One of Napoleon’s swords sold at auction for a record amount, according to the BBC.

A gold-encrusted sword used by Napoleon has been sold at auction in France for 4.8m euros ($6.4m).
Auctioneers said the sword, used in battle some 200 years ago, achieved a world record for Napoleon memorabilia.

The sword, which belonged to eight of the emperor’s descendants, was believed to be the last of Napoleon’s blades in private hands.

“It’s a world record for a souvenir of the emperor, for a sword and for a weapon in general,” auction house spokesman Bernard Croissy said.

The article goes on to describe some of the history of the sword and the origin of its design. Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign has received a significant amount of attention from historians, in part because of the clash of cultures that it represented. Also, it led to the discovery of the Rosetta Stone.

The inspiration for the sword’s design is said to have come during Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign.

He noticed that the swords used by the Arabs, which were also curved, were very effective in cutting off the heads of their French enemies.

The French general is said to have carried the sword into battle at Marengo in June 1800 - before he became emperor - when he launched a surprise attack to push the Austrian army out of Italy and seal a victory for France.

After the battle, Napoleon gave the sword to his brother as a wedding gift and it was then passed down the family through the generations.

The sword was declared a national treasure in 1978 and, while it may be sold to a foreign buyer, they must have a French address and keep it in France for six months a year.

The complete article from the BBC: “Napoleon sword sells for millions”

Two reviews of a book by Lucy Riall on Garibaldi suggest that Riall’s important contribution to the existing literature on Garibaldi, the Risorgimento, and Italian Unification is the way that she shows how effective Garibaldi was at creating his own heroic image.

John Dickie writes:

Lucy Riall’s approach is sober and succinct. She lets the drama of episodes such as the defence of the doomed Roman Republic in 1849 and the expedition of the Thousand in 1860 speak for itself. Garibaldi is shown to be a military leader of genius, and a sincere and audacious patriot. Those who met him were charmed by his physical presence and by his humble but easy manner. Women threw themselves at his feet, and he had no compunction about taking advantage.

But he was also - and here lies the originality of Riall’s book - an astute and astoundingly successful manager of his own image. Garibaldi really was a hero; Riall’s persuasive case is that he was acting out a heroic script.

The Garibaldi persona had several components. Part was chivalrous outlaw, part long-haired romantic genius and part the honour-bound avenger of melodrama. There was more than a touch of the gaucho, too: Garibaldi’s signature poncho and his relaxed horsemanship dated back to his adventure-filled exile in South America.

Then there was religion: he appeared to be the Italian redeemer willing to sacrifice himself to free the nation from subjection. Garibaldi’s speeches played skilfully on these traits, which were more than just matters of style. The expanding press were greedy for stories that converted politics into parables of good against evil.

According to Riall, the real way that Garibaldi made Italy into a nation was not only through force and political efforts but through the creation of patriotic stories that “not only made Italy, but made Italy convincing.”

The complete review by John Dickie in The Daily Telegraph: “Spent bullets and stained bandages”

The other review, by Adam Zamoyski, makes a slightly different point about the creation of the national myth.

There never was a glorious coming together of the ‘nation’ to throw off the shackles of foreign oppression. Unification was the result of an often tawdry interplay of the competing schemes of various intellectuals and revolutionaries on the one hand and the opportunistic manoeuvring of the house of Savoy on the other, helped along by the brutality of the Habsburg administration, the incompetence of the Bourbons of Naples, the anachronism of the Papal States and the often delusional support of British public opinion.

All of this deconstruction leaves the void of explaining exactly how Italian Unification took place. Raill, according to Zamoyski, tackles this question and answers it in terms of public relations.

In this impressively researched, authoritative, intelligent and thoughtful book Lucy Riall sets out to get to the bottom of how and by whom Garibaldi’s image was constructed and, by extension, how the whole Risorgimento myth was foisted on a gullible world.

She identifies Italian Romanticism and its most famous product, Giuseppe Mazzini, as the source. A ground-breaker in terms of political PR, Mazzini deployed the power of Romantic literature to conjure the image of a nation oppressed, and used the tragic tussles of young Italian intellectuals with the ham-fisted and brutal rulers of their country to build this image into a cause. From his exile in London, where he came to rest in the 1830s, he orchestrated pointless risings which he would then write up in legendary manner.

Zamoyski emphasizes how much the creation of nationalist myth was tied to the changing role of the press in European society during the 19th century. This contingent and mutually constitutive relationship is the driving force that propelled the successful development of myth.

The press was just then undergoing a revolutionary change of its own. As readership expanded to embrace less educated classes, politics and history were increasingly represented as living theatre, which required heroes and villains. Garibaldi was a godsend in the circumstances, and he was delivered to an eager public as the physical embodiment of the resurgent Italian nation (which still did not exist in the consciousness of 90-plus per cent of the peninsula’s population).

The legend of Garibaldi developed a life of its own. While he went back to shipping guano across the Pacific, publicists and journalists churned out ever more intimate and sensational material on him. By the time he entered the fray on behalf of Italy once more, in the war of 1859-60, history unfurling had become a spectator sport for the literate masses. Garibaldi played out his part in the full glare of publicity, and his picaresque Sicilian expedition was one of the most publicised, and misrepresented, episodes in European history.

Despite the fact that all his subsequent endeavours were embarrassing failures, the propaganda needs of the Italian cause turned him into a kind of saint, and a bizarre iconography sprang up based on Christian practice and prayers. The legend had taken over from reality.

The idea of legend taking over from reality because of the interplay between the press, the subject, and the story is not a new or a unique theme. It is an important one because it appears not just in isolated cases, but in many different contexts around the modern world. One of my favorite films, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, makes the same point in the American West.

The complete review by Adam Zamoyski in The Daily Telegraph: “The hero of italian unification?”

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”

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”

The BBC reports on the political situation in Turkey and a large rally supporting secularism. The article also includes some background information about the history of secularism in the nation.

The rally began because of concerns that the leading presidential candidate would be too loyal to Islamic influences.

The protesters are concerned that the ruling party’s candidate for the post remains loyal to his Islamic roots.

The candidate, Abdullah Gul, earlier said he would not quit despite growing criticism from opponents and the army.

Keeping with its traditional role in Turkish society, the army remains a staunch supporter of secularism.

An army statement on Friday accused the government of tolerating radical Islam and vowed to defend secularism.

The article lists the military’s history of intervention in politics, in order to preserve a secular order.

The army has carried out three coups in the last 50 years - in 1960, 1971 and 1980 - and in 1997 it intervened to force Turkey’s first Islamist Prime Minister, Necmettin Erbakan, from power.

(more…)

Tomorrow is the five hundredth anniversary of the first naming of “America” which took place in the French town of St. Die. The cartographer Martin Waldseemueller used the term on a map he prepared for Rene II, the Duke of Lorraine.

“AMERICA,” in capital letters, appears on a part of the map showing what is now Brazil. The first map to depict a separate Western Hemisphere and a separate Pacific Ocean, it also included an inset of both North and South America, and a portrait of “Amerigi Vespucci,” whom Waldseemueller honored for being the first to identify the New World as a new land mass.

The cartographer explained his use of the term:

“Europe and Asia have received names of women,” Waldseemueller wrote in the book first released to the public on April 24, 1507. “I see no reason why we should not call this other part ‘Amerige,’ that is to say the land of Americus, or America, after the sagacious discoverer.”

The map itself was quite impressive as was its complete title:

The full title for the 12-panel map covering 36 square feet was “a drawing of the whole earth following the tradition of Ptolemy and the travels of Amerigo Vespucci and others.”

Today the map is located in the Library of Congress, which acquired it in 2003 for

$10 million … making the map the most expensive single item it had ever acquired. “It is remarkable that the entire Western Hemisphere was named for a living person; Vespucci did not die until 1512,” wrote John R. Hebert, the library’s chief of the geography and map division.

The full article: “‘America’s Birth Certificate’ Turns 500″

Professor Laqueur uses a custom edition of a Western Civilization textbook by Kishlansky, Geary, and O’Brien for History 5. The custom edition entails slicing only those chapters relevant to the Berkeley course from the complete edition. This saves the students some money, and it gives us a chance to create a custom cover for the book!

For the fall I want a more elaborate cover than the ones that have been used in the past. The publisher’s representatives said that we could submit photos that they would arrange, but I wanted to go all-out. My friend and fellow Apple Campus Rep Jarrett Fein is a really talented graphic designer, and he is also a former history 5 student. I gave Jarrett some general ideas and he came up with what I think is a stunning custom cover for us to use. It features blue and gold Cal colors, with the gold appearing as rays of light (”fiat lux” — which has UC Berkeley and “Renaissance” meaning), and a variety of really neat images. There is an image of a 17th century European map of the world faded in the background, on the front cover there are images of Renaissance architecture in Venice, and on the back cover there are images of campus buildings in the neo-classical architectural style that are modelled after those in Venice.

The cover is wonderful because it visually depicts one of the points that Professor Laqueur includes in his lectures on the Renaissance, that the legacy of European culture is evident in many ways on the UC Berkeley campus. The architecture of many buildings as well as some of the university’s principles reflect the admiration that the founders of the school had for Venice and European classical ideals.

In the penultimate chapter of Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, Christopher Browning references Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment as evidence of the psychological explanation of how “ordinary” people can end up doing monstrous or unthinkable things. Browning, studying the actions of a reserve police battalion during the Second World War, concluded that the “most relevant” part of Zimbardo’s study “is the spectrum of behavior that [he] discovered in his sample of eleven guards” (Browning, 168). The range of conduct that Zimbardo observed among the prison guards in his experiment closely aligns with the ways that members of the police battalion responded to and took part in the genocide of Jews during the Nazi regime.

Zimbardo has written a new book that elaborates the moral dimensions of his experiment from 1971, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. As the New York Times interview with him reveals, Zimbardo sees his past and present work as a way of understanding how individuals are capable of evil.

Dr. Zimbardo, a social psychologist and the past president of the American Psychological Association, has made his reputation studying how people disguise the good and bad in themselves and under what conditions either is expressed.

His Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971, known as the S.P.E. in social science textbooks, showed how anonymity, conformity and boredom can be used to induce sadistic behavior in otherwise wholesome students. More recently, Dr. Zimbardo, 74, has been studying how policy decisions and individual choices led to abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The road that took him from Stanford to Abu Ghraib is described in his new book, “The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil”

The complete article from the New York Times, “Finding Hope in Knowing the Universal Capacity for Evil”

New York Times article from April 2, 2007 about the decision by municipal authorities in Clitheroe to allow an old Methodist Church to be used as a mosque. It describes the growing presence of Muslims in Britain through a variety of perspectives: local town demography, membership in the House of Lords, and regular attendence at religious services.

Britain may continue to regard itself as a Christian nation. But practicing Muslims are likely to outnumber church-attending Christians in several decades, according to a recent survey by Christian Research, a group that specializes in documenting the status of Christianity in Britain.

The full article from the New York Times website: “Old Church Becomes Mosque in Uneasy Britain”