A Few Historical Fibers

I finished James McPherson's "Battle Cry of Freedom" earlier this week (the same day, coincidentally, that Gov. Mark Sanford announced that he was continuing the long South Carolinian tradition of seceding from unions).

Commuting in D.C. is very compatible with listening to audiobooks, and at just under 40 hours, Battle Cry had been my faithful companion for around two months. Though focusing a little more singly on military history than I was expecting after David Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought (the preceding volume, covering 1815-1848, in the still not-yet-completed Oxford History of the United States series), Battle Cry was especially readable in D.C., given its helpful ability to breathe life into the area's statues and placenames. (I will now forever think of Farragut North as the "Damn the Torpedos!"-Metro Stop, for instance. "Full speed ahead!")

Double-bonus, the book also contained some pretty solid explanatory trivia--it's 1861 and the North needs thousands of new military uniforms; you're in the textiles business, but you're short on wool. What do you do?

To fill contracts for hundreds of thousands of uniforms, textile manufacturers compressed fibers of recycled woolen goods into a material called "shoddy." This noun soon became an adjective to describe uniforms that ripped after a few weeks of wear, shoes that fell apart, blankets that disintegrated, and poor workmanship in general[.]" (p. 324)

And just like that, a new word is born.

Beautiful.

Curio: The Lost State of Frankland

It could have been #14:

I've been reading a lot of histories in the past few months, and have started to amass a pretty good stock of historical curios. The latest comes from Lawrence Friedman's "A History of American Law":

Commenting on early America's zeal for state constitutions, Friedman off-handedly mentions that even "the residents of the 'lost state of Franklin,'" in the early 1780s, gave into the movement. (p.72)

What?

Turns out, the far-west residents of North Carolina weren't too happy when their home state offered to give all of North Carolina's lands west of the Appalachian mountains to the national government, in exchange for the government's assumption of North Carolina's Revolutionary-War debts. (Of note, most of the original 13 colonies had no western border and made similar bargains, ultimately leading to the creation of the Northwest and Southwest territories, and to another odd historical curio: Connecticut's non-contiguous "Western Reserve" in Ohio.)

So, the angry Carolinians did what they thought any self-respecting American should do: they declared independence, drafted a constitution (the first version of which, rejected by voters, would have banned lawyers, doctors and preachers from holding elected office), and petitioned Congress for admission to statehood.

Even crazier?

A majority of the original states gave Frankland their blessing: 7 of the 13 voted to admit the eight North Carolinian counties (which would later comprise the northeast corner of Tennessee) into the Confederacy as the tiny, tiny state of Frankland:

It wasn't the two-thirds required by the Articles of Confederation, though, so Frankland withered. After officially changing its name to "Franklin" and trying to rally the respected Mr. Benjamin F. to its cause (he declined), the citizens of Frankland/lin ultimately gave up the ghost after realizing that it was going to be a lot harder not to get killed by members of the Creek and Cherokee Indian Nations (whose lands they were, after all, invading) without the assistance of North Carolina's militia. The "State" collapsed, having existed just shy of a (pretty respectable) 4 years.

Next up: a couple of items from Daniel Walker Howe's "What Hath God Wrought."

Stay tuned.

Music for One Musician

This is awesome:

(Even more fun:)

I once spent a roadtrip from Alaska to Connecticut listening to a 13-hour history of American avant-garde music in the 20th Century that left me pre-disposed to things like this. The show (aside from its odd introduction featuring Beethoven's 5th, an explosion, and a clip from Suzanne Vega's "99.9 Fahrenheit degrees") started out pretty strong-- earlier episodes featured Copeland, Ives, and Cage, and the genuinely cool, if very video-game sounding, 1940s-era player-piano experiments of Conlon Nancarrow (one of the first to write music that only machines could play).

The middle portion of the program, though, which contained many hours of Schoenberg-inspired atonal serialism, which was a slog. (It seemed to challenge even co-host "MTT"'s near limitless capacity for reverence.) If the goal was to make music that was both "not beautiful" and "impossible to remember," as the show's writers claimed it to have been, it worked. (To give you a sense of where composers from the era were coming from, a leading academic published an article in a 1958 edition of High Fidelity called, bluntly, "Who Cares If You Listen?" Answer: Not him.)

On the heels of that, arriving at the era of the minimalists --- and hearing Steve Reich's work in particular --- was like having color suddenly flood back into a world that had faded into black-and-white. I was hooked---and have been ever since. Few weeks go by now that I don't listen to Reich's Music for 18 Musicians, or Six Pianos.

The online tone matrix lets you generate sounds that have at least a passing resemblance to some of the minimalists' "additive" music, and that probably explains a good part of its appeal for me. Very cool.

Still, it's hard to compete with the real thing.

Cataclysm Made Vivid

When Novarupta exploded in 1912 it reportedly sent enough sulfuric ash into the atmosphere that:

"At nearby Kodiak, for two days a person could not see a lantern held at arm's length,"

and

"Acid rain caused clothes to disintegrate on clotheslines in distant Vancouver, Canada."

From: U. S. National Park Service Website, Geology Fieldnotes - Katmai National Park and Preserve, Alaska, April 2000.

Both facts are oddly compelling. Especially given that there's no real reason why either couldn't happen again tomorrow.

(Given enough time, something similar almost certainly will.)