contained in the markup.

My son made his discovery while impatiently waiting to play a computer game on my laptop. As part of a research project, I had downloaded 45 documents from a section of the CPA Web site known as Consolidated Weekly Reports. All but three of the documents were Microsoft Word. I had one of the Word documents up on my screen when my son starting toying with the computer mouse. Somehow, inadvertently, he managed to pull down the “View” menu at the top of the screen and select the “Mark up” option. If you are in a Word document where “Track changes” has been turned on, hitting “Mark up” will reveal all the deletions and insertions ever made in the document, complete with times, dates and (sometimes) the initials of the editors. When my son did it, all the deleted passages in a document with the innocuous name “Administrator’s Weekly Economic Report” suddenly appeared in blue and purple. It was the electronic equivalent of seeing every draft of an author’s paper manuscript and all the penciled changes made by the editors.

Moore was especially concerned with the substance of the data contained in this electronic marginalia. It gave him unprecedented insight into the thinking of bureaucrats working for the CPA. During the rest of the article he describes the ostensibly deleted theories that the CPA had for why violence was going up or down in Iraq. Even in the midst of these revelations, which show the extent to which the CPA used ethnic stereotypes and reductionist arguements to “understand” Iraq, Moore takes note of the theories that are missing:

Nowhere in any of these theories, including the “boring” one, does the author address the dissolution of the Iraqi Army as a major contributor to the violence. Nowhere, in fact, does the author seem to know which “bums” or “losers” are attacking the Americans or why. Indeed, the most remarkable passage in the entire deletion is a simple statement by an Iraqi businessman, whom the writer quotes in passing while explaining why American-induced economic prosperity will end the fighting. “It is nothing personal,” the Iraqi says. “I like you and believe you could be bringing us a better future, but I still sympathize with those who attack the coalition because it is not right for Iraq to be occupied by foreign military forces.” In the world of the CPA circa 2004, first one American glosses over this Iraqi’s prophetic words, and then another tries — unsuccessfully, as it turns out — to delete them.

Moore’s work is politically-charged because of its contemporary resonance. However, it makes me think about what sorts of tools and techniques the historians of the future will employ in the course of their research. Additionally it shows how even in electronic records that are tightly controlled a candid and unvarnished reality can be discovered or surmised. In a sense this should be incredibly reassuring to historians in the twenty-first century who fret that the rise of email and electronic documents will render the past inaccessible for scrutiny.

The complete article from Salon: “The secret Iraq documents my 8-year-old found”

A flip side to the concept that guides Google, Wikipedia, and so many other internet and computer firms–that we need an ever-expanding capacity to store and access informaton–is the idea that computers should learn how to forget. A recently published working paper from Harvard University suggests that there could be good public-policy reasons for implementing this kind of solution:

Why would we want our machines to “forget”? Mayer-Schönberger suggests that we are creating a Benthamist panopticon by archiving so many bits of knowledge for so long. The accumulated weight of stored Google searches, thousands of family photographs, millions of books, credit bureau information, air travel reservations, massive government databases, archived e-mail, etc., can actually be a detriment to speech and action, he argues.

From a technological perspective this sort of thing seems like it could be very easy to implement. Microsoft Outlook, for instance, already has a feature that will delete or archive all messages after a certain date. Companies that have found archiving every email to be either costly, embarrassing, or both are increasingly adopting “email retention policies” to limit their legal liabilities.

These practices seem fairly “dumb” (in the computing sense of the term). That is, it might end up being a lot more difficult to implement “smart” forgetting of information. It seems like it would be very difficult to teach a computer or a program to forget based on multiple criteria that approaches the level of sophistication of the human brain. We could very easily tell a computer to save all messages from a certain person whom we’re especially close to and with whom we share intimate communications. But some of these are bound to be trivial and worthy of forgetting. Still, sometimes a message that looks trivial based solely on its content might have a tremendous amount of emotional significance for its sender or its recipient. A child’s finger painting might not be a Monet, but his mother still saves it for decades.

The idea that computers would be smart enough to discern what to keep and what to get rid of based upon an almost endless number of factors, including less tangible emotionally based ones, suggests sentience and humanity.

Leaving aside the implications for artificial intelligence, the author of the working paper focuses on the issue from the standpoint of public policy. Would it be a good practice to implement? And, how could it best be implemented? My concern here is that future historians researching their past might be deprived of important ways of understanding our society. Then again, they might learn a lot about us by considering what we programmed our computers to forget.

The complete article from Ars Technica: “Escaping the data panopticon: Prof says computers must learn to ‘forget’ “

The complete working paper from Professor Mayer-Schönberger, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University: “Useful Void: The Art of Forgetting in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing”

Today was Professor Leon Litwack’s last lecture in his undergraduate American history class (History 7B: US History from the Civil War to the Present). Litwack has taught the course for nearly 40 years, educating around 30,000 Berkeley undergraduates. The ten minutes or so of standing ovation he received at the end of the lecture was a testament to the esteem not only in which his current students hold him but also how he is regarded by the many former students and colleagues who came from around the country to attend.

Several weeks ago Professor Litwack delivered his “Ideal Last Lecture” which was part of his Golden Apple Award. That honor was presented by Berkeley students. His “Ideal Last Lecture” is Webcast unlike (unfortunately) his actual last lecture.

The general theme of his lecture was “fight the power” and he spent the hour talking about race and class in the contemporary, post-Civil Rights Movement United States. His argument was that economics and discrimination based upon class has supplanted Jim Crow and overt racial discrimination. He began the lecture with an anecdote from Elliott Jaspin’s Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America about a town in Georgia that manages through a variety of practices to keep out blacks. Legal equality means little in the face of economic and social reality.

Professor Litwack cited a litany of statistics and examples to show that black Americans are disproportionately hurt by poverty. Particularly resonant with me was what he mentioned about the educational system in the United States. During the 1960s and 1970s the goal was public school integration, that is, to get blacks into schools with whites. Since the 1980s, Professor Litwack argued, the goal has been to keep them there while simultaneously middle class whites have “fled” to suburbs and increasingly to private schools. Statistically, schools remain racially stratified, and it is only the form of segregation that has changed.

There were quite a few meaningful and interesting points in the lecture. My only complaint was that the cumulative effect was to leave the audience with a sense of the world getting worse, or at least not getting any better. I suppose it is not the job of a historian to tell us what to do or how to change the present, but I could not help wishing that he had another hour to tell us ways that we could positively impact the depressing trends he laid out for us.

The closest he came to that sort of call to action was the suggestion throughout the lecture that America as a nation needs to own up to its history of slavery and racial discrimination. Education, of course, takes us part of the way to achieving that. Professor Litwack’s committment not only to his scholarship but also to his teaching of so many undergraduates has done so much more than any of the rest of us.

Despite my academic interest in British history, the lecture inspires me to read two recent books about racism in the United States:

Dave Barry reviews David Shipley and Will Schwalbe’s Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home in The New York Times. It’s a fairly lighthearted review about a somewhat serious (at least for business) matter. Most of the advice that the book gives comes down to what intelligent people would consider “common sense” or rules similar to other forms of communication. Barry writes:

E-mail, for all its efficiency, often fails to achieve its intended result; a vague or carelessly worded message can cause major problems — personal, legal and financial — for senders and receivers. Helping you avoid these problems is the goal of “Send,” an informative, entertaining, thorough and thoughtful book. The authors are media veterans — David Shipley is deputy editorial page editor of The New York Times; Will Schwalbe is editor in chief of Hyperion Books — with extensive, and not always positive, experience sending and receiving e-mail. They summarize their essential message in two rules: “Think before you send” and “Send e-mail you would like to receive.”

I was pleased to find that my own email habits seem to conform somewhat naturally to the guidelines that they recommend. I probably err on the side of writing too much, or sending emails that are lengthier than they should be according to Send. My excuse is that I am trying to compensate for what Shipley and Schwalbe correctly note is one of email’s most profound limitations: the inability to accurately convey emotion or tone.

My other failing as an emailer, according to the book, has to do with my closings. I generally just use a dash and then my first name, adopting a style similar to signing a note. Sometimes I will close with “Love” on a personal email and sometimes I resort to “Sincerely” if the email is a more formal request and I don’t know the recipient. Shipley and Schwalbe recommend that the standard closing should be “Yours Ever.” I haven’t read Send to know their explanation for this, but I am intrigued because this was the closing that I’ve read in numerous instances of British Government correspondence that I’ve read while doing research. The British tradition seems alive and well, even in something as mundane as office emails.

The complete review in The New York Times review: Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home