Marine Archaeologist Mensun Bound led a team on a search of Antartica’s Weddell Sea to find the famous vessel of explorer Ernest Shackleton, who lost the ship in 1915.
“Endurance, a 144-foot, three-masted wooden ship, holds a revered place in polar history because it spawned one of the greatest survival stories in the annals of exploration. Its location, nearly 10,000 feet down in waters that are among the iciest on Earth, placed it among the most celebrated shipwrecks that had not been found.”
What they found was “in a brilliant state of preservation,” Bound said.
In England, people had more time to putter around the garden in the last couple years, and guess what? They uncovered old stuff. For example, Bob Greenaway from Oswestry in Shropshire found the Bulla sun pendant. “The retired engineer found the intricate piece while metal detecting in the Marches, unearthing one of the most significant pieces of metalwork ever discovered in Britain – around 3,000 years old.”
Loads and loads of stuff–one might even say hoards–have been found over the last few years.
When she first heard that Pearl Harbor had been attacked, sixteen-year-old Elaine R. Engelson of Brooklyn was “amazed and ashamed” of her “weakness in facing a world crisis.” She wrote to the New York Times the next day that although she, like many others, had “felt the inevitability of war” for some time, “the thought of it actually having come upon us was sudden.” The horrifying events in Hawaii suddenly changed the rhythms of the teenager’s life. She had grown accustomed to countless airplanes flying overhead, but on December 8, the sound of an approaching plane produced a new sense of dread. Although “the world has not yet come to an end by any means,” she had the ominous feeling that “we are on the brink of a precipice overhanging a world of complete darkness.” What was at stake, she said, was something she and many Americans had not fully appreciated until then: “We are fighting to save the world from a fate worse than death.” For a stunned nation, it seemed impossible that the U.S. Pacific Fleet had been caught so unaware. Over twenty-four hundred Americans had died, and the navy had lost eight battleships…. Along with shock and anger came another reaction, shared by millions on both coasts. People wondered if Pearl Harbor was just a prelude to something far worse. In a Gallup poll taken shortly after December 7, 60 percent responded that it was “very likely” or “fairly likely” that the West Coast would be attacked in the next few weeks.
Melvyn Bragg has a very pleasant conversation with professors Judith Hawley, Markman Ellis, and Jonathan Morris on the history of coffee. They discuss how early medicinal reports seem to be just marketing, and how coffeehouses formed around the drink and business needs of customers as well as the side benefit of coffee being non-alcoholic.
Our polarized culture seems to offer two competing visions of engaging with the past. The defilement perspective views history as “at best a sewer of racism, sexism, homophobia, and general social injustice, at worst an abattoir which no reasonable person would even want to peak at.” Its vision is limited to the now. What matters in this moment is all that matters, and it judges the past accordingly, throwing most in the ash heap.
Another perspective approaches the past as a unifying, idealized, almost sanitized, source of universal values and character traits. This produces a reverence for the past that is also locked into the present: “To say ‘This text offends me, I will read no further’ may be shortsighted; but to read a ‘great book’ from the past with such reverence that you can’t see where its views are wrong, or even where they differ from your own, is no better. Indeed, in foreclosing the possibility of real challenge it is worse.”
Rather than either of these views, we should read history expecting to be challenged. Heroes, leaders, and all manner of influential people were no less human than we are. Their sins may have been egregious, but would we have made the same ones had we lived in their day?
At first, virtually all the Cherokee sided with the Confederacy, identifying with the Southern plantation owners, and proud of the black slaves they themselves had bought to pick their cotton. And, complicit with the state of Georgia, the Union had been responsible for the land theft that had cost them their ancestral territory and packed them west in the forced migration known as the Trail of Tears three decades before.
But why did the Cherokee not stay united against a common enemy? How could they have divided against themselves? To answer this, we need go back three decades to the terrible winter of 1838 and the issue that would never go away. Removal—the cruel shorthand for the Trail of Tears—was to the Cherokee Nation what slavery was to America, an issue so profound as to be bottomless and unending.
Greensleeves was all my joy, Greensleeves was my delight, Greensleeves was my heart of gold, and who but Lady Greensleeves
“Greensleeves” is a 400-year-old tune you may know as “What Child Is This?” Ralph Vaughan Williams composed his “Fantasia on Greensleeves,” a marvelous piece made all the more so by starting with this melody.
Many people tell fanciful stories about the origin of this song. Was it written by Henry VIII for Anne Boleyn, who “cast [him] off discourteously” without losing her head for the moment? Was it an old Irish song, as we all know every good song is? Was it first sung by dog-headed men surrounded by rats? The rumors abound. The Early Music Muse drills into this musical history and reveals the truth, as is so often the case, rather boring. In short, a musician wrote a hit tune that many people used for their own songs, and everyone loved it–they still do. It’s the feature song in the K-drama I just blogged about, Mr. Sunshine. While Savina & Drones have a good composition based on Greensleeves, what Vaughan Williams did with it can’t be outdone for sublimity.
We recently finished a 24-episode historical drama created for South Korean television in 2018 and distributed this year through Netflix. Set at the end of the Joseon kingdom, while Korea tried to move into the 20th century as subjects of a king, Mr. Sunshine is essentially a fiercely patriotic story. It begins with loyalists attempting to defend their peninsula from colonialists, despite obviously being outgunned. It ends with rebels raging against the rising tide of Japanese occupation.
We first see Choi Yoo-jin (Lee Byung-hun) as the son of slaves, who runs to avoid being killed and makes it to New York City. He grows up to become U.S. Marine Captain Eugene Choi, deployed to the American embassy in Joseon. He’s an American soldier with Korean skin; most people don’t know what to make of him. But he’s glad to be back in Joseon so he can find the people who murdered his parents and take his revenge.
On a risky American assignment, he encounters the beautiful Lady Go Ae-shin (Kim Tae-ri) doing something distinctly unladylike. He won’t know about her family until long after his interest in her has grown. But two other men are interested in her too: a Korean samurai, who is thought to have sold his soul to Japan, and the son of the second richest family in the country, who happens to be Lady Go’s fiancé. The three men are drawn together by their proximity and held by various mutual interests.
It’s a beautifully filmed drama told reservedly and works as a personal story of love and duty as well as a historical tribute to Korean independence. Americans will find many things to love about it.
If you know a bit of the history of Korea, you’ll be able to guess the story doesn’t have that happy of an ending; if you don’t know the history, you’ll be able to guess the tenor of the end by the prominent place of “Greensleeves” or by the first English words Lady Go learns: gun, glory, sad ending.
SOME TRADITIONAL Christian publishers don’t do much in history. After years of reading overstatements from both left and right concerning America’s founding, I enjoyed the calm and thorough analysis of Mark David Hall’s Did America Have a Christian Founding? (Thomas Nelson, 2019). Those who read minds and extrapolate diaries may still fight over questions of sincerity and personal faithfulness, but Hall clearly shows what’s most important: that Christian ideas profoundly influenced the Founders, and through them all of us.
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