An Incomplete Education by Jones

Ref: Judy Jones (2006). An Incomplete Education. Ballantine Publishing.

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Summary­

• You’ve got some serious educational gaps. And that is what this book is all about…amassing information for the purpose of passing some imaginary standardized test, whether administered by a cranky professor, a snob at a dinner party, or your own conscience.

• The book is divided into chapters corresponding to the disciplines and departments you remember from college; Ch. I: American Studies, Ch. II: Art History, Ch. III: Economics, Ch. IV: Film, Ch. V: Literature, Ch. VI: Music, Ch. VII: Philosophy, Ch. VIII: Political Science, Ch. IX: Psychology, Ch. X: Religion, Ch. XI: Science, Ch. XII: World History.

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---Art History---

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Notable Artists

• Giotto Di Bondone (‘Giotto’) (1266-1337): Florence based Medieval artist who turned Christian doctrine into vivid Art. Giotto’s masterwork is the decoration of the Scrovegni Chapel (Arena Chapel) in Padua, which was completed in 1305, with frescos depicting the Life of the Virgin and the Life of Christ.

• Tommaso Di Ser Giovanni di Simone ‘Masaccio’ (1401-1428): Florentine Artist regarded as the first great Italian painter of the Quattrocento period of the Italian Renaissance. Masaccio is regarded as the best painter of his generation because of his skill at imitating nature, recreating lifelike figures and movements as well as a convincing sense of 3D.

• Tiziano Vecellio ‘Titian’ (1477-1576): Italian (Venetian) painter of the Renaissance, considered the most important member of the 16c Venetian school.

• Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino (‘Raphael’) (1483-1520): Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. With Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, forms the traditional trinity of great masters of the period. Raphael notable paintings include the early Madonna’s (Madonna of the Goldfinch, Uffizi, Florence), the School of Athens, the portrait of Pope Leo X, the murals in the Stanza della Segnatura, and the Pope’s private library.

• Domenicos Theotoocopoulos (‘El Greco’) (1541-1614): Greek painter, sculptor and architect of the Spanish Renaissance regarded as the precursor of both Expressionism and Cubism.

• Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640): Flemish artist and diplomat from the Duchy of Brabant in the S. Netherlands (modern Belgium), considered the most influential artist of the Flemish Baroque tradition.

• ‘Rembrandt’ Van Rijn (1606-1669): Dutch painter, printmaker, and draughtsman considered one of the greatest visual artists in the history of art and the most important in Dutch art history. Rembrandt’s notable paintings include his self-portrait, Biblical scenes, the Night Watch, and the Syndics of the Cloth Guild.

• Paul Cézanne (1839-1906): French artists and post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from 19c impressionism to early 20c cubism.

• Claude Monet (1840-1926): French painter and Father of Impressionism, which is seen as a key precursor to modernism, especially in his attempts to paint nature as he perceived it. The term ‘impressionism’ is derived from the title of his painting “Impression, soleil levant,” exhibited in the 1874 “exhibition of rejects.” Monet’s ambition to document the French countryside led to a method of painting the same scene many times so as to capture the changing of life and the passing of the seasons. Monet’s notable paintings include his series of haystacks (1890-1891), the Rouen Cathedral (1894), and the painting of water lilies in his garden in Giverny that occupied him continuously for the 20y of his life.

• Pablo Picasso (1881-1973): Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and theater designer who spent most his adult life France and is considered the co-founder of the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, and the co-invention of collage. Picasso’s notable paintings include Les Demoiselles d ’Avignon (1907, Museum of Modern Art, New York), arguably the most “radical” of all paintings, and Guernica (1937, Prado).  

• Mark Rothko (1903-1970): Latvian- American abstract painter best known for his color field paintings that depicted irregular rectangular regions of color.

• Willem De Kooning (1904-1997): Dutch-American abstract expressionist artist who was part of the group of artists known as the ‘New York School’.

• Jackson Pollock (1912-1956): American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement widely noticed for his ‘drip technique’ of pouring or splashing liquid household paint on a horizontal surface, enabling him to view and paint his canvasses from all angles. Pollock’s notable paintings include 17A, which sold for $200M in 2016.

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Art Terminology

• Contrapposto: In sculptures of the human form, the pose in which the upper body faces in a slightly different direction from the lower, with the weight resting on one leg. Contrapposto was originally the Greeks’ solution to the problem of balancing the weight of the body.

• Fresco: A method for painting indoor murals.

• Impasto: The technique of applying thick layers or strokes of oil paint, so that they stand out from the surface of a canvas or panel: also called “loaded brush.”

• Morbidezza: ‘Softness’, ‘tenderness’; describes the soft blending of tones in painting.  

• Pentimento: ‘Repentance’ (Italian); the evidence that an artist changed his mind, or made a mistake, and tried to conceal it by painting over it.

• Sfumato: ‘Smoke’ (Italian); a method of fusing areas of color or tone to create a soft, hazy, atmospheric effect.

• Sotto in Su: ‘Under on up’; the trick of painting figures in perspective on a ceiling so that they are extremely foreshortened, giving the impression, when viewed from directly underneath, that they’re floating high overhead instead of lying flat in a picture plane.

• Veduta: ‘View’; a detailed, graphic, and more or less factual view of a town, city, or landscape.

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Art Chronology

• 1924-WWII: Art’s Surrealism period, led by Breton, Aragon, and Eluard, features antibourgeois; committed to the omnipotence of the dream and the unconscious; favored associations, juxtapositions, concrete imagery, the more bizarre the better.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1917-1931: Art’s De Stijl (‘The Style’) period features vertical and horizontal lines and primary colors, applied with a sense of spiritual mission; Calvinist purity, harmony, and sobriety.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.  

• 1913-1932: Art’s Constructivism period features art as art as production, rather than elitist imaginings.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1909-1918: Art’s Futurism period, led by Marinetti and Giacomo, features dynamism, simultaneity, lines of force; vibration and rhythm more important than form; exuberant, optimistic, anarchic, human behavior as art.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.  

• 1907-1920s: Art’s Cubism period, led by Picasso and Braque, features the demise of perspective, shading, and other art standards; dislocation and dismemberment; the importance of memory as an adjunct to vision, so that one paints what one knew a thing to be; collage; analytic (dull in color, intricate in form, intellectual in appeal), then synthetic (brighter colors, simpler forms, “natural” appeal); the successful break with visual realism.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1905-1920s: Art’s Expressionism period, led by van Gogh, Munch, and Nietzsche, features a tendency to let it all- pathos, violence, morbidity, rage- hang out; distortion, fragmentation, Gothic angularity; with the determination to shake the viewer up.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1905-1908: Art’s Fauvism period.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

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---Economics---

• Economics: Concerned with the use of resources. Economics is about changes in production and distribution over time. It is about the efficiency of the systems that control production and distribution.

  • Macro: The side of economics that looks at the big picture, i.e., total output and total employment.

  • Micro: The side of economics that looks at the small picture, the way specific resources are used by firms or households, or the way income is distributed in response to particular price changes or government policies.

• Supply & Demand (& the 4 Laws of)

  • Supply: The amount of anything that someone wants to sell at any particular price.

    • When supply goes up, the price goes down.

    • When supply goes down, the price goes up.

  • Demand: The amount that someone wants to buy at any particular price.

    • When demand goes up, the price goes up.

    • When demand goes down, the price goes down.

• The value of world trade, in real or after-inflation terms, has grown 6.5% a year since 1950. For every $100B more in goods that are traded around the world, growth is pushed about $10-20B higher than it otherwise would be, economists say.

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Notable Economists

• Adam Smith (1723-1790): The 1st Economist; wrote “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776)” and propounded the idea that competition acted as the “invisible hand,” serving to regulate the marketplace.

• Thomas Malthus (1766-1834): Predicted that population growth would always exceed food production, leading, inevitably, to famine, pestilence, and war.

• David Ricardo (1772-1823): Wrote “The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817)”. Ricardo advanced two major theories: the Ricardo Effect and the theory of comparative advantage.

• John Stuart Mill (1806-1873): Wrote “Principles of Political Economy.”

• Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950): Argued that government should not try to break up monopolies, that, in fact, a monopoly was likely to call into existence the very forces of competition that would replace it (the “process of creative destruction).”

• John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946): Wrote “The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money” (modern General Theory) in which he argued that economics had to deal not only with the marketplace but with total spending within an economy (macroeconomics starts here). Keynes saw government intervention as necessary to stimulate the economy during periods of recession, bringing it into proper, if artificial, equilibrium (the New Deal and deficit spending both start here).

• John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-): Wrote “The New Industrial State (1967),” arguing that the rise of the major corporation had short-circuited the old laws of the market. In his view, such corporations now dominated the economy, creating and controlling market demand rather than responding to it, determining even the processes of government, while using their economic clout in their own, rather than society’s, interests.

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Economics Terminology

• Capital Gain: The profit you make from ownership in a company, provided the company has done well.

• Ceteris Paribus: Analyzing a complicated situation involving a huge number of variables by changing one and holding the rest steady.

• Commodities: Economic sectors that include tangible goods and intangible services.

• Disinflation: Occurs when prices rise, but at a slower rate than they did before.

• Dividend: The reward, or payoff, a company gives the stockholder for investing in it.

• Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) (‘Dow’): The most widely used measure of market activity. It’s an index of the price of 30 stocks which trade on the NYSE.

• Econometrics: Creates models of the economy based on a combination of observation, statistics, and mathematical principles.

• Economies

  • Free- Market Economy: An economy in which decisions made by households and businesses, rather than by the government, determine how resources are used. Vice versa and you’ve got the latter.

  • Mixed Economy: A free market economy with some level of government planning.

  • Planned Economy: An economy in which the government determines how resources are used, rather than by households and businesses.

• Externalities: Effects or consequences felt outside the closed world of production and consumption (ie. pollution).

• Factors of Production: Resources including land, labor, or capital- used to make or provide other things.

• Fed (US Central Bank): Headed by a chairman and six colleagues (‘governors’) who direct the country’s monetary policy. Simply put, they can alter the amount of money via supply and the cost of money via interest rates. When the Fed tightens, interest rates rise, and the economy slows down. When the Fed eases, interest rates fall, and the economy picks up.

  • The Fed measures the money supply in three ways, reflecting three different levels of liquidity—or spendability— different types of money have.

    • M1: The narrowest measure; restricted to the most liquid kind of money—the money you’ve actually got in your wallet and your checking account.

    • M2: Includes M1 plus savings accounts, time deposits of under $100,000, and balances in retail money market mutual funds.

    • M3: Includes M2 plus large-denomination ($100,000 or more) time deposits, balances in institutional money funds, repurchase liabilities, and Eurodollars held by US residents at foreign branches of US banks, plus all banks in the UK and Canada.

  • If the Fed releases less money into the economy, interest rates rise, corporate America borrows and produces less, workers are laid off, and everyone’s spending is cut back. When the Fed pumps more money into the economy, the reverse happens. And if it moves too far in one direction or another, the Fed can create a depression (the result of too much tightening) or hyperinflation (the result of too much easing).

  • The Fed and the financial markets will work hard to push interest rates higher if prices start rising. That, in turn, will immediately lower the inflation threat.

• Float: The value of international currencies vis-à-vis each other.

• Futures Market: Originally devised to help out farmers and manufacturers who used farm products. Contracts for future delivery (within a few months) of grains, pork bellies, and assorted other items could be bought and sold, providing a hedge against anticipated rising costs or falling revenues.

• Human Capital: The investments that businesses make in their workers, such as training and education.

• Indifference Curve: Shows all the varying combined amounts of two commodities that a household would find equally satisfactory. For example, if you’re used to having ten units of peanut butter and fifteen of jelly on your sandwich, and you lose five units of the peanut butter while gaining five of the jelly, and the new sandwich tastes just as good to you as the old one, you’ve located one point on an indifference curve.

• Inflation: A rise in the average level of all prices.

• Laissez- Faire: An economy totally free of government intervention, one in which the forces of the marketplace are allowed to operate freely and where the choices driving supply and demand, consumption and production are arrived at naturally, or “purely.” A kind of economic fantasyland.

  • When things don’t go the way economists want them to, based on the laissez-faire system, the outcome is explained as the result of a “market failure.”

  • National Association of Securities Dealers’ Automated Quotations system (NASDAQ).

  • National Production Measures

    • Gross National Product (GNP): A dollar amount that represents the total value of everything produced in a national economy in a year. If the number goes up from year to year, the economy is growing.

    • Per Capita Income: GNP/Population.

  • Gross Domestic Product (GDP): A dollar amount that represents the total value of everything produced in a national economy in a year, however, leaves out foreign investment and foreign trade and limits the measure of production to the flow of goods and services within the country itself. As a result, some economists believe it affords a more accurate basis for nation-to-nation comparisons.

• New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).

• Opportunity Costs: The cost to using your resources (time, money) in one way rather than another (which represented another opportunity).

• Productivity: A measure of the relationship between the amount of the output and that of the input.

• Short-Run & Long-Run

  • Long-Run: A period of time long enough for all of the economic inputs to change.

  • Short- Run: A period of time too short for economic inputs to change.

• Stagflation: High unemployment with high inflation.

• Stock: A share, or fractional ownership, in a company. Companies sell stocks because they need other people’s money to grow. Stock comes in two forms- common and preferred.

• Value Added: is a measure of the difference of the value of the inputs into an operation and the value of the product the operation yields.

  • The VAT is a lot like a sales tax in that it’s a tax on consumption (as opposed to income)

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Economic Theories and Principles

• Economies of Scale: With big factories using long production runs to make a single commodity, you can reduce manufacturing costs. In addition, the more you repeat the same operation, the cheaper it becomes.

• Kondratieff Long Wave Cycle: An obscure 1920s theory from Nikolai Kondratieff at the Soviet Economic Research Center; postulates that throughout history capitalism has moved in long waves which last for between 50-60y and consist of 2-3 decades of prosperity followed by a more or less equivalent period of stagnation.

• Monetarism: Favors a laissez-faire approach to everything but the money supply itself; they have misgivings about social security, minimum wages, and foreign aid, along with virtually every other form of government intervention. They stress slow and stable growth in the money supply as the best way for a government to ensure lasting economic growth without inflation, and they insist that, as long as the amount of money in circulation is carefully controlled, wages and prices will gradually adjust and everything will work out in the long run. Monetarism owes much of its appeal to one of its chief proponents, Nobel Prize–winning economist Milton Friedman, whose theories are generally acknowledged to have formed the backbone of POTUS Reagan and British PM Margaret Thatcher’s economic policy.

• Neo-Keynesianism: Monetarism’s opposite, arguing that there are too many institutional arrangements- unions and collective-bargaining agreements- for wages and prices to adjust automatically. They maintain that the best way for a government to promote growth without inflation is by using its spending power to influence demand.

• Ricardo Effect: Rising wages favor capital-intensive production over labor-intensive production.

• Supply-Side (Trickle-Down) Economics: Maintains that a government, by cutting taxes, actually gets to collect more money.

• Theory of Comparative Advantage: The basis for much of our thinking about international trade; everyone’s economic interests are served if each country specializes in those commodities that its endowments (natural resources, skilled labor, technology, and so on) allow it to produce most efficiently, then trades with other countries for their commodities.

• Theory of Perfect Competition: Firms always seek the maximum profit; there is total freedom for them both to enter into and to leave competition; there is perfect information; and that no business is so large as to influence its competitors unduly.

• The Theory of Rational Expectations: People learn from their mistakes.

• The Theory of Revealed Preference: People’s choices are always consistent.

• The Phillips Curve: Based on data compiled in England between 1861-1957; when inflation goes down, unemployment goes up, and vice versa.

• The Principle of Voluntary Exchange: People buy and sell to get what they want.

• The Process of Creative Destruction: A monopoly will likely call into existence the very forces of competition that would replace it.

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Economics Chronology

• 19 Oct, 1987: Black Monday; all 23 of the major world markets experience a sharp decline. When measured in USD, 8 markets declined by 20-29%, 3 by 30-39% (Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand), and three by >40% (Hong Kong, Australia, Singapore) with worldwide losses estimated at $1.71T. The crash sparked fears of extended economic instability or even a reprise of the Great Depression (Wiki).

• 12 Aug, 1982: The bull market begins when the DJIA drops to its 1980-1982 recession low of 776.92, almost precisely where the Index had closed in Jan, 1964 (WSJ).

• 1971: POTUS Nixon takes the US off the gold standard (the Bretton Woods system).-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1913: The USG creates the Federal Reserve Board (‘Fed’) to direct the countries monetary policy through control of money supply and interest rates.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

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---Film---

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Film Terminology

• Film Noir: A term coined by French critics to describe the kind of Hollywood gangster picture in which the crooks aren’t so much bad as sick, and the passions run dark and brooding.

• Gaffer: From a 19c nautical term; the chief electrician responsible for the placing of light.

• Grip: Film set worker who casts the shadows, working with flags, nets, and silks.

• Mise en scene: ‘Put into the scene’; refers to everything that takes place on the set: direction of actors, placement of cameras, deployment of props, choice of lenses, and so on.

• Montage: ‘Editing’.

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Film Chronology

• 1940: “Citizen Kane” is directed by Orson Welles. In the movie, media baron and thwarted politician Charles Foster Kane (played by Welles and based largely on William Randolph Hearst) dies, in the bedroom of his fabulous castle home, Xanadu, with “Rosebud” his last spoken word.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1915: Rise of ‘feature film’ following the release of “The Birth of a Nation,” directed by DW Griffith, which propels movies out of the realm of stage-bounded theatricality into that of the cinematic.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

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---Literature---

Greek Mythology

• Apollo: Greek Sun God; Son of Zeus and Leto, twin brother of Artemis.

• Dionysus: Greek God of Wine; Son of Zeus and Semele.

  • The rivalry between Apollo and Dionysus began in the 19c, when Nietzsche, in his Birth of Tragedy, contrasted what he saw as the primitive, creative, emotional “Dionysian” state of being, where life is dominated by music, dance, and lyricism, with the formal, analytical, coldly rational, and ultimately static “Apollonian” state, in which art and originality are squelched. Later, Spengler picked up on this notion in The Decline of the West, where he theorized that the uninhibited Dionysian element was the mark of a culture on the rise, the overcivilized Apollonian one the beginning of the end.

• Perseus: Son of Zeus and Danaë (whom Zeus had gotten pregnant by covering her in a golden shower); slew Medusa and rescued Andromeda from the sea monster (who wouldn’t have been sea-monster bait if her mother, Cassiopeia, hadn’t bragged in front of a god about her own beauty). 

• Prometheus: ‘Foresight’; Son of the Titans. Was delegated by the Gods to create man out of clay. Prometheus then stole fire from the sun, with the help of which he was able to breathe wisdom. Zeus saw the fire business as a combination of disloyalty and audacity. Prometheus was chained to a rock, where an eagle pecked daily at his liver, until Hercules finally set him free.

• Theseus: Son of King Aegeus of Athens; the great Athenian Hero who slew the Minotaur (half bull, half man who lived in the labyrinth on Crete) with the help of the princess Ariadne and her ball of thread. Theseus was friends with Hercules and his stories include encounters with Medea, a war with the Amazons, the slaying of Procrustes, and the forgiving of Oedipus.

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Notable Authors

• Homer (8c BCE): Greek Poet; published the Odyssey and the Iliad (~8c BCE), both concerning the Trojan War and are meant to be recited, not read. Western Literature begins here. 

  • Most scholars now seem to believe that there were two poets at work here, the Odyssey poet having been preceded (and influenced) by the Iliad poet, and some of them seem to think that homer “was an archaic Greek verb meaning “to set to verse.”

• Aeschylus (525- 456 BCE): The father of Greek tragedy; Aeschylus was the first playwright to put two actors on stage at the same time, instead of making audiences listen to one man rapping interminably with a chorus

• Sophocles (496- 406 BCE): One of three Greek tragedians (with Aeschylus and Euripides); wrote ‘Oedipus Rex’.

• Herodotus (484-425 BCE): Ancient Greek Historian and geographer from the Greek City of Halicarnassus (modern Bodrum, Türkiye); wrote the “Histories,” a detailed account of the Greco-Persian Wars. Herodotus was the first writer to perform systematic investigations of historical events and is referred to as “The Father of History.”

• Euripides (480/485-406 BCE): One three Greek tragedians (with Aeschylus and Sophocles); a theater innovator who influenced drama down to modern times, especially in the representation of traditional, mythical heroes as ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.

• Thucydides (460-400 BCE): Athenian Historian and general whose “History of the Peloponnesian War” recounts the 5c BCE war between Sparta and Athens until the year 411 BCE.

• Titus Livius (‘Livy’) (59 BCE-17): Roman historian; employed by various government agencies, compiling the history of Rome, from Aeneas and “the founding of this great city,” through Romulus and Remus, the Sabine women, Cincinnatus, Hannibal, et al., up to his own Augustan Age and “the establishment of an empire which is now, in power, next to the immortal gods.”

• Publius Cornelius ‘Tacitus’ (55-117): Roman historian and politician; wrote the “Annals” and the “Histories” covering the reign of Roman Emperors Tiberius, Claudius, Nero, and Agrippina, and those who reigned in the “Year of the Four Emperors (69).” 

• Shakespeare (1564-1616): English Playwright, poet, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world’s pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England’s national poet and the “Bard of Avon” (‘Bard’); he remains the most influential writer in the English language.

  • History (x10): Tell the story of England from the end of the 14c to the reign of Henry VIII.

    • Henry VI, Parts I, II, and III: Early Shakespeare, set against a background of England’s 63y War of the Roses, between the House of Lancaster and that of York.

  • Comedies: Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like it, and 12th Night.

    • Problem Comedies: Troilus and Cressida, All’s Well That Ends Well, and Measure for Measure.

  • Tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear (written between 1601 and 1606).

  • Romances: Romeo & Juliet.

    • The Tempest: The last play wholly written by Shakespeare.

• Milton (1608-1674): English poet and intellectual who wrote “Paradise Lost” (1658–1665), considered one of the greatest works of literature ever written, addressing the fall of man including the temptation of Adam and Eve by Satan and their Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, and “Lycidas,” an elegy on the death of a sailor friend, among others. Milton’s Areopagitica (1644), written in condemnation of pre-publication censorship, is among history’s most influential and impassioned defenses of freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

• Alexander Pope (1688-1744): English poet, translator, and satirist of the Enlightenment era, considered one of the most prominent English poets of the 18c. Pope’s notable works include “An Essay on Man” (1733–1734), the Rape of the Lock, The Dunciad, and an Essay on Criticism, and for his translation of Homer.  

• Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758): American author and puritan- preacher notable as the hero of the Great awakening, the religious revival that swept New England from the late 1730s-1750s. Edward sought a return to Calvinist belief in man’s basic depravity and in total dependence on God’s goodwill for salvation; wrote several books including: “God Glorified in the Work of Redemption by the Greatness of Man’s Dependence on Him in the Whole of It”; pinpoints the moral failings of New Englanders (1731), “A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God”; describes various types and stages of religious conversion (1737), “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741), “A careful and Strict Enquiry into the Freedom of the Will” (1754), “The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended” (1758).

• Samuel (Dr) Johnson (1709-1784): English writer, poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, critic, biographer, editor, and lexicographer who wrote the first Dictionary of the English Language, which he wrote by himself, over the course of 8y, after reading every notable piece of English literature from Shakespeare’s time to his own day and jotting down all the words he thought needed explaining. 

• Gibbon (1737-1794): English historian, parliamentary member and author; wrote “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”

  • Gibbon believed Christianity was the central destructive force in the collapse of Roman civilization. By offering a lot of non-self-starters— “useless multitudes who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity” is how he puts it—the promise of a life after death, Christianity undermined the rational pursuit of both virtue and reward, thereby weakening the Empire’s defenses against the barbarians, who took a more pragmatic, now-or-never approach to life.

• Washington Irving (1783-1859): American short story writer, essayist, biographer, historian, and diplomat, best known for his short stories “Rip Van Winkle (1819)” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820),” both contained in “The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1820),” as well as several histories of 15c Spain dealing with subjects such as Alhambra, Christopher Columbus, and The Moors. Irving served as American ambassador to Spain in the 1840s.

• James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851): American author, wrote “The Leatherstocking Tales”, i.e., The Pioneers (1823), “The Last of the Mohicans” (1826), “The Prairie” (1827), “Notions of the Americans” (1828), “The Pathfinder” (1840), and “The Deerslayer” (1841).

• Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886): German Historian and founder of modern source-based History. Ranke set the standards for much of later Historical writing, introducing ideas including the reliance on primary sources (empiricism) and an emphasis on narrative history.

• Jules Michelet (1798-1874): French Historian and author who wrote the History of the French Revolution (1847) and published a 6-volume L’Histoire de France (1855).

• Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859): British historian and Whig politician, who served as the Secretary of War from 1839-1841; wrote the History of England from the Accession of James II.

• Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882): American author, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist, and poet who led the Transcendentalist movement; wrote “A few passages from Nature” (1836). Emerson remains a linchpin of the American romantic movement, and his work greatly influenced the thinkers, writers, and poets that followed- including Henry David Thoreau.

• Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864): American author, wrote “The Scarlet Letter” (1850) and “The House of the Seven Gables” (1851). Hawthorne’s works are considered part of the Romantic movement and featured an anti-Puritan inspiration.

• Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849): American poet, editor, literary critic, and author, who invented the detective story and formulated the short story (as we know it); wrote “The Raven” (1845), “Ulalume” (1847), “Annabel Lee” (1848), “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The Tell Tale Heart” (1843), the “Black Cat” (1843), and “The Purloined Letter” (1845). Poe was a poverty-stricken alcoholic who did drugs and who married his 13yo cousin.  

• Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896): American abolitionist and author; wrote “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (1851–1852), which depicts the harsh conditions experienced by enslaved African Americans and is considered a catalyst to the US Civil War, “The Pearl of Orr’s Island” (1862) and “Old Town Folks” (1869).

• Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862): American naturalist, poet, philosopher, and author, considered a leading transcendentalist; wrote “Walden” (1854), inspired by the two years he spent communing with himself and Nature in a log cabin on Walden Pond, “Civil Disobedience” (1849), the essay inspired by the night he spent in jail for refusing to pay a poll tax and used as inspiration for Tolstoy and Ghandi, and “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers” (1849).

• Herman Melville (1819-1891): American poet and author of the American Renaissance period; wrote “Moby Dick” (1851), “Typee” (1846), and “Billy Budd” (published posthumously in 1924).

• Mark Twain (1835-1910): American humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, lecturer, and author, praised as the “greatest humorist the US has produced”; wrote “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” (1884), “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” (1876), “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865), and “The United States of Lyncherdom” (1901).

• George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950): Irish playwright, critic, polemicist, and political activist. In all his plays, Shaw’s intention is to shake his audience’s complacency, challenge its hypocrisy, and demonstrate how anybody who isn’t part of the solution is de facto part of the problem. became the leading dramatist of his generation, and in 1925 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. His major works include “Man and Superman (1902),” “Pygmalion (1913),” and “Saint Joan (1923).”

• William Butler Yeats (1865-1939): Irish Poet dramatist, writer, and one of the foremost figures of 20c literature, considered a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival. In his later years he served two terms as a Senator of the Irish Free State.

• Gertrude Stein (1874-1946): American poet, playwright, art collector, and author; wrote “Three Lives” (1909) and coined the phrase “The Lost Generation.”

• James Joyce (1882-1941): Irish Novelist, Poet, and Literary Critic who contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement; published Ulysses (1922).

• Ezra Pound (1885-1972): Expatriate American poet and critic, and a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement and a fascist collaborator in Italy during WWII; wrote “Old Granddad”. Motto: “Make it New.”

• Thomas Sterns (TS) Eliot (1888-1965): American poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, literary critic, and editor, considered one of the 20c major poets and a central figure in English language Modernist poetry; wrote his masterpiece “The Waste Land” (1922).

• Toynbee (1889-1975): English historian, philosopher, and author; wrote a 12-volume “A study of History (1934-1961)” and a 34 volume “Survey of International Affairs.”

  • “History is not the great upward climb (as orchestrated by either God or Darwin) but a series of pulsations, pendulum swings, seasonal cycles, in which civilizations—of which our Western one is but the most recent of twenty-one—rise, flourish, break down, and fall apart, the victims not only of external attacks, but also of internal failures of nerve.” The basic mechanism in all this Toynbee calls “challenge and response,” and he proceeds to illustrate how, from Egyptian and Sumerian times down to the present, every civilization has gradually lost its ability to cope, inevitably succumbing to such unhappiness as the “time of troubles” and, finally, the “universal state.”

• Edmund Wilson (1895-1972): American author and literary critic; wrote “Upstate” (1972);” a meditation on himself, his life, and imminent death. Wilson influenced many American authors, including F. Scott Fitzgerald.

• Lionel Trilling (1905-1975): American literary critic, teacher, and author; wrote “The Liberal Imagination” (1950), the single most widely read “New York” critical work, which, under the guise of discussing literature, actually aimed, as Trilling said, to put liberal assumptions “under some degree of pressure.”

• Hannah Arendt (1906-1974): American author and political philosopher, widely considered to be one the most influential political theorists of the 20c; wrote “The Origins of Totalitarianism” (1951), a dense study of the evolution of 19c anti-Semitism and imperialism into 20c Nazism and Communism.

• Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980): Canadian Philosopher and writer whose work is among the cornerstones of ‘media theory’. McLuhan wrote “the medium is the message,” that is, the way we acquire information affects us more than the information itself.

• Noam Chomsky (1928-): American public intellectual, linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, political activist, and author, sometimes referred to as the “Father of modern linguistics.” Chomsky is a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. Chomsky spearheaded resistance against the American presence in SE Asia.

  • Chomsky’s most famous theory concerns what he called generative (transformational) grammar, in which he argued that the degree of grammatical similarity manifested by the languages of the world, coupled with the ease with which little children learn to speak them, suggested that man’s capacity for language, and especially for grammatical structure, is innate, as genetically determined as eye color or left-handedness. The proof: All of us constantly (and painlessly) use sequences and combinations of words that we’ve never heard before, much less consciously learned.

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Literature Chronology

• 1791: “The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL. D” is published by James Boswell, considered the greatest biography in the English language.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1386-1400: “The Canterbury Tales” are penned by Chaucer as tales-within-a-tale being shared by 29 pilgrims enroute the shrine of Saint Thomas à Becket in Canterbury; a bard’s-eye view of social classes, economic brackets, and personality disorders in medieval England.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

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---Music---

• Almost every detail, large and small, derives from a single idea: in musical terms, a chain of descending thirds.

• Orchestra: broken into 4 sections:

  • Strings: Violins, Violas, violoncellos (cellos), double basses, harp. The largest and usually the most continuously played.

  • Woodwinds: Piccolo, flutes, clarinets, oboes, bassoons. The second largest, they add color and sometimes carry the melody.

  • Brass: French horns, cornets, trumpets, trombones, tuba. Acts as the muscle, or amplifier, in swelling, passionate passages, but generally used sparingly.

  • Percussion: Timpani, Bass drum, snare drum, cymbals, triangles, woodblocks, castanets, celeste, gongs, glockenspiel, xylophone, &c. Provides the beat.

  • Soloist: Faces the orchestra and battles it with virtuosity until, finally, they join in triumphant partnership.

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Notable Musicians

• Johannes Ockeghem (?-1497): Franco-Flemish composer and singer of Early Renaissance music; the most influential European composer in the period between du Fay and des Prez; the last great medieval composer.

• Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643): Italian composer, choirmaster, and string player. Opera’s first musical genius, considered a transitional figure between the Renaissance and Baroque periods of music history.

• Henry Purcell (1659-1695): English composer of Baroque style; wrote Dido & Aeneas, the only English opera to rank as a world masterpiece.

• Alessandro Scarlatti (1660-1725): Italian composer; one of the fathers of classical opera.

• Johan Sebastian Bach (1685-1750): The greatest baroque and the last Renaissance composer. Wrote his musicals between 1733-1748.

• George Frideric Handel (1685-1759): German-British Baroque composer well known for his operas, oratorios, anthems, concerti grossi, and organ concertos.

• Christoph Willibald von Gluck (1714-1787): Italian and French composer. Opera’s first great reformer; attempted to streamline form, do away with excess, and create a balance of power between drama and music.

• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791): Influential Composer and musician of the Classical period; Mozart wrote more than 800 works covering virtually every genre of his time. With Verdi and Wagner, Opera’s Triumvirate of Greats; personalized and humanized opera. Mozart’s three great “Italian” operas: Le Nozze di Figaro, a comedy with political overtones; Così fan tutte, a sexual farce, sort of, that scandalized all but late 20c audiences; and Don Giovanni, the greatest example of Mozart’s unconventional mix of tragedy and comedy.

• Ludwig Van Beethoven (1770-1827): German composer and pianist; one of the most admired composers in the history of Western Music.

• Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791-1864): German Opera composer who wrote operas in France; wrote “Les Huguenots”.

• Gioacchino Antonio Rossini (1792–1868): Italian composer who wrote 39 Operas including the Barber of Seville. Rossini was the pinnacle of opera buffa.

• Gaetano Donizetti (1797–1848): Italian Composer best known for his almost 70 Operas. Wrote predominantly bel canto operas including his Lucia de Lammermoor.

• Vincenzo Bellini (1801–1835): Sicilian opera composer best known for bel canto operas including “the Swan of Catania” and “Norma.”  

• Louis-Hector Berlioz (1803-1869): French Romantic period Opera composer and conductor.

• Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849): Polish composer and virtuoso pianist of the Romantic period.  

• Richard Wagner (1813-1883): With Verdi and Mozart, Opera’s Triumvirate of Greats. Wagner is Opera’s towering intellect, its second Great Reformer and the pinnacle of German Romanticism. Wagnerian “music drama” (his term) aimed at a union of all theatrical arts: poetry, drama, music, and stagecraft; wrote “Tanhäuser (1845)”.

• Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901): With Mozart and Wagner, Opera’s Triumvirate of Greats Mr. Opera; the greatest Italian opera composer. Of his Operas, Rigoletto, II Trovatore, La Traviata, are the most popular; Ata is the grandest; Otello and Fa/staff, his one comedy.  

• Charles François Gounod (1818-1893): French Opera composer; wrote 12 Operas including Faust.

• Bedrich Smetana (1824-1884): Czech composer and patriot; one of the leaders of the movement toward nationalistic opera; a major force behind development of a Czech style. The Bartered Bride, a colorful peasant comedy, is the only one of his works well-known outside the homeland.

• Georges Bizet (1838-1875): French composer of the Romantic period, best known for his operas. Bizet’s “Carmen” is the most famous example of opéra comique.

• Modest Petrovich Moussorgsky (1839-1881): Russian composer, one of the group known as “The Five.” Mother Russia’s #1 operatic son. His one complete opera, Boris Godunov, is based on a play by Pushkin.

• Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893): Russian composer of the Romantic period; the first Russian composer whose music would make a lasting impression internationally. The first to pour Russian themes and melancholia into Western classical molds. His masterpiece, Eugene Onegin.

• Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924): Italian Opera composer regarded as the most successful proponent of Italian Opera after Verdi.

• Richard Strauss (1864-1949): German composer, conductor, pianist, and violinist, considered a leading composer of the late Romantic and early modern eras. The most popular composer of the turn of the 19-20c. 

• Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951): Austrian-American composer, music theorist, teacher, writer, and painter. Widely considered one of the most influential composers of the 20c. Associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art.  

• Béla Bartók (1881-1945): Hungarian composer, pianist, and ethnomusicologist. Considered one of the most important composers of the 20c. Wrote his musicals between 1908-1939.

• Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971): Russian composer, pianist, and conductor, widely considered one of the most important and influential composers of the 20c and a pivotal figure in modernist music.  

• Alban Berg (1885-1935): Austrian composer; one of the most important modern opera composers; an experimentalist working with atonality and post-Freudian themes.

• Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953): Russian composer, pianist, and conductor, acknowledged as a masterpiece across numerous music genres. One of three popular Russian composers with Stravinsky & Tchaikovsky.

• Douglas Moore (1893-1969): American composer, songwriter, organist, pianist, conductor, educator, actor, and author. Moor was a minor explorer of American regionalism and roots. The Devil and Daniel Webster, from Benét’s literary tall tale, and the folkloric Ballad of Baby Doe.

• Virgil Thomson (1896-1989): American composer and critic who was instrumental in the development of the “American Sound.” Thomson made brief forays into opera; Four Saints in Three Acts and The Mother of Us All.

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Music Terminology

• A Cappella: ‘As in church’; used of vocal music without instrumental accompaniment.

• Arpeggio: ‘As played on a harp’; a broken chord in which the notes are played in succession so as to recall—on a piano, violin, whatever—a harpist “sweeping” the strings.

• Cadenza: ‘Cadence’; a passage in a concerto (and a display of virtuosity, florid, brilliant, or both) in which the solo instrument plays without the orchestra.

• Carmen: The world’s most popular opera, and one of the most accessible.

• Coda: ‘Tail’; a concluding, rounding-off section to a piece of music,

• Coloratura: Elaborate ornamentation of the melodic line.

• Da Capo: ‘From the Head’; an indication that a previously played section of music is to be repeated.

• Diva: ‘Goddess’; a great lady of the opera, a legend. The highest accolade given to a female singer, usually by adoring fans or an ecstatic press.

• Glissando: ‘Glisser’- To slide (French); sliding from note to note, as by running one’s fingers over the keys of the piano, strings of the harp, etc.

• Legato: ‘Bound together’; describes a smooth performance without accentuated notes.

• Obbligato: ‘Obligatory’; denotes some indispensable part: an elaborate embellishment of a main melodic line, an instrument that’s critical (but subordinate) to a vocal performance.

• Opera Types

  • Opera Buffa: Comic operas about common people and everyday life, usually revolving around boisterous romantic intrigues; a reaction against the stuffy formality of opera seria.

  • Opera Seria: Operas about Kings, Gods, and Superheroes.

  • Bel Canto: ‘Beautiful Singing’; refers, historically, to the type of singer-dominated opera prevalent in Italy in the 17c and 18c.

• Libretto: The text, or lyrics, of an opera; also a “little book” (the literal meaning of the word) containing the lyrics, a synopsis of the plot, and often, an accompanying translation.

• Pizzicato: ‘Pinched’; directs that, with stringed instruments, the strings are to be plucked with the fingers, not bowed.

• Recitativo: Refers to the speechlike vocal sections used to advance the action in an opera, as opposed to the more lyrical, anchoring arias, duets, etc.

• Sforzando: ‘Forced’; designates a note to be played with special emphasis.

• Staccato: ‘Detached’; opposite of “legato”, with notes to be played in a sharp, highly differentiated manner.

• Tremolo: ‘Tremulous’; a “trembling” effect, either from the rapid repetition of a single note (by, say, fast backward-and-forward bowing) or from the rapid alternation of two notes more than a whole tone apart.

• Vibrato: ‘Shake’; a rapid, slight wavering of pitch.

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Music Chronology

• 1883: The Metropolitan Opera House opens on Broadway after a group of wealthy businessmen, irritated they couldn’t get boxes at the Academy of Music, start their own theater.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1876: The Festspielhaus Opera House opens in Bayreuth, Germany.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1875: The L’Opéra National opens in Paris, designed by Charles Garnier as a monument to the 2nd Empire.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1869: The Staatsoper Opera House opens in Vienna to house the Vienna Court Opera.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1858: The Royal Opera House opens in Covent Garden, UK.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1776: The Teatro alla Scala, Italy’s premier Opera house opens in Milan.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1570: Opera is invented in Italy.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

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---Philosophy---

• Why do we like what we like? Does art per se exist, or is it just patches of color and hummable tunes and words in a row? Is the point of a work of art that it be representative of something, or that it express its creator’s identity, or that it engage its audience? And is there a relationship between what’s beautiful and what’s good? Epistemology: Do we really know anything and, if so, what? And how do we know it? And how do we know that we know it? And how do we know that we know that we know it? etc.

• Ethics: The science or philosophy of morals.

  • Ethical: Describes recognizable, day-to-day behavior that is proper, admirable, or honest.

• Morals: The Practice or enactment of ethics.

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Notable Philosophers

• Aristocles (‘Plato’- Broad) (427- 347 BCE): Athenian philosopher during Greece’s classical period. Founded the Platonist school of thought and the academy, the first institution of higher learning on the European continent.

  • Best-Known Works: The Dialogues- the Apology, Crito, and Phaedo (a trilogy about the imprisonment and death of Socrates); the Symposium (on the nature of love); and the Republic (on the principles of government).

  • Catchphrases: The allegory of the cave, philosopher-kings, the life that is unexamined is not worth living.

• Aristotle (384-322 BCE): Greek philosopher and polymath during Greece’s Classical period; the student of Plato and founder of the Peripatetic school of philosophy within the Lyceum.

  • Best Known Works: Organon, Physics, Politics, Rhetoric, Poetics, Nichomachean Ethics.

  • Catchphrases: The Golden Mean, the Unmoved Mover, the Dramatic Unities (of action, time, and place), entelechy (“the condition of a thing whose essence is fully realized,” or, to paraphrase the Army, “Being all that you can be”), catharsis.

• Saint Augustine (of Hippo) (354-430): Theologian and philosopher of Berber origin and the Bishop of Hippo regius in Numidia, Roman N. Africa. Augustine gave us ideas of separation of Church and State and of history as progression toward a goal.

  • Best Known Works: Confessions, The City of God.

  • Catchphrases: City of God, city of man.

• Saint Thomas Aquinas (Doctor Angelicus/Communis/Universalis) (1225-1274): Italian Dominican friar and priest who was an influential philosopher, theologian, and jurist in the tradition of scholasticism. Aquinas based his theology more on concrete analysis of this world than on irrational faith in the next and constructed the second great synthesis of Christian thinking, which superseded Augustine’s as of the 13c.

  • Best-Known Works: Summa Theologica, Summa Contra Gentiles.

  • Catchphrase: His epithet, “The Angelic Doctor.”

• Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527): Italian diplomat, author, philosopher, and historian who lived during the Renaissance; revolutionized political philosophy and shocked idealists by adopting a purely secular, scientific perspective toward statecraft and wrote the classic how-to book for aspirants to power (The Prince). Based principles of government on the assumption that man is fundamentally bad and that ends justify means.

  • Best-Known Works: The Prince, Discourses.

  • Catchphrase: The chief foundations of all states are good laws and good arms.

• René Descartes (1596-1650):  French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician, widely considered a seminal figure in the emergence of modern philosophy and science. Math was central to his method of inquiry, and he connected the previously separate fields of geometry and algebra into analytic geometry. Descartes built a philosophical system based on deductive reasoning and a priori truths.

  • Best-Known Works: Discourse on Method, Meditations on First Philosophy.

  • Catchphrase: Cogito ergo sum, “take nobody’s word for anything, doubt everything in order to find something to be sure of.”

• John Locke (1632-1704): English philosopher and physician, widely regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers and commonly known as the “father of liberalism.” Locke was the theoretical architect of what we call democracy; he gave us basic liberal ideals (the primacy of the pursuit of happiness, the belief in the natural rights of man) and specific principles of government (majority rule, checks and balances).

  • Best-Known Works: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Second Treatise on Government.

  • Catchphrases: The mind as tabula rasa (blank page), checks and balances, the labor theory of value, laissez-faire, the rights of man, “Knowledge is the perception of the agreement or disagreement of two ideas.”

• Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677): Dutch philosopher of Portuguese- Jewish origin. One of the foremost exponents of the 17c Rationalism and one of the early and seminal thinkers of the Enlightenment and modern biblical criticism. Spinoza was a pantheist and a pure determinist, who believed in the oneness of the universe, in the supremacy of immutable natural law, in the necessity of learning to go with the flow.

  • Best-Known Work: Ethics.

  • Catchphrases: Sub specie aeternitatis (in the light of eternity); all determination is negation.

• Gottfried Wilhelm Von Liebinz  (1646-1716): German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist, and diplomat; one of the most prominent figures in both the history of philosophy, theology, ethics, politics, law, history, and philology. Von Liebinz created the famous analogy of the Cartesian clocks, which postulates that mind and body do not interact, but only seem to, because they are synchronized by God.

  • Best-Known Works: Monadology, Principles of Nature and of Grace, Theodicy.

  • Catchphrases: Windowless monads, preestablished harmony.

• Voltaire (1694-1778): French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher who rejected providence, opined that events have more to do with chance than with design, and proposed a new kind of histoire universelle, based on the notion that men are alike, no matter what country they live in, endowed with the same natural rights and faculties, destined to proceed along the same path of reason and enlightenment. Voltaire was an advocate of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and separation of church and state.

  • Best-Known Works: The Essay on the Customs and the Spirit of Nations.

• David Hume (1711-1776): Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, historian, economist, librarian, and essayist best known for his highly influence system of philosophical empiricism, skepticism, and naturalism. Hume was a Scottish skeptic who took Locke’s empirical arguments to their logical conclusion (which Locke had neglected to do) and wound up doubting our ability to know anything at all.

  • Best-Known Works: A Treatise of Human Nature, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (a simplified version of the first book of the Treatise).

  • Catchphrases: The science of man. Also, Kant’s famous remark that reading Hume “awakened me from my dogmatic slumbers.”

• Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): German philosopher and one of the Central Enlightenment thinkers. Kant’s comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics have made him one of the most influential figures in modern W. philosophy. ” The origin of the world as we know it, he insisted, is the human mind itself, which, far from being tabula rasa, has an inherent structure through which we filter all experience and which imposes its own order on the world of phenomena (though not on the real/ideal world of “things-in-themselves,” which is unknowable).

  • Best-Known Works: Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, Critique of Judgment.

  • Catchphrases: The categorical imperative, transcendental logic, “thing-in-itself” (Ding-an-sich).

• Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel (1770-1831): Germanic philosopher and historian regarded as one of the most important figures in German idealism and one of the founding figures of modern W. Philosophy. Hegel took Kant’s mind-ordered world from the human level to the cosmic one, creating a system into which all past, present, and future experience and thought fit together rationally in an encompassing dialectic that is constantly evolving toward supreme self-consciousness, or Absolute Spirit. At which point we’ll know everything and see God.

  • Best-Known Works: Phenomenology of Spirit, The Philosophy of Right, Lectures on the Philosophy of History (compiled and published posthumously).

  • Catchphrases: The dialectic (thesis vs. antithesis leads to synthesis), Absolute Spirit.

  • Dialectic: The mechanism underlying the whole historical process; ‘The dominant idea, or “truth,” of an epoch (its thesis), brings with it its precise negation (its antithesis); out of their sparring emerges a brand new, more or less hybrid “truth,” or synthesis. (Marx’s favorite part).

• Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860): German philosopher; the first to come right out and insist that there was something more important than knowledge or intellect: namely, will, and specifically, the will to live (Nietzsche and Freud were both to be influenced by this concept). Believing that will was inherently evil, he argued that the best one could strive for was renunciation of desire, a temporary absence of pain through the contemplation of high art and, with any luck, the eventual extinction of the species.

  • Best-Known Works: The World as Will and Idea, Essays.

  • Catchphrase: The world is my idea.

• Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855): Danish theologian, philosopher, poet, social critic, and religious author widely considered to be the first existentialist philosopher. Kierkegaard believed there that there were no reliable guidelines for human action, that one could only hope for enlightenment by committing oneself to a God who might very well never give one the time of day. In the hands of Sartre and Camus, his belief in God was replaced by a belief in the Void. Acknowledged as the “founder” of existentialism.

  • Best-Known Works: Either/Or (more dramatic than theoretical), Fear and Trembling, Sickness unto Death.

  • Catchphrase: The leap into absurdity.

• William James (1842-1910): American philosopher, historian, and psychologist, and the first educator to offer a psychology course in the US; considered a leading thinker of the late 19c, one of the most influential philosophers of the US, and the “Father of American psychology.” James Attempted to make philosophy relevant by abandoning the search for absolutes in favor of a will-it-cut-down-trees approach to ideas. Theorized that reality is whatever we make it, that truth is tantamount to effectiveness, ditto goodness (thus, if believing in God makes you a better person, then God exists), and that philosophy should stick to answering questions that have a “cash-value,” i.e., that will make a significant difference in people’s lives.

  • Best-Known Works: Principles of Psychology, The Will to Believe and Other Essays, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Pragmatism.

  • Catchphrases: The will to believe, the cash-value of ideas (also, in a more literary vein, stream of consciousness, the bitch-goddess success).

• Friedreich Nietzsche (1844-1900): German philosopher, prose poet, cultural critic, and philologist whose work has exerted a profound influence on contemporary philosophy. Nietzsche was vehemently opposed to virtually all established culture and morality. A prophet who announced the demise of God (and, more importantly, of all absolutes), prophesied the world wars (or something very like them), warned of democracy’s tendency to promote conformity and suppress excellence; also, favored selective breeding. Insisted that the dominant force of history is the “will to power,” and advocated a “transvaluation of values” in which the traditional “feminine” virtues espoused by Christianity (submission, compassion, being nice to other people) would be joined with “masculine” virtues (courage, strength, toughness) in a morality that aimed at greatness rather than goodness. Nietzsche hoped for the ascendancy of the Übermensch, or superman, in whom Dionysian instinct and dynamism would be perfectly integrated with Apollonian reason and ethics; went hopelessly insane at 44yo. His sister later distorted some of his writings, making him sound more racist than he really was.

  • Best-Known Works: Thus Spake Zarathustra, The Will to Power (beware posthumous additions by his sister), Twilight of the Idols, Ecce Homo (his autobiography).

  • Catchphrases: The will to power, transvaluation of values, Übermensch, God is dead.

• Henri Bergson (1859-1941): French philosopher who was influential in the tradition of analytic philosophy and continental philosophy, especially during the first half of the 20c. Bergson viewed human history as a contest between the inertia of matter (associated with reason, conservatism, laws, and social pressure) and the creative energy—or élan vital—of living things (associated with intuition, art, charisma, and the mysteries of life).

  • Best-Known Works: Time and Free Will, Creative Evolution, Matter and Memory (see also On Laughter, a minor but famous work).

  • Catchphrase: Élan vital.

• John Dewey (1859-1952): American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform; regarded as one of the most prominent American scholars in the first half of the 20c. For Dewey, philosophy is an instrument for guiding human action, and turned James’ theoretical pragmatism into an applied science, using pragmatic principles to help resolve contemporary social issues.

  • Best-Known Works: Democracy and Education, Reconstruction in Philosophy, The School and Society.

  • Catchphrases: Progressive education, learning by doing.

• Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947): English mathematician and philosopher, best known as the defining figure of the philosophical school known as process philosophy. Whitehead was a mathematician turned metaphysician; his work with Russell produced the first new system of logic since Aristotle, the Principia, which is considered one of the great intellectual monuments of all time. His philosophy, which revolved around theories of change and actualization of potentiality, is now called “process theology.”

  • Best-Known Works: Principia Mathematica (with Bertrand Russell), Science and the Modern World, Adventures of Ideas.

  • Catchphrases: The philosophy of organism, occasions, and becomings.

• Georg Lukacs (1885-1971): Hungarian philosopher; argued that the historical interaction of subject and object is the basic form of dialectics, insisting in History and Class Consciousness, his major work, that a developed class consciousness would impel the proletariat to become both the subject and the object of history.

  • Reification: A concept Marx had introduced in his discussion of the fetishism of commodities in Das Kapital; the process by which bourgeois society transforms social relations into commodity relations, the process by which people become mere objects.

• Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951): Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of math, mind, and language; considered by some to be the greatest philosopher of the 20c. Wittgenstein was convinced that language creates a picture of the real world and that most philosophical problems are merely the result of philosophers’ misuse of language; experience only seems complicated because of our confused descriptions of it, which represent knots in our understanding. Untangle the knots and, according to the theory, philosophical questions will simply dissolve. Was notable for having formulated two separate philosophical systems, the second of which (called ordinary-language philosophy) refuted the first (logical atomism, or picture theory).

  • Best-Known Works: Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, Philosophical Investigations.

  • Catchphrases: Language games; whereof one cannot speak, thereon one must remain silent; don’t ask for the meaning, ask for the use.

• Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937): Italian philosopher; spent the last 10y of his brief life in a Fascist prison, where he managed to write his “Prison Notebooks”. Gramsci’s placed great emphasis on the significance of intellectuals, whom he saw as the leading agents of ideology, an indispensable (and heretofore counterrevolutionary) force in preserving the dominance of the ruling class. This ideological ascendancy he called “hegemony.” The danger of hegemony lies in the way it sneaks in everywhere, so much so that the Weltanschauung of the ruling class comes to seem like simple common sense. To combat this, Gramsci urged proletarians and other progressive elements to struggle to create a counterculture that would challenge the hegemonic domination of the prevailing ideology.

• Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979): German-borne American philosopher; Marcuse’s great contribution was the joining of politics with sex. Marcuse held that we could finally afford to liberate Eros, to eroticize all human relations.

• Louis Althusser (1918-1990): French philosopher; explained how the object of knowledge is different from the real object. This process—equivalent to knowledge working on its object—he calls “theoretical practice.” Such theoretical practice, when applied to society, leads inevitably to a view of society as a totality, which can, however, be broken down—not into a vulgar base/superstructure scheme, but into a tripartite division of economy, politics, and ideology, each of the three relatively autonomous but all of them united in a larger “structure of structures.” Althusser calls particular relationships among them conjunctures, and reasons that any specific conjuncture is likely to be “overdetermined.” Which is to say, complex—also, slightly redundant.

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Philosophy Terminology

• A Posteriori: Knowledge derived from observation; you get to it after (post-) looking around for yourself. A posteriori reasoning from effect to cause.

• A Priori: Knowledge based on assumption-as-bottom-line, on belief that doesn’t depend on experience for validation. A priori reasoning proceeds from cause to effect.

• Aesthetics: Beauty, art and taste, standards and judgments and criticism.

• Deduction: A formal argument that assumes one or more principles as self-evident, then, following rigid rules and forms and proceeding from the general to the specific, infers one or more conclusions from those principles.

• Eschatology: Any doctrine or system focused on such end-of-the-line matters as death, the afterlife, immortality, and redemption.

• Ethics: Which actions are right and which ends are good. Moreover, does the rightness of actions derive from the goodness of their consequences? Is the virtuousness of a motive to be inferred from the rightness of the actions that it tends to prompt? Is it less bad to shoplift from Kmart than from the corner hardware store?

• Induction: Empirical, factual, ordinary-feeling; it makes use of experiment and/or experience- the scientific method to arrive at an inference and proceeds from the specific to the general. When you make an induction, you begin by recording instances, monitoring behavior, counting noses. Induction is about mere probabilities; its success depends on how accurately you observe and over how many cases.

• Logic: What’s valid, what’s invalid; what can and can’t be argued and proven.

• Metaphysics: The search for ultimate categories, with its goal an understanding of the all-inclusive scheme of things otherwise known as the world and of the part man plays within it. Past discoveries have included existence, essence, time, space, God, self, and cause. A lot of philosophers now characterize metaphysics as “overpoetic” and “prescientific.”

• Objective Correlative: The idea that the sensory data we receive from the external world is an accurate representation of the objects and events in that world. It is based on the assumption that our senses provide us with reliable information about the world around us, and that the physical properties of objects and events in the world are the same regardless of our perception of them.

• Ontology: The study of being. It implies getting to the heart of the matter, to the very essence of something.

• Negative Capability: A term coined by the poet John Keats to describe the ability to embrace uncertainty and ambiguity and to live with the unknown without trying to resolve it or explain it away. It is a state of mind that allows for the acceptance of contradictions and complexity, and it involves a willingness to suspend judgment and to allow for the possibility of multiple interpretations and viewpoints.

  • Trilling read this as “a way of dealing with life,” “to make up one’s mind about nothing—to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts,” to trust the subconscious and not “try too hard in coming at a truth.”

  • F. Scott’s reading of it (in The Crack-Up) was a little different: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

• Teleology: A belief in, or study of, an overall purpose, design, or end (telos, in the Greek), usually in nature. Teleologists like to invoke results as reasons and tends to thrive in systems structured around the existence of an active God, intent on revelation. And to be treated as anathema by scientists.

• Weltanschauung: ‘Worldview’; a philosophy of life, how it all works.

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Fallacies

• Affective Fallacy: The supposed error of judging or evaluating a text on the basis of its emotional effects on a reader.

• Intentional Fallacy: The problem inherent in trying to judge a work of art by assuming the intent or purpose of the artist who created it.

• Pathetic Fallacy: A phrase coined by the British critic and essayist John Ruskin to call attention to the tendency on the part of second-rate poets to attribute to nature the emotions and motivations of human beings. Pathetic fallacy is now a fairly neutral term used to designate any nature-as-human image.

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Philosophical -isms

• Idealism: The nature of reality is completely bound up with mind and consciousness and thought, that your leg and your bandanna and your patriotism and Bruce Springsteen and his leg and his bandanna and his patriotism cannot be dealt with- perceived or proven to exist- except through the activity of your (or somebody’s) knowing mind.

• Materialism: All entities- including everybody and everybody’s leg and everybody’s bandanna and everybody’s patriotism and everybody’s mind— can be explained only in terms of matter and energy, atoms and electrons.

• Structuralism: Believe that (1) the component parts of any system have meaning only in terms of their relations to one another; that (2) those relations tend to be binarily organized, i.e., to involve a pair (or many pairs) of terms, each half of which is parallel, or opposed, or inverted, or equivalent, or duplicative, or whatever, with regard to the other; and that (3) all cultural phenomena, from linguistic structures to kinship practices, table manners to skirt lengths, wrestling to insanity, and so on, are governed by the same principles, and hence related to each other. They, as well as all patterns of human behavior, are codes in which the inherent structuring tendencies of the human mind are reflected. And they directly reflect the ways in which the mind sorts, clusters, and mediates every image, every stimulus, every bit of information it stumbles across. Structuralists claim that if you pay close enough attention to these phenomena, ask the right questions, and construct the appropriate “model,” eventually you get to the bottom of things.

  • By questioning the codes—of behavior, of meaning, of authority—it implicitly questioned who had power and why we went along with his having it.

  • Structuralism was the immediate ancestor of- and force behind- poststructuralism, which is, in turn, the kissing cousin of deconstruction and postmodernism.

• Symbolism: A movement led by French Authors Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé, and Yeats that believed there is another world beyond the visual one.

• Deconstructionism: Led by philosopher Jacques Derrida, who in 1966 started one of the greatest academic food fights of all time when he took on the structuralists at a conference at JHU. 

• Postmodernism: Question all such supposedly self-evident structures as superior/inferior, in/out, original/belated, and man/woman, and accused all systems- power structures no less than paragraph structures-of being propped up from the inside and of unwittingly betraying, under cross-examination, exactly how, and how much, they are propped up.

  • Postmodernists believe we can’t confidently declare one idea or way of life better than another (which was postmodernist extraordinaire Jean-François Lyotard’s point), that there is no such thing as universal “truth” or even right or wrong, that it all comes down to language (Derrida’s point) or various forms of power and discourse (Foucault’s point)- which makes a lot of people uncomfortable.

  • Postmodernism was all the rage in American academic circles during the 1980s-1990s. (The French, interestingly enough, had had enough of this stuff by the early Seventies, which explains why most of these fellows ended up in American universities.)

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Philosophy Paradoxes & Arguments

• Buridan’s Ass: A famous stumbling block to the concept of free will. An ass, placed equidistant from two identical bundles of hay, has no basis for choosing one over the other and ends up starving to death. The idea is traditionally attributed to the medieval French philosopher Jacques Buridan, who claimed that a man must choose that which his reason tells him is the greater good, but that he may delay deciding until his reason has had sufficient time to gather all the information it needs. Actually, it’s a starving dog that Buridan refers to; the ass was his critics’ idea.

• Plato’s Cave: The famous allegory with which Plato, using Socrates as his mouthpiece, tries to explain the nature of human knowledge. Picture, says Socrates, a bunch of people who’ve spent their whole lives chained up in an underground den, unable to turn around. Behind them a fire is blazing, but all they can see are their own shadows on the wall of the cave in front of them. Never having seen anything else, they naturally mistake these shadows for reality. In the same way, the rest of us mistake the world as we know it for the real world, whereas the objects, and even the qualities, of this world are only shadows of the pure forms that exist in the realm of ideas.

• Occam’s Razor: “Entities ought not to be multiplied, except from necessity.” The maxim for which William of Occam, the Franciscan scholar, is best remembered. Actually, Occam never really said this, but he did say, “It is vain to do with more what can be done with fewer,” which adds up to the same thing; moreover, he did uphold the principle of eliminating all unnecessary facts or hypothetical entities in analyzing a subject, and he did dissect every question as if with a razor.

• Pascal’s Wager: The pragmatic approach to God, and the 17c French religious thinker Blaise Pascal’s attempt to save the skeptical soul through commonsense reasoning. Basically, his argument goes: OK, so you’ll never know for sure whether or not God exists, it’s all a cosmic game of heads or tails. But you have everything to gain and nothing to lose by betting on His existence. Remember, you’re only staking one finite, so-so little life—no, not even that, only the way you live that life—against a chance to win an infinity of an infinitely happy life. If you win (if God exists), you’ve won everything; if you lose (if God doesn’t exist), you haven’t really lost a thing.

• Zeno’s Arrow: Illustrates the impossibility of motion or change. The flight of an arrow, said Zeno, is an apparent example of motion. But at any given moment of its flight, the arrow is either where it is or where it is not. If it moves where it is, it must be standing still, and if it moves where it is not, then it can’t be there; thus it can’t move.

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Philosophy of God

• The Cosmological Argument: Dates to Aristotle’s theory of motion and encompasses Thomas Aquinas’ version, known as the argument from contingency and necessity. We know from experience that everything in the world moves and changes, said Aristotle (or simply exists, said Aquinas), and everything that moves, or exists, has a mover, i.e., a cause, something that precedes it and makes it happen. Now, we can trace lots of things in the world back to their immediate causes, but there is always another cause behind them and another behind them. Obviously, said Aristotle & Co., we can’t keep tracing effects back to causes indefinitely; the buck has to stop somewhere, there has to be one cause that isn’t, itself, caused by something else, or one entity that existed before all the others could come into existence. This first cause, the Unmoved Mover, is God.

  • The Cosmological argument began running into snags when Hume decided that the whole principle of cause-and-effect was a mirage.

• The Ontological Argument: Originated (possibly) with St. Anselm back in the Middle Ages and which hit its peak with Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, the Continental Rationalists of the 17c, runs as follows: We can conceive of perfection (if we couldn’t, we wouldn’t be so quick to recognize imperfection) and we can conceive of a Perfect Being. God is what we call that Being which embodies all imaginable attributes of perfection, the Being than which no greater Being can be conceived. Well, if you’re going to imagine a Perfect Being, it stands to reason that He exists, since a Perfect Being that didn’t exist wouldn’t be as perfect as a Perfect Being that did, and isn’t, therefore, the most Perfect Being you can imagine. (Is He?) Hence, by definition, God exists. (Doesn’t He?)

  • The ontological argument can be criticized for begging the question; that is, it assumes, at the outset, the very thing it purports to prove.

• The Teleological Argument (the Argument from Design): The argument’s validity never depended on the idea that God is omniscient or omnipotent, only that He’s a better planner than the rest of us. However, as Hume, the great debunker, was to point out, even if we could assume the existence of a Cosmic Architect who was marginally better at putting it all together than we are, such a mediocre intelligence, which allowed for so many glitches in the plan, would hardly constitute God.

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---Political Science---

• Argentina

  • Geopolitics: Federal republic comprising 23 provinces and a federal district that is governed by a president and VP elected for 4y terms.

  • Washington Consensus: An economic policy encouraged by the IMF that calls for removing trade barriers, privatizing major industries, opening Argentina to foreign investors, and pegging the peso to the dollar.

• Cambodia

  • Geopolitics: A multiparty democracy under a constitutional monarchy.  

  • Khmer Rouge: Maoists funded largely by China.

• Canada

  • Geopolitics: A federal union of 10 provinces and 3 Arctic territories with its capital at Ottawa.

  • Misc

    • ~75% of the population lives within 100 miles of the US border.

    • Ontario: The most populous, powerful, urban, and industrialized city in Canada.

    • Alberta: Has most of the world’s second-largest oil reserve (after Saudi Arabia).

    • Resource-rich western Canada feels exploited by the slick and populous east.

• Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) (formerly Zaire)

  • Geopolitics: Comprised of 10 provinces and the capital of Kinshasa.

    • There are ~250 known ethnic groups; the official language is French, but Swahili, Lingala, Kikongo, and at >700 local dialects are also spoken.

  • Misc

    • Mai-Mai: Anti-Rwandan teenage militia fighters in Ituri province, DRC.

• Ethiopia (formerly Abyssinia)

  • Geopolitics: A federal Rep comprising nine ethnically based regions, each of which has considerable autonomy and the right to secede. At the federal level, there is a president elected for 6y, a PM who heads the government and selects the Council of Ministers, a bicameral parliament, a supreme court, and many political parties.

  • Major Ethnic Groups

    • Amhara: Light-skinned aristocrats from the N. highlands, feel superior to all other Ethiopians and resentful of their perennial rivals, the Tigrayans.

    • Tigrayans: From Ethiopia’s N; feel underappreciated; they led the final assault on Mengistu, yet their efforts at peaceful, pluralistic nation-building are drawing fire from all sides.

    • Southern Oromo: Comprise ~40% of the population, have been poor and powerless for centuries.

• France

  • Geopolitics: A Federal Republic divided into 22 regions, 96 administrative departments, and 36,000 communes, and headed by a President elected for 5y terms, invested with great powers.

  • Misc

    • Rivers: The Seine, Loire, Rhine, Rhône, and Garonne.

    • Gaullism: The insistence that France be able to survive without dependance on any foreign power.

• Germany

  • Geopolitics: A federal republic comprised of 13 Länder (lands) and three Freistaaten (Free States) and headed by a Chancellor, President, and a two-house legislature, half of which is elected as the Bundestag.

  • Misc

    • Ruhr Valley: The manufacturing heart of Germany.

• Indonesia

  • Geopolitics: Divided into 32 provinces and headed by a President elected to a maximum of 2x 5y terms, a 550- member House of Reps, and an MPR comprised of the house plus 4 reps from each of the country’s 32 provinces.

  • Pancasila: The governing ethos of Indonesia; five principles on which modern Indonesia was founded: belief in a single supreme god, concern for one’s neighbors, nationalism, democracy, and social justice.

  • Pribumi: ‘Son of the earth’; an ethnic Malay.

  • Jemaah Islamiyah: Indonesian Islamic terrorist group.

• Italy

  • Geopolitics: A parliamentary democracy divided into 20 regions with bicameral governments and headed by a president elected every 7y and a new PM appointed.

  • 7 Hills of Rome: Palatine, Quirinal, Viminal, Esquiline, Capitoline, Aventine, Caelian.

  • Italian Local Organized Crime Branches: Cosa Nostra (Sicily), Camorra (Naples), ‘Ndrangheta (Calabria), Sacra Corona Unita (Puglia).

  • Ghibellines: Supporters of the Holy Roman Emperors.

  • Guelphs: Supporters of the Popes.

• Kosovo: Formerly, a Serbian province bordering Albania and Macedonia. The Serbs, who consider it their historic heartland, refuse to give it up, while its 90% ethnic-Albanian population will settle for nothing less than complete independence.

• Mexico

  • Geopolitics: Headed by a President elected every 6y (1 term max).

  • Mexico sits on huge oil and natural gas reserves but has to import energy from the US because the law restricts private investment in the energy sector and the government can’t afford to finance exploration.

  • Mexico buys close to 90% of US exports.

• Nicaragua

  • Sandinistas: A socialist political party in Nicaragua named after Augusto César Sandino, who led the Nicaraguan resistance against the US occupation of Nicaragua in the 1930s.

    • Recompas: Ex-Sandinistas who refused to stop fighting after the war was officially over.

  • Contras: Disgruntled peasants and Indians manipulated by sadistic former National Guardsmen, they spent a decade terrorizing women and children and sabotaging every Sandinista reform effort.

    • Recontras: Ex-contras who refused to stop fighting after the war was officially over.

• Nigeria:

  • Geopolitics: A Federal Rep. comprising 250 ethnic groups divided into 4 self-governing territories- North, West, and East Nigeria (Biafra), and the federal Territory of Lagos—loosely bound together under a weak central government.  

  • Ethnic Groups

    • Igbos: Christians residing in SE Nigeria

    • Hausas: Conservative, traditional, and solidly Muslim Nigerian ethnic group living in N. Nigeria.

    • Yorubas: Well- educated, westernized, and half-Christians residing in W. Nigeria. The Yorubas are the Nigerians most likely to be doctors, lawyers, writers, or presidents.

• North Ossetia: An enclave of mostly Christian people who have traditionally supported Moscow.

• Pakistan

  • Geopolitics: Comprised of four provinces (Northwest Frontier, Punjab, Sindh, and Baluchistan) and a territory (Federally Administered Tribal Areas- FATA).

  • Abdul Qadeer Khan: Pakistan’s top nuclear scientist, who secretly helped Libya, North Korea, and Iran develop nuclear weapons programs.

• Saudi Arabia

  • Saud Royal Family: Consists of ~5000 princes and an equal number of princesses, is descended from Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, the man who, in 1932, established the Saudi Kingdom.  

  • Agriculture: Only 2% of the country is suitable for growing so much as a date palm.

  • Majlises: Regularly scheduled open forums where Saudi leaders hear all gripes anybody in the kingdom cares, and dares, to make.

  • Ulama: Religious scholars and priests, who function not only as clergy but also as the national judicial system (sharia rules), meting out punishments Koran-style and on occasion even overriding the monarch.

  • Oil: Saudi Arabia sits on more than a quarter of the world’s proven oil reserves and are, by a long shot, its largest oil exporters.

  • Mutawin: Saudi religious police that monitor and enforce everything from drinking, drug use, gambling, begging, and homosexuality to the strands of hair straying out from under a woman’s veil; to dating couples sitting together in the “family area” of the snack bar; to satellite dishes, hidden in rooftop water tanks, capable of beaming CNN—or worse, Desperate Housewives— into Saudi homes from neighboring Bahrain.

• Switzerland (‘Swiss Confederation’)

  • Geopolitics: A Federal Rep comprised of 26 cantons (states) including 6 half cantons, each with its own constitution, budget, and laws. There is no PM, and the federal council, Switzerland’s executive branch, chooses annually, from among its own 7 members, a new president and VP.

  • Misc

    • Switzerland has among the highest heroin-addiction, youth suicide, and HIV-infection rates in Europe.

    • Through the Cold War, Switzerland maintained Europe’s second-largest army (after Germany) and a reserve system that kept every able-bodied man in the country on 24h call until they turned 50; to defend a population of ~6M.

    • Magic Formula: A genteel power-brokering arrangement which, for 44y, put collegiality above partisanship and allowed differing political viewpoints to coalesce into a remarkably stable federal government.

• Taiwan (‘The Rep. of China’)

  • Geopolitics: A capitalist-style multi-party democracy with a President, National Assembly, and a clutch of yuan’s (councils).

  • Misc

    • Chungyang: A rugged and heavily forested mountain range running spinelike down the middle of Taiwan.  

  • Political Parties

    • Old KMT: Favors eventual reunification with China.

    • Democratic Progressive Party (DPP): Vociferously pro-independence.

• Turkey

  • Geopolitics: An Eastern democracy.  

• United Kingdom (UK) of Great Britain and N. Ireland: The formal name for England.

  • Misc

    • A ruling queen typically makes her husband a prince.

  • Nobles (Peers of the realm- English): Passes on his title to his oldest son.

• Vietnam

  • Historically divided geographically and culturally into two native kingdoms, Tonkin and Annan in the N. and the colony of Cochin China, in the South.

  • Vietnam War

    • Following the surrender of Japan at the end of WWII, Ho Chi Minh, leader of the National Communists, ‘the Viet Minh’, declares himself head of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Determined to restore European equilibrium by boosting France’s fractured self-esteem, they decided to give her back her colonies, sending the British to take over Saigon and Chinese troops to recapture the north. Enter, at this point, General Vo Nguyen Giap. Giap raided the local arsenals for the weapons left behind by the French and Japanese and made as much trouble as he could for the occupying French and Chinese forces. The nature of the enterprise began to change in 1949, when the Reds took over China. Ho Chi Minh suddenly found himself with an ally at his back and a steady supply of artillery pouring in from both China and the Soviet Union. General Giap launched a series of ferocious assaults that decimated his own forces but did, at least, have the effect of setting French nerves on edge and driving French troops back to fortified positions.

Misc

• European Union (EU): A parliament (elected by the voters back home), a high court, a council of ministers, an executive commission, and a presidency that rotates among member countries every six months, plus myriad agencies, advisory bodies, and pre-parliamentary committees, divided among Brussels, Luxembourg, and Strasbourg. The EU adjudicates, legislates, and monitors everything from women’s rights to immigration policy, the freedoms of college students to the standards for air conditioners, telecommunications practices to wine prices. And a single currency, the euro. The EU capital is Maastricht, the small Dutch town where in December 1991 the EC became the EU.

• General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT): Charged with preventing the world from falling back into the benighted protectionist practices of the Depression years—quota restrictions, sky-high tariffs.

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Political Science Terminology

• Balkan States: The countries of the Balkan peninsula: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia (aka the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia), Serbia and Montenegro, Albania, Greece, Bulgaria, part of Romania, and the European piece of Turkey.

• Baronets: Literally, “little barons.” In 1611, King James I, needing capital, instigated “a new dignitie between Barons and Knights,” open to anyone whose paternal grandfather had borne arms, who possessed an annual income of at least a thousand pounds, and who was willing to make a £1,095 down payment.

• Boxers (‘Order of Righteous Harmonious Fists’): A popular turn of the 20c uprising in N. China against all the Western legations—French, Russian, and German, as well as British, killing missionaries and railway workers, as well as Chinese converts to Christianity. The European powers, joined by Japan and the US, sent an international force against the Boxers, squashing them in very short order and demanding payment of $330M in concessions.

• British Isles: The islands of Britain and Ireland taken together, along with such outlying island groups as the Shetlands and the Orkneys and the British possessions of the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands.

• Caribbean Islands: Comprised of the Greater and Lesser Antilles.

  • Greater Antilles: Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola (shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic), and Puerto Rico; called “Greater” simply because they’re big).

  • Lesser Antilles: The remainder of the Caribbean Islands, broken down into the Leeward and the Windward Islands.

    • Leeward Islands: The Virgin Islands, Antigua, Guadeloupe.

    • Windward Islands: Grenada, Martinique, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, Curaçao and the Dutch Antilles.

• Colony: Consists of a company of people transplanted somewhere for the purpose of settling it.

• Dominion: A specifically British concept, used of a particularly well-regarded colony that, while still tied to the mother country, is largely self-governing. 

• Downs: An expanse of hilly, grassy upland, good for grazing.

• Duke: Control vast areas under the crown, generally ruling as they see fit.

  • Duchess (Marchioness): The wife of a duke.

• Far East: China, Japan, Korea, and the Philippines. 

• Fen: Flat, swampy land; a bog.

• Fertile Crescent: The region arching from the Mediterranean coast of Syria in the W. to Iraq and the Persian Gulf in the E.; like the Nile Valley, it’s a famous Cradle of Civilization, especially the Mesopotamian portion of it, centered on the plain bounded by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

• Feudalism: A political system that prevailed during the Middle Ages, in which vassals (nobles) pledge fealty (loyalty) to their liege lord (king) exchanging their service in time of war for inheritable fiefs (real estate).

• Glen: A mountain valley (Gaelic).

• HAHA: A moat, or just a fence, stone wall, or hedge sunk into the ground; it encloses a garden or park without impairing the view.

• Heath: That part of a moor that is not quite so soggy and, not covered with heather (synonymous with moor).

• Jacobins: The most radical of the well-educated, middle-class revolutionaries during the French Revolution (who’d met in an old Jacobin, or Dominican, monastery in Paris); it embraced such subgroups as the Girondists and the “Mountain”; and it included almost every French revolutionary leader you ever heard of: Robespierre, Marat, Danton, Condorcet, St. Just, etc. Today, “Jacobin” is used to describe radicals, or extreme leftists, who are determined to carry on the revolution at any cost.

• Jacobite: Brits trying to get James I’s Stuart descendants—Scottish, Catholic, and firm adherents of the divine right of kings—back on the English throne.

• Lea: A grassland or meadow, especially one that’s gone untilled for a while.

• Moor: A broad tract of open land, usually high but poorly drained, with patches of heath. 

• Orient (‘Rise’- Latin): Formerly used to designate Turkey, Arabia, Egypt, Persia, Palestine, etc.

• Protectorate: An imperial power who takes over in the name of the existing ruler.

• Sward: Any land covered with grassy turf, whether man-made (a lawn) or natural (a meadow).

• Territory: A portion of a country, usually remote and undeveloped, that’s not deemed ready to become a full-fledged state or province.

• Tories (‘Court Party’): Originally a 17c Irish plunderer; consisted of the lesser aristocracy, the country squires, and the Anglican clergy—supported Charles and were suspicious of the Whigs’ commercial leanings, among other things. In the 19c, the Tories renamed themselves Conservatives.

• Vale: A broad, low-sided valley, generally with a good-sized stream running through it.

• Whigs (‘Country Party’): Originally a 17c Scottish Cattle rustler; British aristocrats, aiming to decrease the power of the King, backed by the middle class and the merchants of London. The Whigs wanted to see King Charles II checked. They stood for the supremacy of Parliament and for religious toleration. In the 19c, the Whigs renamed themselves Liberals.

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Political Science Chronology

• 2004: The PKK launches attacks on Turkey from N. Iraq.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 2004: Turkey outlaws honor killings.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 2004: Terror at Beslan; ~300 children are killed by Chechens who take over the N. Ossetia school and rape and kill at will.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 2003: NATO troops leave European boundaries for the first time to assume command of UN-mandated peacekeeping forces in Afghanistan.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 2002: Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan wins in landslides, taking over the National Assembly.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 2002: Turkish women are given full legal equality with men.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 2002: The Bali Nightclub bombing is carried out by the Indonesian Islamic Terror Organization ‘Jemmah Islamiyah’, briefly bringing the entire Bali tourism industry to a halt.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 2001: Musharraf declares himself Pakistani president and holds a referendum that grants him the presidency for another 5y while remaining as head of the Army. He amends the constitution granting himself many new powers, including the right to pick whomever he wants to be Supreme Court judges and military commanders and to dismiss elected parliamentary leaders. He creates a National Security Council, dominated by the military, that has power over the civilian government.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 2001: Italy’s richest man, Right-wing media mogul Silvio Berlusconi, is appointed Italian PM.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 2000: Sharia Law is introduced in N. Nigeria. Christians living in the north interpret it as part of a Muslim takeover and a couple thousand people are killed in ensuing protests.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1999: Pakistani Military Coup; General Pervez Musharraf stages a bloodless coup that puts Pakistan back under military rule.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1999: Muslims and Christians slaughter each other in the Moluccas (the Spice Islands).-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1999: Berlin becomes capital of Germany, taking over from longtime stand-in Bonn.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1999: NATO launches its first-ever use of force against a sovereign state without UN approval, when it bombs Yugoslavia for 11w in an effort to stop “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1999: The PKK in Turkey declare a cease-fire following 15y of fighting for Kurdish autonomy in SE Turkey after their leader, Abdullah Öcalan, is captured.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1999: Former Warsaw Pact members- Poland, Hungary, the Czech Rep, and Slovakia join NATO.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1998: Death of Nigerian Leader General Sani Abacha.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1998: Rwanda and Uganda invade the DRC with help from Burundi, ostensibly to stop the Interahamwe from launching attacks from inside Congolese territory but also, as it turns out, to massacre as many Hutu refugees as possible and install a Tutsi-friendly regime in the DRC.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1998: “Africa’s World War” breaks out in the DRC, bringing in 6 neighboring countries and killing an estimated 3.8M Congolese.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1997-2002: Arnoldo Alemán rules Nicaragua as President.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1995: The World Trade Organization (WTO) with HQ in Geneva is formed as the successor to the General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) to deal with the rules of the international marketplace; simply put, to promote free trade. The WTO operates both as a forum in which to negotiate international trade rules and as a high court for settling disputes over them. The WTO’s sister organizations, the World Bank and the IMF, are to oversee investment and currency.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1994: The North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) goes into effect as a trade deal linking the US, Canada, and Mexico.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1994: General Sani Abacha rises to power in Nigeria and dismantles the democratic structures his predecessors had established.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1994: The Rwanda Genocide is perpetrated by the Interahamwe, a Hutu militia, against the Tutsis in Rwanda. The Interahamwe (and ~1.5M innocent Hutu refugees) flee into the E. DRC  in the face of a Tutsi offensive led by Paul Kagame. Within a few years, they spark the Congolese War which kills ~3.8M Congolese.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1994: Adoption of the Ethiopian constitution.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1993: Saudi King Fahd establishes the Majlis Al Shura, a 150-member advisory council. The king appoints its members and can, at any point, dismiss them and appoint new ones.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1993: The Asian Regional Forum (ARF) is formed by ASEAN member states and the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the EU, Japan, N. and S. Korea, Russia, China, India, and Papua New Guinea.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1992: Saudi King Fahd introduces the Basic Law of Government, the closest thing Saudi Arabia’s ever had to a written constitution.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1991: The Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) is founded by Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. 8 other ex-Soviet nations join soon after, including Georgia in 1993. The CIS aimed to prevent inter-republic warfare (descent into chaos) following the collapse of the USSR.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1991: A reunified Germany pledges allegiance to NATO; the Warsaw Pact ends.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1991: Chechnya declares independence from Russia. A few years later the Russian tanks roll in, intending to crush the Chechen regime like a pesky mosquito. Almost two years and many thousands of corpses later, Chechen guerrillas succeeded in driving the Russians out. The republic was de facto independent until 1999—although the place was no more peaceful or law-abiding then than it had been during the war—when the Russians invaded again.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1991: Ethiopian Dictator Mengistu, with the USSR no longer around to back him up, is routed by a loose coalition of rebel groups calling itself the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). Mengistu is forced to catch the next flight to Zimbabwe, where he’d been scouting real estate for some time. The EPRDF take over the country, now lacking a military, police department, money, or anything resembling infrastructure.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1990s: Taiwan declares an end to war with mainland China. The PRC implement the ambiguous “one country, two governments” formula.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1989: The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) is founded by Pacific Rim Nations- the US, Canada, Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the six original ASEAN countries, Australia, and New Zealand with the goal of “free and open trade and investment in the Asia- Pacific by 2010 for industrialized economies and 2020 for developing economies.”-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

  • 1998: Russia and Peru join APEC.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

  • 1993-1994: Papua New Guinea, Mexico, and Chile join APEC.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1988: Death of Pakistani President General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq in a mysterious airplane crash. Benazir Bhutto, the Radcliffe-educated daughter of the former PM, becomes the first woman ever to head a Muslim country and the first to be dismissed, twice, for corruption.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1986: Taiwanese President Chiang Ching-kuo implements the liberalization of Taiwan, legalizing opposition parties, easing press restrictions, and phasing out the imprisonment, torture, and killing of political opponents. He also opens up lines of communication with mainland China.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1984: Nicaragua Presidential Elections; Revolutionary strongman Daniel Ortega is “elected” president, sharing leadership with a 9-member Sandinista directorate.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1982: Spain joins NATO.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1980: Death of Yugoslavian President Josip Tito.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1979: Nigeria adopts the American model of government and reorganizes into 19 states in an effort to defuse regional antagonisms.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1979: Nicaragua Military Coup; Sandinista revolutionaries overthrow the Samoza government.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1978: POTUS Carter severs relations with Taipei and normalizes relations with the PRC.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1977: Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto is removed from office (and later hanged) by his chief of staff, General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq. Zia, who’d claimed he’d only be around for 90d, appoints himself president, twists the constitution around to inflate presidential power, and begins enforcing Islamic law.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1977: Bitter infighting among the Ethiopian Dergue’s 120 members leads to a shoot-out from which Colonel Mengistu Mariam emerges as the country’s leader. Mengistu’s rule, characterized by militant Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy coupled with a short-man complex, lasted for 17y and earned him the nickname “the black Stalin.” During this period, he managed to build the largest standing army in black Africa, which, with the help of Soviet weapons and Cuban troops, allowed him to keep a lid on the rebellions percolating in virtually every Ethiopian province.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1975: Assassination of Saudi King Faisal by a nephew in the middle of a majlis.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1975: Formation of the Group of Seven (G7) by the largest industrial nations; US, Japan, Germany, France, Britain, Italy, and Canada (who joined a year later). Finance ministers of the G8 nations meet annually to consider and coordinate on matters of economic policy and planning.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

  • 1998: Formation of the Group of Eight (G8) after Russia joins the G7.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1974: Deposition of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie (whose name was Ras Tafari up until his 1930 coronation), who claimed royal descent from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Selassie is later strangled in his bed by the Provisional Military Administrative Council (‘Dergue’). For the next few years, the Dergue replaces Selassie’s feudal state with “scientific socialism,” a one-party Marxist system complete with collective farms, nationalized property, and a government stranglehold on the economy.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1973: OPEC embargoes oil supplies to the US and increases worldwide prices from ~$3 barrel to ~$12 barrel in retaliation for US support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1970s: Los Desaparecidos; ~9K-15K Argentinians are silently killed, disappearing into mass graves.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1971: Formation of Bangladesh after E. Pakistan cedes from W. Pakistan. After ruthless suppression, the E. Pakistanis, backed by India, launch an offensive that forces the Pakistani army to its knees.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1967: The Association of SE Asian Nations (ASEAN) is formed by Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, and Indonesia in search of regional security.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

  • 1994: Brunei joins ASEAN.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1966: France withdraws military from NATO, kicking the US and NATO forces out of the country. NATO HQ is moved from Fontainebleau to Brussels.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1965: Indonesian Coup; Suharto ousts Sukarno as Indonesian president. In subsequent struggles for control, between 100K-1M Indonesian communists are killed. Suharto institutes the “New Order”, focusing on national identity, agricultural self-sufficiency, and industrial growth.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1964: Saudi King Saud is deposed for wantonness and incompetence.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1964: France recognizes Mainland China and derecognizes Taiwan. Taiwan is shortly after ousted from the UN in place of the Peoples Rep. of China.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1960s: The Igbos cede from Nigeria to form the Rep. of Biafra. They are blocked inside their own barren (but oil-rich), land where <1M starve to death.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1963: Indonesia sets out to crush neighbor Malaysia, grabbing the W. half of New Guinea from the Dutch.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1963: The Organization of African Unity (OAU) is established by 32 African nations with the task of promoting unity and development, defending sovereignty and territorial integrity, eradicating colonialism, and coordinating economic, diplomatic, educational, defense, etc., etc. policies.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1960: Formation of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) by Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, and Venezuela (later joined by Qatar and Ecuador), Indonesia, Gabon, Algeria, Libya, the UAE and Nigeria. Its 11 current members account for about half the world’s oil supply. They attempt to maintain stable oil prices by controlling production.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1955: W. Germany joins NATO.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• Jul, 1954: The Geneva Conference partitions Vietnam into North and South along the 17th parallel, with the promise of free elections in two years to decide on possible reunification.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• Mar- 7 May, 1954: The Vietminh use PRC and Soviet artillery to siege the 15K strong French garrison for 55d at Dien Bien Phu. The French surrender completely; their defeat led directly to the Geneva Conference, at which France was forced to grant independence to Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, thereby ending her empire in Indochina.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1952: Formation of the European Commission when France, W. Germany, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg pool their coal and steel resources and abandon protective tariffs on them in the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), thus permitting the ready flow of those two commodities across their borders, under the direction of a “high authority” to which each nation surrenders a little of its sovereignty. Soon enough the group eliminates all shared tariff barriers and facilitates the free movement of workers and money among themselves, as well as hit upon a unified trade policy with regard to the rest of the world. The EC later evolved into the European Union (EU).-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

  • 2004: 10 states- the Eastern European nations of Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta and Cyprus join the EU.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

  • 1995: Austria, Sweden, and Finland joins the EU.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

  • 1992: Britain, Ireland, Denmark, Greece, Spain, and Portugal join the EU.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1952: Greece and Turkey join NATO.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1949: Sukarno becomes the first president of Indonesia. He adopts an authoritarian system he calls “guided democracy”, dissolving existing political parties and ruling by decree.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1949: Chiang Kai-shek’s KMT forces withdraw to Taiwan, some 10,000 native Taiwanese are killed in ensuing riots.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1948: Formation of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), originally comprising only European countries to administer the Marshall Plan following WWII.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

  • 1995-2000: The Czech Rep, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and S. Korea join the OECD.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

  • 1994: Mexico joins the OECD.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

  • 1973: New Zealand joins the OECD.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

  • 1960s: The US, Canada, Japan, Finland, and Australia join the OECD.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1948: Formation of the Organization of American States (OAS); a Pan American “Arrangement” to promote peace, security, and hemispheric solidarity among countries of the American hemisphere. The OAS administers small-scale trade pacts such as CARICOM (Caribbean), the Andean Pact, and MERCOSUR (Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, and Bolivia).-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1945: Surrender of Japan at the end of WWII, Ho Chi Minh, leader of the National Communists, ‘the Viet Minh’, declares himself head of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1938: Death of Turkish President Atatürk, who had rallied the Army to defeat the Greeks, established state industries, changed the written form of Turkish from Arabic to Latin, broke the stranglehold of the Muslim religion, abolished the wearing of the Turban, fez, and veil, gave women the right to vote, and insisted that everyone have a last name.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1934-1979: The Somoza family rules Nicaragua as Dictators.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1933: US Marines depart Nicaragua after remaining there for a decade to protect US commercial interests. National Guard lead Anastasio Somoza turns his Guard into a personal militia, arranges for the assassination of his rival, General Sandino (the guerrilla leader for whom the Sandinistas were named), and makes himself president. For the next forty-five years, the Somoza clan ran Nicaragua more like a shady family business than a country. Finally, in 1979, after much guerrilla fighting, Sandinista revolutionaries managed to overthrow the Somoza dynasty.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1932: Abdul Aziz ibn Saud establishes the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia out of a patchwork of rival desert tribes and shards of the former Ottoman Empire.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1931: The Statue of Westminster is ratified by the British Parliament granting British dominions full legal autonomy; Canada gains independence.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1923: The Rep. of Turkey is formed from the defeated Ottoman Empire.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1922: The Irish Free State (Eire) cedes from the UK of Great Britain and Ireland.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1763: The Treaty of Paris is signed by England and France ending the Seven Years War (French and Indian War); France cedes most of its possessions in E. North America to Great Britain (Wiki).

  • 13 Sep, 1759: Battle of the Plains of Abraham (Battle of Quebec); a pivotal battle in the Seven Years War (French and Indian War) in which British forces under General Wolfe defeat French forces under General Louis-Joseph, Marquise de Montcalm. Both generals are mortally wounded in battle; the French evacuate Quebec (Wiki).

• 1707: The Act of Union between England (which includes Wales) and Scotland is signed forming “Great Britain”.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

  • “Little Britain”, better known as Brittany, across the channel in France, had been named and settled by Celts driven out of “historic” Britain by the Germanic Angles and Saxons in the 5-6c.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 16-17c: Immigration of Chinese nationals to Taiwan, originally to avoid paying taxes.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

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---Psychology---

• Brain

  • Left Hemisphere: Controls the right half of the body; responsible for language and logic.

  • Right Hemisphere: Controls the left half of the body; handles such intuitive, nonverbal processes as emotions and spatial relationships.

  • Corpus Callosum: A bundle of millions of nerve fibers that connect the left and right brain by allowing signals to pass between the hemispheres and enabling us to function as an integrated unit.

• Synapse: The junction of two neighboring neurons, or nerve cells.

  • The average neuron in the human brain has between 1,000-10,000 synapses with nearby neurons.

  • When a nerve impulse reaches the synapse, there to jump across to the adjacent nerve cell, it’s given a nudge along by an electrically triggered squirt of a chemical.

Psychological Therapies

• Psychotherapy: ‘Treatment of the soul’- Greek.

• Psychoanalysis: The “talking cure”;  discovered by Josef Breuer and developed by Sigmund Freud for middle-class Viennese ladies suffering from hysteria.

• Psychoanalytically Oriented Psychotherapy (POP): Psychoanalysis adapted for people who can’t take the time and/or won’t lie down. In POP, your therapist may shed the “Dr.” an analyst insists on in favor of “Don” or “Sue,” and may even call you by your given name. Instead of allowing you to ramble on uninterrupted (or fall into stony silence) about your emotionally distant mother, the therapist will interrupt you and talk about what you have/haven’t said.

• Short-Term Dynamic Therapy (STDT): Sets firm deadlines and specific goals in an effort to spur the patient’s will to be well. STDT therapist will typically not only interrupt and guide, he’ll also raise questions calculated to provoke anxiety, e.g., “Is it possible that your mother is jealous of your fiancée? Thus, encouraged to confront his true feelings, simultaneously relating them to past events and working to solve the problem at hand,

• Brief Therapy: Concentrates on lesser ills—mild depression, work stress, grief—and take a here-and-now approach to problems that pretty much ignores causation and childhood in favor of relief and the future, pointing out that memory is not necessarily accurate, let alone therapeutic, and that solving a problem has a higher priority than ferreting out the root of it.

• Gestalt: ‘Configuration’- German; aims to get around what you say to how you feel. Developed by Fritz Perls, of Esalen Institute fame during the 1940s. The patient (usually the “client”) is urged to discover his five senses, the key to Perceptual Reality. According to Gestalt, simple awareness of one’s moment-to-moment sensations is therapeutic. A session involves tuning out the “background” of life and focusing on the distinct “figure” or problem that’s bothering you Right Now.

• Bioenergetics (Biofeedback): Focus neither on the Where and When or the Here and Now, but on manipulating physiology to change emotional patterns. The goal of bioenergetics is to relax your armor, deepen the patient’s breathing, and release the “life force”; the latter entails getting in as many orgasms as possible. Bioenergetics teaches the “release” of tension, biofeedback teaches its “control.”

• Behavior Therapy: Draws partly on the work of Ivan Pavlov and starts from the proposition that all behavior is learned, behaviorists believe that they can fix anything that’s wrong with you. According to a behaviorist, neurotic symptoms—especially phobias, obsessions, compulsions, and a wide range of sexual problems—are simply learned bad habits. The therapist’s job is to help you unlearn them and to replace them with new, more productive patterns. First they’ll “desensitize” you, then reeducate you.

• Cognitive Therapy: A variant of behavior therapy ; a relatively short-term (6w-3m) treatment developed by Aaron Beck of the U. PA, it’s based on the premise that a person’s thought processes (and the linguistic structures that underlie them) go a long way in determining psychological disturbances.

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Notable Psychologists

• Sigmund Freud (1856-1939): Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis. Freud made some of his most revolutionary contributions: the nature of the unconscious, the mechanisms of repression and resistance, the phenomenon of transference, the significance of dreams (“the royal road to the unconscious,” as he put it), and the method of free association. He also developed his seduction theory, the belief that neuroses stemmed from actual sexual assaults on young children, a theory he later abandoned in favor of the belief that such traumas were not real events, but fantasies that stemmed from unconscious wishes.

  • Psychoanalysis: A clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies explained as originating in conflicts in the psyche, through dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst. The ultimate aim of psychoanalysis is to increase the relative strength of the ego so that it can effectively deal with pressures from above and below and with external reality.

  • Metapsychology: A psychological theory that cannot be verified or disproved by observation or reasoning.

  • Freud’s Theory of Neurotic Development: Freud postulated that erotic feeling is first experienced in the mouth, the newborn’s primary source of pleasure; later shifts to the anus, where enjoyment is derived from the retention and expulsion of feces; and ultimately, at about age three or four, to the genitals, in the so-called phallic stage. Under normal conditions, interest in these organs progresses in orderly sequence. Fixation occurs when, as a result of trauma or constitution, libido is bound at a particular developmental stage so that some portion of it never advances beyond this point. When the person gets into trouble later on in life, he is likely to regress to the point of fixation. According to Freud, the bases for psychological disorder are laid down between 1-6yo.

    • Phallic Period: Coincides with the Oedipus complex; begins to develop at about age three, when little girls and boys decide that marrying the parent of the opposite sex and killing off the parent of the same one is a neat idea.

    • Latency Period: At ~5 or 6yo, the boy, fearing castration by his father (a bit of talion revenge), turns away from Mom, and identifies with Dad while girls identify with mother and accept a feminine role (castration and penis envy). Sexual interest is in abeyance.

    • Anal Traits: Possessiveness, meticulousness, orderliness, and retentiveness.

    • Oral Traits: Passivity and helplessness or sadism and exploitation.

  • While Freud’s biomechanical view of human functioning has been seriously (and continually) questioned, his method of psychoanalytic inquiry, his concepts of transference, repetition, and resistance, and his theory of unconscious experience remain the cornerstones of the analytic process.

• Alfred Adler (1870-1937): Austrian medical doctor, psychotherapist, and founder of the school of individual psychology. His emphasis on the importance of feelings of belonging, family constellation and birth order set him apart from Freud and other members of the Vienna circle. He proposed that contributing to others was how the individual feels a sense of worth and belonging in the family and society. Adler was the first to emphasize the importance of the social element in the re-adjustment process of the individual and to carry psychiatry into the community.

  • Alfred Adler challenged Freud in 1910 over the relative importance of the sexual drives. Adler viewed the core problem as man’s struggle to overcome feelings of inferiority (he coined the phrase “inferiority complex”) and saw the “wish to be a complete man”—in the face of physical handicaps and environmental conflicts—as the guiding fiction behind every neurosis.

• Carl Jung (1875-1961): Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung’s work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, and religious studies. Jung worked as a research scientist at the Burghözli psychiatric hospital, in Zurich, under Bleuler. During his time, he came to the attention of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. The two men collaborated on a joint vision of human psychology. Jung saw man as influenced by higher forces and developed a theory of character based on two fundamental personality types: the introvert and the extrovert.

  • Introvert: Absorbed in his inner world.

  • Extrovert: Turns outward at the expense of private experience.

  • For Jung, the overriding goal was always the achieving of a harmony between the conscious and the unconscious; that alone could make a person one and whole.

  • Jung argued that neurotic symptoms were not always the residue of an unhappy childhood, as Freud maintained, but were often attempts on the part of the mind to correct its own disequilibrium, and therefore could serve as pointers to a more satisfactory synthesis.

• Melanie Klein (1882-1960): Austro-British psychoanalyst considered one of the pioneers of psychoanalysis. The further developed the psychoanalysis of children (psychagogy) and is the founder of psychoanalytic object relations theory. Klein subdivided the first year of life into two phases; the paranoid-schizoid, in which the infant relates to anatomical parts of persons, chiefly the breast and penis; and the depressive, in which the mother is recognized as a whole person who can therefore be destroyed by the child’s own hatefulness.

• Harry (Herbert) Stack Sullivan (1892-1949): American psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and representative neopsychoanalysis. Sullivan pared down his motivational system to two basic needs: satisfaction (both biological and emotional) and security (which he viewed as the avoidance of anxiety). Sullivan thought loneliness was the most painful of human experiences.

  • To understand the individual, one must understand the network of relationships in which he is enmeshed; one must pay attention to the “interactional” rather than the “intrapsychic.”

  • Sullivan’s good mother is the nonanxious mother; his bad is a nervous or timid soul who empathically communicates her distress to the child, who then gradually learns to modify his behavior in order to modulate Mommy’s anxiety.

• Donald W. Winnicott (1896-1971): English pediatrician and psychoanalyst who was especially influential in the field of object relations theory and developmental psychology. Winnicott is best known for his ideas on the true self and the false self, the “good enough” parent, and, borrowed from his second wife, Clare Winnicott, arguably his chief professional collaborator, the notion of the transitional object.

• Heinz Kohut (1913-1981): Austrian born American psychoanalyst best known for his development of self-psychology, an influential school of thought within psychodynamic/psychoanalytic theory which helped transform the modern practice of analytic and dynamic treatment approaches. In the system that Kohut eventually constructed, man’s search became a struggle to develop a cohesive and integrated self. Failure to develop at least one aspect, either mirroring or idealization, ultimately leads to a defective sense of self and the inability to maintain a consistent sense of self-esteem, that is, to narcissistic pathology. Growth occurs largely through experiencing a relationship that supplies what the parents failed to supply, rather than through the power of verbal interpretation.

  • Disorders of the Self: Defects in the sense of inner cohesion and continuity.

• Jacques Lacan (1901-1981): French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, described as “the most controversial psychoanalyst since Freud.” Lacan’s work made impacts on continental philosophy and cultural theory in areas such as post-structuralism, critical theory, feminist theory, and film theory, as well as the practice of psychoanalysis itself.

  • In girls the motive for the demolition of the Oedipus complex is lacking. Castration has already had its effect, which was to force the child into the situation of the Oedipus complex. Thus, the Oedipus complex escapes the fate which it meets with in boys: it may be slowly abandoned or dealt with by repression or its effects may persist far into women’s normal mental life. I cannot evade the notion (though I hesitate to give it expression) that for women the level of what is ethically normal is different from what it is in men. Their superego is never so inexorable, so impersonal, so independent of its emotional origins as we require it to be in men. Character-traits which critics of every epoch have brought up against women—that they show less sense of justice than men, that they are more often influenced in their judgments by feelings of affection or hostility—all these would be amply accounted for by the modification in the formation of their superego which we have inferred above. Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes (1925).

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Psychology Terminology

• Archetypes: The mythic images and motifs that go to make up the collective unconscious (Freud).

• Collective Unconscious: The deep, species-wide layer of the psyche underlying the personal unconscious (Freud).

• Complex: A group of interrelated, and emotionally charged, ideas or images (Freud).

• Hysteria: (Womb- Greek); pre-Freud, used to designate only certain female disorders; subsequently applied to any disorder in which anxiety is converted into bodily paralysis or a sensory disturbance like blindness.

• Individuation: (Similar to self-actualization); a process that involves coming to terms with the thinking/feeling and intuition/sensation axes that together determine the four psychological “types”; the pairs “extrovert/introvert” and “anima/animus” (the latter pair alluding to the woman-inside-every-man and the man-inside-every-woman (Freud).

• Inferiority Complex: An isolating element which plays a key role in personality development (Adler).

• Obsession: A mental state in which talismanic doing, fussing, straightening, and sometimes just plain thinking are used to express frustrated sexual energy, i.e., ritual handwashing.

• Phobia: A mental state in which anxiety is projected onto a single class of things (i.e., wide-open spaces, little white mice) that are then scrupulously avoided.

• Self: The very center of one’s being (Freud).

• Self-System: That configuration of traits that have been reinforced by the affirmation of the significant persons in the child’s life, and the security operations the child develops in order to avoid anxiety and threats to self-esteem. Three types: Good- me, Bad-me, Not-me (Sullivan).

• Synchronicity: A meaningful coincidence of two casually unrelated events (Freud).

• Transference: A psychological practice in which an analyst roughly re-creates an original childhood conflict and acts as a stand-in for hard-pressed, erratic Mommy and/or Daddy, allowing the patient to “transfer” submerged emotions onto them and work through conflicts, within the safety and consistency of the analysis.

• Narcissistic Neuroses

  • Melancholia: Severe depression.

  • Dementia Praecox: Post adolescence schizophrenia.

  • Paranoia: A projection (and defense mechanism) magnified and embellished to the point of delusion.

  • Perversion: Regression to some soft, unchallenging, essentially self-involved state. 

• Id, Ego, Superego: Conflicts exist among id impulses (those unconscious reservoirs of sexual and aggressive impulses constantly seeking discharge), ego defenses (which ward off the direct discharge of the impulse and its access to consciousness), and superego restrictions (the stern conscience which embodies parental and cultural standards). The embattled ego must mediate between the primitive forces of the id and the censoring, guilt-inducing power of the superego. This gave rise to Freud’s second instinct theory, the conflict between Eros, the life-preserving instinct, and Thanatos, the death force.

  • Id: Nature; what you’re born with; the seat of the instincts and repository of libido

  • Ego: Nurture; integrates sensory perceptions, modulates voluntary movements, keep tabs on the instincts that are penned up in the id next door, and provide for their, as well as its own, pleasure, all without ever losing sight of reality.

    • The Ego makes compromises amongst the three, adopting special techniques called defense mechanisms: repression, regression, projection, denial, reaction, reversal, displacement, isolation, intellectualization, undoing, and sublimation.

      • Repression: Severs the ego from internal pressure.

      • Denial: Severs the ego from pressures of the outside world.

      • Intellectualization (Rationalization): Overthinking a problem in order to avoid making contact with the emotion or anxiety behind it.

  • Superego: Takes shape in childhood, incorporating the early influences of parents and teachers; conscience, morality.

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---Religion---

• Judaism: A religion based on the proselytizing of Abraham in Sumeria in which there is only one God, named Yahweh, who instructed Abraham to move to the other side of the Euphrates (‘Other Side’- Hebrew).

  • Holy Doctrine: Torah, Mishnah, Talmud.

    • Torah: The first 5 books of the Bible; contains the divinely revealed history of mankind.

  • Practice:

    • Mitzvahs: Good deeds done for the sake of doing the right thing.

  • Branches: Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist.

    • Reconstructionist: Believe God is a natural force, like gravity.

  • Misc

    • Zionism: A Jewish political movement born in reaction to European anti-Semitism in the 19c (in particular, the Dreyfus Affair), that set to make good Yahweh’s offer of a Jewish homeland in Israel.

    • Kabbalah: Judaism’s mystical tradition, based on esoteric reinterpretations of Scripture.

    • Pharisees: One of two great Jewish religious sects and political parties in the 2-1c BCE. In its oral form, the Pharisees believed in an afterlife, a day of judgement, a resurrection, and the Messiah. Their ideas underlie many aspects of Orthodox Judaism today. Figuratively, a ‘self-righteous hypocrite’.

    • Sadducees: One of two great Jewish religious sects and political parties in the 2-1c BCE. The Sadducees were the minority party and died out by ~70, the year the Romans destroyed Jerusalem.

• Christianity: The first Christians were Palestinian Jews who, smitten with Jesus of Nazareth’s notions about universal love, the brotherhood of man, and redemption through faith, saw nothing particularly disloyal or disruptive in regarding themselves as Jews for Jesus. It wasn’t until Jesus’ followers began recruiting non-Jewish converts, who insisted that circumcision was weird and Christ divine, that Christians and Jews split from one another.

  • Apostles: ‘Send away’- Greek; the 12 envoys of Christ. Paul is often added to the list of primary apostles, and Judas sometimes retained, swelling the group to fourteen.

  • Choirs of Angels (from highest to lowest): Comprise the nine grades of angels, divided into three hierarchies and surround God in perpetual adoration.

    • Seraphim (Seraph): The highest-ranking of the nine “choirs” of angels with three pairs of wings that hovers over the throne of God and has a reputation for zeal and ardor. Often blue colored.

    • Cherubim (Cherub): The second highest ranking of the nine “choirs” of angels with anywhere from 1-4 faces and either one or two pairs of wings. God sits among or just above the cherubim.

    • Thrones.

  • Disciples: ‘Pupil’- Latin; Students of Christ.

  • Golgotha (Calvary): ‘Skull’; the place where Jesus was crucified.

• Islam: ‘Submission to the Will of God’-Arabic.

  • Muslim: ‘One who Submits’- Arabic; followers of Islam.

  • Five Pillars of Islam

    • Affirmation of Faith, in the words “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet.”

    • Pray 5x per day, turning towards Mecca (at the call of the Muezzin).

    • Fast from sunup to sundown during the month of Ramadan.

    • Make the Hajj, pilgrimage to Mecca, at least once.

    • Give alms.

  • Holy Doctrine

    • Koran: The Text of Islam, which contains the words of Allah as revealed to Muhammad. Most of the Koran is devoted to retelling the stories of the Old and New Testaments from the Muslim point of view. 

    • Hadith: The collected sayings of Muhammad; provides details about ethical behavior and daily ritual.

  • Branches

    • Sunnis: ~85-90% of all Muslims; believe that Muhammad’s friend Abu Bakr, who was elected the first caliph after the Prophet’s death, is the legitimate successor.

    • Shi’ites: Islam’s Minority; believe that the prophet’s nephew and son-in-law Ali is the legitimate successor, with the line of succession traced through Ali and Fatima, Muhammad’s daughter. Shi’ites believe in rule by 12 imams (perfect leaders), under whom the ayatollahs compose a sort of middle-management cadre.

• Zoroastrianism (Zarathustrianism- Greek): The state religion of Persia. In its early form, Zoroastrianism was mainly concerned with increasing the harvest and ensuring the happiness and well-being of various farm animals.

  • Pantheon: Zoroaster trimmed the pantheon of Persian gods to two warring ones: Ahura Mazdah (Ormuzd), the Creator and God of Goodness and Light; and Ahriman, God of Evil and Darkness. Ahura Mazdah is attended by 6 lesser deities who translate roughly into Good Thought, Highest Righteousness, Divine Kingdom, Pious Devotion, Salvation, and Immortality. Ahriman has his own entourage of evil spirits (divs, daevas). Human beings, by their thoughts and actions, can side with Goodness, Light, and Life or with Evil, Darkness, and Death, and, by doing so, participate in the ultimate destiny of the Universe.

  • Holy Doctrine: Zend Avesta.

• Hinduism

  • Pantheon: ~330M gods, each of whom is a manifestation of Braham and many with subsidiary manifestations including Shiva the Destroyer (‘the Cosmic Dancer’), Vishnu the Preserver (‘Krishna’, ‘Buddha’), Shakti the Divine Mother.

    • Brahman: The Infinite Being.

  • Holy Doctrine

    • Vedas: Ancient Scriptures, written in Sanskrit; lays the groundwork for Hinduism.

    • Upanishads (‘Secret Doctrine’).

    • Mahabharata: The Longest poem in the world, containing India’s favorite religious text.

    • Bhagavad Gita: A dialogue between the God Krishna and a soldier named Arjuna.

  • Misc

    • Tantric: ‘To join’- Sanskrit.

• Buddhism: Similar to Hinduism, without the caste system, less emphasis on the Gods, ritual, and vibrant colors, and substitute Nirvana for Brahman. Follows the Four Noble Truths, the Noble Eightfold path, the Three Baskets, and the Great Wheel.

  • Nirvana: ‘Going out’ as of a candle; figuratively, liberation from all desires, cravings, and “becomings,” from suffering and from the endless round of lifetimes and selves.

  • Yin & Yang: The two poles of experience, joined in a symmetric union, a continuous cycle; yang the bright, creative, male, heavenly force, yin the dark, receptive, female, earthly one, each of the two containing the seed of its opposite.

  • Branches

    • Hinayana: A form of Buddhism practiced by the S. camp (Sri Lanka, SE Asia), characterized by orthodoxy (what Buddha said goes), austerity, and a concept of salvation based on one’s own right living.

    • Mahayana: ‘Great Vehicle’; A form of Buddhism practiced by the N. camp (Nepal to Japan), which postulates that the Buddha is not just historical but divine and that nobody- not even a bodhisattva, two-thirds of the way to being a Buddha himself- is going to enter into Nirvana until every last one of us is ready to enter into Nirvana.

    • Lamaism: A subcamp of Buddhism practice in Tibet and headed by the Dalai Lama.

    • Zen Buddhism: A subcamp of Buddhism practiced in Japan, transplanted from China.

      • Satori: The attainment of enlightenment through intuition rather than intellect, prepared for in activities like Judo, calligraphy, flower arranging, etc.

  • Misc

    • Hinduism spawned Buddhism.

    • There are now almost no Buddhists in India itself.

• Confucianism: A practical, social, ethical religion full of advice on how to behave in the world, father to son, husband to wife, ruler to subject, older friend to younger friend, and it’s more code than creed, with no churches or clergy.

  • Holy Doctrine

    • Lun Yü (Analects): Confucianism’s basic reference work.

• Taoism (Daoism): A mystical religion devoted to transcending everyday life and finding the Tao.

  • Tao: The Path, the way of the natural order.

  • Holy Doctrine

    • Tao Te Ching: ‘The Way of Virtue’; the collection of teachings of Lao-Tzu, the ‘Grand Old Man’ of Taoism.

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Religious Leaders

• Ishmael (Unk): Son of Abraham (and Hagar), conceived when Abraham’s wife Sarah, for years unable to have a child, finally sent her Egyptian maid Hagar in to sleep with her husband. Later, Sarah became pregnant with Isaac and, in a fit of jealousy, had Hagar and Ishmael cast out into the wilderness to die. God came to their rescue, however, by providing a well at Beersheba. Ishmael grew up in the wilderness under God’s protection and became the first Arab. Ishmael is considered a prophet in Islam. According to the bible, Ishmael died at 137yo.

• Siddhartha Gautama (‘Buddha’) (563- 483 BCE): Son of a 6c BCE Indian prince of the Shakya clan born in Lumbini (Nepal), who renounced worldliness (and his family) in favor of enlightenment, the middle way (between extremes of self-indulgence and self-denial), and, eventually, Nirvana. 

• Lao-tzu (‘Laozi’) (6-4c BCE): The “Grand Old Man” (literally) of Taoism, said to have once baffled Confucius in philosophical debate. Laozi is the author of the Tao Te Ching.

• Zoroaster (‘Zarathustra’) (>500 BCE): The spiritual founder of Zoroastrianism in Persia.

• Mary Magdalen (Unk): Possibly the sister of Martha, and most likely not a harlot; the latter slander came from the fact that she took her name from Magdala, her hometown, which was a seaport with a bad reputation. According to the four canonical gospels, Mary is said to have traveled with Jesus as one of his followers and was a witness to his crucifixion and resurrection. She became a saint and a symbol of repentance, and she gave us the word “maudlin” (tearful) and the French “Madeleine,” (name and cookie). In paintings, she’s usually the one with the red hair.

• Muhammad (570-632): A Bedouin trader turned Arab religious, social, and political leader and the founder of Islam. Muhammad united Arabia into a single Muslim polity, with the Quran as well as his teachings and practices forming the basis of Islamic religious belief. Muslims see Muhammad as the direct descendant of the prophet Ishmael, the first son of the prophet Abraham.

• John (Jan) Huss (Hus) (1369-1415): A Bohemian theologian and philosopher who became a Church reformer and the inspiration of Hussitism, a key predecessor to Protestantism, and a seminal figure in the Bohemian revolution. Hus is considered the first church reformer and his teachings had a strong influence on Martin Luther.

• Thomas à Kempis (1380-1471): German-Dutch of the late medieval period; author of ‘The Imitation of Christ’, which charted the progress of the individual soul up to and including its union with God. Kempis emphasized how we can all commune directly with God in perfect solitude, without need of words, worship, or sacraments, let alone church property. His teachings had a strong influence on Martin Luther. 

• Martin Luther (1483-1546): German priest, theologian, author, hymnwriter, professor, and Augustinian friar. He is the seminal figure of the Protestant Reformation and the namesake of Lutheranism.

• John Calvin (1509-1564): French theologian, pastor, and reformer in Geneva during the Protestant Reformation. He was a principal figure in the development of the system of Christian theology later called Calvinism, including its doctrines of predestination and of God’s absolute sovereignty in the salvation of the human soul from death and eternal damnation. Calvin experienced a sudden conversion at 24yo, joined forces with religious revolutionaries, and published his Institutes of the Christian Religion.

  • Calvin did much with the idea of predestination (God had chosen some people to be saved, others to be damned; Calvinists tended to be militant, uncompromising, self-righteous—i.e., Puritans. They also refused to recognize the subordination of church to state or the laying down of rules by any king or parliament. Rather, Christians should, according to Calvin, Christianize the state, as Oliver Cromwell would do a century later in England. Calvinism took root in France (the Huguenots were Calvinists) and spread to England, Germany, Netherlands, Poland, and Hungary.

• John Knox (1514-1572): Scottish Minister, Reformed Theologian, and writer who was a leader of the Country’s reformation. Knox was the founder of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland.

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Religious Terminology

• Beadle: A minor parish officer who along with various non-ecclesiastical tasks, ushers people in and out of Sunday services, delivers messages for the parson, and generally keeps the parishioners in line.

• Curate: Assistant to the rector or vicar, who usually does most of the tedious church work of the parish.

• Gaza: The biblical city where the Philistines brought Samson to blind him after his betrayal by Delilah. Samson retaliates by bringing down the Philistine temple on top of them all.

• Gilead: A fertile, mountainous region east of the Jordan River, between the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea.

• Job’s Comforters: Refers to the kind of friends who, when times are bad, manage to make them worse.

• Puritans: Extreme; Calvinistic Protestants.

• Rector: The head clergyman of a parish, who has rights to the parish lands and owns its tithes. He holds his post for life and can pass it on to his sons.

• Sexton: A kind of dignified janitor, who takes care of church property, rings the church bells, and digs the graves.

• Vicar: A sort of freelance parson who stands in for a dead or absent rector or who heads a parish in which the tithes belong to someone else

  • After tithes were abolished in England in 1936, the terms “rector” and “vicar” became synonymous.

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Religion Chronology

• 1982: Publication of the New King James Version of the Bible, which restores inadvertently changed parts of the original 17c text and modernizes some of the language—“sheweth” to “show,” “thy” to “your.”-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1978: Publication of the New International Version of the Bible.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1971: Publication of the Living Bible in various versions.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1970: Publication of the New English Bible by the Oxford & Cambridge University Press.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1966: Publication of the Jerusalem Bible, heralded as the first Roman Catholic translation into English from the original text rather than from the Latin Vulgate.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 15c: The Reformation; Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, et al., fed up with Church corruption, split Western Europe into Catholic and Protestant factions.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1054: The Pope of Rome excommunicates the Patriarch of Constantinople, henceforth splitting the church into Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox divisions.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 8c: Moslem armies conquer Persia; a small group of Zoroastrians escape to India. Now known as Parsis and concentrated in and around Bombay, they’ve become one of the wealthiest, best-educated, and most-respected minority groups.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 6c: Buddhism is imported to Japan from China via Korea.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 5c: Japan appropriates a written language from China.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 325: The Nicene Creed is avowed by the church at its first ecumenical council, affirming belief in the Holy Trinity. By the end of the 4c, Christians had put together a testament of their own, comprising the four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, twenty-one epistles, and the Revelation of St. John the Divine.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 312: Roman Emperor Constantine converts to Christianity.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 70: The Romans destroy Jerusalem leading to the decline of the Sadducees, a minority Jewish party.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 586 BCE: The Babylonian Captivity (1st Diaspora); the Babylonians under King Nebuchadnezzar capture the two tribes of Judah, just S. of Israel, forcing tens of thousands into exile in and around Babylon.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 6c BCE: Taoism (Daoism) is founded by Laozi in the E. Chinese province of Henan (Britannica).

• 6c BCE: Confucianism is founded by Confucius in the E. Chinese province of Shandong (Britannica).

• 6c BCE: The Babylonians (New Babylonians, Chaldeans) dominate the fertile plain in the S. of Mesopotamia, from their capital at Babylon.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 700 BCE: Shintoism (Shin-tao: Way of the gods), the religion of ancient Japan is developed out of a combination of nature and ancestor worships. Shintoism has a complex pantheon of kami (gods), led by a Supreme Sun Goddess.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 722 BCE: The 10 Northern tribes of Israel are taken captive by the Assyrians and scattered across the Assyrian desert.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 8-7c BCE: The Assyrians dominate the mountain region North of Mesopotamia, from their capital at Nineveh.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• ~1140 BCE: Moses leads a group of transplanted Hebrews out of slavery in Egypt, trekking with them back to the Promised Land (Canaan).-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1700 BCE: Rise of Judaism; Sumerian Abraham preaches there is one God (Yahweh) and relocates to the Promised Land on the other side of the Euphrates (‘other side’- Hebrew).-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

  • Yahweh promised Abraham offspring galore (Abraham is 99 at the time), along with rights to Canaan, the Promised Land, later renamed Palestine after the Philistines, who occupied part of it—in perpetuity.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

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---Science---

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Chemistry

• Phases of Matter: When matter is subjected to high temperatures, two important things happen. First, it changes form. Heat an ice cube and you get water; heat the water and you get steam. If you heat a collection of atoms enough, the collision will become so violent that their electrons will be torn loose and you’ll have a new form of matter—a collection of negatively charged electrons and positively charged nuclei.

• All of the chemical elements heavier than He, including the Fe in your blood and the C in your DNA, were made in stars that later died, returning their contents to the interstellar medium.

• Catalyst: Promotes, enhances, or speeds up a chemical reaction, by combining, on the molecular level, with each of the active ingredients involved, bringing them into contact with each other, and while furthering a reaction, remains itself unchanged.

• Enzymes: The bodies catalysts; Protein molecules that figure in the chemical reactions of living organisms.

• Specific Gravity: The ratio of a given density of a solid or a liquid to the density of water (and of a gas to air).

• Brownian Movement: The irregular movement of minute particles of matter when suspended in a liquid.

• Phlogiston Theory: The theory formulated be Stahl that all combustible substances had a physical component- phlogiston, that was released on burning.  

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Biology

• Genetic Engineering: The process that inserts genes from one living organism into the cells of another, thereby custom-tailoring them to do work they weren’t designed for.

• Embryo: A fertilized egg containing 46 chromosomes, 23 from each parent, that carry the coded information needed for all your inherited characteristics.

• Chromosomes: Comprised of several thousand genes, each responsible for a particular trait.

• Genes: Comprised of DNA, the chemical that programs and operates all life processes.

• DNA: The chemical that programs and operates all life processes. Phosphates and sugars form the railing of the staircase, and pairs of four N bases in various combinations form the steps (~3M of them in Humans). The order of the base pairs determines the particular characteristics of any shrub, egret, human, etc.

  • Double Helix: The structure for DNA, containing 3B pairs of chemical code letters that are responsible for making proteins, the basic building blocks of life.

  • ~97% of nucleotides are “junk”—that is, they don’t correspond to protein coding.

  • Humans have ~25K genes, similar to the puffer fish and the mustard weed.

  • Once you’ve discovered the elusive gene, the next step is understanding the pathogenesis of a disease, then treatment, and eventually, prevention.

  • ~99.9% of human beings’ DNA is identical.

  • DNA Transplantation: Discovered by CA researchers, Cohen and Boyer, who turned bacteria into human-insulin factories, removing DNA from a human cell and cutting it with special enzymes at the spot where the needed gene is found. Then, using more enzymes, the human gene is snapped into a plasmid, a strand of extra DNA, found in bacteria. When that bacterium reproduces, it creates millions of copies of itself, each with the new gene.

• In-Vitro Fertilization (IVF): Test tube babies; several ova are removed from the mother and fertilized in a petri dish with sperm by the farther and returned to the mother’s womb.

• Lichen: The symbiosis (‘life-together’) of alga, with the ability to photosynthesize, and fungus, which stores the moisture the alga needs.

• Osmosis: Fluid transmission through a membrane from one side, where there’s a lower concentration, to the other, where there’s a higher concentration.

• Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer (Cloning): A cell is taken from an adult animal. The nucleus, along with the DNA inside it, is pulled out and placed beside an empty egg cell without a nucleus. The egg and the nucleus are then nudged together by a mild electrical current and bathed in a kind of chemical love potion. The egg is essentially duped into thinking it has been fertilized, and in the best-case scenario it starts dividing like crazy. Soon after its creation, the blastocyst (the ball of dividing cells that develops after conception) is transferred to the womb of a surrogate mom. (Dolly—or her cellular beginnings, anyway—were only “grown” in the lab for 7d before they were inserted into a blackface ewe’s womb. The surrogate then carried her to term.)

• Stem Cells: The jacks-of-all-trades of the cell world. Stem cells are part of the body’s repair system, dividing without limit and replenishing other cells in the organism. These remarkable creatures can either stay as they are or morph into something more specialized, such as a muscle cell, a brain cell, or a red blood cell.

• Linnaean Classification System: Kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species.

• Kingdoms: Plantae, Animalia, Protista.

  • Protista: Single-celled amoebas, bacteria, slime molds, etc.

• 12 Cranial Nerves: Olfactory, optic, oculomotor, trochlear, trigeminal, abducens, facial, acoustic, glossopharyngeal, vagus, accessory, hypoglossal. 

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Physics

• Fundamental Forces

  • Strong Force: The force that holds all the elementary particles together in a nucleus.

  • Weak Force: The force operating in many situations in nature, the most familiar being the slow radioactive decay of some unstable nuclei and particles.

  • Electromagnetism: The dominant force in the interactions of molecules; the interaction that occurs between particles with an electric charge.

  • Gravity: Mutual attraction occurring between all matter with mass or energy.

    • Weight: The measure of the force of gravity acting on a body and, unlike mass, tends to vary, from place to place.

• Centrifugal Force: ‘Center fleeting’; the force that pulls an object away from the center of a specific orbit to a degree based on the mass of the object in question, the speed at which it’s traveling, and the radius of its path.

• Centripetal Force: ‘Center seeking’; the force that pulls an object towards the center; gravitational, mechanical, or electric.

• Quantum Mechanics: The 1920s theory which describes the behavior of matter on the atomic and subatomic level. In the subatomic world, the only way to observe a particle is to bounce another particle off it.

• Quantum: (‘How Much’- Latin); originally, anything that could be counted or measured. Quanta (plural) refers to the discontinuous series of little packets in which light sometimes travels.

• Quark: A subatomic particle so elementary as able to be further broken down further. 

  • The word itself is borrowed from a song in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, “Three quarks for Muster Mark” (where it may refer to the squawking of birds, their excrement, or both).

• Subatomic Particles: Protons, neutrons, mesons, baryons, kaons, and more.

  • Proton: 2x Up quark + 1x Down quark.

  • Neutrons: 1x Up quark + 2x Down quarks.

  • Leptons: A category of subatomic particles that includes electrons, muons, and neutrinos.

• Doppler Effect: The change in the frequency of a wave (whether of sound or of light) that occurs whenever there is a change in the distance between the source and the receiver; named for the early 19c Austrian physicist Christian Doppler. If the source of the waves and the receiver are approaching each other (or one is approaching the other), Doppler observed, the frequency of the wavelengths increases and the waves get shorter, producing high-pitched sounds and bluish light. If the source and receiver are moving farther apart, sound waves are pitched lower and light appears reddish. (The most commonly cited example of the Doppler effect: the train whistle that screeches in the distance, dropping in pitch as it approaches the platform where you’re standing.)

  • Doppler is used in radar to track the velocity of a moving object; in astronomy to measure distances between and rotations of stars, planets, and entire galaxies; and to track satellites.

Physics Theories & Principals

• Grand Unified Theory (GUT): A theory in which the electromagnetic and the strong and weak nuclear forces are all considered to be fundamentally the same. The GUT predicts that the proton, hitherto thought to be the stable building block of the nucleus, decays.

• Principle of Relativity: States that any two observers will discover the same laws of physics in action, regardless of their relative motion, no matter how different the picture may look to the two of them. Special Theory is restricted in that the two observers can’t be accelerating, whereas the general theory holds for any observers, accelerating or not. Since gravity produces acceleration, it can be treated only in the context of the general theory.

• Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle: A principle relevant to the subatomic world in which the act of measurement changes the system being measured. The principle tells us that if we choose to measure one quantity (e.g., the position of an electron), we inevitably alter the system itself and therefore can’t be certain about other quantities (e.g., how fast the electron is moving).

• Archimedes Principle: Holds that buoyancy is the loss of weight an object seems to incur when it is placed in a liquid, and that that loss is equal to the weight of the liquid it displaces.

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Nuclear Physics

• Critical Mass: In a nuclear chain reaction, the minimum quantity of fissionable material necessary to keep neutrons popping and those nuclei alert.

• Fission: The splitting into smaller parts of large atoms when struck by free neutrons, causing the atom to “splinter,” releasing 2-3 more neutrons, which in turn strike and splinter neighboring nuclei in a chain reaction.

• Fusion: The joining of the nuclei of two little atoms, H generally, at temperatures approaching 50M °C, to form a single, heavy He nucleus, ejecting high-speed neutrons in the process.

• Half-life: The time it takes half of an original sample of a radioactive substance like U, Ra, or C-14, to decay.

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Thermodynamics

Thermodynamics: The branch of physics dealing with the transformation of heat into work and other forms of energy.

• 1st Law of Thermodynamics (The Law of Conservation of Energy): Energy is conserved; that is, it’s indestructible- there is always the same total amount of it in the universe.

• 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (Entropy): Entropy of the universe tends to a maximum.

  • Entropy: A measure of the total disorder, randomness, or chaos in a system. In thermodynamics, it crops up every time any work gets done, since the only way work ever gets done is through heat transfers—hot water meeting cool air, for instance, to produce the steam that drives a steam engine. At the outset, the system is said to be at a low level of entropy: The fast-moving water molecules are distinct from the slow-moving air molecules, and the whole thing has a kind of order to it. But as the heat flows into the cooler medium—as heat naturally does—the fast-moving molecules begin to spend themselves, mixing with the slow ones until eventually all the molecules are moving at approximately the same speed. At this point, we’re at maximum entropy; everything is at the same temperature, all the molecules are milling about without any order, and nothing more can be accomplished. The energy within the system is still there, but unless you separate the molecules again, returning them to a state of tension by heating some and chilling others, it can’t be used to make things happen anymore.

    • Increased entropy—things going from a state of relative order to one of disorder—is the upshot of all natural actions.

      • The Second Law doesn’t seem to operate the same way on the subatomic level, where time flows in at least two directions, if it flows at all.

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Geology

• Ice Ages: Over the past billion years, the earth has experienced three long periods during which ice built up at its poles, each period made up of several 100,000-year “ice ages,” when glaciers advanced to cover much of the world. These ice ages were punctuated by 10,000-year “interglacials,” warm spells marked by the melting of the vast ice sheets. We live at the end of such a temperate time-out; the last great ice age wound down about 7,000 years ago. At its peak, 20,000 years ago, glaciers encased much of North America, Europe, and Asia. Days were about eleven degrees colder than they are now, forcing humans and animals southward.

  • Astronomical Theory: States that three periodic changes in the Earths position relative to the sun seem to have launched ice ages by influencing the amount of solar radiation the earth receives. Because of the gravitational pull of the sun and moon on the equator, the earth wobbles on its axis like a toy top slowing down. Every 22,000 years or so, it describes a circle in space. The axis also tilts, causing the seasons. When the North Pole tips away from the sun, it’s winter in the Northern Hemisphere. Today, the angle of tilt is 231/2°, but every 41,000 years it moves from 22° to 24° and back again. Perhaps the most important cycle is a change in the shape of the earth’s orbit—from nearly circular to highly elliptical and back to circular—every 100,000 years due to the gravitational tug of fellow planets. The combined effect of these three cycles is to place the earth farther away from the sun at certain times, cooling the planet into an ice age.

• Greenhouse Gases (GHGs)

  • Carbon Dioxide (CO2): The gas we exhale; permeable to solar radiation (sunlight) but opaque to IR (heat). We need some CO2 to act as insulation, along with H2O (v) and O3. No sweat, as long as it stays in its current proportions (~.03% of the total atmosphere).

    • Since CO2 stimulates photosynthesis and increases plant yields, agricultural productivity could soar.

• Climate Change: A rise in the global temperature of a mere 2°C to 4°C (3.6°F to 7.2°F), which some climatologists and a brace of computers think could happen by this century, would melt polar ice caps, causing seas to rise and submerge coastal cities; upset weather patterns, triggering droughts and floods; and decrease wind circulation, playing havoc with ocean currents and depleting the fish supply.

• Ozone layer: ~10miles up and 20miles thick; protects the planet from deadly UV and other high-energy radiation.

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Pathogens

• Viruses

  • Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV): The Virus which causes AIDS, enters the body hidden inside helper T cells and macrophages in blood, semen, or vaginal fluid from an infected person. The virus apparently hijacks the victim’s helper T cells when they come to investigate the intrusion. It keeps more or less quiet for months or years in these hostage T cells until they begin to divide, perhaps in response to some subsequent infection. Not only do the helper T cells fail to sound the alarm that would activate killer T and B cells, but they are themselves spreading the disease. Second-wave invaders, in the form of opportunistic infections, meet no opposition when they march in for the kill.

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Immune System

1. A foreign invader (virus, bacterium, parasite) enters the body.

2. WBC’s (the average person has ~1T, borne in the bone marrow) are alerted. These cells are of two major kinds:

   1. Phagocytes: Cell eaters, that constantly patrol the body looking for intruders to devour.

      1. Macrophages: Recognize and engulf foreign substances, breaking them down into smaller pieces (phagocytosis).

   2. Lymphocytes: Specialized WBC’s called T (thymus, where the T cells mature) and B (bone marrow, the birthplace of b cells) communicate via cytokines.

      1. Helper T-Cell (CD4+): Recognize and respond to foreign substances, such as pathogens, and help to coordinate the immune system’s response to these threats by stimulating the activation and proliferation of other immune cells, such as B-cells and Killer T-cells.

      2. Killer T-Cell (Cytotoxic T-Cell): Recognize and kill infected or cancerous cells by using specialized proteins called T-cell receptors, which allow T-cells to “see” certain proteins, called antigens, on the surface of cells. When a killer T-cell encounters an infected or cancerous cell that has the right antigens on its surface, it will release chemicals that trigger the death of that cell.

      3. Suppressor T-Cell: Shuts the immune response down following the suppression of a pathogen.

      4. B-Cell: Borne in the bone marrow; capable of creating millions of different antibodies, which either fight the invaders or flag them so phagocytes can recognize and devour them.

      5. Cytokine: A special protein that enables Lymphocytes (T and B cells) to communicate.

3. Macrophages begin to swallow up pathogens, taking from each the equivalent of its dog tag- a tiny piece called the antigen, which a macrophage then displays on its own surface to attract helper T cells trained to recognize that particular antigen. (The thymus apparently has on hand a T cell able to recognize each of nature’s hundreds of millions of antigens.)

4. Macrophages secrete a cytokine called interleukin-1, which stimulates the helper-T cells to reproduce.

5. The helper-Ts in turn secrete interleukin-2, which causes the creation of still more helper-T cells and of killer T cells, whose job it is to clobber body cells already taken over by the invader.

6. The new helper T cells release several lymphokines that:

   1. Orders the production of B cells in the spleen and lymph nodes.

   2. Tell B-cells to stop reproducing and start making antibodies, proteins tailored to fight specific antigens.

   3. Secrete gamma interferon, a lymphokine that boosts T-Cell activation, assists B-cells in producing antibodies, and helps macrophages digest the enemy.

7. When the invaders are vanquished, suppressor T cells tell the rest of the immune system to call it quits. Turning off the immune response is as important as launching it; some forms of blood cancer seem to be the result of T and B cells gone wild. And the immune system can mistakenly attack the body’s own cells, as in such autoimmune diseases as rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus. (Allergies are basically an immune-system overreaction to harmless invaders like dust and pollen.)

8. Phagocytes clean up the debris—dead cells, spilled protein fragments.

9. Certain B and T cells, called memory cells, remain in the blood and the lymphatic system, on guard against renewed attack by the same antigen.

• Vaccination: A sort of basic training for memory cells; it introduces dead or weakened disease-causing substances into the body, priming memory cells so that they’ll recognize the invader should it ever appear again in full force.

• Chemicals like asbestos overwhelm macrophages, which can’t digest them.

• Monoclonal Antibodies: A cross between spleen and cancer cells that produces antibodies that scout the body for incipient tumors.

• Psychoneuroimmunology: The study of interactions between the mind and the nervous, endocrine, and immune systems.

  • A body under stress produces an excess of the steroid cortisol. Because macrophages coping with all that cortisol can’t seem to handle other infections, we catch more colds when we’re stressed out.

  • Exercise seems to stimulate the brain to produce natural painkillers, called endorphins and enkephalins.

  • The brain may speak to the WBCs through the cytokines, protein messengers, and the WBCs may talk back.

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Math

• Fibonacci Series: An oft appearing naturally occurring ratio. For instance, the ratio of scales distributed in opposing spirals around a pine cone is 5:8; of bumps around a pineapple, 8:13; of seeds in the center of a sunflower, 21:34.

  • Golden Ratio: The ratio between any two adjacent Fibonacci numbers (after 3) is roughly 1:1.618.

• Zero: An ancient Hindu innovation, arrived in Europe in Roman times, along with the Arabic numerals.

• Quaternion Nature: The complex number concept extended from 2D-4D.

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Notable Scientists

• Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwarizmi (780-847): Persian polymath from Khwarazm who produced vastly influential works in mathematics, astronomy, and geography. In 820, was appointed astronomer and head of the library of the House of Wisdom in Baghdad. Using the numeral system of the Hindus, went on to develop algebra, without which the complex weight distribution of Gothic cathedrals probably couldn’t have been pulled off.

• Abū Bakr al-Razi (864/5- 925/35): A Persian physician, philosopher, and alchemist who lived during the Islamic Golden Age; widely regarded as one of the most important figures in the history of medicine. Wrote “The Comprehensive Book,” which summed up everything that had been known of medicine in Greece, India, and the Middle East and some of what had been known of medicine in China.

• Tycho Brage (1546-1601): Danish astronomer known for his astronomical observations; noted as the first competent mind in modern astronomy. King Frederick II, in order to avoid brain drain to Germany, set up Tycho as feudal lord of the island of Hveen and provided him with the wherewithal to establish what in effect was the world’s first observatory and think tank. Brahe spent ~20y there making the most complete survey of the heavens since the Greeks closed up shop. When the new administration of Christian IV cut off funding, he migrated to Bohemia, where he made his greatest contribution: He provided the data on the basis of which Johannes Kepler, a German and his successor as Imperial Mathematician, calculated the elliptical orbits of the planets.

• Giordano Bruno (1548-1600): Italian philosopher, mathematician, poet, cosmological theorist, and Hermetic occultist best known for his cosmological theories, which conceptually extended the then novel Copernican model. He proposed that the stars were distant suns surrounded by their own planets, and he raised the possibility that these planets might foster life of their own, a cosmological position known as cosmic pluralism. He also insisted that the universe is infinite and could have no “center.”

  • The Inquisition gave Bruno a chance to recant, but he wound up burning at the stake anyway. Since Socrates, no man had fought less to save his own life. Or at least that’s the way Victorian press agentry told the story. Bruno had been an adherent of Copernicanism (the earth moved; the universe was infinite) but he was also of a mystical stripe (other worlds were inhabited; infinite universe was indistinguishable from infinite God). As a case for martyrdom for science, therefore, this can be thrown out on technical grounds: By modern criteria, Bruno wasn’t a scientist at all. Rather, he used scientific ideas to dress up a system of hermetic magic. And, in any case, the Inquisition didn’t indict him for Copernicanism; they indicted him for his lukewarm acceptance of the doctrine of the Trinity.

• Johannes Kepler (1571-1630): German astronomer, mathematician, astrologer, natural philosopher, and writer. A key figure in the 17c Scientific Revolution best known for his laws of planetary motion and his books on Astronomia nova, Harmonice Mundi, and Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae which provided one of the foundations for Newton’s theory of universal gravitation.

• Isaac Newton (1642-1727): English mathematician, physicist, and natural philosopher, widely regarded as one of the most influential scientists in history. Newton made significant contributions to the fields of physics and mathematics and is known for his three laws of motion, which describe the relationship between a body and the forces acting upon it. He developed the theory of universal gravitation.

  • The story is that it was the falling apple that suggested to Newton the theory of universal gravitation, and the story, as Brewster acknowledges, was spread by Voltaire, who got it from Newton’s niece, Catherine Barton.

• Olaus Roemer (1644-1710): Danish astronomer made the first measurement of the speed of light in 1676 by tracing the path of the planet Jupiter. Roemer also invented the modern thermometer showing the temperature between two fixed points; at which water boils and freezes.

• Leonhard Euler (1707-1783): Swiss Mathematician, physicist, and astronomer who made important contributions to a wide range of fields, including calculus, trigonometry, and number theory.

• Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778): Swedish Botanist, zoologist, and taxonomist who came up with the idea of dividing plants into 24 “classes” distinguished by their sex, that is, according to the length and number of stamens and pistils in their flowers, then subdividing those classes into “orders” based on the number of pistils. Authored Systema Naturae, in which he outlined his system of classification that Is still in use today.

• Henry Cavendish (1731-1810): English natural philosopher and scientist who was an important experimental and theoretical chemist and physicist. He is noted for his discovery of H, which he termed “inflammable air” and combined H and O to get H2O but concluded that H2O was H minus phlogiston.

• Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier (1743-1794): French nobleman and chemist who was central to the 18c chemical revolution and who had a large influence on both the history of Chemistry and Biology. Lavoisier saw that air was made up of two elements of which one contributed to combustion and one, N, did not.

  • Lavoisier was beheaded during Robespierre’s terror, but the case against him wasn’t that he had invented modern chemistry, only that he had been a tax collector under the old régime.

• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831): German philosopher; among the most important figures in German idealism and one of the founding figures of modern Western philosophy. Hegel introduced evolution into philosophy, and Marx brought it into politics.

• Hans Christian Oersted (1777-1851): Danish physicist and chemist who discovered that electric currents create magnetic fields- the first connection found between electricity and magnetism. Oersted had brought a compass needle close to an electrical wire, thereby stumbling on electromagnetism.

• Charles Darwin (1809-1882): English naturalist, geologist, and biologist widely known for his contributions to evolutionary biology. His proposition that all species of life have descended from a common ancestor is now generally accepted and considered a fundamental concept in science. Darwin made evolution come off as science—first, in his Origin of Species, published in 1859; later, in his Descent of Man, published in 1871.

• Niels Bohr (1885-1962): Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922.

• George Boole (1815-1864): British mathematician, logician, and philosopher and founder of Boolean Algebra; his “Laws of Thought” substituted letter symbols (a and b, x and y, etc) for words to stand for components of thought and elements of formal logic which could be mathematically manipulated.

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Science Chronology

• 2004: The UN General Assembly adopts a largely symbolic, nonbinding resolution to prohibit all forms of human cloning.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 2003: Dolly the lamb is put down at a young age after developing lung disease along with a number of other ailments.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 2002: Discovery of the Hominid Homo georgicus in the nation of Georgia, challenging the “out of Africa” mindset.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 5 Jul, 1996: Birth of Dolly the lamb, the first mammal to be cloned from the adult body cells of another.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1993: An experimental fusion reactor at Princeton produces a few MW of power for a fraction of a second; while doing so, though, it uses up more power than it produced.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1990: Inception of the Human Genome Project (HGP) by the US DoE and the US NIH, tasked to identify the thousands of human genes and map the exact sequence of the ~3B pairs (nucleotides) that make them up.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1989: Two researchers in Utah claim to have seen Nuclear Fusion in a room-temperature test tube (‘Cold Fusion’).-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1984: Discovery of the hominid Australopithecus aethiopicus; known mostly by the “Black Skull” fossil discovered in the Lake Turkana area of Kenya.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1984: Discovery of Homo ergaster (Turkana Boy) as an almost complete skeleton of a lanky 11yo adolescent.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1978: Birth of Louise Brown in England, the first test tube baby.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1974: Discovery of the hominid Australopithecus afarensis in Ethiopia by anthropologist Donald Johanson, who found a female skeleton he dubbed Lucy, after the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1968: Steven Weinberg (then at MIT) theorizes that the weak and electrical forces are unified (essentially identical), and that apparent differences between them were due more to the present low temperature of the universe than to anything fundamental to their natures.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• Mid-1960s: Physicists discover that the myriad elementary particles around us are comprised of a small number of still more basic entities called Quarks, which are held together by particles called gluons. Scientists believe that these particles derive from an even more basic form of matter called quark-gluon plasma, a primordial soup that made up the universe ten millionths of a second after the Big Bang. As things cooled down, this liquid went through “hadronization,” hardening into protons and neutrons, which in turn coalesced first into nuclei, then into atoms.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1959: Discovery of the hominid Paranthropus or Australopithecus boisei in Tanzania.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1952: Biologists clone a frog using the DNA in the nucleus of an intestinal epithelial cell of a tadpole.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1938: Discovery of the hominid Paranthropus or Australopithecus robustus by Robert Broom in South Africa.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1929: Astronomer Edwin Hubble notices that the light from distant stars was becoming redder, he took this “Doppler Shift” or “Red Shift” to mean that the stars were rushing away from earth. His conclusion, known as Hubble’s Law and now generally accepted, was that the universe is expanding.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1927: Heisenberg observes that the closer you get to observing the velocity of a particle, the further you inevitably get from measuring its position, and vice versa. Indeterminacy of velocity times indeterminacy of position will equal roughly, h.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1924: Discovery of the hominid Australopithecus africanus during a 73 day dig by the famous anthropologist Raymond Dart in South Africa. The discovery blew apart the idea- commonly held up until that point- that Asia was the home of the origins of man.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1922: Niels Bohr wins the Nobel Prize for his new model of the H atom.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1907: Discovery of the hominid Homo heidelbergensis in Heidelberg, Germany.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1903: The term “cloning” is coined by a Horticulturist. It was originally used to describe an exact genetic copy of an individual organism, asexually produced.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1900: Introduction of Quantum theory when Max Plank proposes it as a way of accounting for the emission of light by a body so hot that it’s luminous and which underlies quantum mechanics.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1900: Max Plank discovers that radiant energy is given off in particles, qanta, not continuously. Energy of a photon= h*v (radiation frequency). Plank’s constant (h) is calculated s 6.547-27.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1895: German mathematician Georg Cantor works out “the arithmetic’s of infinity.” Aleph-null is simple infinity: the familiar ∞, roughly equivalent to the endlessness of the natural numbers.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1882: π is shown to be transcendental.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1873: e, the base of the so called “natural” logarithms, is shown to be transcendental.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• Jun, 1858: Darwin receives from Wallace (who was in Malaya, recovering from malaria) a paper setting forth not just a theory of evolution but a theory of evolution by natural selection.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1856: Discovery of the hominid Homo sapiens neanderthalensis.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1845: Wallace begins discussing transmutation of species after reading Chambers’ Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1844: Frenchman Joseph Liouville proves the existence of transcendentals- irrationals that would not serve as solutions to any of the infinite number of polynomial equations in any of the infinite number of degrees possible- but couldn’t come up with an example.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1843: William Hamilton introduces quaternion nature, complex numbers extended from 2D to 4D.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1837: Darwin begins keeping his Notebook on Transmutation of Species.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1827: Botanist Robert Brown postulates Brownian Movement, the irregular movement of minute particles of matter when suspended in liquid. Brown had watched microscopic pollen grains floating around in water, noticing that although the direction any particular pollen grain would take was unpredictable, all the grains moved faster when the water got hotter and slowed down as it cooled.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1805: British chemist John Dalton publishes the modern atomic theory of matter, showing that the enormous variety of substances that surround us are made up of only a few different chemical elements, each of which has its own type of atom.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1761: π (from perimetron- Greek for ‘measurement around’), the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, is proved to be irrational.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1676: Danish Astronomer Olaus Roemer makes the first measurement of the speed of light after carefully tracking the path of the planet Jupiter.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 16c: Italian Mathematician Cardano begins using negative numbers, pointing out that there can be less than nothing- a debt, for instance. Prior to this, anything less than zero was considered “fictitious.”-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1202: Leonardo of Pisa introduces Arabic numerals into Europe.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 3c BCE: Archimedes principle is developed by Archimedes in Syracuse, Sicily, an important Greek outpost. The local king Hiero II suspects that the royal jeweler is sneaking some silver into the new, and supposedly 100% gold, royal crown. Hiero calls in Archimedes, who for a while is stumped. He knows that gold weighs more than silver and consequently has less volume and that the volume of a piece of pure gold and of a crown of pure gold weighing the same amount would be the same. But how to measure the volume of a strange-shaped thing like a crown? Then, pondering the problem one day in the tub, Archimedes realizes that a body immersed in liquid displaces exactly its own volume of that liquid. Measure the volume of the water that’s spilled over the side of the tub and you’ve got the volume of the thing in the tub. At which point, Archimedes shouts “Eureka!” The crown causes the water to rise higher, revealing itself to have a greater volume (and hence to be less dense, i.e., not pure gold). And revealing the jeweler to be guilty.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 500 BCE: The first irrational number is discovered by Pythagoras, when he constructs a right angle, each of whose sides was one unit long, and measured its hypotenuse. His proof that it couldn’t be put into fractional form was very upsetting, and resulted in the immediate sacrifice of a hundred oxen.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 20 Ka: Peak of the last Ice Age; glaciers encase much of N. America, Europe, and Asia, days were about 11 degrees colder, and humans and animals lived further southward.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 35 Ka: Disappearance of Neanderthals, replaced by Cro-Magnons, a hipper subspecies of H. sapiens responsible for celebrated cave paintings in Lascaux, France.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• ~94-12 Ka: Life of Homo floresiensis (Flores, Indonesia) aka ‘The Hobbit’; a hominid who stood ~3’ tall and weighed ~55lbs. Their brains were about as big as grapefruits.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• ~195 Ka: Rise of modern humans- Homo sapiens sapiens (‘wise, wise man’) with a brain size of ~1350cm3.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• ~250-30 Ka: Life of Homo sapiens neanderthalensis (Thal: valley- German); a hominid. Neanderthals disappeared mysteriously ~35ka, to be replaced by Cro-Magnons, a hipper subspecies of H. sapiens responsible for the celebrated cave paintings in Lascaux, France.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• ~600-100 Ka: Life of Homo sapiens (‘wise man’) or Homo heidelbergensis (from Heidelberg, Germany); a hominid with a flatter face and bigger brain (~83% the size of ours).-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• ~1.7-1.5 Ma: Life of Homo ergaster (‘work man’); considered the first hominid with a conscience, since a female H. ergaster was found to be in the advanced stages of a nasty bone disease, meaning that other members of the tribe must have looked after her.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• ~1.8 Ma: Life of Homo georgicus (found in the nation of Georgia); an apelike species.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• ~1.8ma- 300 Ma: Life of Homo erectus (‘erect man’); an apelike species close to the size of modern humans with a smaller jaw, larger brain (~750-1225cm3) and probably stronger than modern humans. An Atkins-like protein-rich diet meant a larger brain and a smaller gut. H. erectus produced the first hand-axes and was the first to make use of fire and shelter—the rude beginnings of culture.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• ~2-1.5 Ma: Life of Paranthropus or Australopithecus robustus; an apelike species with a small brain size (~530cm3), large teeth, and a humanoid humerus and femur.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• ~2.1-1.1 Ma: Life of Paranthropus or Australopithecus boisei (‘super robust’); an apelike species standing upwards of 5.5’ tall and weighing as much as 150lbs with large teeth (known as “nutcracker man”) with some molars measuring 2cm from front to back, suggesting the species was still primarily vegetarian.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• ~2.4-1.5 Ma: Life of Homo habilis (‘handy man’); an apelike species standing ~4.5-5’ tall and weighting from 64-100lbs with a moderately sized brain (~750cm3).-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• ~2.5 Ma: Life of Australopithecus garhi (garhi: Surprise- Afar); an apelike species with a small brain size, large teeth, and a humanoid humerus and femur.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 2.6 Ma: Dating of the oldest known tools used by proto humans in Ethiopia’s Afar region.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• ~2.6-2.3 Ma: Life of Australopithecus aethiopicus; an apelike species with a small brain size (~410cm3), a large, flat face with no forehead, huge teeth, and evidence of powerful chewing muscles.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 3-2 Ma: Life of Australopithecus africanus; an apelike species with a small brain size (~420-500cm3) in a very apelike skull.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 3.9-3 Ma: Life of Australopithecus afarensis (from Afar region); an apelike species with a small brain size (~400cm3) in a very apelike skull (though with more humanlike teeth).-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• ~4 Ma: Life of Australopithecus anamensis (anam: lake- Turkana); a bipedal apelike species.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• ~5.8-5.2 Ma: Life of Ardipithecus ramidus (ardi: ground/floor- Afar); an apelike species that stood ~4’ tall and weighed ~80lb. Could walk upright, but probably spent a lot of its time in the trees.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 6 Ma: Life of Orrorin turenensis; an apelike species.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 7-6 Ma: Life of Sahelanthropus tchadensis; an apelike species with a small brain size (~350cm3).-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 15 Ma: The Earth’s climate cools; steamy forests give way to grassy savannah, and tree dwellers eventually move around the savannah floor, giving rise to the family Hominidae.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• Big Bang: All matter is in the form of superparticles. In each transitional case following the Big Bang, a new form of matter occurred as soon as the temperature had dropped to the point at which the interparticle collisions no longer had sufficient energy to disrupt the fragile new structure.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

  • Big Bang + 500K years: The first electrons attach themselves to nuclei to form simple atoms.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

  • Big Bang + 3 Minutes: Elementary particles collect to form the nuclei of atoms.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

  • Big Bang + 10-5 Seconds: Quarks condense into the elementary particles that are the building blocks of matter as we know it.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

  • Big Bang + 10-12 Seconds: The third ‘freezing’; the Universe becomes more complex.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

  • Big Bang + 10-36 Seconds: The second ‘freezing’; the Universe becomes steadily more differentiated.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

  • Big Bang + 10-43 – 10-36 Seconds: The universe may have conformed to the grand unification theory (GUT).-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

  • Big Bang + 10-43 Seconds: The first ‘freezing’; two broad classes of particles appear- one similar to the electron, the other to the photon, with quarks also first appearing. The force of gravity became distinguishable from the other forces.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

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Misc Quotes

“The more the critical reason dominates, the more impoverished life becomes; but the more of the unconscious and the more of myth we are capable of making conscious, the more of life we integrate.”-Jung.

“One interesting bit of conjecture to come from split-brain theory: the idea that déjà vu—the feeling that what’s happening now has already happened in the past—may be nothing more than a neurological glitch that causes information to reach one hemisphere a split second before it reaches the other, so that a single event is processed twice.”

“In all my lectures I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man.”-Emerson.

“Things Are Often What They Seem.”-Hebert Sullivan.

“Less is more.”-Mies van der Rohe.

“Man strives for a homeostasis in which tension is minimal.”-Freud.

“Form follows function.”-Mies.

-The functionalist credo, generally attributed to Mies, but actually used by several eminences, including Louis Sullivan. The earliest use appears to be by Horatio Greenough, a mid-19c Yankee sculptor remembered for his statue of George Washington in a peekaboo toga.

“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,” and “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”-Henry V by Shakespeare.

“Mrs. Warrens Profession was written to draw attention to the truth that prostitution is caused, not by female depravity or male licentiousness, but simply by underpaying, undervaluing, and overworking women so shamefully that the poorest of them are forced to resort to prostitution to keep body and soul together.”-Shaw.

“Nations, like human intelligence, undergo an ordered and predictable progression, from an initial primitive stage through divine (or childish), heroic (or adolescent), and finally civil (or adult) ones. Then they die, and the process begins somewhere else. History is not a great unfolding; it is, rather, cyclical.”-Vico, Historian.

“The State is the institutional embodiment of reason and liberty, the march of God through the world.”-Hegel.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”-George Santayana, Harvard Philosopher.

“This I regard as history’s highest function, to let no worthy action go uncommemorated, and to hold out the reprobation of posterity as a terror to evil words and deeds.”-Tacitus.

“The Hero, not the Establishment or the State, causes things to evolve, that “Universal History … is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.”-Carlyle’s Central Thesis (shared by Nietzsche, Shaw, DH Lawrence, and Wagner).

“It is only the wisest and the stupidest who cannot change.”-Lun Yü.

“The proper man understands equity, the small man profits.”-Lun Yü.

“Silence is a friend who will never betray.”-Lun Yü.

“Without going out of the door, one can know the whole world. Without peeping out the window, one can see the tao of heaven. The farther one travels, the less one knows.”-Lao-Tzu.

“I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”-Ecclesiastes 9:11.

“And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”-Matthew 7:3.

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Terminology

• Acte Gratuit: A gratuitous act, sudden, enigmatic, and often disruptive, undertaken on impulse.

• Affect & Effect

  • Affect: The verb, implies influence. “Smoking can affect one’s health; how has it affected yours?”

  • Effect: The noun. “Smoking has had an effect on me and on my health.”

• Alcohols

  • Bitter: A traditionally English type of draught, or keg, beer that is light, dry, strong, and relatively high in both hops and alcohol content.

  • Claret: The British term for any red Bordeaux wine.

  • Gin: Promoted in the 18c by William of Orange, who considered it the perfect drink for the workingman. Gin drinking leveled the poor like a plague. By the mid 19c, the gin epidemic had begun to taper off, except for the curious defection of many respectable working-class women from beer to gin, after which gin was nicknamed “Mother’s Ruin.”

  • Grog: Any liquor, but especially rum, that’s been diluted with water. Grog was named after Admiral Edward Vernon (whom the sailors called “Old Grog” because he always wore a grogram coat), who gave the order that the daily rations of rum aboard Her Majesty’s ships be diluted. Pretty soon, taverns catering to sailors had taken up the practice, and grog became what one settled for when one couldn’t afford a stiffer dose.

  • Hock: Originally referred to wine from the area around Hochheim, Germany; became a general British term for any white Rhine wine.

  • Madeira: A heavily fortified white wine from the Portuguese island of Madeira. This was one of the first fortified wines to make it big in England, having arrived in the 17c along with the Portuguese bride of Charles II, Catherine of Braganza. Catherine loved to sip Madeira in the morning as she munched a slice of Madeira cake; before long all the fashionable ladies got into the habit of tossing off a little glass to get the day started, a practice that lasted well into the Victorian era. As a result, Madeira, besides being a standard dessert wine, had a reputation as a ladies’ drink. For the record, Madeira comes both dry and sweet.

  • Mead: A sweet, fermented honey or honey-flavored wine the Babylonians were drinking in ~2000 BCE. Mead was the official wedding drink, stipulating that the bride’s parents be required to keep the groom well supplied with “the wine of the bee” for the month following the marriage; that month became known as honeymonth, hence our honeymoon.)

  • Port: A sweet, red, fortified wine originally from Oporto, in Portugal; the drink of choice for the upper class.  It was traditional for the well-heeled Victorian father to lay down a pipe of port (about 140 U.S. gallons) at the birth of his son or godson, to be opened after the boy’s 21st birthday.

  • Porter: A dark brown, heavily hopped brew with a 6-7% alcohol content.

  • Sack: A dry white wine from Spain or the Canary Islands.

  • Sauterne: The greatest of the white Bordeaux wines, grown in the Sauternes region of the province of Bordeaux. It is a sweet, intense, fruity wine served, then and now, with dessert.

  • Sherry: The world’s most popular fortified wine; comes from Spain. Real sherry comes from Andalusia, Spain (the name “sherry” is an anglicization of Jerez, the capital of the sherry region).

  • Stout: A stronger, more heavily hopped version of porter.

  • Tokay: A sweet dessert wine; golden brown and comes from the town of Tokay, or Tokaj, in Hungary.

• Aleatory: Depending on chance (literally, on the throw of a die).

• Bete Noire: ‘Black Beast’; someone or something that one fears, dislikes, or characteristically avoids.

• Bona Fide: Done or made ‘in good faith’; sincere, genuine.

• Captious: Perversely hard to please, given to fault-finding and petty criticism.

• Catharsis: The experience of purgation, or purification, of the emotions that Aristotle claimed tragedy could be counted on to produce, thereby rendering it socially useful.

• Cordon Sanitaire: The line, generally guarded, between an infected area and an adjacent, as-yet uninfected one.

• Coup De Grâce: ‘Stroke of mercy’; the death blow, delivered to someone mortally wounded; any finishing or decisive act.

• De Rigueur: Absolutely necessary; required by good form if nothing else.

• Éminence Grise: The power behind the throne, the person who exercises unofficial authority.

• Enervating: The opposite of ‘energizing’; sapping, debilitating, depriving of strength or vitality.

• Enthousiasmos: A state of transcendent ecstasy.

• Fait Accompli: ‘Accomplished fact’; a thing already consummated, so that fighting it is useless, and changing it impossible.

• Force Majeure: ‘Superior strength’; The irresistible force, out of your control, generally unexpected, serving to release you from your obligations.

• Gemütlichkeit: From Gemüt, temperament, feeling. Implies geniality, coziness, a sense of shared well-being.

• Gnomic: Wise and pithy, full of aphorisms.

• Hamartia: ‘Fatal flaw’ (or ‘error’, ‘shortcoming’)’ in what, according to Aristotle, it takes to be a tragic hero. A necessary component of tragedy because, Aristotle reasoned, there is no point in witnessing the destruction of a man who is thoroughly virtuous, on the one hand, or thoroughly corrupt, on the other.

• Heuristic: Concerned with ways of finding things out or of solving problems; proceeding by trial and error; using hypotheses not to come to an immediate conclusion but to eliminate irrelevancies and modify one’s take on things as one goes along, with any luck arriving at a theretofore unknown goal.

  • Heuristic Method: Trains a student to find things out for himself.

• Histor (‘learned man’).

• Hubris: Arrogance, pride.

• Inchoate: Nascent, undeveloped, immature, imperfect.

• Ineffable: Unutterable, either because you can’t (it’s too overwhelming) or you shouldn’t (it’s too sacred).

• Love

  • Agape: Love of God, or love of god’s creatures. Now, the giving of affection without expecting anything back.

  • Amour-Propre: ‘Self-love’; the need for admiration by others, neurotic self-involvement.

  • Eros: Sexual love; the base for the term ‘erotic’.

  • Philia: Love of friends.

  • Physike: Kindness or love towards creatures of the same race.

  • Xenike: Benevolence towards guests.

• Money

  • Crown: A silver coin; worth five shillings.

  • Farthing: A quarter of a penny.

  • Florin: A silver coin, with a flower on it, worth two shillings.

  • Guinea: A little bigger than a pound—one shilling bigger, to be precise. At first a coin, made from gold from Guinea, with a little elephant stamped on it.

  • Mite: An eighth of a penny.

  • Penny: In the plural, “pence,” twelve of which used to make up a shilling (and 240 a pound).

    • Ha’penny (halfpenny).

    • Tuppence (or twopence).

    • Thrippence (or threepence).

    • Fourpence (also called a groat).

    • Sixpence (also called a tanner, also a teston).

  • Pound: Originally equivalent to a pound-weight of silver pennies, called sterling’s.

    • The sign, equivalent to our $, is a crossed L, £, from the first letter of librum, the Latin word for pound.

  • Shilling: Twenty of them used to make up a pound, before being discontinued in 1971.

• Noisome: Disgusting, unwholesome, unpleasant.

• Nota Bene (NB): ‘Note well’; calls your attention to something the writer thinks you might miss or not see the, in his opinion, enormous significance of.

• Otiose: Ineffective, serving no purpose, futile.

• Plangent: Striking with a deep, reverberating sound, as waves against the shore.

• Priapic: Suffering from a persistent, and usually painful, erection.

• Protean: Changing form easily; variable, versatile.

• Raison D’être: ‘Reason for being’; justification for one’s existence.

• Uninterested & Disinterested:

  • Uninterested: Indifferent, Uncaring.

  • Disinterested: Impartial.

• Zeitgeist: ‘Time ghost’; the spirit of the age, the taste and outlook of a period or a generation.

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People

• St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430): Theologian and Philosopher of Berber origin and the bishop of Hippo Regius in Numidia, Roman N. Africa. His writings influenced the development of Western Philosophy and Western Christianity and he is viewed as one of the fathers of the Latin Church. His many important works include “The City of God,” “On Christian Doctrine,” and “Confessions.”

• Thomas More (1478-1535): English lawyer, judge, social philosopher, author, statements, and noted Renaissance humanist; served Henry VIII as Lord High Chancellor of England from Oct, 1529- May, 1532. Wrote “Utopia (1516)”, which describes the political system of an imaginary island state. More was canonized by Pope Pius XI in 1935 as a martyr and declared a patron saint of statesmen and politicians by Pope John Paul II in 2000.

• Henry IV (Henry of Navarre, Henry the Great, Good King) (1553-1610): French King from 1589-1610. He was the first monarch of France from the House of Bourbon, a branch of the Capetian Dynasty, and the most fondly remembered of all the French Kings; the first politician to make use of the slogan “a chicken in every pot.” Assassinated in 1610 by Catholic Zealot, Francois Ravaillac.

• Cardinal Richelieu (‘Red Robe’) (1585-1642): French clergyman and statesman known as l’Éminence rouge (‘Red Eminence’). Richelieu was consecrated as a bishop in 1607, was appointed Foreign Secretary in 1616, Cardinal in 1622, and Chief minister of French King Louis XIII in 1624 until his death in 1642. Richelieu’s famous three-point program for consolidating the power of the monarchy and the French state: Suppress the Protestants, curb the nobles, and humble the House of Austria.

  • Richelieu was the villain in Dumas’s The Three Musketeers.

• Louis XIII (1601-1643): French King (1610-1643) and King of Navarre (as Louis II) from 1610-1622; married to Anne of Austria (daughter of the Spanish King), chosen by his mother (and regent) Marie de’ Medici.

• Louis XIV (1638-1715): French King also known as ‘Louis the Great’ (‘Sun King’) whose reign of 72y and 110d is the longest of any sovereign in history. Married to Marie Thérèse of Spain to fulfill a treaty agreement, who produced several children who died in infancy and one prince, the Grand Dauphin, who died before he could become king.

• Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790): American inventor, writer, and statesmen. Wrote “Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One” (1773), “An Edict by the King of Prussia” (1773), and “Experiments and Observations on Electricity” (1751), among others. Franklin invented a stove, bifocal glasses, and the lightning rod; he established one of the first libraries, fire departments, hospitals, and insurance companies; he helped negotiate the treaty with France that allowed America to win independence; and was a member of the Constitutional Convention.

• Louis XV (1710-1774): French King who succeeded his great-grandfather, Louis XIV at the age of 5. Married to Maria Leszcynska, the daughter of a dethroned Polish king.

• Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826): American statesmen, diplomat, lawyer, architect, philosopher, and founding father; served as the John Adam’s VP and was the 3rd POTUS (1801-1809). A Southerner, agrarian, progressive, and all-around Renaissance man. Founder of the Democratic Republicans (modern Democratic party) and the principal author of the Declaration of Independence.

• Louis XVI (1754-1793): Son of Louis, Dauphin of France and King of France before the fall of the monarchy during the French Revolution. He was referred to as Citizen Louis Capet during the 4 months just before he was beheaded. Married to Antoinette, previously the Archduchess of Austria. He adored her; she despised him.

• Alexander Hamilton (1755/7-1804): American military officer and statesman; a northerner federalist, an industrialist, a venture capitalist, and a power broker. Founder of the Federalists (modern Republican party) and the first US Secretary of the Treasury from 1789-1795.  

• Alexis Charles Henri Clérel, comte de Tocqueville (1805-1859): French aristocrat, diplomat, political scientist, political philosopher, and historian, best known for his works “Democracy in America (1835 & 1840), in which he analyzed the living standards and social conditions of individuals as well as their relationship to the market and state in Western societies. Tocqueville drew a line between liberty and democracy, worried aloud about “the tyranny of the majority” and the distrust of excellence, and predicted, that, within a century, the US would have >100M people and would, along with Russia, be one of the world’s two leading powers.

• Karl Marx (1818-1883): German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, and socialist revolutionary. Marx co-authored the Communist Manifesto with Engels in 1848 and the four volume Das Kapital (1867-1883). Marx was influenced by the social ideas that came out of the French Revolution, the economic ideas that came out of the British Industrial Revolution, and, especially, by the philosophical ideas coming out of Germany.

  • Marx is one in an ever-lengthening line of German philosophers, the most notable of whom was Hegel, to whom he—along with other “Young Hegelians” like Engels—was much devoted in his youth and from whom he picked up the very useful dialectical method. Marx was interested in the big questions, and the one his system “solves” is that most basic quandary of history; namely, what makes it go, and where. Marx answers the question by taking dialectics (Hegel’s thesis-antithesis-synthesis dynamic) and combining it with materialism, the half of philosophy that says matter constitutes, and has precedence over, mind. The result, as if you didn’t know: dialectical materialism. Marx’s argument is that economic relationships are the basic forces in history and that it is only around them that the whole complex of social relationships arises. Marx called these two interrelated aspects the economic “base” and the social “superstructure.” As a materialist, he felt that the “relations of production”—the basic setup and reciprocal interaction among those people or classes who are doing the work and making (or not making) the money— defined by the “base” decreed the “general character of the social, political, and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their existence that determines their consciousness.”

  • For Marx, the social system- the superstructure, contains within itself the seeds of “contradiction,” leading to a disequilibrium with the economic base and, eventually, to the overthrow of the whole business—in other words, revolution; also progress. Watch how it works: Material conditions (agrarian, industrial, whatever) spawn economic classes. Thus, at some point, there’d been a feudal, or landholding, class, which, according to the theory, got top-heavy and overwhelmed by a bourgeois, or commercial, class. Now, in plain sight of Marx and anybody else whose eyes were open, that bourgeoisie was calling into being its dialectical antithesis, the proletariat. In fact, the more bourgeois a country was, the more it was going to become proletarian: The busier the factories, the bigger the laboring class. Eventually, with all these bourgeois types devouring each other in their race to get ahead, the proletariat will see its chance and take over, “expropriating the expropriators,” “seizing the levers of production,” and abolishing private property.

  • Religion- “the opiate of the people,” the only thing that keeps them from protesting the grimness of their lives by promising all of them another one later.

  • “Theory must be joined with practice.”-Marx.

  • “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains, they have a world to win. Workers of the world, unite.”-Communist Manifesto.

  • Marx sought a new socialist order in which the oppressed would be freed and wealth would be distributed on the principle of “to each according to his needs, from each according to his ability.” Ultimately, even this workers’ state would “wither away,” leaving no oppressive institutions to mediate among people; in the meantime, it was to be governed, in Marx’s phrase, by a “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

• Friedrich Engels (1820-1895): German philosopher, historian, political theorist, and revolutionary socialist. Engels developed what is now known as Marxism together with Karl Marx. In 1845, he published “The Condition of the Working Class in England,” based on personal observations and research in English cities. In 1848, Engels co-authored the Communist Manifesto with Marx and later wrote “Das Kapital.” In 1884, he published “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.” Perhaps his most enduring contribution, however, is the elaboration of the idea of the “relative autonomy” of the superstructure, the notion that it could interact with the base, sometimes actually pushing it along a bit, if only for a limited period.

• Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin (1870-1924): Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist who served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia (1917-1924) and of the Soviet Union (1922-1924). Under his administration, Russia, and later the USSR, became a one-party Socialist state governed by the CCP. Ideologically a Marxist, his developed are called Leninism. Lenin emerged as the leader of the Bolshevik (or “majority”) faction of the Russian Communists, and became, after the October 1917 revolution, the first head of state of the new Russia.

  • Lenin put everything through the sieve of revolutionary practice in the belief that any issue could be resolved in response to: “Is it good for the revolution?”

• Rosa Luxemburg (‘Red Rosa’) (1871-1919): Polish and naturalized German revolutionary socialist, Marxist philosopher, and anti-war activist. She was a member of the proletariat, various communist parties, and a champion of revolutionary ideology. Luxemburg’s major theoretical work is The Accumulation of Capital, which attempts to supplement Marx by establishing a precise economic argument for the inevitability of the collapse of capitalism. Rosa contends that the contradiction between capitalism’s reliance on non-capitalist markets and its tendency to destroy its non-capitalist environment can only lead to its ruin.

• Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (1879-1953): Georgian revolutionary and Soviet political leader who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. Born Josef Dzhugashvili, he changed his name to Stalin (“Man of Steel”); he held power as General Secretary of the CCCP (1922-1952) and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR from 1941-1953. Initially governing the USSR as part of a collective leadership, he consolidated power to become a dictator by the 1930s. Stalin formalized the ideas of Marxism-Leninism into his own policy of Stalinism.

• Leon Trotsky (1879-1940): Russian Marxist revolutionary, political theorist, and politician. Ideologically a Marxist, his developments to the ideology are called Trotskyism. Trotsky organized the Red Army after the revolution and led it to success in the ensuing Russian civil war.

• Mao Zedong (1893-1976): Chinese communist revolutionary and founder of the PRC, which he led as the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party from the establishment of the PRC in 1949 until his death in 1976. Ideologically, Mao was a Marxist-Leninist whose theories, military strategies, and political policies are collectively known as Maoism. Mao’s major contribution is the idea of peasant revolution. In the late 1920s Mao broke with the orthodox view that the proletariat was the only revolutionary class and proposed, to the consternation of the Soviets, that the peasantry play the leading role.  

• Malcolm X (1925-1965): American Muslim minister and human rights activist who was a prominent figure during the American Civil Rights movement. Malcolm X was a spokesman for the Nation of Islam until 1964, he was a vocal advocate for Black empowerment and the promotion of Islam within the Black community. He was gunned down by an informal firing squad hired, purportedly, by the Muslims, the USG, or the Red Chinese.

• Ernesto “Che” Guevara (1928-1967): Argentine Marxist revolutionary. A major figure of the Cuban Revolution who has become a countercultural symbol of rebellion in popular culture. As a young medical student, Guevara traveled throughout S. America and was radicalized by the poverty, hunger, and disease he witnessed. His burgeoning desire to help overturn what he saw as the capitalist exploitation of Latin America by the US prompted his involvement in Guatemala’s social reforms under President Jacobo Arbenz, whose eventual CIA-assisted overthrow at the behest of the United Fruit Company solidified Guevara’s political ideology. Later in Mexico City, Guevara met Raúl and Fidel Castro, joined their 26 July movement, and sailed to Cuba aboard the yacht Granma with the intention of overthrowing US- backed Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Guevara supported popular uprisings across the developing world, including North Vietnam, the Congo, and various Latin American hot spots. Summarily executed by the Bolivian Army.

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Chronology

• 1978: U. of CA Regents v. Allan Bakke; SCOTUS’ first affirmative- action case that declared itself firmly behind the principle of affirmative action (and Bakke’ right to get into medical school).-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

  • Allan Bakke, a 38yo white engineer, had twice been refused admission to the U of CA medical school at Davis, despite a 3.5 college GPA (well above the 2.5 required for white applicants and the 2.1 required for minorities). Bakke concluded that he’d been passed over because of Davis’ strict minority admissions quota, Bakke took his case to the Supreme Court, charging reverse discrimination.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1973: Roe v. Wade; a SCOTUS case that legalizes abortion as part of a woman’s right to privacy. According to the opinion, the state only has the right to intervene when it can prove it has a “compelling interest,” such as the health of the mother. As for the fetus, its rights can begin to be considered only after the 26th week of pregnancy.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

  • The state of TX filed a petition for rehearing, comparing the Court’s assertion that a fetus was not a person before the third semester of pregnancy to the Court’s 1857 decision that Dred Scott was not a person.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1972: Furman v. Georgia; a SCOTUS Case that, for 4y, made capital punishment unconstitutional because it was “arbitrarily and capriciously imposed’.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

  • 1976: The US Supreme Court reverses its stand on Capital Punishment; ruling on a batch of five cases, that the death penalty was not cruel and unusual punishment per se.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1966: Miranda v. Arizona; a SCOTUS case that was the culmination of a series of decisions designed to protect the accused before trial, all of which got their muscle from the exclusionary rule (i.e., throwing out evidence that doesn’t conform to tight judicial standards).-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

  • In 1963, Barbara Ann Johnson, an 18yo candy-counter clerk at a movie theater in Phoenix, was forcibly shoved into the backseat of a car, tied up, and driven to the desert, where she was raped. The rapist then drove her back to town, asked her to say a prayer for him, and let her go. Soon afterward, the police arrested 23yo Ernesto Miranda, a high school dropout with a criminal record dating back to the time he was 14. Miranda had already been convicted of rape in the past. Johnson identified him in a lineup. Miranda then wrote out a confession, stating that it was made with full knowledge to his rights. He was convicted and sentenced to 40-50y in prison, despite his court-appointed lawyer’s contention that his client had been ignorant of his right to counsel. An appeal to the state supreme court failed, but the Supreme Court’s decision set Miranda free. Miranda was later reconvicted on new evidence. He served time in prison, was released on parole, and was stabbed to death in a Phoenix bar 10y after the Court’s landmark decision.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1962: Baker v. Carr; a SCOTUS case in TN between Baker, a disgruntled voter, and Carr, the election official. The Supreme Court decided that unequal election districts were discriminatory and violated the 14th amendment, leading to myriad reapportionment cases and the phrase “one man, one vote,” shifting the countries center of gravity from the hinterlands to the cities. The decision led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which, with its 1982 revisions, legitimized gerrymanders created for the specific purpose of giving African Americans a chance at political power in states notorious for racial discrimination.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

  • Background: The US’ demographics had changed over the years but its election districts hadn’t, so that small towns and rural areas were consistently overrepresented while cities were underrepresented, putting power firmly in the hands of minority and special-interest groups.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1954: Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka; a SCOTUS case brought by Brown as an umbrella for 5 separate segregation cases from 5 different states. The petition was brought on behalf of 8yo Linda Brown, whose father was tired of watching her take the school bus to a blacks-only Topeka school every day when there was a whites-only school near their home. The Court’s decision overturned the principle of “separate but equal” facilities it had established with Plessy v. Ferguson back in 1896. NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall, argued for the petitioners and later became the Supreme Court’s first black justice.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

  • Dr. Kenneth B. Clark, the NY psychologist who made the courts safe for psychosociology by introducing as evidence his now-famous “dolls experiment.” Clark had shown a group of black children two dolls, one black and one white, asking them to choose the doll they found prettiest and would most like to play with, and the doll they thought looked “bad.” The children’s overwhelming preference for the white doll was seen as proof that segregation was psychologically damaging to black children.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

  • POTUS Eisenhower, who was so unsympathetic to the cause of desegregation that the Court, knowing it couldn’t count on him to enforce its decision, put off elucidating the how-tos of the opinion for a whole year.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• May, 1954: French forces are defeated the Vietminh at their garrison in Dien Bien Phu.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1948: Hiss Papers; former US DoS official Alger Hiss is accused by Whittaker Chambers, a senior editor at Time magazine and a former spy, of helping him deliver secret information to the Russians. Richard Nixon, an ambitious young lawyer out to make a name for himself, took on Chambers case. Soon afterward, Chambers produced five rolls of incriminating microfilm (not “papers”) claimed to have been hidden inside a pumpkin on his MD farm. These, along with an old typewriter supposedly belonging to Hiss, were the famous props on which the case against him rested. Nixon pushed hard, and the government bent the law in order to try Hiss after the statute of limitations on the alleged crime had run out. Hiss was convicted and served ~4y in jail.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1936-1939: The Spanish Civil war is fought by the Leftists (‘Republicans’, ‘Loyalists’) concentrated in the South, which tended to be poor, in the industrial region around Barcelona and Madrid, and the rightists (‘Nationalists’, ‘Rebels’) concentrated in the Catholic heartland of Spain and Galicia in the NW. Hitler and Mussolini side with the Nationalists and Stalin with the Republicans. The Nationalists, led by Franco, crush the Republicans, resulting in ~600K Spaniards deaths with innumerable more wounded.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

  • 1936: Spanish Elections; several left leaning factions join in a Popular Front against the right, defeating many in elections and push ahead with their vision of the New Spain. The Military revolts at Spanish Army bases in Morocco, led by General Francisco Franco, with almost all soldiers siding with their officers and the rightists.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

  • 1936: Spanish King Alfonso XIII is driven out in an uneventful revolution. The new republican government, pledges economic and social reform and determines to propel the country out of the 18c and into the 20c. They move against the Church (separating it from the State, which it had been pushing around since at least the Inquisition); break up a few of the big landed estates, redistributing the acreage among the peasants; and give a degree of local autonomy to the Catalans, in and around Barcelona, as well as to the Basques.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

  • 1933: The Spanish government falls into the hands of the rightists.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1921-1923: The Teapot Dome Scandal; POTUS Harding gives control of US Naval Oil reserves at Elk Hill, CA and Teapot Dome, WY to Interior Secretary Albert Fall. A year later, Fall secretly leases the reserves to the owners of two private oil companies, one in exchange for a personal “loan” of $100K, the other for $85K cash, some shares of stock, and a herd of cattle. Fall became the first cabinet member ever to go to prison.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1919: Schenck v. United States; a SCOTUS case that denied the petition of John Schenck, a young man arrested for distributing pamphlets arguing against the legality of the draft. In the decision, the principle of “clear and present danger” became one of the rare justifications for restraining freedom of speech.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1918: Hammer v. Dagenhart; a SCOTUS case that overturned a congressional act designed to limit child labor. The act prohibited interstate or foreign commerce of commodities produced in factories employing children <14, and in mines employing children <16. The suit was brought by Dagenhart, who had two sons working in a NC cotton mill and who was determined to keep them there.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 28 Jun, 1914: Assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, and his wife, Sophie, in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, for centuries under Turkish rule but since 1878 a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, by Bosnian revolutionary Gavrilo Princip, a member of the Black Hand, a secret society headquartered in the kingdom of Serbia.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

  • One month later, Austria, delivering an outrageous ultimatum to the Serbian government, demands to be allowed to participate in suppressing anti-Austrian feeling in Serbia and in punishing any conspirators in what has turned out to be an assassination plot involving officials of the Serbian government. When the Serbs tactfully rebuff the ultimatum, Austria declares war.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1899-1902: The Boer War; the English conquer the Boer Republics in the Transvaal and Orange, incorporating them into the British Empire.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1894-1906: The Dreyfus Affair; Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a wealthy Jewish officer in the French artillery, was accused of having betrayed secrets to the Germans. Although the evidence against him was slim, rabid anti-Semitism in the military prompted a court-martial to convict him of treason and sentence him to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island. Great applause from the public. Two years later, Colonel Georges Picquart, chief of army intelligence, discovered new evidence pointing to the innocence of Dreyfus and the guilt of one Ferdinand Esterhazy, a major in the army and a notorious adventurer. The military, however, was unwilling to admit its error and opted for a cover-up. Picquart was silenced and the authorities refused to reopen the case. But Dreyfus’ brother made a few discoveries of his own, and soon the whole affair turned into a major political issue, with all France divided into two factions: the Dreyfusards and the anti-Dreyfusards (for which read pro-republic, anticlerical liberals, and royalist, militarist conservatives, respectively). Major Esterhazy was finally tried and acquitted by a court-martial. An outraged Zola wrote his famous open letter beginning “J’accuse,” for which he was promptly sentenced to jail. He escaped to England. Major Henry, an army intelligence officer who, it now turned out, had forged much of the evidence used against Dreyfus, committed suicide. Ester-hazy followed Zola’s lead and escaped to England. Dreyfus was retried, convicted again by a military court—this time, found “guilty with extenuating circumstances.” Great hue and cry from the public. The President of France finally stepped in and pardoned Dreyfus, but by this time, pardon wasn’t good enough. The public was still up in arms, and demands for Dreyfus’ complete exoneration were coming in from all over the world. Finally, in 1906, he was cleared, and, in 1930, his innocence was proven by the publication of secret German papers showing that Esterhazy had, in fact, been the culprit.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

  • The repercussions of “I affaire Dreyfus” were enormous. It discredited the royalist elements in France, brought the left wing to political power, gave rise to a period of rabid antimilitarism and anticlericalism, hastened the separation of church and state, and exposed the extent and depth of French anti-Semitism. And for at least a decade, the country remained split between die-hard anti-Dreyfusards and righteous Dreyfusards.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1857: Dred Scott v. Sanford; a SCOTUS case filed by Dred Scott, a Missouri Black man who sued his master, claiming that he had been automatically freed by having been taken first to IL, a free state, then to the MN Territory, where slavery had been forbidden by the Missouri Compromise Chief Justice Roger Taney denied his petition and delivered the opinion for a predominantly Southern Court. First, he ruled, Negroes were not citizens of the US (they had, as he put it, “no rights any white man was bound to respect”) and were not, therefore, entitled to go around suing people. Scott, it declared, couldn’t possibly have been freed by his stay in the MN Territory because MN wasn’t free territory. In fact, Congress had no right to create free territory since, in so doing, it had violated the 5th Amendment by depriving Southerners of their right to property. Ergo, the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, null, and void.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

  • Background: The whole country was waiting to see who would ultimately get control of the new western territories. If the slave states succeeded in institutionalizing slavery there, it would mean more votes and political power for the agrarian South. If the antislavery states got their way, it would mean an even greater concentration of power for the industrial North; in which case, the South threatened, it would secede.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 23 Feb, 1854: The Orange Free state is founded by the Boers during their “great trek” from the British in Southern Africa (Wiki).

• 17 Jan, 1852: The Transvaal is founded by the Boers during their “great trek” from the British in Southern Africa (Wiki).

• 1848: The Revolutions of 1848 (‘Springtime of the Peoples’, ‘Springtime of Nations’); a series of political upheavals throughout Europe which remains the most widespread liberal revolutionary wave in European History challenging the existing monarchial order (Wiki).

• 1848: “The Communist Manifesto” is published by Engels and Marx.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1845: “The Condition of the Working Class in England” is authored by Friedreich Engels.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1837-1901: Reign of Queen Victoria over England.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

  • 1838: The ‘Peoples Charter’ is drafted for the London Working Men’s Association (LWMA) by Lovett and Place, two self-educated radicals, in consultation with other LWMA members demanding universal adult male suffrage, secret ballot, equal electoral districts, annual elections of the members of the House of commons, and the payment of salaries to those members so that you wouldn’t have to be independently wealthy to be able to spend your days in session there.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1830-1837: Reign of King William IV over England.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1819: McCulloch v. Maryland; a SCOTUS case that prevents the state of MD from taxing notes issued by the 2nd Bank of the US. MD argued that by incorporating the Second Bank, Congress had exceeded its constitutional powers and that, in any event, the states could tax whatever they wanted to as long as it was on their turf. In the decision, Marshall not only proclaims, once and for all, the supremacy of national over state government, but also establishes both the federal government’s—and, by extension, the Court’s—right to make what was henceforth to be known as a “loose construction” of the Constitution.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1815: England annexes the Cape of Good Hope according to the terms of the Congress of Vienna. The Boers make the “great trek” inland, clearing the Transvaal and the Orange Free State to get away from the British. The English, during their planning for a Cape-to-Cairo railway, find themselves confronted now by two little Boer republics just where a few hundred miles of track were supposed to go down. The discovery of gold and diamonds in the Transvaal pressurized matters further. Brits poured in, the Transvaal refused to pass the bills that would allow the Brits to build their mines, the Brits started to terrorize the Boers, and Europe started screaming about British bullying. (The German emperor, William II, even sent a telegram to the president of the Transvaal congratulating him on having staved off the British raiders “without having to call for the support of friendly powers.”)-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1811-1816: The Luddites, led by Ned Ludd, riot, destroying machinery in the factories of N. England, blaming the impact of the Industrial Revolution for their unemployment and misery.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1811-1820: Reign of British King Gorge IV in place of his father, George III, who was declared insane (although he eventually recovered).-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1803: Marbury v. Madison; arguably the single most important US Supreme Court case; establishes the right of judicial review (without which there wouldn’t be any Supreme Court decisions).-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

  • Marbury had been appointed a district-court judge by outgoing president John Adams. In the hubbub of changing administrations, however, the commission—the actual piece of paper—never got delivered. When the new secretary of state, James Madison, refused to honor the appointment, Marbury appealed to the Supreme Court to issue a writ of mandamus, which would force the new administration to give him his commission. Now, forget Marbury, Madison, and the meaning of the word “mandamus” for the moment; what was really going on was a power struggle between federalist Chief Justice of the Court John Marshall, and determined anti-Federalist, POTUS Jefferson. Marbury’s had been only one of innumerable last-minute judgeships handed out by the lame-duck Federalists in an effort to “pack the courts” before the anti-Federalists, who had just won the elections by a landslide, swept them into permanent oblivion. Understandably, the anti-Federalists were furious at what they considered a dirty trick. To make matters even worse, Marshall himself was one of these so-called midnight judges, appointed just before Jefferson’s inauguration; and, as it happened, it was Marshall’s brother who had neglected to deliver Marbury’s commission in the first place. By all standards of propriety, Marshall should have been vacationing in Acapulco while this case was being argued. Instead, he wrote the opinion himself, managing to turn it into the classic mix of law and politics that approaches art. First, he declared that Marbury was theoretically entitled to his commission. Second—and here’s the twister—he denied Marbury’s petition on the grounds that the part of the law that allowed the Supreme Court to issue writs of mandamus in this sort of case was unconstitutional, and therefore null and void. The results: (1) Marbury got to keep his dignity, if nothing else; (2) Jefferson was appeased because Marbury didn’t get the job; (3) the Court avoided a confrontation with the president it would certainly have lost, since it didn’t have the power to enforce a writ of mandamus even if it had had the power to issue one; and (4) most important, the Court officially established itself as the final arbiter of the constitutionality of any law passed by Congress, and it did so by righteously denying itself a power. This last point made the Court the effective equal—in a checks-and-balances sort of way—of both Congress and the president. And let’s not forget that (5) Marshall came away from the case looking like the soul of judicial integrity, not only because he’d rejected a Federalist place-seeker, but because the law he’d overturned was a Federalist law.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1796: Formation of the Federalists (modern Republican party) by Alexander Hamilton in opposition to Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1796: Formation of the Democratic Republicans (modern Democratic party) by 3rd POTUS Thomas Jefferson in opposition to Hamilton’s federalists.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1796: Marriage of Napoleon and Josephine.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1762: The “Social Contract” is published by Rousseau, glorifying “the noble savage” and describing a society in which men could be happy: Individuals would surrender their natural liberty to one another, fusing their individual wills into a General Will, which, rather than a king or even a parliament, would be the true sovereign power. The ideas he set forth help bring about the French Rev.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1730s- 1750s: The Great Awakening sweeps New England. Led by Puritan clergyman Jonathan Edwards, the movement sought a return to Calvinist belief in man’s basic depravity and in total dependence on God’s goodwill for salvation.-Incomplete by Jones.

• 1677: Marriage of William (of Orange) and Mary. William was a Dutchman; fatherless, childless, humorless, and utterly devoid of table manners, he seemed incapable of any passion except a rabid hatred of the French. He was imported by the English Parliament to unseat Mary’s father, the Catholic James II, which he did in a bloodless victory of political maneuvering over divine right known as the Glorious Revolution. Thanks in part to the obedient Mary, who was merely William’s safe-conduct to the English throne, Parliament gained supremacy over the crown, England became securely Protestant again, and William, who didn’t care a fig for the crown, for England, or for Mary, got to pursue his impossible dream: eliminating all things French from the face of the earth.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1648 The Peace of Westphalia ends the Thirty Years’ War.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1643-1715: Reign of French King Louis XIV (the Sun King). Louis XIV’s attempts to center power in the crown led to the open rebellion known as La Fronde, in which nobles and bourgeoisie nearly succeeded in toppling the monarchy.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

  • 1685: French King Louis XIV revokes the Edict of Nantes.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1610-1643: Reign of French King Louis XIII with his minister Cardinal Richelieu.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

  • 1620: The Crown of Navarre merges with the French crown.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1608: Shakespeare’s ‘The Kings Men’ company takes over the Blackfriars Theater.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1608: The Puritans (extreme Calvinistic protestants) depart England for Holland, eventually arriving at Plymouth Rock in 1620.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1589-1610: Reign of Henry IV (‘Henry of Navarre’, ‘Henry the Great’) as King of France. Henry was the first monarch of France from the House of Bourbon.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

  • 1610: Assassination of French King Henry IV by Catholic zealot Francois Ravaillac.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

  • 1598: French King Henry IV (Henry of Navarre) issues the Edict of Nantes, promising French Protestants (Huguenots), the same civil and religious rights that French Catholics had.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1543: Publication (posthumously) of Copernicus’ “On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres.” Until then, the Ptolemaic system was accepted by virtually all educated Europeans.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1534: The Act of Supremacy is signed by Henry VIII declaring the English monarchy to be the “Protector and Only Supreme Head of the Church and Clergy of England.”-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1469: Marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella, who begin the Spanish Inquisition, expel the Jews and Moors, and conduct a conquest of Grenada.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1381: The Peasants Revolt (The ‘Wat Tylers Rebellion’, ‘Great Rising’) in England; a major uprising across large parts of England due to socio-economic and political tensions generated by the Black Death in the 1340s, high taxes from the conflict with France during the 100y war, and instability in London.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1358: The French Peasants Insurrection (‘Jacques’) occurs in response to economic hardships brought about by the Black Death and the 100 years’ war.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1170: Assassination of Thomas Becket by the Catholic Church in Canterbury Cathedral.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 1152: Marriage of English King Henry II & Eleanor of Aquitaine.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 704: The Battle of Samarkand; following the battle, Muslim forces acquire Chinese papermakers. They build paper mills of their own at Samarkand and at Baghdad, where they translate Galen, Ptolemy, Aristotle, Euclid, Hippocrates, and Dioscorides. Later, they pass the process to Europe by way of Spain.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 525: Marriage of Justinian and Theodora. Justinian consolidates the Byzantine empire, drives out the barbarians, establishes the famous Justinian Code, and initiates most of the architectural feats associated with Byzantine glory.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 476-1500: The Middle Ages (‘Dark Ages’, ‘Medieval Times’- Medius aevum- Latin) between the fall of the Roman Empire and the onset of the Renaissance in Italy.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

  • 1300-1500: The Late Middle Ages.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

  • 900/1000- 1300: The High Middle Ages.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

  • 476-900/1000: Early Middle Ages; dominated by Charlemagne.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 2c: Ptolemy, a Greek in Alexandria, Egypt, codifies all ancient astronomical beliefs: the earth is the center of the universe, around which the sun, the planets, and the stars all revolve, and beyond the orbit of the most distant star lay the empyrean, the place where angels and immortal spirits dwelled.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 146 BCE: Greece is annexed by Rome.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 149-146 BCE: The Third Punic War; “Delenda est Carthago” (Carthage must be destroyed- Cato). Roman forces blockade Carthage and then conquer the city, taking it apart house by house and stone by stone, and finally ploughing the whole place under. The survivors become slaves and the surrounding lands the Roman province of Africa.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 218-201 BCE: The Second Punic War; Carthaginian forces led by Hannibal invade Rome from Carthaginian Spain by crossing the Alps. In a counter-offensive, Rome takes Carthaginian Spain and defeats the Carthaginian fleet, before invading Carthage.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 264-241 BCE: The First Punic War; Rome removes Carthaginian forces from Sicily, taking Sardinia and Corsica.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 431-404 BCE: The Peloponnesian War is fought between the Peloponnesian League led by Sparta and the Delian League, led by Athens. The War ruins Athens and Sparta comes out triumphant, taking over the Athenian Empire.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 9c BCE: Carthage (Tunisia) is settled by the Phoenicians (Punic- Roman).-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 5 Ka: Founding of the first cities.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 12 Ka: Invention of Agriculture.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

• 18 Ka: The first animals are domesticated.-Incomplete Edu by Jones.

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